The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘Right then, Regis was rewriting the rulebook on centre-forward play,’ opines Martin Swain. ‘He had everything, explosive pace but also a deft touch, grace and intelligence. He was exhilarating to watch. If he’d have been an album, Regis would have been the Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper’s.’

  In his first season as a professional, Regis found himself within one victory of the FA Cup final – in those days still the English game’s showpiece occasion. Albion’s semi-final opponents the next month were Ipswich Town, who were managed by Bobby Robson, a former West Brom player of the fifties and sixties. The Suffolk side were battling against relegation and a fairy-tale script appeared written for the young Baggies striker. The week before the game, Atkinson’s confidence was such that he was filmed by the BBC’s Football Focus show walking up to the Royal Box at Wembley Stadium to collect the cup.

  Atkinson also changed his team for the match. Despite being back in the side in the League, Cunningham returned to the bench, and Bryan Robson was also dropped. Such hubris proved costly. The game was played at Arsenal’s Highbury stadium and West Brom had lost it within twenty minutes of the kick-off. By then, Ipswich had scored two goals without reply. Mick Martin got himself sent off and John Wile sustained a head injury trying to defend the first goal. His head swathed in bandages, Wile played out the rest of the match with blood streaming down his face. Yet his team-mates appeared just as dazed as he did in limping to a 3-1 defeat; no one more so than Regis, who froze for this, his biggest game.

  ‘It was painful, very painful,’ he says. ‘We’d been playing great football and we were on a hot streak, but we didn’t perform on the day. It was my first real taste of disappointment. Ron also did that TV programme and Ipswich didn’t need any more motivation after that, watching him walking around Wembley.’

  ‘Ron lost us that game,’ insists Godden. ‘We were all sitting there in the hotel on the morning of the match and there he was on the telly, picking the cup up. We all went, “Oh, shit.” I spoke to a couple of the Ipswich lads after the match. They said Bobby Robson had walked into their dressing room and told them not to worry about the game as we’d already won it.

  ‘In his early days as a manager, that was an example of Ron’s naivety. I think he’d also begun to believe his own self-importance. But he was learning as he went along and he came down a peg or two.’

  There was a second significant event that took place in the capital that month. A crowd of 82,000 gathered in Trafalgar Square on 30 April and marched from there to Victoria Park in Hackney for an outdoor concert organised by Rock Against Racism. Britain was doubtless a divided nation, but this mass, the majority of them white, at the very least indicated that the cracks along social and racial lines were not as uniform as they might have first appeared to be.

  Among the artists on the bill that afternoon were the Clash, X-Ray Spex, the Tom Robinson Band and Steel Pulse. Roger Huddle and Red Saunders from Rock Against Racism had only managed to obtain a licence for the event by telling the local council that they expected no more than 500 people to attend.

  ‘Otherwise, we’d have had to get Portaloos and we couldn’t afford them,’ says Huddle. ‘The National Front twice tried to burn the stage down in the days beforehand. I remember the Clash and their dreadful manager, Bernie Rhodes, being very, very awkward. We bought a bottle of Red Label whisky for the park keeper and introduced him to Steel Pulse. My abiding memory is of him sitting with their road crew, a great cloud of dope smoke enveloping them.

  ‘It had been raining all week, but the sun broke out when the demonstration arrived from Trafalgar Square. It was almost Biblical. The people who’ve since written all the punk rock books have said that the kids were just there for the bands, which is total crap. This perception that everyone who was white and working class was then a racist is an absolute nonsense.’

  ‘That show galvanised all the cultures that were happening in Britain at the time,’ claims David Hinds of Steel Pulse. ‘It turned on its head the idea that all of Britain was racially divided. The country was seen as being very right-wing, but the punk guys were all about trashing the system and saying they weren’t down with the programme. Reggae music got on board with that.

  ‘After that, we started to perform at universities. That was to predominantly white audiences, because not too many black folks were able to pursue that level of education at the time.’

