The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  Arsenal was a club of rich traditions. The grand marble entrance hall of their Highbury stadium in north London reeked of class and distinction. It had as its centrepiece a bronze bust of Chapman, the man who’d first given rise to their sense of entitlement. Yet the 1960s had up to that point been a fallow decade for the club. The former captain of England, Billy Wright, had failed to recapture the glories of his own playing career while serving as the club’s manager, and Arsenal’s recent trophy cabinet was baren.

  In 1966, the year that England won the World Cup and Batson signed schoolboy forms with the club, Arsenal appointed Bertie Mee to replace the underachieving Wright. The 48-year-old Mee had played for Derby County and Mansfield Town, but his career had been cut short by injury in 1939. He joined the army, rising to the rank of sergeant in the Royal Medical Corps where he also trained as a physiotherapist. After the war, he took the new skills he’d acquired in the forces into professional football, working at a number of clubs before coming to Arsenal in 1960. A man of sharp intelligence, Mee set about re-organising the club as if he were engaged on a military exercise.

  Batson settled in well at Arsenal over the next three years, but in June 1969 was given an ominous warning of things to come. He was playing for the club’s junior side in a South East Counties League game when he felt his knee buckle in a tackle. He’d ruptured his cartilage, an injury of sufficient seriousness to keep him out of the game for a year. On this occasion he was able to heal, and he returned in time to participate in a vintage season for Arsenal. In that splendid year of 1970–71, Mee led the club to a League and Cup double, and Batson’s youth team also went on to lift the FA Youth Cup.

  ‘After we’d won in the semi-final, Bertie Mee took all of the youth team and the coaching staff out for meal,’ says Batson. ‘We went to a restaurant called the Hunting Lodge in Haymarket. I was a London boy and a bit of a Jack-the-Lad, but it was by far the best restaurant I’d ever been to. Bertie Mee’s philosophy was that some of us were hopefully going to go on to have successful careers in the game, so we needed to know how to behave in such an environment.

  ‘He was one of the most astute men I’ve come across. He had a motto: “Remember where you are, who you are and what you represent.” He wasn’t just thinking of us as footballers, but as young men growing up. He knew a lot of us weren’t going to make the grade. In the meantime, he wanted to give us a good education in not just football, but also in life in general.’

  In all, 1971 was an eventful year for eighteen-year-old Batson. At Arsenal, he successfully graduated from the youth team and was offered a full contract by the club. He also met his future wife, Cecily. The couple were introduced to each other through mutual friends and were to be married three years later. Through all the tribulations to come, Cecily would be Batson’s rock, and her faith in him was deep and unwavering.

  Soon he was on the verge of the Arsenal first team, his passage through the ranks as smooth as it had ever been. He made his debut the following March in a 2-0 defeat at Newcastle. No fanfare surrounded this game and for years afterwards Batson remained ignorant of the fact that he’d become the first black player to represent the club in the Football League. He made a further nine appearances for the senior side during the next eighteen months. But he was always there as understudy to the club’s regular full-back, Pat Rice. It was the first time since taking up the game that Batson felt as if he had stalled.

  ‘I began to realise that things weren’t going as well for me as they should have been and I was losing ground to other young players that were coming through,’ he admits. ‘I didn’t like the idea that I was being overlooked. The club had also brought in another defender, Jeff Blockley from Coventry, and for a lot of money. I thought that if I wasn’t better than him in their eyes, then I’d be better off going elsewhere.

  ‘To be honest, up to then I’d taken football a bit too lightly. It was all relatively new to me and I didn’t see the significance of it as being that great. It was just something that I enjoyed doing. I jumped at the first offer that came my way, because I was so flattered that somebody else wanted me in their team.’

  In January 1974, Batson left Arsenal for Cambridge United. In doing so, he dropped from the First Division to the Third. Cambridge had only been elected to the Football League as recently as 1970, but had won promotion at the end of the previous season under the management of Bill Leivers, who’d been a rugged defender for Manchester City and Doncaster Rovers in the fifties and sixties. However, the club was struggling to compete in a higher division and the signing of the new young full-back did nothing to reverse their fortunes. At the end of Batson’s first season with them, Cambridge were relegated back to the Fourth Division.

