by Paul Rees
‘Most of these guys had grown up poor. Benito was a lad from a small village. His mom still came round to his house once a week to cook him a traditional peasant soup for dinner. They found themselves at Real and earning that kind of money. No one was going to take that off them.’
Sid Lowe makes a less prosaic appraisal of Cunningham’s situation. It is one that would perhaps chime more with ex-colleagues of his at Orient and West Brom. ‘I’ve spoken to a few of his former team-mates at Real and the overwhelming perception of Laurie was that he didn’t have a bad bone in his body, but he was a bit dizzy,’ he says.
‘In terms of the way they viewed football, he possibly wasn’t seen as being as committed as the rest of them were. That was a very tough, aggressive Real Madrid side and he was theoretically the fantasy player. He had the talent, but as time went on, I think it was felt that he could and should have been better than he ended up being. The players that were closest to him would argue that this was ultimately as a result of injury. But in particular, the relationship he had with Stielike was a very cold one.’
Away from the internal politics at Real, Cunningham settled down to life in Madrid. At first, the club moved him and Brown out of their hotel and into a luxury apartment within walking distance of the Bernabeu. The couple soon exchanged this for an even more ostentatious four-bedroom house in Las Matas, an exclusive enclave popular with Madrid’s moneyed rich some sixteen miles from the city centre. Their new home was located on a well-to-do estate that was patrolled by security guards and walled off from prying eyes. Goyo Benito lived on the same complex.
Cunningham gave off every indication of being a man at peace with the world. He and Brown lived with their four sheepdogs and a Great Dane a neighbour had asked them to adopt. He spent his time at home enjoying their swimming pool or idling away the hours doing structural drawings or sketching out ideas for clothing designs. His favourite spot for dinner was a local sports club that was owned by an Englisman, John Fitzgibbon. He paid for his brother Keith to come over from England and stay with them for three months at a time. He acted as referee in the regular games of football that Fitzgibbon organised for the community of British expats and in which Keith often turned out.
‘He seemed contented and very relaxed,’ says Keith Cunningham. ‘He knew how to adapt to things. He liked to go out and have a dance too, but he didn’t go over the top. He might have a glass of wine, but nothing more.
‘The only guy from the team that he used to have round to the house was Benito. The pair of them would go out to dinner together too. He didn’t mix with a lot of the other players. It seemed to me that the manager and other people at the club always wanted him to associate with them more, but my brother was his own man. He did what he wanted to do.’
‘You got everything for free,’ says Brown. ‘We got the house. We were given a new BMW because that’s what all the Real Madrid players drove. You didn’t have a Mini. That didn’t suggest wealth. If we walked into a stereo shop, we’d get given a new Bose system because we might have rich friends coming round to the house who’d see it and want to buy one. We had a complete new Japanese kitchen put in. You had to be careful. You start to take the value of stuff for granted and that wasn’t how we were.’
On the football pitch, Cunningham and Real Madrid continued to flourish in tandem. He bloomed in the unique atmosphere of Spanish football: the huge crowds and the carnival of noise; the pockets of supporters who’d share a bottle of wine during a game and leap to their feet to celebrate a moment of great skill. Cunningham gave them plenty to cheer. He was like a matador and the defenders his bulls. He’d tease them forward, the ball as bait. He’d show it to them, make them charge for it and then at the point of contact, whip it away, leaving them to hack and bore at thin air. The more he did it, the more enraged they got, until he’d bled all the fight out of them.
‘I’m not saying it because he was my brother, but he was brilliant for Real Madrid,’ says Keith Cunningham. ‘He was beautiful in every game that he played in during that season. To see him get the ball and go swivelling around people . . . It was so overwhelming that I’d jump up from my seat and tip my beer over the people in front of me.’
Cunningham was able to date his greatest ninety minutes in Real Madrid’s white, and perhaps his best of all: 10 February 1980. This was the reverse fixture with Barcelona at their Nou Camp stadium, when he kissed at perfection. He was like a conductor leading a symphony, seeming able to set the tempo of the whole game and to determine the exact moments to bring it to a crescendo.