  The semi-final defeat exposed a weakness in Atkinson’s West Brom team: an inability to deliver when it mattered most. This was their Achilles heel and it would come back to disable them time and again during the next year. However, they recovered their sense of purpose in the immediate aftermath of the Ipswich game and picked up a head of steam in the League.

  The next Wednesday night, they beat Newcastle at the Hawthorns. Regis opened the scoring and Paddy Mulligan, now on borrowed time, added a second. The following Saturday, they saw off Manchester City 3-1 at their Maine Road stadium with Cunningham once again in the starting line-up. Regis scored the first goal that afternoon too. Picking up the ball on the halfway line, he barged through the entire City defence. Goalkeeper Joe Corrigan advanced to meet him, but Regis didn’t break stride, lifting the ball up and over Corrigan and into the net. He was perhaps never greater than he was in that one moment, never again appearing so much a force of nature.

  ‘I was sat among the City fans in the main stand that day,’ recalls Albion supporter John Homer. ‘Cyrille ran through most of their team to score his goal. I couldn’t help but jump up it was so exciting. There was an old guy sat next to me with a broken leg. He hit me over the head with his crutch.’

  ‘That goal showed just how quick and powerful Cyrille was,’ says Bryan Robson. ‘He had all the attributes to go on and become even better, but he was laid-back and I thought that held him back a bit. I used to tell him that if I’d have been his size, I’d be smashing people out of the way left, right and centre. He was definitely too nice for his own good.’

  In all, West Brom lost just one of their remaining seven games and finished the season in sixth place in the League. Atkinson brought Batson back into the team for the final three matches, sealing Mulligan’s fate and setting in place the foundations for the next season. Thereafter, the three black players would be picked out and held up as a self-contained unit within the team. Yet Batson, the elder of the three, gravitated more to such senior members of the side as Tony Brown, Ally Robertson and Ally Brown.

  ‘Brendon is intelligent, astute, well-read and principled and we were all great friends,’ says Regis. ‘But Laurie and I were single guys and very tight. Brendon was five years older than me and he had a wife and kids, so he couldn’t hang around as much with the two of us.’

  At its end, another drama was also played out that season. A couple of Frenchmen turned up at the Hawthorns one afternoon purporting to be journalists and requesting an interview with Regis. Atkinson checked out their credentials and discovered that both were working for the top French side St Etienne, who’d won their national title in three of the last five seasons and had also reached the European Cup final in 1976.

  Their interest in Regis was two-fold. In the first instance, St Etienne was seeking to pair him with the club’s emerging young French striker, Dominique Rocheteau, for the next season. The French Football Federation also wanted to fast-track blossoming talent into its recruiting system in time for the 1978 World Cup finals in Argentina. Since Regis had been born in French Guiana and had dual nationality, he fitted the bill. He was also coming to the end of his one-year contract with Albion.

  ‘As soon as the story broke, I was dispatched to the Hawthorns,’ says Bob Downing. ‘I parked at the Europa Hotel and as I was getting out of my car, Cyrille was coming out of the front doors and Ron was pulling up in his Jag. Ron wound the window down and shouted at Cyrille, “Tell him fuck all.” Cyrille shouted back, “But I don’t know fuck all.”’

  ‘We were being offered £750,000 for a kid who’d had only a hand
ful of League games for us,’ says Atkinson. ‘At the time, the record fee for a British player was the half-million quid Hamburg in Germany had paid Liverpool for Kevin Keegan the previous year.

  ‘Anyway, I knocked it on the head. I gave him a better contract with us and that was Cyrille settled. On top of that, I gave him an extra couple of grand as a signing-on fee because he’d been up front with me. What I didn’t know, John Gordon had already then handed him £10,000 over and above what he was getting to stay at the club. He didn’t tell me that, the cheeky sod. To be fair, had he gone to France, Cyrille would have made an absolute fortune.’

