The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  Brendon Batson took the mess that Allen presided over on and off the pitch as a personal affront. Schooled at Bertie Mee’s rigorous Arsenal academy, he was a man of strong convictions about how things should best be accomplished. He compiled a list of his grievances with the new regime, concluded that they were unlikely to be satisfactorily resolved and submitted a transfer request, which was promptly turned down.

  ‘Big Ron had dominated the club and his going left a gaping hole,’ he says. ‘In his place you had a manager who just didn’t seem to grasp what we’d done and had hoped to do.’

  However, in the midst of this ruinous drama Cyrille Regis was having his most productive season as a goal-scorer. He’d never been especially prolific, but now was scoring at a rate of a goal per two games in a struggling team. In the League, he struck a brace of hat-tricks, against Birmingham and Swansea City. Yet there was one goal of his in particular that stood out. Not on account of it being extraordinary, though it was, but because it could be viewed as a shining monument to a vanishing age.

  It was the only goal of an FA Cup Fifth Round tie with Norwich at the Hawthorns on 13 February. Watching footage of it now, there’s no sense of what’s to come. It’s an unseasonably bright day, but the ground is half full and the game ragged. No time or place for wonder. Ally Robertson wins the ball in the centre circle and loops it towards Regis. He’s surrounded by defenders, has his back to goal and has forty yards to travel. You expect him to hold the ball up or lay it off, to conform to the nature of the contest. Instead, Regis takes it on his chest, spins and runs with it, shrugging off one, two challengers and leaving a third defender sprawling in his wake. He dashes ten yards and looks up just once, then fires. He hits the ball right-footed and with such force that he’s bent double and off the ground when it begins its unstoppable trajectory. It proceeds in a perfect, vicious arc into the top left-hand corner of the Norwich goal, the net bulging.

  Freeze-framed as he turns to celebrate, Regis has both arms raised and is beaming. The late-afternoon sun bathes him in an amber glow. He is a king in his kingdom, but also a picture of unconfined joy. Right there and then, he seems to epitomise all that had been won and also lost inside and outside of the club and the game.

  ‘It was one of my best years,’ he says. ‘Ronnie Allen was a factor for me, because he was the only manager I ever played for who’d been a forward, and he understood a striker’s mentality. I’d never had a lot of stamina and he was used to training top-class players abroad. He told me that he didn’t want me crossing the halfway line. Before that, I’d been expected to chase back and defend corners and free kicks because I was good in the air. So I had more explosive energy that season. That allowed me to zip past people in the last half-hour of a game.’

  In the aftermath of the Norwich match, Regis was called up by Ron Greenwood to the full England squad for the first time. The occasion was a Home International against Northern Ireland at Wembley on 23 February. The week of the game an anonymous-looking envelope arrived at the Hawthorns marked for his attention.

  ‘Inside it there was a bullet and a handwritten note,’ says Regis. ‘The letter said: “If you put a foot on Wembley turf you’ll get one of these through your knees.” In football, we laugh at everything. So we put it up on the dressing room wall and had a good laugh about it. I’ve still got the bullet somewhere.’

  ‘Cyrille used to change near me and when he got that I told him I’d rather he didn’t,’ adds John Wile. ‘We had to make light of it, because really there was no other way of dealing with something like that.’

  Regis came on as a sixty-fifth-minute substitute for Trevor Francis at Wembley in a game won 4-0 by England. In doing so he became just the third black player to represent the country after Viv Anderson and Laurie Cunningham. The match otherwise passed without incident and Regis made two further appearances for England that year, against Wales and Iceland, but he was never given the benefit of an extended run in the team.

  There was no improvement in West Brom’s form in the League and they were in increasing peril of relegation. However, they managed to reach the semi-finals of both the League and FA Cups. Tottenham were their opponents in a two-legged League Cup tie. Both games were tight and fractious, but the north Londoners were the better and more potent side, and were expected to win. The teams drew 0-0 at the Hawthorns and Spurs duly ran out 1-0 winners at White Hart Lane the following week.

