The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  Before then, it was back to the grind of the League. Less than forty-eight hours after being run ragged at Southampton, West Brom had to face bottom-of-the-table Chelsea at the Hawthorns. The Midlands had endured a further heavy snowfall and a combination of meltwater and rain reduced the Albion pitch to a mud bath that night. Both sides laboured on it, the game becoming a war of attrition that the home side sneaked 1-0.

  Two more close-fought victories followed against QPR and Derby. There was next to no free-flowing football to be seen at either of these games, each of them descending into a pitiless slog. It was Cunningham who dragged West Brom over the line in both, scoring two sublime goals.

  ‘Against Derby, Laurie got the ball on the left-hand side of their box and bent it round the ’keeper with his right foot,’ describes Atkinson. ‘It’s the sort of skill that’s been cultivated now, but you didn’t see it then.

  ‘Big Jack Charlton was manager of Sheffield Wednesday at the time and he was at the game. He and I were talking after the match and he told me that Laurie would never score another goal like it. I took him into my office. We recorded the games on spools of film in those days. I dug the one out with the QPR match on it and said to Jack, “Here, watch this.” Just two days earlier Laurie had scored an identical goal from virtually the exact same spot.’

  Red Star came to town on 21 March. The Hawthorns was expectant, packed to its rafters. Under the glare of the floodlights, West Brom tore out of the gates and laid siege to the Belgrade goal. On forty-one minutes, a Regis header brought them back on level terms in the tie. The pulsating atmosphere turned feverish, nostrils filled with the scent of blood and glory.

  Half-time came and went and still the flow of the game was all one way. Red Star’s players tried to break up its rhythm with a series of fouls and time-wasting tactics. It worked to the extent that it frustrated the home team and the crowd, but it seemed their armoury was otherwise empty. Yet still they hung on and still Albion strived in vain to land a knockout punch.

  In the final minutes, Red Star fell back again into their own half. West Brom came after them, throwing men forward. There was no thought given to regrouping and coming again in extra time. Of course, it was a trap, and in their naivety and blinded by their desperation to claim a prize, West Brom walked right into it.

  Red Star hurled the ball back up field. Three of their forwards gave chase. Hopelessly exposed, Ally Robertson was left to stop them. He tried, but in vain. Savic popped the ball past him and fired it into the net, clinical as an assassin. The goal was recorded at eighty-eight minutes. The Hawthorns fell silent as a tomb. It was another agonising defeat to absorb, another step too far.

  ‘How many chances did we make that night?’ asks Robertson, still hurting twenty-five years later. ‘But that was also us not learning. Because we were battering them we kept on charging up field, going for goal and never thinking that they could score one as well. One thing is for sure, that would never have happened to Liverpool. They were used to being in that situation. They’d have settled for extra time and gone on and won the game from there.’

  Time also ran out for Jim Callaghan at the end of that month. In the House of Commons, the Conservative leader Margaret Thatcher tabled a motion of no-confidence in his government. On a night of high drama on 28 March, Callaghan lost this by a single vote. The Prime Minister had declined to save himself by turning down a last-minute deal with the Ulster Unionists, the party to which Enoch Powell had defected.

  A General Election was called for 3 May. This would soon enough lead to radical changes to the political and social landscape of the country. It remains a moot point as to whether or not these benefited the British people as a whole. Likewise, change would also be forced upon West Bromwich Albion at the end of that season. However, it is inarguable that this wasn’t for the better of the club. In fact, it left it broken.

  Chapter Twelve: Gone to Dust

  The arrival of spring is a time of renewal and of new life coming to bloom. That year, it was also the ending of things at West Bromwich Albion. Their title challenge, their spirit, the team itself, all came undone. The events occurring on the football pitch were inevitable and unavoidable. The result of damage inflicted during the long, hard winter just past. What happened off it was more to do with the frailties and failings of men. These were of a lack of foresight and fortitude, and a commensurate surfeit of arrogance and hubris.