  The most important result of that season for Regis and the rest of the West Brom team occurred in a game in which they weren’t even involved. On 10 May, Liverpool beat the Belgian side Club Brugge 1-0 at Wembley to retain the European Cup and secure their place in the competition for the next year. Then in its purest form, European Cup qualification was dependent upon a club winning its national League or holding the trophy. Liverpool’s continued participation in it allowed West Bromwich Albion to claim the fourth slot allocated to English sides in the second European club tournament, the UEFA Cup, and in what would be the club’s centenary season.

  Having held on to their talismanic striker, there was a growing sense at West Brom of something special looming on the horizon. Atkinson and his board of directors doubtless suspected it might be measured in the accumulation of trophies. Yet ultimately, it amounted to something more lasting and profound.

  Chapter Eight: Perfect Storm

  Nine days after playing their final game of the 1977–78 season, Ron Atkinson and his West Brom players left the West Midlands for China. The seeds of this unlikely post-season jaunt were sown when the Football Association declined an invitation from the Chinese government for the English national side to be the first Western team to visit the country. West Brom was volunteered in its stead by the club’s chairman, Bert Millichip, a solicitor by trade and also an influential member of the FA Board.

  The West Brom party arrived in the capital of Peking on 11 May to begin what was dubbed the ‘Friendship Tour’. They were accompanied by a couple of journalists from the Midlands and a BBC documentary crew fronted by the reporter Julian Pettifer, who’d made his reputation a decade earlier covering the Vietnam War. It was less than two years since Chairman Mao’s death and China was still finding its way out from under the rigid strictures imposed upon it by his Cultural Revolution. To the visiting footballers, the country seemed bleak and unremitting. As Bryan Robson bemoaned to Pettifer, this was nothing like their preferred destination – a beach in Spain.

  Prior to leaving, the players had been ordered to the Foreign Office in London and informed that the trip was to be an important diplomatic exercise aimed at gilding China’s re-emergence into the world. In other words, they were to behave themselves. As they were being paraded at a succession of official engagements in China, their mood remained as sombre as that of the various Communist Party ‘minders’ who tailed them for the next three weeks. Atkinson laid a bet with his players that before leaving the country he’d have coaxed one of these shadows into joining him for a glass of champagne and a Havana cigar. He never even came close to succeeding.

  There were occasional moments of levity. During a visit to the Great Wall, midfielder John Trewick was filmed affecting disinterest at the sight of the vast man-made structure. ‘Once you’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen them all,’ he dolefully concluded. It was an example of Trewick’s bone-dry humour, but in The World About Us documentary film that resulted from the trip it was made to seem like the kind of witless remark expected of a footballer. Edited out of the footage by the BBC men were a succession of like-minded wisecracks from Trewick’s team-mates, among them Mick Martin’s assertion that he’d bent balls around bigger walls. The players had laughed especially hard at that one. Laughter was otherwise the rarest of sounds on this groundbreaking foray.

  ‘China remained in Mao’s grip and it was very austere, everything that Big Ron in particular hated,’ says Dave Harrison, covering the trip for the Evening Mail. ‘We visited all these cultural sites by day, but there was nothing to do at night. And Ron loved a night out. He described those three weeks to me as the longest three years of his life.

  ‘I remember aimlessly walking around the hotel one evening and going by Ron’s room. The door was open and he shouted out to me, “Oi, Scoop – in here!” He told me I had to take away his belt, shoelaces and razor blades, because he was considering topping himself. I sat there and chatted with him for the next hour about all sorts of things – football, home, family. After that, he always referred to me as the man who’d saved his life.’

  ‘Cyrille and I went to see Mao lying in state in what was then Red Square,’ adds Tony Godden. ‘It was more for something to do, because we were absolutely bored shitless. We were being chaperoned and filmed everywhere we went, and having to be suited and booted to go around the embassies.’

  For the most part, the majority of the West Brom side shunned the many cultural excursions laid on for them by the Chinese authorities. They instead occupied themselves with either playing cards, tennis at the British embassy or cricket in the grounds of their hotel. As was his habit, Ally Robertson skulked around the hotel armed with a bucket of water intent upon drowning one team-mate or another. However, his roving was brought to an abrupt end when he leapt out from behind a door and inadvertently doused a passing Bert Millichip. Normally a man of great reserve, the Albion chairman’s outraged response was heard several floors up.

