The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘The whole team played well, but Laurie was absolutely sensational that night,’ says Atkinson. ‘George Best would have been a comparison at the time, but now I think a better one would be Thierry Henry in his prime at Arsenal. He was as brilliant as that. Spanish TV was at the game and that was when Real Madrid first took an interest in him.’

  Cunningham’s showing in Valencia brought him gushing press notices. It also began to ferment in his mind the notion that he was meant for higher things and a grander stage to parade on. However, within just a week another black footballer at a Midlands club had written a much bigger story.

  On 29 November 1978, Viv Anderson of Nottingham Forest became the first black player to be capped by England at senior level. Cunningham had been racing him to smash through this particular glass ceiling, but it was Anderson’s name that went into the record books. He made his full international debut in an otherwise insignificant friendly international against Czechoslovakia at Wembley. The great rock that he, Cunningham and the other black players in the English game had been shouldering uphill was now set for its long tumble towards breaking open the floodgates.

  ‘There wasn’t any rivalry between Laurie and me about it,’ says Anderson of the record. ‘If there had been, you’d have never got him riled anyway. In fact, I don’t think the matter of who got there first was ever mentioned between us.

  ‘Of course, it was a big deal. Before the game, I got good luck telegrams from the Queen and Elton John. My mom and dad were on the telly. But as a young footballer, it was all about trying to play well. The one thing I had in mind was that I didn’t want to let either myself or my family down.’

  Winter was biting when Valencia landed in the West Midlands. To the Baggies fans used to the more mundane ebb and flow of League football, their doing so seemed fantastical. These were the days before European cup matches and continental league games had become a fixture of English television schedules. One might catch a glimpse of a spellbinding footballer such as Kempes through the wider coverage that was afforded a World Cup, but otherwise not at all.

  The evening before the game, the Valencia team trained under the Hawthorns floodlights. Their being there was so out of the ordinary that small packs of Albion supporters turned up outside the ground on a frigid night to try and catch a glimpse of them. ‘Me and my mate stood freezing on Halford’s Lane and I got Kempes’s autograph,’ recalls Dave Bowler. ‘I mean, the idea that Mario Kempes should come to the Hawthorns. Jesus!’

  Ron Atkinson was also as an observer that night, but he took a less prosaic view. ‘It was icy cold and Kempes was out there in a hat and gloves,’ he says. ‘I thought to myself, “This lot really won’t fancy it tomorrow.”’

  If anything, it was colder the next night. Breath froze in the air and a rapier wind cut to the bone. Yet it was packed inside the Hawthorns and just as loud and partisan as it had been at the Mestalla. Indeed, those that were there claim the old ground never knew a better atmosphere.

  Valencia made their intention clear from the outset, which was to stop Cunningham by any means necessary. The hapless Castellanos had been replaced in their side by a more streetwise defender, Juan Daniel Cordero. The first time Cunningham skipped past, Cordero hacked his legs from under him. As the game progressed, one brutish lunge at Cunningham followed another.

  However, this time it was West Brom who made the flying start. The game was just five minutes old when Statham tossed a hopeful ball into the Valencia box. It was allowed to bounce, rearing up and striking a defender on the hand: penalty. Tony Brown stepped up and sent goalkeeper Jose Luis Manzanedo the wrong way. 1-0. Unlike West Brom in Spain, Valencia recoiled. Albion began to dominate them, zipping the ball about on a pitch made slick with damp. Wile and Roberson smothered Kempes; Cantello suffocated Bonhoff.

  In obsessing over Cunningham, Valencia neglected Regis. The big man pulverised them for it. This was one of those nights when he seemed able to run through brick walls. The more he outmuscled their defence, the more the will seemed to seep out of the Spanish side. Before half-time, Regis thundered into their penalty area and forced the ball through to Brown to score. The referee disallowed it for offside. West Brom netted again not long after the interval and once more had it chalked off for an infringement. Regis then hit the post with a soaring header. Valencia clung on by their fingertips.