  Even the recent past is a distant country and the structural framework of football in the late-seventies was very different to the game we now comprehend. Back then there were two more teams in the top division of the Football League and forty-two games to a season rather than thirty-eight. There was no such thing as squad rotation. Like the rest, the top clubs maintained a small playing staff to compete in the League and also domestic and European cup competitions. The game itself was slower, but also the pitches it was played on were heavier, more gruelling and energy sapping.

  These were the circumstances that brought about Albion’s doom at the climactic point of the 1978–79 season. Ron Atkinson was able to call on just fifteen players in all but two of their fifty-nine games during the campaign. He fielded the exact same side in more than half of these. The spate of cancellations through the winter left them with a fixture pile-up to plough through, when their meagre resources were drained and running on empty.

  ‘We were playing two, three times a week,’ says Derek Statham. ‘We were all of us out on our feet, tired and jaded.’

  Their breaking point was in April. Eight games in twenty-four days. Two of these were on consecutive days at Easter. Deep down there was a collective belief in the dressing room that Liverpool were now beyond catching, but still they summoned the will for one last push. It ran to sixteen games; none of these free-flowing and all of them ground out. For all the plaudits won for their attacking football, Atkinson insisted that this team of his could also win ugly. That it had guts as well as great craft. Here was the proof. They lost just once. However, that defeat came in the game they could most ill-afford to lose.

  Easter was begun with a battling 1-1 draw at Southampton, Regis scoring. The next day, Good Friday, brought about the same result against Arsenal at the Hawthorns. Then there was hope and something to grasp at. Liverpool travelled to the West Midlands on Easter Sunday to face Aston Villa and got beaten 3-1. On the following Monday, West Brom went to Bristol City knowing a win would bring them to within four points of the League leaders and with a game in hand on them: striking distance.

  The scene was set for a triumph. Ten-thousand supporters followed the team down the M5 motorway and poured into Bristol’s Ashton Gate ground in a sea of blue and white. At the turn of the year, at the zenith of their season, West Brom had run rings around these same opponents, waltzing in the snow at the Hawthorns. However, this side was now the ghost of that one. Their legs had turned to lead and their will was exhausted. In the stands and on the terraces, the massed ranks tried to bring them back to life, as if the noise of their voices might be a magical elixir. Their fervent support and the hard slog of games, the sweat and strained sinew, all of it was in vain. Bristol ran out 1-0 winners with Cunningham and Regis passing through the game like shadows. And that was that, their race run, the flickering embers of their season gone to dust.

  The formalities of it still had to be completed. Six more games running to the middle of May. Nothing left to play for but the consolation prize of finishing closest to Liverpool. The dramas now being played out happened off the pitch and in the background, and these were just as ruinous. At this time clubs held players to short-term contracts and negotiated these at the end of each season. It was a widely held belief that the Albion board of directors were parsimonious in such matters. Or, to be more accurate, it was said that the club was run as if it were a corner shop.

  True or not, the fabric of the team began to be unpicked. Len Cantello, who’d joined West Brom from school in 1967, handed in a transfer request. Atkinson accepted
it. Undervalued to the last, Cantello was lined up for a move to struggling Bolton. One or two of his team-mates suggest Cantello’s wife was homesick for her native Lancashire and he was acting to save his marriage. Cantello disputes this.

  ‘Bluntly, it was over money,’ he insists. ‘I was tired of seeing other players being brought into the team and getting paid double what I was on. I wasn’t envious, but I wanted the club to be fair. To be honest, it was the worst decision I’ve ever made. But you make your bed and lie in it.’

  ‘A lot mistakes were made at that time,’ says John Wile. ‘Len was a very, very good player and critical to our team. He wanted something like £10, £20 a week extra, and the club wouldn’t give it to him.’

  The second contract rebel was Cunningham. He had grown frustrated with the club’s lack of haste in offering him a new deal. Moreover, he was on just £120 a week and like Cantello was aware of a significant disparity in what he was being paid compared to others in the team, Regis among them. According to Nicky Brown, he took counsel from Albion director John Gordon. In Brown’s telling, Gordon advised him to seek a move and with his help ‘we kind of cleverly put it out there that Laurie was looking to leave.’ Gordon seems to have concluded that this did not represent a conflict of interest on his part.