  The exceptions to this rule were Cunningham, Regis and Batson. Alone among the party, the three of them visibly welcomed the Chinese experience. They went off together on each of the organised trips, they sampled the local dishes laid on at the various official functions and enjoyed the attentions of a curious public. Harrison says he asked Regis about this ‘and he told me that, as far as he and Brendon were concerned, both of them had come from outside of England, so they were used to embracing a new culture. The other thing was that no one in China had seen a black person, so they were a bit of an attraction themselves. Wherever they went, there was interest in them.’

  ‘The thing that stood out for me was how smart the three lads were,’ says Trewick. ‘We were all the rest of us scruffy so-and-sos and there they were, immaculately turned out in their beautiful shirts and well-tailored suits.’

  West Brom played four matches while in China. The first was against a club side from Peking on a bare, hard pitch and in sweltering heat. Despite 80,000 people packing the city stadium, the game took place in silence. Before kick-off, an announcement was made over the PA instructing spectators to remain quiet and seated. During the half-time interval, the Albion players were further taken aback by having a retinue of officials enter their dressing room and serve them bowls of ice-cream on a trestle table.

  The match was won at a canter, 3-1. It was a story repeated in the subsequent games in Shanghai, Kwantung Province and against the Chinese national side. In Shanghai, the oppressive air appeared to have been lifted as 40,000 shirt-sleeved fans peppered the local stadium with splashes of colour. It was a stark and welcome contrast to the sea of grey tunics that had confronted them in Peking.

  Returning home via Hong Kong, Atkinson arranged for the grateful party to have a night out at the horse races on the then British colony. Here, at last, the manager was again in his element, playing the role of ringmaster and keeping everyone’s glass but his own filled with champagne. There was a horse called Cambridge Lad running in the last race of the evening. A delighted Atkinson harangued everyone into betting on it and it romped home at odds of 20/1.

  Willie Johnston hadn’t gone to China. Rather, he’d joined up with the Scottish squad to prepare for that summer’s World Cup in Argentina. Played to the rhythm of a tango and against the backdrop of swirling clouds of ticker tape, the tournament itself was a spectacle so unfamiliar to the watching audience back in Britain that
it could have been taking place on a different planet, albeit one under the rule of a brutal military junta. Compared to the game at home, there was something otherworldly about the football that was served up too. The best of it – which is to say when the leading nations rose above blatant gamesmanship and physical intimidation – was a carnival of skill and daring.

  The Scots travelled to South America flush with a misguided sense of optimism. In the event, they were beaten by unfancied Peru in their opening match and crashed out of the competition at the first group stage. Even before then, Johnston had been sent home in disgrace, having failed a drugs test that was administered after the game with Peru. The substance in question was nothing more sinister than a hay fever remedy, but Johnston’s reputation doubtless counted against him at the Scottish Football Association. It offered up no challenge to his exclusion from the tournament, or the subsequent twelve-month ban that FIFA handed him down at both international and club level. This ruled Johnston out of West Brom’s upcoming UEFA Cup campaign and hastened his exit from the club. It also meant Cunningham was now unchallenged as the team’s wing man.

  ‘After Argentina, that was me done,’ says Johnston. ‘At every ground I went to the next season, I was getting booed or having ‘junkie’ chanted at me, and it was all for a load of shite. Big Ron told me I wasn’t going to get in the team and also that the chairman didn’t want me at the club. Eventually, Vancouver Whitecaps in the American Soccer League came in for me. I’d not been to Canada, so off I went.’

  Back in Britain, Johnston’s troubles amounted to no more than a footnote next to the dominant story of that summer. This was that of the former leader of the Liberal Party, Jeremy Thorpe, who was facing a committal hearing on a charge of conspiracy to commit murder. An extraordinary saga, as it was played out it became as much to do with the morals and mores of the country’s privileged – and white – upper classes as with any alleged crime.