The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  If nothing else, the Middlesbrough encounter gave Atkinson a proper insight into the complicated character of Laurie Cunningham. Prior to leaving the Midlands for the North East, he’d berated Cunningham, and also Regis and Tony Godden, for failing to turn up for the trip in a shirt and tie. Cunningham brooded on the long journey up to Middlesbrough, confiding to Godden that this was going to be one of those days when he was incapable of rousing himself to play.

  He was as good as his word, being a spectral presence during the first forty-five minutes of the game. Hugging tight to the touchline, he appeared unconnected to or unconcerned with what was going on elsewhere on the pitch. Not that much was happening, since the match was proving as drab and unappealing as the January gloom. When the players trooped into the dressing room at half-time, Atkinson at once set about trying to goad them to action. The sour expression on Cunningham’s face pulled him up short.

  ‘Big Ron said to him, “Listen, son, if you don’t fancy going out for the second half, get yourself in the bath,” ’ says Derek Statham. ‘He was being sarcastic and obviously so. But Laurie said, “Okay, boss,” and then stripped off and disappeared to the showers. The rest of us were a bit shocked, because we were about to go and battle on through the game.

  ‘Laurie could be like that, a bit of a boy at times, and that incident summed up his character. There were one or two other situations like it later on, but in general with him, the good outweighed the bad.’

  Cunningham was dropped to the bench for the next match, a home fixture against Coventry, and also omitted from the five games that followed it. Regardless of this, Atkinson now claims that his first key act at West Brom was to restore Cunningham to the side, suggesting he was being shunned by his predecessor. In truth, Cunningham was a regular starter in Allen’s team. It was only during the final weeks of his reign that the manager wearied of his erratic form and left him out, hoping to provoke from him a positive response.

  Like Allen, Atkinson took a paternal attitude towards his most enigmatic player. He nurtured him, but also suffered the pangs of a frustrated parent at a wayward child. He had an easier relationship with Regis, one that was based on mutual respect. Of the two of them, it was the big striker he felt most able to rely on whenever the going got tough. The fact that Regis had been an electrician was a standing joke between the pair of them. Whenever he had a poor game, Atkinson would threaten to banish Regis back to his former trade.

  ‘Both of them were good lads, but Cyrille was more outgoing,’ says Atkinson. ‘You could talk loudly with him across the group, whereas with Laurie, you were better off taking him to one side and doing it on the quiet.

  ‘I spent a lot of time after training with Laurie, which is when I got closest to him. He’d stay out on the pitch with me and bang balls about, taking free kicks at the goalkeepers. I thought he was very much misunderstood. People formed an impression of him, because he would turn up to a disco in a white suit, but I found him to be a terrific guy.’

  A shrewd man-manager, Atkinson recognised how close Cunningham and Regis had got to each other and created a sense of competition between them. Sidling up to Regis before a game, he’d glibly suggest he go out and see if he was as good as Cunningham. To Cunningham, Atkinson would dangle the carrot that Regis’s all-action performances were showing him up. The two of them invariably rose to the bait, one being as proud as the other.

  ‘Big Ron would wind Cyrille up in particular,’ says Ally Robertson. ‘After training, he and Laurie would whack balls at each other for extra practise. Laurie controlled the ball without seeming to try, whereas at first it would be bouncing everywhere off Cyrille. Big Ron would be bawling at him, “Control the frigging thing.” But Cyrille kept working at it and you should’ve seen the difference in him.’

  ‘I believe I only ever played with one black lad, but when I was younger I did some training with the coach of the British weight-lifting squad,’ says Atkinson. ‘I’d be in the gym with all the black lads on that team, like Precious McKenzie and Louis Martin, the world champion.

  ‘This was 1960 and none of us then knew much about the black lads, but I was amazed at how they would laugh and joke about everything. There were no inhibitions and everything was treated with humour. That’s how we used to go about it at West Brom as well.’