  Cunningham’s potential availability peaked Real Madrid’s interest most of all. The Spanish giants were on the point of winning their nineteenth La Liga title and wanted to sign a star player from overseas to propel their tilt at the following season’s European Cup. Real had held a virtual monopoly over Europe’s premier competition in the fifties and early sixties, but it had been thirteen years since they had last lifted the trophy. Fresh in the minds of the club’s powerbrokers were the memories of how Cunningham had torn Valencia to shreds.

  Bands of scouts were dispatched from Madrid to watch West Brom’s remaining games. They were conspicuous at the Hawthorns in their dark overcoats and darker glasses, looking like Mafioso. A move to Spain’s most extravagant club promised to make Cunningham rich beyond his wildest dreams. This was at a time when the average cost of a house in Britain was £13,650. Inflation had risen to 17 per cent, hiking the price of a pint of milk to 25p and a gallon of petrol to 79p. The gap between the incomes of the highest and lowest earners in the country had narrowed to its closest-ever point.

  ‘Of course, there was the money,’ says Brown. ‘Laurie was always thinking about the bigger picture. He’d come from a family of real hard workers who’d fought to make their way in the world. He thought of what he would be able to do for them.

  ‘But it didn’t matter that much to him. Because he knew by then that it was just a means to access stuff, that it didn’t buy happiness. He would be fine so long as there was still the funk, the soul and the reggae and we had our six dogs. He was also a curious man. The prospect of going to Spain was like getting a new job, or having a promotion. Plus, how about living in the sunshine and learning to dance the flamenco?’

  Keith Cunningham puts it more simply than that: ‘My brother always said that he’d have gone to Real Madrid for nothing.’

  Britain was riven with agitations, tensions and troubles as the decade drew to a close. On 23 April, St George’s Day, the National Front staged a rally in Southall, west London. The district was targeted on account of its vibrant Asian community and potential to be a flash point. Events came to a head at a meeting the NF held at the town hall. As this was going ahead, the building was surrounded by 3,000 protestors drawn from the local community and also such activist groups as the Anti-Nazi League and the Socialist Workers’ Party. This crowd was met by another almost as large comprised of police officers.

  At a certain point, members of the Metropolitan Police’s Special Patrol Group moved to break the gathering up. Officially, they were armed with batons. However, it was later claimed that coshes, crowbars and sledgehammers were found in the lockers of some of the officers involved. In the resulting melee, Blair Peach, a 33-year-old who taught special needs children at a school in the East End, was pursued down a sidestreet and beaten to death. No one was ever charged with his killing. A second protestor, Clarence Baker, singer with the reggae band Misty in Roots, was also struck on the head and remained in a coma for five months.

  Margaret Thatcher and her Conservative Party swept to power in the General Election less than two weeks later. Thatcher had adopted a hard-line stance on immigration and this succeeded in gutting the National Front of all but its most extreme support. The NF won less than 200,000 votes in the election, a mere 0.6 per cent of the national total. This rolled back the gains the party had made in previous polls and marked the end of it as a force in mainstream politics.

  However, it didn’t follow that the cancer the NF had spread had been cut from the national debate. Voters in the Portsmouth North constituency returned the Tory candidate, Peter Griffiths, as their new MP – a position he retained for the next eighteen years. This was the same Peter Griffiths who’d fought and won the Smethwick seat in such contentious circumstances in the 1964 poll. The same Peter Griffiths who’d later written of his time in the West Midlands: ‘I myself have watched West Indians in large cars arriving at the office of the Ministry of Labour in Handsworth to draw their weekly allowances of unemployment pay . . . It is a galling sight to hard-working people.’