  Even then, there was almost a sting in their tail. Midway through the second half they were awarded a free kick twenty-five yards from goal. Kempes, who had up to then been inert, came to life to take it. He struck it hard and true, like an arrow, but Godden flung himself to his right and parried it out. After that, Valencia had the look of beaten men.

  In the final minutes, Cunningham at last wriggled out of Cordero’s clutches and cut an arcing ball back from the touchline for the unmarked Tony Brown to volley in the winning goal. The result put West Brom into the quarter-finals of the competition. It spoke louder that they had got there by toppling one of the glamour names of European football.

  ‘Valencia had expected to win the competition and quite easily,’ says John Wile. ‘They probably hadn’t even heard of West Bromwich Albion, but we’d beaten them and well. It meant that people in the game now knew that we were a team to be reckoned with.’

  For Cunningham, Regis, Batson and that entire West Brom side, this seemed the point of their arrival. It held the promise of being the gateway to further glories and bigger prizes. Yet if they had studied the other results in the competition that night a note of caution might have been struck. The team set to be their opposition in the next round, Red Star Belgrade, had seen off another of England’s UEFA Cup representatives, Arsenal.

  The facts of the matter were these: the Yugoslav side had edged their home leg by the odd goal and then battled to a 1-1 draw at Highbury, soaking up pressure and stealing the tie in its final minutes. However, these were lessons lost to Ron Atkinson and his team.

  Chapter Ten: Footsteps in the Snow

  The win over Valencia set the triumphal tone that endured at West Bromwich Albion through Christmas and into the New Year. This would amount to the defining crescendo of Cunningham, Regis and Batson’s time together at the club, and as well to the highest peak of Ron Atkinson’s managerial reign. Yet at the same point the country as a whole was sinking deeper into economic chaos and also facing up to the onset of a ruinous winter. The latter of these two events would end up having the decisive impact on Albion’s season.

  At the start of December, a pall of arctic weather settled over Britain. This helped to account for one of the lowest gates of the season turning out at the Hawthorns to see West Brom breeze past Middlesbrough 2-0. A week later, they rolled over local rivals Wolverhampton Wanderers 3-0 on their own patch and in conditions that were just as raw. A heavy snowfall forced the postponement of their next scheduled home match, against Southampton. Soon, this would become a familiar and destructive pattern.

  For now, hope and expectation still surged at the club – even though they had all but vanished on Britain’s streets and in its homes. Unemployment in the country had reached a post-war peak of 1.5 million and the cost of living continued to be driven up. Strong and purposeful government was required to stand firm in the face of these stresses, but this was lacking. The incumbent Labour regime was instead operating as a minority administration and clasping on to power thanks to a precarious pact it had agreed with the Liberals.

  Attempting to stem inflation, Prime Minister Jim Callaghan imposed a 5 per cent limit on pay rises in the public sector. He was undermined almost at once in this by a series of booming settlements in the private arena. First among these was a whopping 17 per cent offer that the management at car giant Ford gave up to its workforce, caving in to union pressure and bringing to an end a bitter two-month long strike. The fall-out left Callaghan facing a vote of no-confidence in Parliament in the week between West Brom beating Middlesbrough and Wolves. He won this, but narrowly.

  Emboldened by the ou
tcome at Ford, tanker drivers were next to walk out for more pay on 18 December. A significant number of the strikers worked for major oil companies such as BP and Esso, and fuel supplies were seriously disrupted. The embattled government teetered on the edge of declaring a national state of emergency. This began the so-called Winter of Discontent in Britain. Still more corrosive and drawn-out industrial disputes followed in the weeks to come, and these all but brought the country to its knees.

  One of the areas to suffer most acutely through this was the industrialised West Midlands. As a result of the fuel shortages, factory production lines in the region ground to a halt. Even though these recovered in the short term, this point marked the beginning of the end for the Black Country as a manufacturing power base. A strike by local bakers also incited people to panic buy bread in shops and supermarkets. This hurried along the mood of despair growing out of the housing estates and in the working men’s pubs and clubs surrounding the Hawthorns and other football grounds like it.