  As Atkinson was settling to his task that January, the social divides then running through the country continued to crack and yawn. The former chairman of the National Front, John Kingsley Read, was sent to trial at the Old Bailey in London on a charge of inciting racial hatred. Read had given a speech eighteen months earlier in Newham, East London, in which he’d referred to ‘niggers, wogs and coons’. He had also brought up the recent murder of an Asian man in nearby Southall, telling some 300 supporters, ‘One down, a million to go.’

  In his summing up, the presiding Judge, Justice Neil McKinnon, questioned whether ‘nigger’ was an offensive term. As evidence against this he cited the antiquated nursery rhyme, ‘Ten Little Niggers’. He went on to state that, although Read had insulted a murder victim, this was not in itself an offence. Read was acquitted by the jury, prompting a storm of protest. A total of 133 MPs subsequently signed a petition to have McKinnon de-wigged.

  The same month, Leader of the Opposition Margaret Thatcher gave an interview to the TV current affairs programme World in Action in which she claimed that Britain was unable to take in any more migrants. Thatcher’s comments resonated with a portion of the electorate, resulting in a surge in the opinion polls for her Conservative Party and staking out a territory that she would fight on during the General Election of the next year.

  As winter passed into spring, fortunes improved for West Bromwich Albion on the pitch. Atkinson’s team gathered momentum around the speed of Cunningham, now restored to the side, and that of Regis, Willie Johnston and Ally Brown, the one player he had rescued from the reserves. He’d also revived the career of the club’s longest-serving player, Tony Brown, who’d clashed with Allen but was now once again a pivotal point of the team.

  Between then and the end of the season, the Baggies suffered just two further defeats in the League. Atkinson and his team grew in stature. Bryan Robson and Derek Statham flowered into exciting talents, and Regis and Cunningham shared sixteen goals between them. There was nothing complicated about Atkinson’s approach to management: he got the best out of his players by keeping his message to them as basic and concise as possible.

  ‘Ron was full of life and had such great enthusiasm for the game, and that rubbed off on the players,’ says Robson. ‘He wanted people to enjoy themselves around the football club and for us to express ourselves in every game. There were no unbelievable tactics in his team talks he’d just tell us to go out and play attacking football.’

  ‘If we won 5-4 or 4-3, Ron was over the moon,’ says Johnston. ‘Before a game he might mention which player he expected you to mark, but all he really talked about was scoring goals. That was his one measurement, were we entertaining him and the punters.

  ‘Aye, he was a flash bugger too. A neighbour of mine at the time was a jeweller and I used to pick up loads of gear off him, things that were worth a fortune. Laurie and Cyrille were into it and then Ron started to take stuff off me as well, bracelets and gold ingots that he wore round his neck.’

  After the withdrawn Allen, Atkinson’s outsize personality was a gift to the local media. He would always take a call from a reporter, was never short of a quote and he revelled in the attention it brought him. Outwardly, and as much among the players, he didn’t discourage the view that he was a big-time Charlie and the life and soul of the club. But in seeing him up close, one was allowed an opportunity to peer behind this mask.

  ‘Ron was a great one for filling up people’s glasses, especially if the chairman was paying for the drinks, but he wasn’t a boozer,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘He’d work the room, but would only sip at a champagne or white wine. I never once saw him worse for wear.’

  ‘
We often used to travel on the team bus in those days and that season I remember being sat with Ron for an overnight trip to Ipswich,’ recalls Bob Downing. ‘He got out a copy of the Rothman’s Football Yearbook and told me to open it at random. He asked me to pick out any player from it and read out his statistics to him – the number of games he’d played, how many goals he’d scored and so on. Straight off, he told me the name of the player and he did that over and again for the next two hours. I couldn’t believe it. But that was what he was like. He loved football.’

