by Paul Rees
These were the things that each of them shared and which ran to their core. The battles fought and the vicious slights that had been absorbed and that they were still expected to endure. Perhaps it was this that put steel behind their smiles in the team line-up photograph taken that night. One thing is for certain, they went out determined to win the game. And win it they did, 3-2.
‘Oh, we were up for it, big time,’ says Regis. ‘Not just because it was black versus white. All of us just had that winning mentality. And looking back at that team now, those were the guys that were at the vanguard of black football.’
No one knew it just then, but this was also the last time Laurie Cunningham would grace the Hawthorns. He picked up a knock during the game, which ruled him out of the Forest match. There were better, more memorable and dramatic games that season, but none that summed it up quite so well as this last one. Brian Clough’s title holders had sneaked up on the rails in recent weeks to get within a point of West Brom. A win would push them into second place, whereas Albion needed only to avoid defeat to secure runners-up spot.
Like Cunningham, Bryan Robson was also injured and missing from the West Brom line-up. Forest meanwhile had one eye on the European Cup final that they would be contesting less than two weeks hence. Nonetheless, there was a crackle and fizz to the game. Albion had recovered their attacking bearings and Forest came on neat, tidy and purposeful. The two most cavalier teams in English football putting on a show, even it was for one of its least gilded honours. West Brom had the better of it, but spurned their chances. Forest took the best of theirs, Trevor Francis scoring late on, and to them went the spoils.
Forest went on to Munich and there beat the Swedish side Malmo to win the biggest honour in European football. There was nothing for the vanquished West Brom players but a dull, gnawing ache in the pit of their stomachs. This was the bitter realisation that they had taken so little from a season to which they had given so much. Reporting on the Forest match, the Express & Star, stuck a knife into raw wounds: ‘Albion came to the end of their road last night and found they had taken a long trip to nowhere.’
‘They were probably the best team never to win the Championship,’ says reporter Bob Downing. ‘A lot of them were convinced they were going to do it that season. To end up finishing third was an absolute choker. It knocked them for six.’
In such close proximity to the moment, this is what the Albion side appeared to be: glorious failures, but failures just the same. Of course, no one at the time could possibly have foreseen that the ultimate measure of them would not be made in games won or lost, or in the trophies that might have been but never were. It would not have been countenanced that this team, that season, changed British football more than any other before it or since. And as well, changed British sport in general and perhaps the whole damn country.
The sight of Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendon Batson together in West Brom’s stripes was the tipping point for a generation of British kids. It broke down for them the real and imagined barriers that had held them back. It spurred them into the game and brought to it zest, colour and a public face that more accurately reflected the make-up of modern Britain as a whole. Liverpool’s title, Forest’s European Cup, distant echoes now, all part of the normal hum and drum of sport. The clarion call that was begun at the Hawthorns continues to ring out far beyond that – loud and clear and indelible.
‘At the time, those of us who just looked at the three of them as footballers thought, “God, they’re good and aren’t West Brom good now as well,”’ says the broadcaster Pat Murphy. ‘But as one looks back in retrospect, it all begins to fall into place. You remember the appalling racism at places like West Ham, Millwall and Chelsea. Obviously, there was great dignity shown there. And on that basis, they were pioneers and trailblazers, role models and examples. Call it what you will.
‘That isn’t to say that the three players would’ve thought that of themselves. Cyrille was humble because of where he’d come from. Brendon was intelligent and well grounded. He’d done his apprenticeship at Arsenal and been around the block. One might say Laurie was the exception. He was the kind of player that you didn’t see much of at the time. But I perceived him as a quiet lad who just wanted to play football.’
‘It’s a cultural thing, not just a football matter,’ adds journalist Chris Lepkowski, who now reports on the club for the Evening Mail. ‘And speaking as an Albion supporter, I feel a tremendous sense of pride in that fact.
