The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

‘We all came in and sat down and Ron said to us, “You’re playing great. Keep going and you’ll get the equaliser, no worries,” ’ says Tony Brown. ‘Ally Robertson had to tell him I’d just scored. Ron didn’t miss a beat. He said, “Well, keep going and you’ll get the winner, no worries.” It took all the nervousness out of the situation. We were still laughing when we went back on the pitch.’

  From the start, the make-up of the second half was different. West Brom wrestled the initiative and restricted United to intermittent attacks. These floundered on the rocks of a stout defence marshalled by Wile and Robertson. Cunningham propelled his side forward, slicing through United’s ranks at will. The booing was heard more often now and it was louder in volume. At one point it was being directed at Regis and the ball ran out of play. Sinstadt seized his chance. ‘Once again there’s some unsavoury booing of the black players,’ he noted in his commentary, adding, ‘which says nothing for their sportsmanship at all.’

  His words seem mild now, but it was then a taboo to report the racist abuse that was being regularly meted out to black footballers in the British game, and Sinstadt broke it. His was a lone voice. In the subsequent press coverage of the game, there was no mention made of the barracking that Cunningham, Regis and Batson were subjected to at Old Trafford. In that regard, it was business as usual.

  ‘It’s the one thing that sticks out most in my mind,’ Sinstadt says now. ‘There was this almost laissez-faire attitude to the abuse of black players. It was sort of accepted, which worried me greatly. I determined that I was going to have a go about it at some point.

  ‘You have to bear in mind that other than the FA Cup final and England-Scotland games, there were no live matches on television. It was all edited highlights. Even with a great game like that one, you were lucky to get thirty minutes of it on air. So if you intended to have a go about something, you had to judge when there was the most reasonable chance of it making the edit.

  ‘That was in my mind during the game. I recall the perfect situation arising when the move began that led up to West Brom’s first goal. I was aware of the sound coming from the terraces and I started to speak, but the priority was to go with the goal. I never had the same opportunity again when I was absolutely sure that what I said would be broadcast. In a way, it still disappoints me that I wasn’t able to make a stronger point. But I got no comeback from what I said, either from ITV or the viewers.’

  West Brom pressed on. Robertson had a header cleared off the line by Greenhoff. Cunningham kept coming. On one mesmeric run he covered half the pitch and left three defenders behind. He was only stopped by a desperate challenge on the cusp of United’s goal, the ball breaking to Regis. From twenty yards out, the centre-forward struck it first time and brought a spectacular diving save from Bailey.

  The pitch had begun to cut up and it was almost impossible to predict which way the ball would bounce off the uprooted turf. This made it increasingly difficult for the players to bring it under control. But for Cunningham, that is. When he took it, and caressed it, the ball seemed fastened to his dancing feet. With thirteen minutes to go, he broke free again and made for goal. There was no stopping him this time. As Bailey advanced, he drilled the ball beyond the flailing keeper and into the far corner of the net to give his side the lead.

  In the final minutes, Cunningham yet again stripped United’s bedraggled defence. Sinstadt was moved to a second indelible reflection. ‘And he’s away again,’ the commentator purred. ‘To show that pace and grace and control.’

  Considering this now, he says: ‘I was thinking about Cunningham and Gareth Bale the other day. Because both of them went on to Real Madrid, but two more different wingers you couldn’t imagine. Bale is all power, whereas Cunningham appeared to drift past people because his balance and footwork was so good. But then, he needed to be like that with the defenders that were around in his day. Otherwise he’d have ended up in the front row of the stand.’

  This last dash of Cunningham’s led to Albion’s clinching goal. Off he went, down the touchline, leaving his attending full-back Stewart Houston for dust. The ever-willing Ally Brown accepted the ball from him and then rolled it into the box for Regis to come onto and hammer into the roof of the net. That was the final score: Manchester United 3–5 West Bromwich Albion.

  ‘At that moment in time, we were playing above the ground,’ says Atkinson. ‘United’s best player was their keeper, and by a mile. If it weren’t for Gary Bailey, I honestly believe we’d have had ten goals or more that day.’