  It was a different matter in the FA Cup semi-final that took place at Highbury on 3 April. Pitted against Second Division QPR, Albion were hot favourites to progress to Wembley. However, the Arsenal stadium had been the scene of Atkinson’s undoing four years earlier at the same stage of the competition. Allen also now sent his side to their doom there. In advance of the game the Baggies’ manager fixated on QPR’s veteran midfielder Tony Currie. Currie was a class act and a former England international, but at thirty-two he was past his best and likely to struggle against the more mobile Gary Owen, who’d become a fixture in the West Brom side.

  ‘At 12.30 p.m. on the day of the game, Ronnie Allen got us together at our hotel and read his team out,’ recalls Ally Robertson. ‘We’d trained all week with the regular team and lined up how we’d expected to play, but he’d changed it. He announced he was dropping Gary Owen and replacing him with Martyn Bennett, a centre-half. We were all looking at each other thinking, “Where the hell has that come from?” The game turned out to be a nightmare. We started off bad and got worse.’

  Allen decided to set his side up to guard against the dormant threat posed by Currie. It made for a tortuous spectacle. The supposed superior team encamped in their own half, their opponents given licence to possess the ball but unable to do anything constructive with it. Even Regis succumbed to inertia. Marshalled by the strong but limited Bob Hazell, he hardly had a kick.

  Scoreless at half-time, the West Brom players trooped off to the dressing room and into what John Wile describes as a ‘hell of a row’ with their manager. It did them no good. The second half was a horror show, deathless. In the end it was decided by a freak goal, Robertson attempting to make a clearance and the ball rebounding off QPR striker Clive Allen’s knee and into the Albion net.

  There was nothing left for them to play for now but survival in the League, and with the dressing room mutinous and rancorous. Six successive games were lost after the QPR debacle and West Brom slipped into the relegation places. Edgy, unconvincing wins against Wolves and Notts County dragged them back out of it, and it all came down to the penultimate fixture of the season against Leeds at the Hawthorns. A victory would be enough for Albion to retain their First Division status and relegate the Yorkshire side, whose empire had crumbled. Defeat would instead send them into the abyss.

  Regis won the match with his twenty-fourth goal of the campaign, but there was no time to celebrate it. The loss sent Leeds’ fans on a rampage. Fighting broke out on the terraces and outside of the ground, with uprooted seats and chunks of masonry being used as missiles. This was also a riot borne of frustration and anger, but at nothing more than a game. In that regard, it seemed to reflect the ugly, brutish and senseless tone of the period as a whole.

  In the summer of 1982, Regis signed a new contract with Albion. He reflected later that this was a mistake and that he was ‘about to enter my wilderness years’. The club went there with him. Allen resigned at the end of the season and was replaced by an unsung Scot, Ron Wylie. A grafting midfielder with Aston Villa and Birmingham in the fifties and sixties, Wylie’s inglorious coaching career to that point had amounted to spells as an assistant at Villa and Coventry, and a couple of years in charge of a Cypriot side, Bulova. He was a decent man, but an uninspiring choice.

  Shorn of Allen’s pernicious influence, West Brom had a better time of it the next season and finished eleventh in the League. However, the rot continued below the waterline. The average gate at the Hawthorns fell again to 15,260, the lowest it had been since 1914 in the shadow of the Great War. John Wil
e and Ally Brown were sold off and on 30 October 1982, Brendon Batson’s playing career came to a premature end. He was playing for West Brom at Ipswich that afternoon and the team was on its way to a 6-1 defeat. Going in for a challenge, Batson felt his leg twist and his knee buckle.

  ‘It was the same one I’d injured as a sixteen-year-old at Arsenal and I knew that pain all too well second time around,’ he says. ‘It was what’s called a bucket-handle tear to the cartilage. The Sunday morning after the game, I went to see my daughter riding in a show-jumping event in Birmingham. I was walking up a flight of steps to the viewing gallery and I felt my knee go. That was it, done.’

  Batson was 29-years-old and never played again. He’d made 220 appearances for West Brom, but statistics didn’t begin to tell the tale of his career. As a defender, he was outstanding, as a man, even more so. In both cases he was never less than resolute, strong-willed, determined and defiant, and he had needed to be at the time he came into football. He was gone from the hurly-burly of the game too soon, but left having made an immense imprint on it.