  ‘Within a few months, I’d gone from the top of the game to bottom,’ says Batson. ‘We started off the next campaign disastrously as well. The chairman gave Bill Leivers a vote of confidence and two weeks later sacked him. The lads were running a book on who was going to replace him as manager. No one put a bet on Ron Atkinson, because none of us had heard of him.

  ‘He turned out to be a totally different manager to both Bertie Mee and Bill Leivers. Neither of them got involved in the hurly-burly of the club, but Ron genuinely believed that he was the best player at Cambridge. He got involved in everything from picking himself for the reserve team to playing cards with the lads at the back of the coach. We did wonder what the hell was going on, but he was infectious and also nakedly ambitious.’

  At Cambridge, Atkinson acted fast to turn the team around. He got rid of the older players he presumed had been idling and brought in a group of younger, hungrier recruits for little or no money. Results soon improved, but it took him longer to resolve his opinion of Batson. In Atkinson’s mind, Batson was still swanning around the place as if he was at a big club and he made it his job to knock him down a peg or two.

  ‘I fell out with him on a regular basis,’ says Batson. ‘He thought I had a chip on both shoulders and I disagreed. I probably did hark back too much to my time at Arsenal, but because that was my benchmark. However, I think he had an ulterior motive. He saw that I was one of the main players at the club and if he could dominate me, then he’d be able to dominate the whole dressing room.’

  ‘It was entirely his fault,’ counters Atkinson. ‘I had to have a right blast at him. He thought the manager himself was untouchable, because apparently he had been under the previous regime.’

  Atkinson dropped Batson from the first team and into the very reserve side for which the manager himself was then turning out. On the bus to their subsequent games and also on the pitch, Atkinson pointedly ignored him. The pair of them didn’t exchange a single word for the next three weeks. At which point Atkinson summoned Batson to his office and told him he was re-instating him in the Cambridge first team. Even so, he still hadn’t finished pricking at Batson’s ego.

  ‘He said to me that he’d liked my attitude and then, bugger me, he made me substitute,’ says Batson. ‘If he hadn’t been so big, I’d have taken a swing at him. It was my dear wife who gave me the advice that I needed and I kept my head down. After that, he pulled me in again out of the blue and told me I was going to be his next captain.

  ‘From then on, Ron and I got on famously. Ever since, he’s had this name for me – Batman. And without him, I don’t think I’d have ever got back into the top flight of the game.’

  ‘Brendon would be the first to admit that his outlook to the game, and to life in general, changed completely,’ considers Atkinson. ‘He was only young, I suppose, and he thought he was Billy Big Time having come down from London. We quickly agreed that he wasn’t and got on with it.’

  There was another aspect of playing for a smaller club that Batson also became accustomed to. In the tight grounds of the Fourth Division, he was able to hear each word of the vitriol being directed at him from the terraces. To begin with, his wife came to see the games. She was accompanied by one of his cousins, who stood six foot six and w
ould stand glaring at the perpetrators until they fell silent. But Cecily Batson soon sickened of the shouts of ‘nigger’ and the monkey noises being directed at her husband and thereafter stayed away.

  On the pitch, Batson couldn’t and wouldn’t turn the other cheek. Just as he’d done ever since he was at school in Tilbury, he hit back at his tormentors. During a game at Bradford, Atkinson’s assistant, John Doherty, had to restrain him from jumping into the crowd to confront a fan who’d thrown the ball back at him. His temper also never failed to flare when he was goaded by opposition players. He was sent off three times in Atkinson’s first two seasons at the club.

  The first of these occasions was against Stockport County. He was up against a senior Stockport player. According to Batson, the player directed a stream of racist invective at him throughout the game. In the fifty-fifth minute, his tolerance broke and he lashed out, his fist flashing past the referee who’d come between the two of them and striking the player on the jaw, knocking him to the turf. Batson then turned and walked off the pitch, not bothering to wait on the official’s judgement.

