by Paul Rees
‘I used to say to each of them, “If people call you a black so-and-so, then so what? How many times have I been told I’m a Scottish twat?” I didn’t give two hoots. The thing was we never, ever allowed anyone to call them ‘nigger’. That’s derogative. Anyone that did, I’d be the first to punch them.’
‘What shocked me when I joined West Brom was the volume,’ says Batson. ‘The noise and level of the abuse was incredible. At times, it was almost like surround sound in the grounds. But it was such a regular occurrence, you almost got used to it.
‘We’d get off the coach at away matches and the National Front would be right there in your face. In those days, we didn’t have security and we’d have to run the gauntlet. We’d get to the players’ entrance and there’d be spit on my jacket or Cyrille’s shirt. It was a sign of the times. I don’t recall making a big hue and cry about it. We coped. It wasn’t a new phenomenon to us. From when I came to England, I was familiar with people shouting at me from cars or on the Underground in London.
‘With the other players in the side, it was none of their business. It didn’t concern them and they weren’t sensitive to it. I also remember speaking to the BBC and confronting them about when they were going to say something about it. They told me it wasn’t possible to make out what was being shouted. What a load of bollocks that was. All of the excuses I got were a joke.’
The three players were also now accustomed to receiving hate mail at the club. Cunningham got the most, on account of his relationship with Nicky Brown, which was well-publicised. Yet Bryan Robson also recalls being sent vile letters asking him how an Englishman could tolerate having black team-mates. One of the more regular correspondents to the club was an Everton fan, who’d send in an abusive screed each time Albion were due to play on Merseyside. He directed this at Atkinson, urging him not to select his ‘monkeys’ for the game.
‘It was otherwise very well written,’ says Atkinson, smiling. ‘We treated a lot of it with humour. Before each game with Everton, Cyrille would say to me, “Gaffer, has he written?” He’d read it out and burst out laughing. We’d even stick it up in the dressing room. But then, we always beat Everton and the big man usually weighed in with a wonder goal.’
‘I never knew how sincere Ron was about the three black players,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘He was a pragmatist and he enjoyed players that excited him; it didn’t matter what their colour was. Cunningham and Regis thrilled him. He also liked good, solid defenders that didn’t piss around, and in that respect Brendon Batson was perfect for him.’
It was Cunningham again who attracted the most menacing heat away from the football stadia. Death threats were posted to the house he shared with Brown in Birmingham. On one occasion, a petrol bomb was thrown through their front door. Brown remembers him calmly stamping out the flames licking at the doormat, as if it were the sort of thing that happened every day. His only recourse remained on the pitch. That season, more than any other, he was able to keep striking back and winning victories.
At the end of September, West Brom went to play Chelsea at Stamford Bridge in the League. The west London club was another that had become notorious for the ferocity of its support. As at West Ham and Millwall, this was most apparent when there was a black player in the opposition team.
‘I wasn’t a Chelsea fan, but my brother-in-law had a season ticket and he took me along to see the game,’ recalls Lord Herman Ouseley, now chairman of English football’s anti-racism campaign group Kick It Out. ‘Going to football as a black man was then a very uncomfortable experience. You had to keep your head down and your wits about you.
‘At the beginning of the game, the three West Brom players got fruit thrown at them. Each time one of them touched the ball, the booing was horrendous. After about twenty minutes, Laurie weaved his way through the Chelsea defence and Cyrille banged the ball into the net. The guys sitting around me were enraged. They stood up and the abuse reached a cacophony.
‘Not long after, Laurie went through again and set up another goal. They were even more livid. But then one of these gorillas sitting in front of me turned to another and said, “Mind you, the nigger is fucking good, isn’t he?” This was a moment of inspiration for me and I sat there with a glow inside. It was saying, whatever the odds, you can win people over by your talent and perseverance.’
The game against Chelsea was won 3-1 and took West Brom into the top three in the League. By then they had also completed the formalities of getting through to the next round of the UEFA Cup, seeing off Galatasaray by the same score at the Hawthorns.
