The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  ‘I also think back to incidents like the one where he took himself off to the shower at half-time in that game we had at Middlesbrough. He was a fantastic footballer when he hit the heights, but there was a flaw in his character.’

  Chapter Fifteen: Ghost Town

  Just like the soaring heights that Laurie Cunningham navigated at the beginning of his time with Real Madrid, there was something deceptive and illusory about West Bromwich Albion’s successful 1980–81 season. Through it the club was able to mount its second credible challenge for the League title in three years, with Ron Atkinson’s reconfigured team acquiring a look of permanence and consistency. This gave the impression of foundations laid on solid ground, whereas in truth they were pitched on shifting sand.

  Perhaps the most withering blow of all to be inflicted on the club came on 24 September 1980. On that date, Albion’s vice-chairman, Tom Silk, and his wife, Catherine, were killed when their private plane crashed over France. A successful businessman, Silk believed that a football club could be the conduit through which a man could realise his dreams. He had progressive ideas about developing Albion into the sort of institution that could have continued success, and he had been Atkinson’s keenest advocate. In the sense that he dared to speculate, Silk was a man of the times. He was also a very necessary counterweight to the more cautious and pragmatic Bert Millichip. His passing meant that West Brom would never again break any transfer records or aspire to a place among the game’s elite.

  ‘There were a lot of boardroom hassles and a number of the players were coming to the end of the road too,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘As well, Ron was of a certain age and had aspirations. The club wasn’t able to sustain what had been started, because they couldn’t get enough bums on seats or investment from the board. If only. Those two words might sum up that time at the club.’

  Following Silk’s death, Atkinson grew frustrated at a lack of support from the West Brom board and at its intransigence. On the pitch, he still meant for his side to entertain first and foremost, and the football they played was attack-minded and pleasing on the eye. Yet this team didn’t have a maverick spirit to call upon or a wild streak to it. Games were won, but none were left burnt into the minds of its supporters. There was instead a staple of odd-goal victories against such middling clubs as Southampton, Crystal Palace and Brighton & Hove Albion.

  In defence, West Brom were tough and unyielding with Tony Godden, Brendon Batson, Derek Statham, John Wile and Ally Robertson still in tandem. The midfield was busy and effective. Remi Moses and Bryan Robson were the heartbeat of the side and paired together for all but three games during the campaign. However, the team’s most reliable weapon was again Cyrille Regis. Still just twenty-two, he’d recovered fitness and was once more battering and bullying defenders, and scoring outlandish goals.

  Albion sat sixth in the table at Christmas. By the start of March, they had climbed to third. Heading into the business end of the season, they beat a string of accomplished sides at the Hawthorns: Liverpool, Nottingham Forest and the League leaders, Ipswich. This last win came on 4 April and brought them to within six points of Aston Villa, who’d leap-frogged Bobby Robson’s team as a result of it, with five games left to play. Their next match was at Villa Park on the following Wednesday night. Win it and they would give themselves a fighting chance of taking the title.

  In the event, it was a typical local derby, closely fought, fast and frenetic. Yet there was a familiar ending to it for West Brom. The psychological fault-line running through Atkinson’s Albion again pulled them up at the decisive hurdle and the contest was settled by a late goal from Villa’s Peter Withe. Villa went on to win the League. Albion finished up in fourth place, with the consolation of having qualified for another crack at the UEFA Cup.

  A crowd of 48,000 watched the match at Villa Park, but in general attendances were down in the Football League. Gates slumped by as much as a third at West Brom that season and the Hawthorns didn’t get close to being full. The deserted seats and terraces made for a flat, lifeless atmosphere at stadia across the country. Going to football, one got the impression of turning up at the fag-end of a party that had wound down, but was being kept going by the most hardened and desperate revellers. If there were curtains they would have been drawn to block out the light, and the mood was sour and stupefied. In part, this decline was attributable to the menace of hooliganism, which continued to taint the game, and also to the moribund nature of much of the football on offer. However, the most salient factor was that people simply couldn’t afford to watch the games.