‘One of the first matches I covered for the paper was at Portsmouth in 2002. At half-time, I was walking up to the press box at Fratton Park and chatting to a colleague. There was an old Jamaican guy coming up behind me. He must have picked up my accent and he tapped me on the shoulder. He told me that he wasn’t a fan, but that he was there to see Albion. When he’d first arrived in England from Jamaica, he’d heard about this club with three fantastic black players. He said that he’d come along to pay his respects.’
At the end of the season, Regis and Cunningham did at least win recognition for their football. Regis was acclaimed ‘Young Player of the Year’ by his fellow professionals. It perhaps goes without saying that he was the first winner of the award to be black. He expressed a measure of embarrassment upon picking it up. He had scored seventeen goals during the campaign, but suggested that more than half of them had been created for him by Cunningham.
At the end of May, Cunningham made his belated debut for the full England team when Ron Greenwood selected him for a Home International against Wales at Wembley. The game itself was a turgid 0-0 stalemate that spoke volumes about the parlous state of the national team. It was not an environment that encouraged instinctive acts of daring or untamed mavericks such as Cunningham. He did show off tantalising flashes of his club form, but he was on a leash and a victim of Greenwood’s rigid conformity.
He was cheered on by a small band of supporters in the stadium that night. Atkinson and Regis had driven down together from Birmingham for the game, and Cunningham had invited along his brother Keith and their childhood pal, Eustace ‘Huggy’ Isaie. These two parties collided in the Wembley players’ lounge after the game and to the evident bemusement of Atkinson.
‘It was kind of a strange experience,’ remembers Isaie. ‘We were all of us dressed up in suits, but I was wearing a West Brom Albion club tie that Laurie had given me. Cyrille came over to say hello to Keith and brought Ron with him. Ron kept staring at me with a puzzled expression on his face. He thought I was one of his fringe players, but he had no idea which one.’
Atkinson might not have been aware of it at this point, but Real Madrid had stepped up their pursuit of Cunningham. In Brown’s account, the Spanish club flew Cunningham and her out to Ibiza straight after the Forest match.
‘Real came and got us and hid us out on the island,’ she claims. ‘We needed some time to think things over. Cyrille joined us. We were staying in San Antonio and these were still kind of the hippy days of the town. There were lots of people wearing cheese-cloth and attempting to find themselves.’
This elaborate subterfuge continued on the night of the England-Wales fixture. A contingent from Real Madrid met with Cunningham, Brown and John Gordon in an underground car park opposite Wembley Stadium to begin discussing personal terms. These were concluded the following weekend when the couple and Gordon were flown out to Madrid to meet with senior officials from the club. This last trip gave rise to an enduring myth that Cunningham had gone to the Spanish capital of his own volition and knocked on Real’s door, offering his services. This is no more credible than Brown’s assertion that he was invited to play football with Bob Marley while they were on Ibiza. Marley did make a summer visit to the island, but in 1978.
Nonetheless, Cunningham left Madrid having determined his immediate future. He confided as much to Regis and Tony Godden at West Brom, and also to his England team-mate Viv Anderson before a World Cup qualifier in Bulgaria on 6 June.
‘Laurie and
I roomed together and normally I did all the talking,’ says Anderson. ‘He would keep to himself, even if it was just the two of us. But on this occasion, he was flicking through a car brochure and pointing out all the new Mercedes models. I thought I was doing well having a Mini.’
Formal talks between West Brom and Real Madrid were begun during the last week of June. Atkinson hosted these at his home and in the company of chairman Bert Millichip, the club’s secretary, Alan Everiss and John Gordon. The Madrid delegation was led by Real’s long-serving Managing Director, Antonio Calderon, who arrived determined to play hard-ball over the size of Cunningham’s transfer fee.
‘I’d asked Bert Millichip to let me be our lorry driver,’ says Atkinson. ‘I told Calderon that we wanted £1.5 million for Laurie. He offered £250,000. I had a little Yorkshire terrier at the time, never barked at anyone. But it started growling. I said, “See, even he knows how ridiculous that is.” ’
The two clubs eventually settled on a £950,000 fee. On 28 June, Cunningham was announced as the first Englishman to sign for Real Madrid. In the Express & Star that evening he was pictured alongside a beaming Atkinson and a more taciturn Calderon. The latter is draped in one of the scarves that hawkers had done a brisk trade selling outside of the Hawthorns for the past two years. Stitched into it were four words: ‘Laurie Cunningham is magic’.