  Regis celebrated his decisive blow with his arms spread wide and a huge grin across his face. He was rejoicing in the win, but then also perhaps hailing another, deeper victory. This had been won against the faction of United’s support that had scorned him, and also Cunningham and Batson. This crowd and others like it. Never one to make a fuss about the abuse, Regis sucked it up outside of the game. But once on the pitch, he was able to look the mob in the eye. Look them in the eye and then beat them down.

  There is one final moment from that afternoon that remains frozen in time. Atkinson and his Manchester United counterpart Dave Sexton were interviewed on the pitch after the game for the TV. Sinstadt asks Atkinson to nominate his man of the match. Atkinson replies: ‘It would be a toss-up between one of the coloured front people and today, I think, Cyrille Regis.’

  ‘Ah yes, we were still then referring to them as “coloured” players,’ notes Sinstadt. ‘In that period this was not offensive to many people. It was the black players themselves who made it known that they found it offensive.’

  The result meant that West Brom ended the year just two points off Liverpool and breathing down their neck. This was shaping up to be a gripping battle for supremacy and between two contrasting ideologies: the ruthless perfectionism of Liverpool against the free spirits of West Brom. For the neutral, there was only one side to be on.

  ‘I’m not even an Albion fan, but I couldn’t wait to get home that night and watch the game against Manchester United,’ says journalist Martin Swain. ‘The sheer bravura of that side, the sweep of it, was just stunning. They also had that vulnerability that we Brits love to see in our teams.

  ‘With regard to that particular contest with Liverpool, I’m reminded of the West Indies cricket team of the same era. It was a fairly joyless experience going to see them win Test matches in those days, because there were no cracks in their make-up. They had this kind of brutish efficiency. There was something of that about that Liverpool side too.’

  ‘There is a common perception that the team was built by Johnny Giles, improved by Ronnie Allen and finished off by Ron Atkinson,’ considers Bob Downing. ‘I think that does Ron a great disservice, because he galvanised it. He got them playing football the way he wanted it played and everybody else longed to see it. Basically, it was the idea of, “If you score one, we’ll get two.”

  ‘However, with that team it always comes back to the three lads – to Laurie, Cyrille and Brendon, because they broke the mould. I don’t believe for a second it ever mattered to Ron what colour they were. All he cared about was that he’d got three very good players.’

  It wouldn’t be possible to follow the drama of Old Trafford, but there was nothing anti-climactic about West Brom’s next game. This took place just two days later against Bristol City. The weather worsened the night before the match, and New Year’s Day dawned chill and with a thick blanket of snow covering the Hawthorns pitch. This led to most other games in the country being postponed, Liverpool’s among them. Atkinson saw an opportunity to reel the League leaders in and resolved that come what may, his side would play.

  The Hawthorns ground staff and a band of willing supporters were rounded up to sweep snow from the pitch and terraces. Even then, the turf had been rendered bone-hard and treacherous by a sharp frost. It appeared a pointless task, but this didn’t deter Atkinson. Just before Christmas he’d visited the Adidas factory in Strasbourg, France, and been shown a new brand of football boot speci
fically designed to be worn on Astroturf. Atkinson had ordered a consignment and he sent his team out to warm up for the game in them.

  ‘The day before, I’d worn a pair of them for training,’ he says. ‘I’d said to Cyrille, “Look, I’m even better than usual.” He was falling about all over the place, although to be fair he wasn’t the best five-a-side player. The boys were out there in their new boots when the referee and the Bristol manager, Alan Dicks, came out to inspect the pitch.

  ‘You’d never even entertain playing the game today and neither of them wanted it to go ahead. But there were 25,000 people in the ground by then. Bomber Brown went flying past us and shouted over to me, “Gaffer, this is brilliant!” I turned to the ref and said, “He’s played 700 games – if he wants to go ahead, I’m happy with that.” ’

  Atkinson had ensured the dice were loaded from the start. Bristol City was a dogged mid-table side, but one West Brom would have been expected to beat in regular conditions. With their players struggling to stand up, the Bristol cause was hopeless. The only surprise was that they kept the score to 3-1.