  After two years in power, Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government had been able to do nothing to reverse the country’s economic decline, and Britain had sunk into recession. For a great swathe of the population, the threat of unemployment and the pressures of high inflation remained a constant, inescapable fact of life. In the West Midlands and other regions, the landscape was dotted with the skeletons of closed factories and plants. Where it hit hardest, this bleak outlook and the harsh prospects of finding other work engendered a communal sense of ennui: a dull acceptance that British working folk would never again have it so good.

  ‘With Thatcher, it became a community of self, didn’t it?’ suggests Albion supporter John Homer. ‘People had to really think about how they spent their money. And if you lived in the Black Country it came down to whether you went to the football or ate. Two years before that you couldn’t even move your feet at the Hawthorns and now you were sat next to rows of empty seats. You were left feeling bereft. Especially since that period of flair and sparkle had been so wonderful, but also so brief.’

  Lagging behind in the opinion polls and with morale sagging, Thatcher and her embattled government caught an unlikely break in the week West Brom’s title challenge rose up and then fell. On 2 April 1981, Argentina’s ruling military junta launched an invasion of the British-owned Falklands Islands and claimed them for its own. An archipelago stranded in the freezing South Atlantic, the Falklands were a relic of the old Empire and an outpost few in Britain had heard of to that point. However, Thatcher’s declaration of war on Argentina and her ordering of a British task force to recover the Falklands whipped up a kind of crazed national fervour. Thatcher tapped into this and extrapolated from it the idea that one could triumph through nothing more than an old-fashioned spirit of get-up-and-go.

  She succeeded to the degree that millions of Britons were convinced that being prepared to work hard and speculate was enough for them to prosper. Yet as simplistic a credo as Thatcherism was, it was also divisive and destructive. It rewarded privilege and encouraged intolerance. It made social outcasts of those who were presumed to lack the smarts and gumption to pull themselves up by their bootstraps and better their lives. Nowhere was this scorn and subsequent neglect felt more keenly than in Britain’s depressed inner-city areas.

  Thatcher reaped a whirlwind during the spring and summer of 1981. Brixton in south London was the first district to flare up during the second weekend of April. The rate of unemployment in the area was highest among the black community – it ran to 50 per cent – and tensions had been simmering since the turn of the year. These were exacerbated by a Metropolitan Police initiative to reduce crime in Brixton. Codenamed Operation Swamp ’81, it sent teams of plainclothes officers pouring onto the streets to stop and search anyone suspected of having committed a crime. That April, a thousand people in the district were pulled up by police within the first five days of it starting.

  Brixton exploded on the afternoon of Saturday 11 April. The spark for this was an incident that occurred the previous day when police were called to the scene of the stabbing of a local black youth, Michael Bailey. A crowd of 200 or so black and white youths subsequently gathered and confronted the attending officers. In this febrile atmosphere, wild and inaccurate rumours that the police had left Bailey to bleed to death were spread through the community. At 4 p.m. the next day, a full-scale riot broke out. Police vehicles and buildings
were set on fire, shops were looted and police and rioters fought pitched battles on the streets. This conflagration burnt deep into the night and accounted for 250 injuries to the police and public, and eighty-five arrests.

  ‘Bloody Saturday’ in Brixton set off a slow-burning chain reaction across the country that erupted into effect in July. During the course of that month rioting broke out in Toxteth in Liverpool and in Moss Side in Manchester. In the West Midlands, tensions flared in deprived areas of Wolverhampton and Smethwick and in Handsworth in Birmingham. In each instance, the root cause was the same: urban decay fostering a sense of hopelessness and an exponential escalation in hostilities between police and the local communities. In the year preceding the riot in Handsworth, an estimated 40 per cent of black youths in the area had been stopped and searched. Speaking in its immediate aftermath, Sheila Wright, the local Labour MP, said: ‘The feeling I get from listening to the kids here is that they have no future.’