  Without him, West Brom’s story turned into a bad farce. Ron Wylie lasted less than two years as manager. The team was again cannon fodder in his second season and he was sacked halfway through it. Like Allen, Johnny Giles returned to the club and also failed at the second time of asking. Giles begot Ron Saunders, who’d led Aston Villa to their 1981 title but had then got Birmingham relegated. A taciturn and seemingly humourless character, Saunders was at the tiller when Albioin finally dropped into the Second Division, having won just four games during the whole of the 1985–86 campaign. Out went Saunders and back came Atkinson like the prodigal son, only to walk out on the club again within a year. Rudderless, West Brom drifted into the shadows of the lower leagues. They would be stuck there for sixteen years.

  ‘It happened right in front of me and was terribly sad,’ says Derek Statham, who remained at Albion until 1987. ‘It was obvious what was going on at the club: they were getting rid of the higher earners, bringing in a lot of rubbish, and were prepared to face the consequences. All that had been built up was allowed to fall apart and it was inevitable how it was going to end.’

  Regis was at the Hawthorns until 1984. Injuries had taken a toll on him by then. The constant pounding to his knees and ankles dimminished his pace and mobility. He had also been wrung out having to lead the line of an ailing team. However, the simplest truth was that he had increasingly missed Laurie Cunningham. He was his own man and a powerful presence, but Cunningham had been a lightning bolt for him to spark with and fire off. In his last two seasons at the club, Regis was teamed with a gangling young black lad named Garry Thompson who’d been signed from Coventry by Ron Wylie. Thompson was a good, honest player, but not a magical one. Not someone who could detonate Regis.

  ‘I’d never had to handle a dip in my career up until that point,’ says Regis. ‘I didn’t know how to deal with a loss of form over a long period. Or with constantly playing when you’re not fully fit. That was happening to me a lot, especially under Ron Wylie. I was seen as the mainstay of the team. Not being boastful, but in a sense it was like if I was out there, then there was hope.

  ‘I didn’t understand that form is temporary and talent permanent. Being out there all the time without being quite right, it affects the whole way that you play. You get a bit stale. The team also wasn’t doing well, so it was a constant battle. Johnny Giles came back and wanted to change things around. He felt that I’d got too complacent.’

  Regis was put on the transfer list. Coventry City bid £250,000 for him. It was the first and last offer West Brom got. In the hierarchy of West Midlands football, Coventry ranked below West Brom, Aston Villa, Birmingham and Wolves, and above only Walsall. This was despite the fact that they had been in the top flight of the Football League since 1967, having risen from its basement under the stewardship of the club’s most famous son, Jimmy Hill. They had also trailblazed to the extent of having the first all-seater stadium in England.

  Yet Coventry was perceived to be a small-time club that was operating above its station. It had never won one of the game’s major honours and began each season with the primary objective of survival in the First Division. In the two most recent campaigns, Coventry had achieved that by the skin of their teeth. For Regis, going there would be at best a sideways move.

  ‘Two years before I’d been on the verge of the England team and won ‘Midlands Footballer of the Year’,’ he says. ‘I was sure that once word got out that Coventry wanted me, other clubs would come in. But no one did and that hurt. Not the Villas or the Evertons, just a bottom-four club. Man, it affects your confidence and self-esteem. So I made an emotional decision rather than a career one. Looking back, it was a really, really bad one.’

  Chapter Sixteen: Born Again

  Cyrille Regis went to Coventry City at twenty-six fearing his best days had gone. The team he joined had a rag-tag look to it. It appeared to have been assembled more in hope than expectation. The manager was Bobby Gould, a bullish character who’d played for Coventry and nine other clubs during a meandering career as a jobbing striker. Gould’s time in management would follow the same course, and among his recruits to Highfield Road were the ex-England centre-forward Bob Latchford and Regis’s erstwhile Albion colleague Peter Barnes. Both of them were also using Coventry as the latest staging post in their long drifts through the game.

  Next to these journeymen, Coventry had a sprinkling of fresher, rawer talent. Like Regis, 22-year-old full-back Stuart Pearce had trained as an electrician and been snapped up from a non-league club down south, Wealdstone. Pearce was so intense and committed on the pitch that he acquired the nickname ‘Psycho’. He would go on to bigger and better things at Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest and become a fixture in the England team. Forward Terry Gibson stood five-foot-four in his socks and had failed to make the grade at Tottenham, but was nippy, skilful and pugnacious. A nineteen-year-old local boy, Lloyd McGrath was a diligent midfielder and among the wave of black youngsters who were now following Regis’s path into the professional game. John Barnes at Watford had just then broken into the England squad and future internationals Ian Wright and Paul Ince would emerge in the next two years at Crystal Palace and West Ham respectively.