  Even the news was disrupted. As Christmas neared, the National Union of Journalists called its members out. In the Midlands, the proprietors of the Express & Star and Evening Mail newspapers were forced to publish skeleton editions. In being so diminished and with their assets stripped by circumstance, these now seemed like a portent of things to come. Since he was so attuned to the currents of the local media, given the sounding board it allowed him, this brought the encroaching gloom into Ron Atkinson’s orbit.

  ‘Bob Downing at the Express & Star and I hadn’t been in to see him for a bit, so Ron rang both of us to find out what we were doing,’ explains Dave Harrison. ‘Normally, we used to have to troop along to the club every day to get a story off him for the papers. If there was nothing going on, he’d tell us we could write up that he was looking at signing such-and-such a player. It wasn’t true, but it gave us copy.

  ‘We told him we were out on strike and he invited us down to the ground for a cup of tea. Bob was first into his office. When I went in after him, Ron said to me, “You’re not married are you, Scoop?” Then he handed me £30 and told me to buy a Christmas present with it for my mom. He also said that if I mentioned anything about it in the paper, he’d never speak to me again. That was Ron. He was a very generous bloke.’

  At this time, Atkinson also engineered a story intended to introduce some festive cheer to the papers. To bring this about, Cunningham, Regis and Batson were persuaded to be photographed in Santa Claus outfits. The subsequent picture was published beneath the headline: ‘Guess who’s dreaming of a white Christmas?’ Cunningham suffered the indignities of this in silence and Regis accepted it as a fact of life. For his part, Batson felt as though he’d been railroaded into something beyond his control. It wasn’t the last time that season that this would be the case.

  On Boxing Day, the West Brom manager took his team to the capital to face Arsenal. Highbury was traditionally a difficult place to go to and win, and Arsenal had run into a rich vein of form. Just three days earlier they had crushed their north London rivals Spurs 5-0 at White Hart Lane, a result that brought them level on points with West Brom in the League.

  The visitors began the game at a frenetic pace, rushing into a 2-0 lead within the first twenty minutes through goals from Bryan Robson and Ally Brown. In the second half, Arsenal turned the tide, prompted by their most influential player, a young Irishman named Liam Brady. They struck back from the penalty spot and thereafter pressed hard to take control of the match. Yet the Baggies withstood the onslaught to secure a hard-fought victory. They were now within three points of Liverpool at the top of the League, having played two fewer games than their closest rivals for the title.

  In the Express & Star the next day, Atkinson declared the win at Highbury to have been his most satisfying of the season so far. In this respect, the upbeat note he struck chimed against the storm clouds billowing in the world outside. Further up front, the paper reported on two youths being hospitalised with machete wounds following a Boxing Day clash in Wolverhampton town centre between white and Asian youths. This was the sort of flashpoint that exposed the racial tensions simmering barely below the surface in towns and cities around the country.

  Both the local and national press fixated on a different story two days later. Under increasing pressure to get a result of their own, the West Midlands police announced that they had remanded a 50-year-old man in custody in connection with the Carl Bridgewater murder. He was Patrick Molloy, described as ‘unemployed and of no fixed abode’. In due course, Molloy confessed to robbing Yew Tree Farm on the afternoon Carl was killed and in the company of three other local men, James Robinson and a pair of cousins, Vincent and Michael Hickey.

  The apparent ending of the hunt for the killers of the schoolboy was met with widespread relief, an almost collective exhaling of breath. In this one isolated case, there was the promise of a good and appropriate outcome. This was of justice being seen to be done and then swift and proper retribution resulting.

  If it had to be boiled down to a single game for the three West Brom footballers and their manager of that time, it would be this one: 30 December, Manchester United at Old Trafford. At this point, Ron Atkinson couldn’t wait for the next match to come around, and he savoured his team as much as did their most avid supporter. Here, they attained his ideal. Cunningham rose to another level. Regis summoned one of his most striking acts of strength and power. Batson was at his coolest and most assured.