  The government’s response was to commission an inquiry into the rioting from Lord Justice Scarman. Published in November 1981, the Scarman Report made clear that the out-breaks had been the result of extreme social and economic problems afflicting Britain’s inner cities. Scarman stressed an urgent need for government action to prevent ‘racial disadvantage’ from becoming an ‘endemic, ineradicable disease threatening the very survival of our society.’ Reporting on the botched police inquiry into the murder of black teenager Stephen Lawrence in February 1999, a second Judge, Sir William Macpherson, concluded that Scarman’s recommendations had been ignored.

  ‘It was a terrible period,’ says civil rights activist Derek Campbell. ‘We had overt racism in the police force. In Handsworth, they were simply targeting the black community. There were policies and decisions made in this country that took no account at all of the ethnic minority communities. We were seen as being people that would cause insurrection and make problems and we had no rights. We were not valued in British society.

  ‘In Handsworth, it was only because those disturbances affected business that anything happened. Not because people felt sorry for us. We were seen to be damaging the reputation of the area and so for a time money was thrown at the situation to stop us from doing it again. However, it was a short-term measure and then everything went back to normal.’

  This scorched backdrop prompted a more eloquent form of protest to come roaring out of the West Midlands, at the head of which were two of its leading multi-racial bands. The previous May, the Beat from Birmingham had released ‘Stand Down Margaret’, a howl of rage masquerading as a frothy ska track in which the the band’s singers, Dave Wakeling and Ranking Roger, chanted how bleak and sorrowful the future looked.

  Speaking about the song to Shirley Halperin of the Hollywood Reporter in 2013, Wakeling said: ‘That time signalled a breaking of the English spirit. Thatcher turned neighbours into competitors. A generation saw their parents give up on life as they saw their own opportunities stunted. They saw the town where they’d grown up being dismantled. The scapegoats for this were everybody who seemed different.’

  The soundtrack of the summer of 1981 was the Specials’ ‘Ghost Town’, which spent three weeks at the top of the UK singles chart in June. Inspired by the creeping desolation and despair bandleader Jerry Dammers witnessed in his native Coventry, it arrived like a cold wind blowing through a graveyard. Dammers’s nightmarish vision of urban collapse was set to a sparse, spooked beat and the haunting invocation that their hometown was becoming like a ghost town. Repeated over and again, it carried the weight of an impending apocalypse.

  A separate musical movement had also sprung up out of Britain’s inner cities. This was Oi!, the bastard offspring of punk rock and mouthpiece for a particular strain of white, working class rebellion. Oi! cast off punk’s art-school affectations and was rooted instead in the yobbish sound of pub rock and football terrace chants. Its leadings proponents were bands like Sham 69, Angelic Upstarts, The 4-Skins and the Cockney Rejects. The last named group was a gang of rough and ready West Ham fans with affiliations to the club’s notorious hooligan crew, the Inner City Firm.

  The issues of unemployment, police harassment and urban violence were all covered in Oi!’s lyrical manifesto. However, it was damned by its association with far-right groups such as the National Front and the British Movement, since it harvested from the same fertile recruiting pool of disaffected skinheads and football fans. This was further stoked by the release of the agenda-setting Strength Thru Oi! album in May 1981. Compiled by the then music journalist Garry Bushell, its title appropriated the Nazi Party’s ‘Strength Through Joy’ slogan and featured on its cover a sneering skinhead, Nicky Crane, who at the time was serving four years in prison for racist violence.

  ‘Bushell didn’t understand that Oi! was a Nazi expression of right-wing supremacy,’ says Roger Huddle, founder of Rock Against Racism. ‘He thought it was the true representation of Britain’s working-class youth, not ours. The fact that you could have two expressions didn’t enter his head.’

  There was upheaval of a different sort at West Bromwich Albion that summer. At the end of the season, Manchester United had again finished among the also-rans, and manager Dave Sexton paid for the club’s years of under-achievement with his job. In their search for Sexton’s successor, the Old Trafford board soon alighted on Ron Atkinson. Memories of the manner in which United had been dismantled by his West Brom side two years earlier were still sharp. This was accomplished with a swagger that had once been the exclusive preserve of the Red Devils in the halcyon days of Best, Law and Charlton, and when the sixties and United had both swung.