  Such as it was, the soul of the club belonged to the two eccentric characters who marshalled the team’s defence. Looming goalkeeper Steve Ogrizovic looked like a giant from a children’s fairy-tale. He was twenty-five, but could pass for two decades older and had hands the size of buckets. Ogrizovic had been a policeman before becoming a footballer and was a prodigious smoker. Centre-half Brian Kilkline also appeared more ancient than his twenty-two years with his flowing hair and eruption of facial hair. He was built like an oak and had the bearing of a barbarian warrior about to go off and do battle with Roman legions. Kilkline was referred to as ‘Killer’ among his team-mates on account of his up-and-at-’em approach to both football and life in general.

  In short, Coventry seemed to be a mess, and they played like it for two years. Regis’s first season at the club looked like ending in relegation until the team strung together three successive victories to save themselves at the death. The last of these was a 4-1 win over champions Everton on the final Saturday of the campaign, with Regis bagging a brace of goals. Gould had been sacked at Christmas and replaced by his assistant, Don Mackay. A Glaswegian and a former goalkeeper, Mackay was an able deputy but not a leader of men. Under him, Coventry also scraped through the next campaign. Two points separated them from the drop on this occasion, which put added value on a 3-0 home win they recorded against Ron Saunders’s sinking West Bromwich Albion.

  These were desperate times for Regis. He was meant to be for Coventry all that he had been for West Brom, which is to say formidable and almost larger than life itself – not just a part of the team, but its strongest component. The trouble was that Regis felt as though his powers had waned, and he found himself going through the motions.


  ‘I’d ended up being a big fish in a small pond,’ he says. ‘Everything was focused on me and I wasn’t playing well, so there was double the pressure. We were a poor side and always having to win the last game of the season to stay up. Nothing against Coventry, but I was a better player than that.’

  Regis had slipped his moorings off the pitch, too. In 1983, he married his long-term girlfriend Beverley and had fathered two children with her, a son, Robert, and daughter Michelle. However, Regis wasn’t rooted by family life. In fact, he ran from it and also from the anguish of his own apparent decline. He’d always enjoyed a night out, but now these were more frequent and there was something more wilful and destructive about his drinking and carousing.

  ‘I was causing Beverley a lot of pain,’ he told the Sunday Mercury newspaper in 2010. ‘It was a tough cycle to get out of. I was stuck in a vortex of work hard, play hard, partying and girls. Every so often I’d get a call from a newspaper to tell me they were going to run a story saying I was with this girl or that girl. That happened to me a couple of times during my early days at Coventry. Nothing ever came of it, but I would clutch the phone in terror and think of the embarrassment and shame if my wife, family and the public found out.’

  Regis’s saviour in football was the unremarkable-looking figure of John Sillett. A former defender for Coventry from 1962-66, Sillett was in his fifties, bald, overweight and known to one and all as ‘Snozzer’. He also had an infectious enthusiasm for the game and a zest for life. In this respect at least, he was very much like Ron Atkinson. When Don Mackay was dismissed at the end of the 1985–86 season, Sillett and Coventry’s more reserved Managing Director, George Curtis, were paired up to run the football side of the club. Sillett’s infectious joie de vivre injected life into the place and fired up the team.

  Coventry finished tenth in the League the next season. Freed from the shackles of a relegation battle and inflated by Sillett’s promptings, Regis was rejuvenated. He found himself again the point around which a team coalesced, top scoring with sixteen goals and rolling back the years. One of Regis’s strikes was the last in a 3-0 home win over Third Division Bolton Wanderers in a Third Round FA Cup tie. Played on 10 January 1987 in front of a sparse 10,000 crowd, it was a low-key beginning to the ultimate triumph of Coventry’s season. They proceeded through the competition with more impressive away wins against Manchester United, Stoke and Sheffield Wednesday, and into a semi-final with Second Division Leeds at Wednesday’s Hillsborough stadium.