  ‘Joe Royle, who’s a big pal of mine, was the Bristol centre-forward,’ relates Atkinson. ‘Before kick-off, he came walking past the referee’s room, outside of which was all this paving. I could hear his metal studs clattering on the concrete. He told me there was no way the game should be played under these conditions. I said to him, “Joe, if you think it’s dangerous and don’t want to get hurt, stand still.” The first time he ran was in the seventy-fifth minute when Alan Dicks pulled him off.

  ‘I actually think that was our best performance of the season. I’d told the lads it was going to be tricky and we’d have to help the ball on a lot. But I couldn’t believe the quality of our play. Cantello was playing push-and-runs as if he were on the best surface at Wembley.’

  It was a match meant for Laurie Cunningham above all others, and on that afternoon he was unplayable. He glided across the rutted pitch with the poise of a ballet dancer and showed off a conjuror’s mastery of the ball. Admiring him in that moment, Atkinson was convinced that there was no greater talent to be seen in the English game right then.

  ‘I had this one saying about Laurie,’ he remembers. ‘That he was so good he could run on snow without leaving footprints.’

  Out in the country, 1979 began just as wretchedly as the old year had ended. Troops were put on standby to deliver petrol supplies as a result of the ongoing tanker drivers’ dispute. Motorists and shoppers were launched on a fresh wave of panic buying. On 6 January, MPs demanded the emergency recall of Parliament to address a rising sense of hysteria. Escaping to football in the midst of this, and most especially the kind of thrilling football being dished up by West Bromwich Albion, was like finding a light in the darkness.

  ‘That’s a significant point,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘I can speak with authority on what a grim time it was, because I was working on the local TV news show Midlands Today and doing football reports for radio in Birmingham. Life was bloody hard for people and football was very, very important to a lot of them.

  ‘What was it Marx said? The opium of the masses and all that. It’s all there in terms of what football can do to unite people and give them a sense of purpose. That was definitely the case with that West Brom side. They were such a shot in the arm and made people feel good about themselves.’

  ‘Those were really tough times in this area,’ says author and Albion supporter Dave Bowler. ‘The redundancy notices were starting to come out in 1979. It was miserable, but you could go to the Hawthorns and know that it was going to be exciting and you’d be entertained. I’d paid £10 for a season ticket to stand in the Smethwick End. That still is the best value I’ve ever had.’

  The tremors set off by Atkinson’s team and the presence of Cunningham, Regis and Batson were also now being felt in the wider culture. The makers of the popular table football game Subbuteo produced a West Brom team set that included three black figurines. Such was the attention to detail that one of these was given a moustache like Batson’s. The club even registered in the annual appraisal of the cultural landscape outlined in the music paper New Musical Express.

  ‘That was when I knew we’d cracked it,’ says supporter John Homer. ‘You opened up the NME and their “in” thing was West Bromwich Albion. That’s your two loves right there, music and football. It was the ultimate show of respect and it’ll stick with me to my dying day.’

  Yet there was also a down side to the increased attention and acclaim. It fostered in Atkinson a craving for more, and he was impetuous about pursuing it. He was compelled to break the British transfer record, spending £516,000 of the club’s money to sign David Mills from Middlesbrough. Mills was a decent footballer but no star, and he would never justify Atkinson’s extravagant outlay. His arrival tipped the balance of the team, and in the shattering of his confidence one could also detect the breaking up of its foundations.

  Not that this was on anyone’s mind on 13 January. On that day the Baggies travelled to Norwich for a match that would send them to the top of the League. There was perhaps too much football in their legs and it was a scrappy performance, but a Regis goal earned a 1-1 draw to lift them a point clear of Liverpool. This was a peak for the team, but it also brought its three most striking components into the sharpest focus.