  The prospect of restoring United to greatness and emulating the feats of such a giant of the game as Matt Busby was the glamour job Atkinson craved and he leapt at it. This was troubling enough for Albion, but Atkinson also added collateral damage. He made Bryan Robson his first signing at Old Trafford and then snapped up Remi Moses. In fairness to Atkinson, Moses pitched up at the Manchester hotel United’s new manager was being lodged at and volunteered his services.

  ‘It was the middle of the night and he knocked on my door and announced he’d come to sign for me,’ says Atkinson. ‘I was in the middle of doing a deal to bring Frank Stapleton from Arsenal and we had to find another room to stick Remi in. He was there till two in the morning. Smashing little player and just what United needed at that point. It was a tragedy what happened to him.’

  Moses’s 150 games for United were stretched out over an eight-year period and his Old Trafford career was blighted by injury. He was eventually forced to retire from the game at twenty-eight: a shooting star that burned out. He later found work as a property developer and as coach to the Manchester Warriors inline skating side, settling to a quieter life outside of football. Robson took a different, more elevated path at United. He went on to become the most decorated English footballer of his generation, captain and mainstay of both his club and national teams, winning ninety caps for England and in 1993 helping United to their first League title in twenty-six years.

  Atkinson’s Old Trafford reign was in many regards the mirror image of his time at West Brom. He again fashioned a youthful, exciting team, but one that was also flawed and vulnerable. They ran hard for the title in his first season at the club, but were beaten to it by Liverpool and came in third. Trophies were won – the FA Cup in 1983 and 1985 – and these made Atkinson United’s most successful manager since Busby. However, Busby had brought to Old Trafford the League title and the European Cup, and these were the peaks the club continued to aspire to and which Atkinson was unable to reach.

  He came closest in the 1985–86 season, which United began with a run of ten successive victories. They fast opened up a seemingly impregnable lead in the League, but then choked and trailed in a distant fourth behind Liverpool. Atkinson was sacked after United made a wretched start to the next campaign. His replacement was a younger up-and-coming manager, a flint-eyed Scot named Alex Ferguson. United recovere
d from his going, but Albion didn’t. Atkinson’s departure tore the heart and soul out of the club.

  ‘The start of it was Laurie and Len Cantello being sold,’ says Cyrille Regis. ‘But it was still a decent side. And then Ron left. Bryan Robson was the most complete footballer in the team and it was a no-brainer for Ron to take him to United. He had a big fight to get him out of the club. He told me he’d come back for Derek Statham and me, but never did. Things started to change then.’

  In Atkinson’s stead the West Brom board re-appointed his predecessor, Ronnie Allen. It was a fatal mistake. During his spell in Saudi Arabia the already remote Allen had grown more sombre and inward-looking. Next to the warmth and well being Atkinson had emitted, he returned to the club like an ice storm. Allen froze out Tony Brown and moved on Peter Barnes. In their place he brought in workmanlike footballers such as Steve Mackenzie from Manchester City and Andy King from Everton, and also two misfiring Dutchmen, Martin Jol and Romeo Zondervan.

  West Brom won just two of their opening twelve League games of the 1981–82 campaign. At a later point in the season, they lost ten of eleven matches. They were knocked out of the UEFA Cup 4-1 on aggregate by Grasshopper Zurich in the First Round of the competition. The radiant vision of Atkinson’s marauding side faded to grey, and gates at the Hawthorns fell as low as 11,000. Two years earlier the club had lit up both the Black Country and English football, but now it was as ravaged-looking as the town and area it served.

  ‘The players that had come into the side didn’t have the same attitude or work ethic, or appreciation of the team being the most important thing,’ says John Wile. ‘It was hard. I was falling out with people in the dressing room on a regular basis and having to try to motivate them at half-time or through games. We’d gone from being a very well organised and disciplined team to one that had split into factions.’