It was clear that the side had now taken shape. Batson had added an extra dimension to it. Both he and his opposite full-back, Derek Statham, were reliable defenders but also able to attack sides down the flanks. The young Robson was emerging as the complete midfielder. Alongside him, Tony Brown and Cantello were in the form of their lives. Up front, Regis was the team’s totemic presence. In the middle of the month, he followed Cunningham into the England U21 squad and made a victorious international debut in Denmark.
And then there was Cunningham. He gave to West Brom an edge that was intangible and unpredictable. The season was two months old, and he was sparking like a fire about to come blazing to life. His moments of brilliance flashed across a darkening gloom in the West Midlands. The Express & Star was then reporting another round of strikes over pay at the Ford car plant in Birmingham, and on the almost 80,000 industrial jobs having gone from the region.
A still more terrible event occurred that month. On 19 September, a thirteen-year-old schoolboy named Carl Bridgewater was completing his evening paper round in Stourbridge, not ten miles from the Hawthorns. One of his last calls was to Yew Tree Farm. The elderly couple who owned the property were out that day, but Carl knew them well and let himself in through the back door. It was his dreadful luck to have arrived at the house as it was being robbed.
One or more of the burglars took the boy at gunpoint from the kitchen and into the sitting room. Police found him there on the sofa, where at some time after 4 p.m. he’d been shot through the head at point-blank range with a sawn-off shotgun. The cold brutality of his murder shocked people in the West Midlands and across the country. It also seemed to encapsulate a feeling of hopelessness and desolation rushing to the surface.
Chapter Nine: Tora! Tora! Tora!
October began badly for West Bromwich Albion. In the first week of the month they were knocked out of the League Cup by Leeds and then beaten in the League at Tottenham, with each game ending 0-1. These were rare occasions when Atkinson’s team failed to score, and neither Cunningham nor Regis was able to sparkle.
At Tottenham, the cut and thrust came instead from a player who seemed just as rare and exotic to the English game as them. Running Spurs’ midfield that day was Osvaldo Ardiles, a slight but deft Argentinian who’d starred for his country in the summer World Cup. In the aftermath of the tournament, the north London club had signed him and also his compatriot, Ricardo Villa. Their doing so marked a further step along the road towards British football arriving at a cosmopolitan perspective.
Extending this ideal to one of Britain itself becoming truly multicultural was still then liable to provoke fear and foreboding. A bleak vision of this was again being articulated by Enoch Powell, more than a decade after he’d foreseen the country drowning in a river of blood. The Wolverhampton MP skulked back to attack at this, his bête noire, like a beaten but ravenous dog.
Speaking to the Express & Star newspaper, Powell claimed England’s ‘coloured’ population would double in the next twenty years. In this, he detected a threat to the nation as great as that of the Norman invasion of 1066. Raged Powell: ‘I am thinking of the people of this country who no longer dare to step out of their front doors after dark, because thugs will steal their wallets.’
This was an opportune moment for the movie musical Grease to open in the UK, which it did to great fanfare on 19 October. Through its lens, beleaguered Brits escaped in the
ir droves to an idealised America of the 1950s where life was lived to the beat of fast cars and young love. It was perhaps symbolic that the world being pictured in it was as pretty and white as Olivia Newton-John’s central character, Sandy.
West Brom had been momentarily stalled, but they were soon enough moving through the gears again. Indeed, the loss at Tottenham seemed to spur them to renewed efforts. Straight after it they embarked upon a run of seventeen games unbeaten. This would take them surging past the might of Liverpool to the top of the League. However, it was the manner of their doing so that resonated rather than the fact of it. For in this glorious period of three months, they played with a style that took the breath away.
Their football had a dash and flair to it that cast off the chains binding the sport in England. It aspired to something greater and more utopian than winning games through the functionality that was then the norm. In that sense and at that time, it was as wondrous as the world of make-believe conjured up in Grease. At its core were also two lead characters that might have leapt from the pages of fiction, the unyielding Regis and the mercurial Cunningham.