  The real making of Atkinson and his West Brom side was the FA Cup run they went on through the second half of that season. Albion had already eased past Blackpool in the Third Round of the grand old competition before Atkinson joined them, but he was in charge for their next tie, a clash against Manchester United at Old Trafford. The Red Devils were by then a shadow of the glorious team assembled by Matt Busby in the 1960s, the one of George Best, Bobby Charlton and Dennis Law. In 1974, they had even suffered the ignominy of relegation to the Second Division. However, they had reached the final of the competition in each of the last two seasons, winning it in 1977, and they were still formidable opponents on their own ground.

  On a miserable January afternoon, 57,000 supporters watched the two teams fight out a 1-1 stalemate in driving rain. United were kept in the tie by their England international winger, Steve Coppell, who grabbed an equalising goal in the last minute of the game. The replay took place four days later on an even wetter night at the Hawthorns. In a deluge, a near-38,000 full house was held captivated by one of the defining games of Atkinson’s regime. Played on a glutinous pitch, it witnessed their irrepressible manager urging his West Brom team to a death or glory charge.

  Tony Brown put Albion ahead in the fourteenth minute, but United reeled them back in before half-time. Early in the second half, Regis was first to react after Willie Johnston had thundered a shot against the crossbar, and he hustled the ball over the line to claim the lead again. Still United roared and again they got back on level terms in the final seconds of the game through another of their England players, Gordon Hill. With rain still lashing down, Atkinson stirred his exhausted players to one more titanic effort in extra time. He was rewarded with a second Regis goal, a towering header, less than a minute after the restart. United came once more and pounded at the sagging Albion defence, but to no avail. The cup holders were conquered.

  ‘I have never been involved in anything like these two games,’ Atkinson told reporters after the match. ‘There was so much drama and atmosphere that anyone who saw them will remember them for a lifetime.’

  This was just the start of things. Three weeks later, West Brom’s Fifth Round match was almost as thrilling, a 3-2 victory over Derby County, with Regis helping himself to another two goals. By then, Atkinson had turned his attention to the future beyond that season. The following week he announced his first signing for the club, a full-back plucked from his former side, Cambridge United.

  Brendon Batson had just turned twenty-five and the size of the fee Atkinson paid for him – £30,000, a trifling sum even then – spoke of his standing in the game. An unheralded Third Division footballer, he would nonetheless prove to be Atkinson’s shrewdest investment. He was bought to replace Paddy Mulligan, who’d entered into a battle with Atkinson he couldn’t win.

  ‘I’d had a lot of very promising young players at Cambridge, all of whom were eighteen, nineteen years old,’ says Atkinson. ‘Everybody expected me to go back to the club for one of them. It wasn’t until I got to West Brom and saw Paddy Mulligan playing at right-back, and quite well as it happens, that I thought, “Blimey, Brendon can do everything he can, but he’s quicker and a lot younger.” Until then, it had never entered my thoughts to sign Brendon.’

  Chapter Six: Batman

  Like Cyrille Regis’s family, Brendon Batson’s took root in the Caribbean. He was born on 1 February 1953 on Grenada. The island’s origins were volcanic and the rich fertility of its soil allowed it to produce an abundance of such spices as nutmeg and mace. Batson and his brother and sister were raised in this idyll by their mother who was estranged from their father, a man the three children barely knew. The first memory Batson has of his childhood is that of running along a beach, an azure sea lapping at the sand.

  When he was six years old, Batson’s mother nonetheless moved her three children to their father’s home island of Trinidad. Compared to the more sedate Grenada, it was a bigger and more bustling environment in which to grow up. They went to live with their godmother in San Fernando, a coastal town that lies to the south of the island’s capital, Port of Spain.

  ‘I had a very happy time on Trinidad being around my cousins,’ Batson recalls. ‘Port of Spain was a hive of activity and I remember seeing a lot of cricket and hockey out in the savannah. Yet my mom always felt there was something better out there for us. Her older brother and sister had gone to live in England and it was explained to us that the streets over there were paved with gold.’