  Atkinson appealed against this dismissal and the referee also intervened on Batson’s behalf. His hearing was held in Birmingham the following week and before the FA’s disciplinary committee. By coincidence, sitting at the head of this was the West Bromwich Albion chairman, Bert Millichip. Speaking in a plummy baritone, as if presiding over the highest court in the land, Millichip told him: ‘Mr Batson, we do not wish to see you here again.’

  ‘The following season, we were again playing Stockport and winning 4-0 with two minutes to go,’ says Batson. ‘That same Stockport player kicked out at me and said something, so I hit him again. Ron came into the dressing room afterwards and said, “Well, Batman, I don’t think we’ll be appealing this time.”

  ‘It was a real shock to me. I’d got a bit of abuse as a schoolboy, but up till then I don’t recall ever getting it from fellow pros. The other lad was Robin Friday – bless him – who was playing for Reading at the time. I lashed out at him too. He came up to me in the players’ lounge after the game and said, “Bren, I’m so sorry, but I was told to wind you up because you’re a bit hot-headed.” He thought the best way to do that was to call me all the racist names under the sun. I nearly hit him again.

  ‘I also had a set-to with one of our own players at Cambridge. Ron called me in for a cup of tea and read me the riot act. But he also gave me a lot of good advice. I seemed to calm down after that and never got sent off again.’

  With Batson as his skipper, Atkinson took Cambridge to the Fourth Division title in his second full season at the club. He left them the next year sitting on top of the Third Division. Four weeks after he’d gone, Batson followed him to the Hawthorns.

  To begin with, Batson got a mixed reception from his new team-mates. His arrival at West Brom stirred up undercurrents in the dressing room, a complex environment at any football club, and one where fear and paranoia are never far from the surface. This was especially the case whenever there had been a change of manager, since the existing order was now under threat and no one was certain of their place in the scheme of things.

  Coming from Cambridge and as Atkinson’s erstwhile captain, the other players viewed Batson with suspicion, surmising that he was the manager’s agent. It was also evident that he’d been brought to the club to replace Paddy Mulligan, an eccentric but popular figure in the team. More often than not, players meet such a challenge with either grace or dull acceptance, but Mulligan seethed.

  ‘Paddy Mulligan was a loony,’ says Tony Brown. ‘A typical Irishman, I think. A bit of a lad, loved the women. He made it clear that he was upset about Brendon coming in. The lads take notice of that kind of thing and Brendon took a bit of stick. But if you go under in the dressing room, then you’ve got no chance. Brendon could look after himself. He was very well-spoken and he knew what it was all about.’

  ‘A dressing room is a dressing room,’ says Batson. ‘Some are good, some bad and some are indifferent. The one at West Brom was typical. You had very strong characters in there like Len Cantello and Ally Robertson. John Wile was an imposing figure. Then there were the quieter lads like Bryan Robson. Laurie was shy, but charming. He spoke in a very soft voice. I’d seen Cyrille on the TV ploughing through the mud, but he was even bigger in the flesh.

  ‘As the new boy, it’s up to you to integrate and the one thing you’ve got to be able to do is prove that you can play. I had to win them over that way. Without doing that, I was going to get slaughtered.’

  Atkinson immediately threw Batson to the lions. He allowed him just the one training session before pitching him into the first team at Mulligan’s expense for a midweek match at Birmingham City. Being a local derby, there was an extra tension surrounding the game. This was further heightened by the storm that raged in the Midlands that night, the rain coming down in torrents and a howling wind blowing through the creaking St Andrew’s ground.

  In the minutes before kick-off, Batson was suffering his own, quieter tumult. In the changing room under the main stand, he sat shrunken in his seat. He absorbed nothing of Atkinson’s pre-match team talk, but for the sight of the manager’s mouth opening and closing. He didn’t even sense Mulligan’s eyes boring into him. The Irishman was sitting across from him, right next to the door. At that moment the two of them had everything to lose.

  As the players filed out onto the pitch, Mulligan bid each of them good luck and best wishes. He met Batson with a warm smile. ‘All the best, Brendon,’ he said airily. ‘Hope you have a fucking nightmare.’