In bleached-out footage of the match, at a certain point one sees him collect the ball wide on the left, near the halfway line. He pushes it ahead of him, ambling after it so that it might seem as if he were unsure of what to do next, but in reality he was coiled like a spring. Barcelona’s full-back, an Argentinian named Rafael Zuviria, is tempted in and then ruthlessly punished for his presumption. Cunningham shifts from inert to explosive in one fluid, effortless movement, past Zuviria before he can blink or think, and off and running to the edge of the Barcelona penalty box. Without breaking stride, and at full pace, he curls the ball with the outside of his right foot across the face of Barcelona’s goal and directly into the path of an oncoming team-mate, who scores. It is an exquisite and audacious pass, the measurement and angle of it as precise as a mathematical formula. Madrid ran out 2-0 winners and effectively ended Barcelona’s interest in the title.
To perform as a Real player at the Nou Camp is to face the wrath and scorn of more than 100,000 rabid Barca supporters. It came rolling down from the high, vast terraces in an unchecked torrent, deafening and menacing – a declaration of war. Yet at the final whistle of this game, the Nou Camp rose as one to applaud Cunningham from the field. It was – and still is – an act so unprecedented that Madrid’s sports newspaper AS ran a piece commemorating it on the twenty-fifth anniversary of its happening under the headline, ‘The man who ran riot in the Nou Camp.’ AS quoted a Barca fan comparing Cunningham to his own club’s maestro, the Dutchman Johan Cruyff, who starred for Barcelona for five years from 1973 and once guided them to a 5-0 win in the Bernabeu. ‘It was like seeing Cruyff but with black skin,’ the supporter concluded. ‘That kid could do anything with a football.’
‘The idea of Cunningham getting a standing ovation at the Nou Camp sounds as if it should be apocryphal, but it’s not,’ says Sid Lowe. ‘What is nonsense is the suggestion posited later that Barca’s fans were on his side because he was a black guy and they were showing they were different. It was an extraordinary performance from him and he put them to the sword. That in a way was a problem for him, in the sense that people kept on harking back to it.’
He had other great games that season. Boskov often referred to his brilliance in a 4-1 crushing of Malaga. However, the master class that Cunningham gave in the Nou Camp left him with a conundrum he couldn’t hope to solve: how could one ever be better than perfect? This was difficult enough for him to comprehend in his prime. After injuries had taken their toll, it broke him.
The chase for La Liga boiled down to a two-horse race between Real Madrid and Real Sociedad from the Basque country. The sides ran neck-and-neck until the end of it, with Sociedad having the edge in their games against each other, drawing 2-2 at the Bernabeu and humbling Real 4-0 in front of Sociedad’s own fans. Crucially, Real Madrid were otherwise invincible in their own back yard and won each of their remaining sixteen games at the Bernabeu. They hit four without reply past Atletico Madrid, five against Hercules and eviscerated Rayo Vallecano 7-0. It was their home form that was decisive and Madrid edged Sociedad to the title by just a single point.
Real also completed a domestic double that season, beating the minnows of Castilla 6-1 in a Copa del Rey final staged at the Bernabeu. Yet the prize they most coveted eluded them. They negotiated a perilous route through to the semi-finals of the European Cup. Their opening tie against the Bulgarian side Levski-Sofia was won comfortably enough 3-0, b
ut they only sneaked past Porto of Portugal on goal difference in the Second Round, with Cunningham registering the crucial strike in the away leg.
This set them up for a quarter-final tie with the Scottish champions, Glasgow Celtic. They slumped to a 2-0 defeat at Celtic’s Parkhead Stadium and in an atmosphere as fevered as any generated by the Madridistas at the Bernabeu. Celtic clung on to their lead until the forty-fifth minute of the return leg, but then Cunningham intervened. His first significant influence on the game was a moment of impudence and supreme self-confidence. On the verge of half-time, Real Madrid won a corner. Cunningham took it with the outside of his right foot, a skill as rare as it was fiendishly difficult to execute. The ball arced into the Celtic box and then plunged as if falling from a cliff top, coming down under the crossbar and right on to the head of the leaping Santillana. Ten minutes after the re-start, Stielike was the beneficiary of Cunningham’s munificence. He played a quick one-two on the edge of the Celtic box, skipped past two defenders and looped the ball onto the penalty spot for the German to fire into the net. Four minutes from time, Juanito won the contest, finishing off a move that was started by Cunningham.