  ‘It’s very hard to tell people now what Britain was like then,’ suggests Martin Swain. ‘The country was undoubtedly far more racist. Look at the culture of the time with things like Love Thy Neighbour on TV. You didn’t have black guys watching games. Or but for the occasional player, being in teams. Then this West Brom side appeared. To begin with they were almost like oddities, curiosities in a huge white landscape. That was one element. But the other thing was that they were exciting, swashbuckling and just bloody great.

  ‘For me, it was all encapsulated by Regis. Cunningham was possibly a bit more erratic, but Regis was off the scale. For a huge number of white kids in Britain, he’d have been our first black hero. He was the first one that a twelve-year-old white kid would go out on the playing field and want to be. That’s a massive thing. From a social point of view, this country hasn’t produced a more important sporting team than that one. We’ve now got a multicultural country and I love it, and they’re part of the reason why. That is their triumph.’

  ‘There is a lot of truth in that,’ concurs civil rights activist Derrick Campbell. ‘Their skill on the football pitch was their currency, and it gave them a key to access people from different backgrounds and walks of life. I think a prevailing view was, “Can you believe that they’re black?” They were so good and they were black. It was almost the “I can’t believe it’s not butter” moment. That alone created discussion and mystique.’

  Chapter Eleven: The Three Degrees

  From their perch on top of the Football League, West Brom’s players and their manager must surely have allowed their thoughts to drift to the possible glories to come. It had been more than half a century since the club had won its solitary League Championship and there was now the promise of another, and in its centenary season too. This being the case, such wanderings were soon stilled as winter closed in and stopped them dead in their tracks.

  The team was able to negotiate its passage into the Fourth Round of the FA Cup, doling out another thrashing to Coventry after a replay and with Brendon Batson scoring one of his very few goals. But then their season ground to a halt. Blizzards swept the UK during the last week of January, with drifts as much as ten-feet high closing a fifty-mile stretch of the M6 motorway in the Midlands. There were further heavy snowfalls and then temperatures plunged below freezing. Streets and parks and pitches were turned white and the air to ice.

  Football fixtures around the country were wiped out. In the seven weeks between the draw at Norwich that sent them to the summit of the table and the start of March when the weather at last broke, Albion were able to play just two League games. Even more damning than this enforced state o
f inertia was the frustration of knowing that their rivals Liverpool were untroubled by it. With the ambition and foresight of champions, the Merseyside club had installed undersoil heating at its Anfield ground. Unlike the Hawthorns, their pitch wasn’t ravaged by frost, and the Liverpool machine was kept ticking over.

  The Reds had reclaimed their lead in the League and charged six points clear of their challengers by the time West Brom got back into action. This landed them a damaging psychological blow. In due course, the resulting fixture backlog would exert an ever-greater physical toll on the Baggies. All they could do in the meantime was turn up for training: five-a-side games in the snow if the team was able to clear the pitches at Spring Road. Then off to the pub. Round and round this same routine went, momentum dying on the vine.

  ‘We’d just come through that period where we’d beaten Arsenal, Manchester United and Bristol City and had five wins on the bounce,’ says Atkinson. ‘In that spell, I think we could’ve overcome any team in Europe. If it weren’t for the weather, I still believe we’d have gone on to win the League that year. In fact, I think we’d have been out of sight by the end of February. But there you go.’

  The bleakest picture of all was forming across the country. At the start of January, Prime Minister Callaghan rushed back from a conference in the Caribbean in an effort to calm the mounting unrest. Landing at Heathrow Airport, he tried to put on a jocular front when confronted by reporters. This gave rise to the defining newspaper headline of the time, on the front page of the Sun on 10 January. It spoke of a government fatally disconnected from the mood of its people and of events spiralling out of control, and it ran to just three words: ‘Crisis? What crisis?’

  On 22 January, Britain was hit by its biggest day of strike action since the General Strike of 1926. This mass walk-out was led by public sector workers who were protesting their proposed wage increases and thousands of whom stayed out indefinitely. Public transport was stopped. Ambulance drivers were reported to be refusing to take 999 calls and the army was drafted in to provide a skeleton service. Almost half of the hospitals in the country were restricted to treating emergencies.