‘We were just frightening at that point and far and away the best side in the country,’ insists John Wile. ‘The younger players who came in, Laurie, Cyrille, Bryan Robson and Derek Statham, had got better from the year before. But everybody was at the top of their game. Regardless of where we went, if we didn’t get a minimum of a draw we were disappointed. We thought we could win every game. This wasn’t arrogance, but confidence.’
The charge began on 14 October in a League match against Leeds, before one of the most volatile crowds in the country at Elland Road. For much of it, they were second best to a strong Leeds side, and it was left to Wile, Robertson and Godden to stem the flow of their attacks. Leeds surged in front, but Tony Brown grabbed an equaliser against the run of play.
‘We were getting a right good chasing, but hanging in there,’ says Ron Atkinson, taking up the story. ‘I was sitting on the bench thinking of bringing Regis off. It might have been the only time I ever thought of it. But then Statham got injured and I had to bring Willie Johnston on at left-back. In the last five minutes of the game, the big man went and got two goals.
‘He’d taken a bit of stick off the Leeds crowd that day, but then we took stick as a team. And at the end of the game, he got a standing ovation off the park.’
Brendon Batson recalls the culmination of this match rather differently. ‘I remember walking off after we’d beaten them and almost inevitably Laurie, Cyrille and I were together,’ he says. ‘The malevolence coming down from the terraces was almost unbelievable. In those days, I was always very glad that there were fences in front of the crowd. On that occasion it allowed us to bravely indicate the score to them.’
Their next game was a West Midlands derby against Coventry City at the Hawthorns. As these things go, it was a fixture lacking in the intensity that characterised Albion’s clashes with Aston Villa or Wolverhampton. The city of Coventry was just too far up the M5 motorway to generate that kind of heat. But this contest was billed as being a battle for supremacy in the region, since Coventry began the game one place ahead of West Brom in the table.
On the day, Coventry wore an away strip that no one who attended the match is likely to forget. It was milk-chocolate brown in colour and entirely awful. Yet the trace memories of West Brom’s performance that afternoon have lingered stronger. They tore into their helpless opponents from the kick-off, making a mockery of the closeness between the two sides in the League.
Flashing the ball about the pitch, Tony Brown, Robson and Cantello were an exercise in perpetual motion. Regis was destructive, Cunningham dazzling, both of them ruthless in establishing their dominance over their opponents. In total, it was scintillating, captivating and magical. Between them, Regis and Cunningham shared four goals. The final score was outrageous – West Brom 7 – 1 Coventry. A breathless report in the Express & Star the next Monday described it as: ‘The most one-sided show since Custer took on the Indians . . . Never have I seen a team’s defence cut to ribbons so decisively.’
‘It was easy to play in that side, a doddle,’ says Statham. ‘All of us went through the games with massive smiles on our faces. We didn’t have a care in the world. We just wanted to get out on the pitch two, three times a week.’
‘Tactics went out of the window,’ insists Atkinson. ‘We were good defensively, because we had good defenders, but there was no point in telling that team to stick men behind the ball. We were better freewheeling. In that respect, I’d say the side we were most like was the Arsenal one of Thierry Henry, Dennis Bergkamp and Patrick Vieira.
‘As regards motivating them, I’d seen a war movie called Tora! Tora! Tora! and I can remember bringing that up. It was about the Japanese at Pearl Harbor. I told the lads that it meant “Attack, attack, attack”. So that’s what I used to go in and say to them before a game – “Today lads, Tora! Tora! Tora!”’
As his side picked up momentum, Atkinson let slip to his favoured newspaper reporters that he’d had an offer from the United States to go and coach the Philadelphia Furies in the nascent North American Soccer League. He stressed that this was set to make him the highest-paid manager in the US. This served its intended purpose. The day after it was reported, he and his trusted number two, Colin Addison, agreed new and improved three-and-a-half-year contracts with West Brom.