  Fortune was also at hand. Football then occupied a late-night niche on British television. Edited highlights of just two or three games from the Football League were broadcast each week of the season on the BBC’s Match of the Day or on such commercial rivals as The Big Match in London or the Midlands-focused Star Soccer. As such, the great majority of the most gripping contests of the era have faded to memory. Not this one. It was filmed for Star Soccer and lives on, as vivid and enthralling now as it was then. Preserved in this state, it remains a true game for the ages.

  Going into it, the two teams were in contrasting shape. West Brom arrived in Manchester chasing a fourth straight victory in the League. In their two most recent matches, against Liverpool and Bolton, United had shipped six goals without scoring. West Brom sat third in the table, United five places below them and as many points adrift (at this time two points were awarded for a win). Yet history was on United’s side; Albion hadn’t managed a win in their previous seventeen visits to Old Trafford.

  It was a bitter day and the temperature barely nudged above freezing all afternoon. Flurries of snow swirled around the ground. Manchester was also in the middle of a public transport strike. Neither this nor the adverse weather deterred a crowd of 45,000 from attending the game. Atkinson fielded a line-up that had become familiar and unchanging. United’s team didn’t have the same settled look to it, but it retained a surfeit of skill and solidity. Going forward, England’s Steve Coppell and the Northern Ireland international Sammy McIlroy provided craft and creativity. Two redoubtable Scottish centre-halves guarded the back, Gordon McQueen and United captain Martin Buchan.

  The game took a little time to spring to life. Both sides initially seemed to be shaking off the ache of a hectic Christmas schedule, and the ball passed between them like a hot potato. But it settled to a bracing rhythm, the action swinging from one end of the pitch to the other. For West Brom, Tony Brown and Ally Brown tested United’s goalkeeper Gary Bailey with long-range shots and Batson planted a diving header just wide of the post. At the other end, Godden was forced into a point-blank save from McIlroy.

  It was all hustle and bustle, sweat and endeavour. Except, that is, for when the ball arrived at Cunningham’s feet. For the briefest moment, this brought an oasis of calm to the game, with time seeming to stand still. Then he set off, gliding forward. His acceleration to full speed appeared effortless. As one, then two players rushed to close him down, he shifted his point of his balance one way or the other. Then he was gone in a flash, defenders trailing in his wake �
� like a will o’ the wisp. It was then that one was able to hear clearest the chorus of boos reverberating around the ground in a low rumble.

  On twenty-one minutes, United took the lead. Albion’s defence cleared the ball from a corner, but only to the edge of their own box. United’s right-back Brian Greenhoff was waiting there and he returned it on the volley, his shot looping over the despairing Godden.

  Albion hit straight back. Cunningham collected the ball on the left-side touchline and cut infield. As he was doing so, the Star Soccer commentator, Gerald Sinstadt, attempted to make a point that until then had not been voiced on British television. ‘The booing of the black players,’ Sinstadt began, but this was as far as he got. Cunningham was too quick for him, slipping the ball into the penalty area for Tony Brown to swivel onto and score.

  Cunningham now had wings. Within minutes he was flying once more and this time from the centre circle. He skipped past two lunging challenges and then released the ball to Regis. In the blink of an eye, Regis had back-heeled it into the path of the onrushing Len Cantello, who speared it into the top corner of the net from the right-hand side of United’s penalty area. Five months later, ITV’s viewers voted it their ‘Goal of the Season’.

  At 2-1 the contest seemed to be there for the taking for the visiting side. But no, United dug deep and West Brom capitulated. First, McQueen rose unmarked to head a corner home. Then McIlroy capitalised on another lapse in the Albion defence to give his side the lead, 3-2.

  Again, momentum shifted. Tony Brown released a charging Robson through the middle. Bailey came to meet him and palmed his goal-bound shot to safety. Then with the referee’s half-time whistle beckoning, Statham hoofed the ball into United’s penalty area and Brown swept it up and into the net for 3-3. Atkinson had missed this last twist, having gone to the dressing room where he was running over in his mind how best to rally his team.