  Along the south coast from Portsmouth, Jeremy Thorpe was turfed out of the North Devon seat he’d held for twenty years. Thorpe had run a hopeless campaign. Just five days on from the election, the former Liberal leader went on trial with three other men for the attempted murder of his alleged gay lover. All the moral squalor of the period seemed to find a place to reside in Court One at the Old Bailey. Billed as the ‘Trial of the Century’, it ran for three weeks, at the end of which Thorpe and his fellow defendants were acquitted on all charges. Thorpe hadn’t given evidence, so a jury never got to hear his side of the story, or him be cross-examined on it.

  ‘But the key man was Thorpe’s fellow defendant, David Holmes,’ says former Sunday Times reporter David May. ‘He was also gay and had been best man at Thorpe’s wedding to his first wife. Holmes didn’t give evidence either, but later told his story to the News of the World saying that he had acted at Thorpe’s incitement, but only to frighten and not kill Scott.’

  The final week of West Bromwich Albion’s season began with a lacklustre defeat at Spurs. This had been preceded by four straight victories that had kept Liverpool in sight, but still tantalisingly out of reach. Their remaining League game against Nottingham Forest would determine which team finished second best to the champions. It was scheduled for a Friday evening, 18 May. Two nights beforehand, Len Cantello had his testimonial game at the Hawthorns.

  These fixtures were regular dates on the football calendar. The vast majority of players were still making no more than modest earnings out of their short careers in the game. In granting their most loyal servants the gift of a testimonial, clubs allowed some of them to fortify themselves against a long and looming retirement. There was a standard format to the games and in the normal course of things they passed without incident or making a ripple. The host club invited a guest team to participate in a friendly match in honour of the player being recognised, and this went ahead in a convivial atmosphere.

  In contrast, the very idea of Cantello’s testimonial stirred up waves. The conception of it pitched an all-white West Brom team against an ‘all-blacks’ side made up of Regis, Cunningham, Batson and other black footballers then playing in the English game. It prompted an outcry from various anti-racism groups. Their fear was that the separatist nature of the two teams would bring an equally divided crowd to the match and encourage widespread abuse to be directed at its black participants.

  ‘The lads on the organising committee had just wanted to do something completely different,’ says Cantello. ‘Don’t forget, our five-a-side games in training were always the English lads versus the rest, or old ’uns against young ’uns. So we got together with
Cyrille and asked him if he thought he could pick a team to beat us. He said that he could and without a shadow of doubt.

  ‘There was never a thought that it would be a problem or an issue. We were all on the same side. We didn’t look at each other as black, Irish or whatever; that didn’t come into it in that particular dressing room.’

  In the event, the match was a success. It took place on a shirt-sleeves evening and before a good-natured crowd of 7,000. Speaking to the Daily Mail in 2012, Batson recalled looking around the Hawthorns terraces before kick-off and seeing ‘more black and Asian faces than we would normally get for a League game. It was anything but divisive. None of us had felt uneasy about the idea or hesitated for a second.’

  Batson and his team took to the field in brilliant all-white strips. Among the others in the side were two central defenders from Wolves, Bob Hazell and George Berry, Stoke City’s upcoming striker Garth Crooks, Ian Benjamin from Sheffield United and a couple of lads from Hereford United, Winston White and Valmore Thomas. There were also two youngsters drawn from Albion’s youth ranks, Remi Moses and Vernon Hodgson. The eighteen-year-old Moses was the most highly rated of the club’s new batch of recruits. Short but stocky, and with a crown of afro hair, he was a Manchester lad and a nippy, tough-tackling midfielder. He hurried and harried, snapped and bit. Cantello’s game was his official coming out and after it he was soon enough saddled with a sobriquet as predictable as it was unwelcome: ‘The Fourth Degree.’

  The stories this group could tell, then and thereafter. Bob Hazell might have reflected on the abject poverty he’d hauled himself out of in Handsworth. No one from his home patch ever told Hazell he was the best footballer in the area, but he was doubtless the most committed. Within weeks of the next season starting, Garth Crooks would be able to recount how he’d scored a hat-trick for the England U21 team at Leicester City’s Filbert Street ground and still got booed by a vociferous section of the home support.