‘Laurie phoned me and told me to turn the TV on that night because he was going to be on the news,’ recalls Bobby Fisher. ‘He was always a bit over the top with regard to that sort of thing, so I just sort of humoured him. But he said, “No, no, I’m an overnight millionaire.”’
Atkinson concurs with Brown and Keith Cunningham, maintaining that it wasn’t possible for Albion to hold on to Cunningham once Real came calling. Perhaps, but then also the club believed he was replaceable and were eager to take the money on offer. Certainly, Atkinson’s side was no one-man team, and Cunningham was a flashing comet. He played 114 games for West Brom and scored thirty goals. These were drops in the ocean next to the statistical contributions stacked up by such stalwarts as Jeff Astle, Tony Brown and, in due course, Cyrille Regis. Yet he brought something different to West Brom, a unique element without which the formula of the team could not be the same. At his best, he was devastating, explosive and without equal.
If the Express & Star is to be believed, the transfer moved him to make one of his most expansive public utterances. It quoted him as saying: ‘It’s a sad day for me. I have enjoyed my three years with Albion, but they messed me around so much when I attempted to get another deal that I felt my future lay at another club. With the World Cup finals taking place in Spain in 1982, I am hoping to get acclimatised and really make a bid for a place in the England squad.’
‘It just needed for there to have been a little bit of dynamism and vision in the West Brom boardroom,’ Regis says. ‘They should have realised that they had a great side, players who were twenty-one and twenty-two years old and playing the kind of football that we did. Kept the nucleus of that team together and then added to it. Why muck it up?’
Regis contends that the Baggies could have kept hold of Cunningham had they acted earlier and made him a better offer. He was still just twenty-three and with time and his best years ahead of him. Had he remained, things would likely have turned out different for him and perhaps also for the club. But if not then, he would still have gone at some point. For all his apparent reticence, he had a grander vision for himself than slogging through the English mud.
From the time he first began kicking a ball about on the backstreets of north London, Cunningham looked to a distant horizon and a more wondrous idyll. He was withdrawn off the pitch, but on it he sought acceptance, attention and acclaim. All this and more than that, more even than mastering the game, through football he craved meaning and a reason for being. He believed he was never going to find that higher purpose by remaining in the West Midlands or in England, if at all.
‘In all honesty, I don’t recall Laurie ever standing up and saying he was going because of this or that,’ says Brown. ‘As much as anything, I think for him it was a case of, “Okay, there are more black players coming through in England now. This is happening. Let’s go to the four corners and try something new.” And certainly, I don’t believe West Brom as a body, as a club, realised what they had until he’d moved on.
‘I once told his mom, Mavis, that all I’d talked about as a child was of one day going off and travelling. She said to me, “That’s all our Paul ever wanted too – the world.” ’
Chapter Thirteen: Too Much Too Young
The pre-season of 1979 was the last time West Bromwich Albion could be considered a big-spending club. Flush with Real Madrid’s money, Ron Atkinson was allowed to plough it back into the rebuilding of his team. Ironically, his former running mate Malcolm Allison was just then embarking on a disastrous tenure as manager of Manchester City and had set about dismantling a promising young side. It was Atkinson’s opinion that he was the major beneficiary of Allison’s folly.
His first signing from Maine Road was Gary Owen for £465,000. The 21-year-old was a popular player with City’s fans and also captain of the England U21 team. A bustling, ball-playing midfielder, Owen stood out on the pitch on account of his hunched posture and apparent lack of a neck. In acquiring him, Atkinson congratulated himself on a good bit of business. He believed he’d got a ready-made, but younger replacement for the departed Len Cantello.