Their semi-final opponents were Hamburg, who in Kevin Keegan had a high-profile Englishman of their own. Keegan was crowned ‘European Footballer of the Year’ in 1978, but wasn’t able to affect the first match at the Bernabeu, which Madrid won 2-0. Cunningham scored in Germany, but it was a catastrophic second leg for his team as Hamburg rolled them over 5-1. Spain might be theirs for the ruling, but not the rest of Europe.
At the end of the season, Cunningham was given pause to reflect on another, more ominous development. He’d become a marked man in La Liga, a target for whatever thuggish treatment opposition defenders saw fit to dish out. It wasn’t as though he hadn’t been subjected to bruising tackling in England, but there seemed to him an even more malicious intent to the challenges in Spain.
‘He couldn’t quite believe how much the defenders in Spain were allowed to hurt him,’ says Sid Lowe. ‘But that was the nature of the game in La Liga at the time. If it were still the case now, the matches would finish with both teams having just six players left on the pitch.’
‘When Laurie came off after a game you could see stud marks all over his legs from where he’d been kicked,’ says Brown. ‘He’d thought that with the Spaniards being Latin, they’d play the game like Brazil and he loved Brazilian football. That’s when he began to have enough and his attitude to the game changed. I believe that he knew his career was in danger through injury. The referees didn’t handle it and nor did the club. He was just left to bear it and that was a heartbreaking thing to have to watch.’
Cunningham began the next season in good form. He was rested, having had a holiday in Ibiza that he and Brown took with Cyrille Regis and his girlfriend, and as dashing on the pitch for Madrid as ever. Real had prevented him from joining up with the England squads for most of the past year, but he’d also resolved this dispute.
Ron Greenwood selected him for a World Cup qualifier in Romania on 15 October 1980. England laboured to a 2-1 defeat in Bucharest, lacking in both flair and invention. Cunningham sat on the bench until the game was as good as lost and he was only thrown on for its last gasping. It was his sixth and last appearance for his country. The glorious international career that seemed inevitable when he’d scored on his groundbreaking debut for the U21 team just two years earlier was over before it had ever got started.
‘Whenever I saw him playing for England, he’d get the ball and just roll it down the side of the opposing full-back for Ray Wilkins or one of the other midfielders to run onto,’ says Ron Atkinson. ‘I challenged him about it after one match, asked him why he wasn’t taking his defender on. He told me that’s what Ron Greenwood had instructed him to do. Are you serious? Having bloody Ray Wilkins running on ahead wouldn’t bother any team. Laurie’s game was all about getting at people. It was such a waste of him.’
The next month Cunningham’s wings were clipped in Spain and he came crashing to earth. He was playing for Madrid in a hotly contested La Liga game at Real Betis on 16 November. Betis’ chief henchman, Francisco Bizcocho, felled him with a stamping challenge, breaking the first toe on his left foot. It sounds now like a relatively trivial injury, but it proved to be the ruin of him. In the first instance, the injury had left the toe rigid and unyielding. Cunningham had gained a crucial advantage by being feather-light on his feet, able to run on the tips of his toes like a ballet dancer. He was now robbed of that ability and it left him fatally handicapped.
Cunningham’s relationship with the all-powerful board of directors at Real Madrid was also soured in the wake of the injury, and this was just as damaging to him. He’d run into trouble before for missing the occasional training session, but then he was scoring goals and winning games for the club. It was a different matter when he was sitting on the sidelines. Days after his operation, he was spotted in a nightclub with a plaster cast still on his foot. The club took a righteous stance against this latest indiscretion. Playing to the gallery, Real’s President, Luis de Carlos, fulminated that Cunningham had flouted the moral guidelines laid down by the club’s patriarch, Santiago Bernabeu. He was given a two-month suspension and a one million pesetas fine.