Atkinson might also then have made a mental note of a pop record that was released in the UK that month. Titled New Dimensions, it was the new album from an American soul and R&B vocal trio called the Three Degrees.
Into November West Brom went, reeling off victories against Birmingham, Ipswich and Bolton. Their passage through to the next round of the UEFA Cup was made to seem just as perfunctory as they brushed aside the Portuguese team Sporting Braga 3-0 on aggregate. However, this win set them up for a far more challenging encounter. This was against the Spanish side Valencia, the hot favourites to win the competition.
Valencia boasted two of the stars of the 1978 World Cup in their glittering line-up. Both of their names were also familiar on the West Brom training ground as a result of Ron Atkinson’s method acting. The Argentinian striker Mario Kempes had been the top goal scorer at the summer tournament and was also the most lethal marksman in La Liga in each of the two previous seasons. Tall, cavalier and with flowing black hair, there was something of the pirate about him.
Behind Kempes, the team’s strings were pulled by the West German Rainer Bonhof. A bullish midfielder, Bonhof had won the World Cup with his country in 1974 and was most feared for his stinging free kicks. Alongside these two, the Valencia team was dotted with top-class players. The club itself had a rich history. Since its formation in 1919, Valencia had been the most consistent challenger to the two giants of Spanish football, Real Madrid and Barcelona. The Valencia trophy room boasted four La Liga titles and the same number of triumphs in the national cup, the Copa del Rey (‘the King’s Cup’).
The first leg of the tie was to be played in Spain on 22 November. Valencia’s home ground was the imposing Mestalla stadium, famed for its steep, banking terraces and intimidating atmosphere. It was an ominous place to have to go; the sense of dread it engendered was re-enforced by the fact that it had served as a concentration camp during the Spanish Civil War.
Arriving in the Mediterranean city, the Albion players were buoyed by their impressive form in the League but their nerves were nonetheless jangling. There was a very different temperature to the European matches and to this one most of all. Valencia had lost the away leg in each of their two previous matches in the competition that season, but had looked invincible at home. Four goals were plundered against CSKA Sofia of Bulgaria, and the Romanian side FC Arges Pitesti had been hit for five.
‘We were supposed to be resting on the afternoon of the game, but I couldn’t sleep,’ says Len Cantello. ‘So I went down to the hotel lounge and found Big Ron. I asked him for a ball. I wanted to go
and have a kick about on the tennis courts. He said, “Sit down instead and have a beer with me.”
‘At first, I thought he was trying to tell me I wasn’t going to be playing. I had one bottle of beer and then he told me I could have another. When I’d finished it he said, “Right, now you can go and sleep that lot off.”’
The noise inside the Mestalla that night was intense and overpowering, and it seemed for a time that it might choke the West Brom side. They fell behind within sixteen minutes of kick-off. Godden misjudged the flight of a corner kick, flapping at the ball and allowing Kempes’s fellow Argentine, Dario Luis Felman, to rush in and bundle it into the net. Valencia’s 50,000 supporters ratcheted up the volume still further, expectant of another goal deluge.
However, this early set-back didn’t deter West Brom, but rather it jolted them to action. They started to keep the ball better than Valencia and move it quicker, tightening a grip on the contest and slowly, slowly subduing the crowd. Key to this was Cunningham, who came of age on the night. He began demanding the ball off his team-mates, and when it was at his feet he unleashed his full repertoire on the game.
He was imperious, sublime, and in the magical moment where the promise of great talent explodes into full bloom. The man tasked with trying to subdue him, Valencia’s Angel Castellanos, was given a torrid evening. Cunningham toyed with him like a cat with a mouse, turning and twisting him like a corkscrew.
The home crowd hurled oranges at their menace as if this might knock him out of his stride. It did nothing of the sort. He left them gasping instead at his audacity in taking a corner with the outside of his foot, the ball whipping through the air. Three minutes into the second half, he silenced them. Sprinting onto a pull-back from Ally Brown, he steered the ball into the net for Albion’s equalising goal. He and his team threatened to score more, but Valencia hung grimly on.