  In 1962, Batson’s mother decided to send her two sons off to this supposed land of promise to live with their uncle and his wife. Lacking the funds for four air tickets, she was forced to remain behind on Trinidad with their sister. She swore to her sons that the pair of them would join the brothers in two years, an undertaking that she kept to the day.

  The two boys flew into London and from there went to live with their extended family in Tilbury, the Essex town from which the original Caribbean immigrants to Britain had dispersed across the country. It was April and Britain was emerging from an especially frigid winter. Batson’s aunt was a midwife and it was said that she had delivered over half of the town’s children. Yet the Batson’s were made more conspicuous by being the only black family to be then living in Tilbury.

  ‘We never had to introduce ourselves to anyone,’ says Batson. ‘Whenever people in the town saw a couple of little black boys, they knew we must be Batsons. My mom had really sold coming to England to us as a full-blown adventure, but then reality started to kick in. My brother and I were looking forward to seeing snow, but it was freezing cold. I’ve hated winter in England ever since. We were used to living in big houses with verandas and wide-open spaces, but Tilbury was very small and cramped.

  ‘Trinidad was a very cosmopolitan country too. I’ve got lots of mixes in my family, Indian and Chinese bloodlines. By contrast, England seemed to me a very white country. I’d never experienced racism before, but I suddenly found as a nine-year-old at primary school that I was being called all these names that I didn’t fully understand. I learned to fight then and carried on fighting until I was well into my teens. It certainly taught me how to grow up.’

  Batson attended the local Catholic school, St Mary’s, which prided itself on the strength of its football teams. Before coming to England, he’d never even seen a football match. But a fellow pupil named Dennis Sheridan coaxed him into joining in with the massed games that were a feature of life at the school.

  ‘There was a big field full of daisies round the corner from us and that’s where we went to play,’ says Batson. ‘You’d go across with your mates, three or four of you. And then another group of four would come and join in, and then another. Before you knew it, you had a twenty-a-side game going on.

  ‘Everyone would bring along a ball and we’d pick the best one to use for the game. One of the things I most remember is seeing all these footballs lined up in a row alongside our makeshift pitch. When it fell dark, you had to scramble for your ball if it was decent, otherwise some other kid would run off with it.’

  The St Mary’s school side was run by a Mr Fitzgerald, who taught maths and English. At the start of the next school year, Batson put his name down for the open trials that Fitzgerald ran for the team. In several regards he was ill-prepared for such a test, most notably in that he didn’t own a pair of football boots and still knew next to nothing of the rules of the game. In fact, the sole position on the field he could name was goalke
eper – and this was only on account of his classmates having told him not to volunteer for that slot, since in their opinion it was the worst place to be stuck in to play.

  It was therefore no great surprise that the trial game turned out to be a disaster for him. He seemed so befuddled during it that Fitzgerald approached him afterwards and suggested to him that cricket might be his game after all. Seeing he was now on the verge of tears, Fitzgerald offered Batson the comfort of a second chance the week after. He loaned a pair of boots in the interim and did well enough on this next occasion to be selected for the team.

  This rapid rate of improvement continued through his school years. It was as if he were meant for the game. He found his niche as a defender and, being a fast learner, soon excelled in the role, gravitating from the school side to the Thurrock district team. When he was eleven, Batson’s mother and sister arrived at last in England. The reunited family moved from Tilbury to the London district of Walthamstow, in the north-east of the capital. This change in circumstance did nothing to interrupt his progress at football. He turned out for his school and district sides and also a Sunday league team, Rippleway Rangers.

  It was while representing his London district that Batson was spotted by George Male, a scout for Arsenal. Male had played at full-back for the all-conquering Arsenal side of the pre-war era, which had won the League title five times between 1931 and 1938. He invited Batson, then aged thirteen, along to train with the club’s schoolboys twice a week, on a Monday and Thursday evening.