‘It was a massively overblown reaction on behalf of the club,’ says Lowe. ‘They came down on him not just because they thought he deserved it, but also because they felt a very keen need to be seen to be doing so and to be upholding values. Camacho said to me later that Laurie didn’t do anything wrong, but that he failed to realise where he was and what club he was at.’
From then to the end of the season, Cunningham played just forty-five minutes of first-team football for Real Madrid in La Liga. Without him, the club came second to Real Sociedad, in a reversal of the previous campaign’s shoot-out. On this occasion, the two sides were only separated by goal difference. Real were also dumped out of the Copa del Rey by Sporting Gijon, but made it to the final of the European Cup, where they faced Liverpool in Paris on 27 May.
Despite his evident lack of match fitness, Boskov recalled Cunningham for the European final at the Parc des Princes. His manager doubtless hoped that he might be the key to unlocking Liverpool’s miserly defence, but he did so in vain. Cunningham’s performance was fitful and erratic. It contained no more than trace elements of the player he’d been the season before, like echoes in a well. The game itself was an ugly, unedifying contest, with brutality trumping skill. Madrid won the battles for midfield and defensive superiority, but Liverpool claimed the war. Their solitary goal came from an unlikely source, full-back Alan Kennedy scoring in the eighty-second minute to give them victory.
The next season was even more desperate for both Real and for Cunningham. The team slipped to third in La Liga behind a surging Sociedad side and the hated Barcelona. He suffered a string of injuries to his left knee that required three surgeries and left his leg laced with ugly scars. Later, he’d recount how defenders would use these scars as points of reference to aim kicks at. He was most embittered by one incident in particular that he said occurred in training. Cunningham claimed he was put out of action for months by a team-mate making a deliberate lunge at his shattered knee, tearing a ligament.
‘He felt as if he was being kicked out of football and again because of the racist element,’ says Bobby Fisher. ‘He believed people were jealous of the money he was getting, but also there was the fact of him being black. He was just coming back from rehabilitation when he was taken out in training. He was most sad about that and that was the finishing of him at Madrid.’
Others are less certain of the veracity of this account. The writer Phil Ball likens it to an urban myth. He adds: ‘If it did happen it was probably Camacho that took him out, but Camacho took everyone out because that was his game. If there was no one else around he’d foul himself.’
‘I’ve never been able to stand that story up,’ continues Sid Lowe. ‘I’m not saying it didn’t
happen, but I haven’t managed to confirm it and I do have some doubts. I know Laurie’s brother and Bobby Fisher have hinted that there was something much darker going on. I think they perceive a level of rejection of Laurie that his team-mates deny. But then, of course they’d deny it.
‘Camacho spoke to me in a way that suggested he was genuinely fond of Laurie. Del Bosque wasn’t a great mate of his, but he didn’t have a problem with him. There is a hint from one or two of them that they saw Nicky as the problem rather than Laurie, but I’m just as cautious about accepting that view.’
The statistics for that season show that Cunningham was able to make only three appearances in La Liga for the team. He flickered in the home leg of a UEFA Cup quarter-final against the German side Kaiserslautern. However, in the reverse fixture he was sent off for retaliation before half-time and Madrid slumped to one of their worst ever European defeats, 5-0. He was also in the side that exacted revenge on Sporting Gijon in the final of the Copa del Rey in Valladolid on 13 April. These were the last times he was seen in a Real Madrid shirt.
Cunningham knuckled down through increasingly long periods of recovery and rehabilitation, determined and uncomplaining. Yet no matter how much he strived to regain fitness, he couldn’t escape the plain fact that he would never, and could never again, be the same footballer. The best of him was lost.
‘It was the ultimate frustration for him,’ says Fisher. ‘He’d always been able to express himself on the football pitch, but he was no longer anywhere near having the elegance, fluidity and beauty that he’d had in his prime.’
‘Was I surprised that it didn’t work out for Laurie at Real Madrid? No, I wasn’t,’ concludes John Wile, Cunningham’s captain at West Brom. ‘It was disappointing to see him get injured. But I thought that the inconsistencies I saw in his game at Albion went with him right through his career.