‘I’d got to know Cyrille, Bryan Robson, Derek Statham and also Laurie through the U21s,’ says Owen. ‘So I was aware of the potential that West Brom had and of the fact they had an exciting manager who let them play with flair and abandon. The attraction of going there at that time was the calibre of players like Regis, Robson and Brendon Batson.
‘There’s no two ways about it, Big Ron also has a silver tongue. He made it very clear to me how he thought my going there would enhance the team and help it to push on even further.’
Within weeks, Owen’s City team-mate Peter Barnes had followed him to the Hawthorns for a fee of £750,000. Barnes was twenty-two at the time, a year younger than Cunningham, and Ron Greenwood’s first-choice winger in the England side. Atkinson again felt able to trumpet that he’d improved the team. His third signing was John Deehan from neighbours Aston Villa. A strapping striker, Deehan had scored forty goals in 110 appearances for Villa and was also an England U21 international. He was expected to complement Regis and add greater firepower to the Albion attack.
There would be no arduous trip to the unknown before this season began. In the stead of China, Atkinson took his new-look team out to the Spanish Costa del Sol on a bonding exercise and to soak up the sun. He returned flush with optimism and to face a return match against the Chinese national team at the Hawthorns as a curtain-raiser to the forthcoming campaign.
‘I remember Ron being very positive from the beginning, never showing any negativity,’ says Barnes. ‘Gary and I were both living in the Europa Hotel in West Bromwich at the time and Ron was also there on match day. After a pre-match meal, all the players went back to Ron’s room and he stood there before us dressed up in his gold jewellery, an expensive watch and a nice suit. His team-talk was never complicated. He just told us to go out and attack.’
On a glorious summer’s day, West Brom took up Atkinson’s challenge and dismembered the hapless Chinese with a series of rapier thrusts. Owen and Barnes sparkled. David Mills came into the side for the veteran Tony Brown and for the briefest moment promised to be a commanding presence. The team as a whole prowled and purred. There seemed no reason to believe they wouldn’t be a force to be reckoned with once again.
Yet for all Atkinson’s bombast, doubts had begun to creep in among some of the more established players. These were as black and foreboding as the shadows extending across the Hawthorns pitch in the late-afternoon sun during that first match. Skipping past a lightweight Chinese team was all well and good, but they had the more revealing evidence of tr
aining and the close combat of the daily five-a-side games to go on. These told a different story. It suggested that Atkinson hadn’t bought quite as well as he thought.
‘We’d lost Len who was a grafter and Gary Owen never quite did that,’ John Wile told writer Dave Bowler. ‘He was like a dog with a bone for an hour, all over the show, but he faded late on in games. Peter Barnes was very erratic. Good players both of them, no question. But they weren’t as consistent as the guys they’d replaced.
‘John Deehan came in on a lot of money, more than the rest of us. He was twenty-two and living in a big house outside of Birmingham. People like Ally Brown, Alistair Robertson and me were ten years older, had smaller houses and were getting paid less. That upsets the dressing room. As a player, you don’t mind so much if someone comes in and will give you thirty goals a season. But when they don’t make a huge difference it eats away at the spirit of the team.’
‘Why would you let Laurie go and buy Peter Barnes?’ asks Regis now. ‘Why sell Len Cantello and get Gary Owen? It was bizarre. But it was out of our hands.’
There was a further ill omen to come out of the China game. During the course of it, Regis picked up a knock on his knee and had to be withdrawn. It soon became apparent that he’d damaged cartilage and would require surgery. This kept him sidelined for more than three months and in that time West Brom’s season went from bad to worse. They won just once in their opening nine games in the League and crashed out in the First Round of the UEFA Cup 4-1 on aggregate to the unfancied East German side, Carl Zeiss Jena.
Liverpool brushed them aside 3-1 at Anfield, and Nottingham Forest recorded a crushing 5-1 victory at the Hawthorns. Deehan was proving to be a less than adequate stand-in for Regis and would go on to score just three goals all season. On 6 October, a 2-1 reversal at Middlesbrough sank them into the relegation places and on the same number of points as the bottom club, Bolton. The doubts that had been bubbling under in the dressing room burst to the surface.