  ‘Brendon was terrible that night,’ recalls Albion supporter John Homer. ‘His positional sense seemed to be all over the place and he couldn’t control a ball for love nor money. He’d come out of the Third Division and he looked lost.’

  ‘I think that debut was probably the worst I ever saw,’ says Bob Downing. ‘All of us reporters went up to Ron’s office the next day and asked him for his thoughts on Brendon. He told us he’d come good. I shot back that he hadn’t been good last night, because you could talk to Ron like that. He said, “Brendon will be alright, he’ll prove himself.” And he did.’

  For all Batson’s woes, West Brom battled to a 2-1 win at Birmingham. He retained his place in the side for the next match at Ipswich. Following his mischief at Middlesbrough two months earlier, Cunningham was still exiled from the starting team for this game, but Atkinson introduced him as a second-half substitute. It was the first time that Batson, Cunningham and Regis found themselves together on the pitch.

  In due course, Atkinson fielding an unprecedented three black players in his West Brom team would be unmissed and unforgettable. It would not fail to provoke one form of reaction or another, good or bad. Yet no mention of it was made in the press reports that followed the game, a 2-2 draw. For now, at least, it was a minor issue to the wider world.

  However, it didn’t go unnoticed within the West Brom dressing room. In his own autobiography, Atkinson claimed that a number of the other players were initially resistant to this influx to the team and that he had to quell an uprising. He now modifies that statement.

  ‘No, the three of them were popular lads at the club,’ he says. ‘And in that regard, I only ever had a problem with one player. He told me that it was clear you had to be black to get into the team. I said to him, “Well, it makes a change from being Scottish or Irish, doesn’t it?”’

  Chapter Seven: Melting Pot

  The ways in which Ron Atkinson got under the skin of his players were as many as they were unorthodox. To switch them on to the task at hand, he’d have them submerge their heads in buckets of ice-cold water, or smear Vapour Rub in their faces. Each West Brom player also got used to having Atkinson inform him in a conspiratorial whisper that he was the team’s main man.

  Before a game, Atkinson prowled the dressing room like a caged lion. He regaled the players with his musings on the strengths of the opposition that day and then told them that th
ey were better, that it was a matter of fact that they were going to win this game and all others. Or he’d ask them to look around the room and tell him which of their team-mates they’d swap for someone from the other side, knowing full well the answer. ‘No one, Boss,’ they chorused back.

  When the players at last lined up to leave the sanctuary of the dressing room, Atkinson blocked their path. He barged into each of them, one after another and with his chest barrelled out. As he was doing this, he beseeched them all to go out there and excite both him and also the people who’d paid good money to see them. By then, even the meekest among them walked onto to the pitch feeling ten-foot tall.

  ‘Back then and in his pomp, he was a terrific manager,’ says Martin Swain, now chief football reporter with the Express & Star. ‘He was young, on the make and on the way up. His great mission statement was that he didn’t ever want to put out a team that bored him. Because if it bored him, how the hell could it be expected to entertain the crowd? And that West Brom team was the embodiment of his ideal.

  ‘All the journalists of the time also loved Ron. Each of them looked forward to doing their match previews with him on a Friday morning. He’d sit there in his office, pouring the tea, cracking jokes and feeding them lines. Clearly, that spirit flooded into the side because they began to play with a freedom that broke the mould of English football in the seventies.’

  As well, Atkinson was able to manage effectively such contrasting personalities as Laurie Cunningham and Cyrille Regis. In their case, this was perhaps because the extremes of his character were such close echoes of theirs. He was a flash dresser like Cunningham. Yet to both of them there was a quieter, more reflective side. Neither of them was a big drinker and each guarded their hidden depths with degrees of intensity.

  With Regis, he shared a charming and engaging manner. People warmed fast to the pair of them and both men came to life among others in a way that Cunningham never did or could. Each of them was also mindful of the lower station in the game that he had come from, and as a result both were compelled to seize the opportunity afforded them at West Bromwich Albion.