The Three Degrees

by Paul Rees

  For Regis, FA Cup semi-finals held recent and bitter memories. In this, his third, he got echoes to begin with of the two abject defeats he’d previously suffered with West Brom and of other, darker days. The underdogs Leeds started at a gallop and Coventry froze. Regis was stuck on the periphery of things and unable to get a foothold in the game. In so being he was at least spared the tribal chorus of boos that rose up from the Leeds supporters whenever Lloyd McGrath or winger Dave Bennett, Coventry’s third black player, got the ball.

  Leeds took the lead in the sixteenth minute and seemed rampant. Yet the game turned on one fleeting moment that involved Regis. It seemed insignificant at the time, but it had a profound effect. Reeling from Leeds’ assault, the Coventry defence was reduced to punting long, hopeful balls upfield. Nearing half-time, Regis got on the end of one. He took it on his chest, felt Leeds’ centre-half Brendon Ormsby coming up close behind him, spun and ran. In three, four strides he was clear of Ormsby and at the edge of the Leeds box. He shot, the ball screwing just wide of the goal.

  ‘But that was a sight of the old Cyrille,’ says reporter Martin Swain. ‘The whole Coventry team took off from that instant. You could sense how it gave them all a lift. To watch an athlete be able to do that and on such a big stage, it’s what us mere mortals gaze at in wonder.’

  The game went into extra time, but a resurgent Coventry won it 3-2 and went on to their first Wembley final. It was still then true that the climactic point of the FA Cup was English football’s grandest occasion. The nation stopped to watch the final, and Regis’s last command performance took place before 100,000 spectators inside the stadium and a live TV audience of many millions.

  Tottenham’s artisans were in opposition on a sun-kissed afternoon in May and were odds-on favourites to lift the famous trophy. The Spurs side was blessed with an elegant but formidable midfield trio of Osvaldo Ardiles and the England internationals Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle. Each of them was blessed with prodigious abilities to manoeuvre a football and capable of seizing hold of a game and dictating its course. That season they had an especially lethal striker to finish off their orchestrations. Sharp as a needle point, Clive Allen was enjoying a golden campaign and had helped himself to forty-eight goals.

  Allen duly notched his forty-ninth of the season just two minutes into the game. Waddle slipped his marker, Greg Downs, with almost arrogant ease and crossed for him to score. In that instant, the outcome of the match seemed certain. It was the last time it would appear so. Coventry’s cup run had given them self-belief and reserves of inner strength, but also a sense of destiny, and they didn’t capitulate. In this regard, Regis was especially significant to them. The final wasn’t his greatest game, not even close. However, he had an influence on it simply by being. He was the team’s anchor, a fixed point for them to send the ball to and immovable once in possession of it. The devastating burst of speed had gone from his legs, but he retained the strength and sheer presence to occupy defenders and wear them down. This allowed others around him to exploit both space and also tired minds and limbs.

  The contest pitched and see-sawed through ninety minutes of regular time and then thirty minutes’ extra-time. Coventry’s man-of-the-match Bennett equalised Allen’s strike. An own goal from Kilkline regained the lead for Spurs and Keith Houchen restored parity again on the hour with a diving header. In the fifth minute of the additional period, Spurs’ Gary Mabbutt inadvertently turned a cross from McGrath into his own net. Spurs came storming back once more, but Coventry held on to the lead and the cup was theirs.

  Their celebrations were gleeful, delirious. The team paraded around the pitch in triumph. Sillett danced a jig on the Wembley running track and in front of the TV cameras. All of them were sucking up the moment, and were also now seeming disbelieving of it. In the midst of it all, Regis stood tall. He wore the lid of the cup on his head and a big and untroubled smile on his face. For all the symbolic victories he’d won, this was his first tangible trophy, and also his last.

  He spent four more seasons at Coventry. His and the team’s form endured through two of them, Regis top scoring again in 1988 and Coventry finishing a best ever seventh in the First Division the next year. In October 1987, he was recalled to the England team to win his fifth and final cap as a substitute in an 8-0 romp over Turkey in a European Championship qualifier at Wembley. That return was fleeting for him and so also was Coventry’s period in the sun. Relegation threatened the club once more in the 1989–90 season and Sillett was sacked.

  By then, Regis had been left first devastated and then changed by a single, terrible event that occurred in Spain. He’d had a premonition of this the summer after Coventry’s cup win and when he’d been visiting Laurie Cunningham in Madrid. In the early hours of one morning, Cunningham was driving them back to his house from a night out when he fell asleep at the wheel of his Renault 5 GTI. The car veered across the road and smashed into a barrier that ran alongside the city’s main A6 highway.

  ‘We’d been out drinking and partying and it was about 2 a.m.,’ Regis says. ‘The car rolled over three or four times. It ended up sliding on its roof. I can still see and hear it now, the sparks and the noise. I was waiting for the impact, but there wasn’t one. It was a lucky escape, but we’d both had our seatbelts on.’

  Both of them walked away from the scene of this crash with nothing more than cuts and bruises. The shock of it wasn’t enough to curb Regis’ drinking or save his marriage. He and Beverley were divorced, the wounds raw and painful. It would be another two years before he faced up to his demons and then only after receiving news that Cunningham had gone to his doom during the early hours of another Madrid morning on the same stretch of road. Today, he marks the loss of his friend as the turning point in his life.

  ‘It got me to think about everything and ask what it was all about,’ he says. ‘Here’s a guy whose life was very parallel to mine. He’d had a great career and all the riches – the houses, the cars and the whole thing. Yet he’d left it all behind. Within a year I’d reached out to a group called Christians in Sport and become a born again Christian.’

  ‘Cyrille did everything that a young man in his twenties would do,’ says Martin Swain. ‘He lived the life and it cost him Beverley, who was lovely. And he knows that. But he came out the other side and this fantastic person emerged. He’s a very rounded man and totally understated. One of my great pleasures in life is being able to sit with Cyrille and talk with him about everything from spirituality to the demon drink.’

  In all, Regis played one more League game for Coventry than he did for West Brom and scored thirty-five fewer goals. Former Ipswich and England centre-half Terry Butcher took over as the club’s new manager at the start of the 1990–91 season and deemed him surplus to requirements. He was given a free transfer and picked up by Ron Atkinson, who’d just then taken over at Aston Villa. He spent two seasons at Villa, at thirty-three the elder statesman in a strong side that finished runners-up to Manchester United in the inaugural season of the English Premier League in 1992–93. That Villa squad provided ample evidence of the legacy Regis had bequeathed to the game, since it included eight other black players: Earl Barrett, Ugo Ehiogu, Bryan Small, Paul McGrath, Tony Daley, Dalian Atkinson, Martin Carruthers and Dwight Yorke.

  He was a bit-part player by the end of his time at Villa and after being released by them dropped down through the Leagues. He went first to Wolves and then to Wycombe Wanderers and finally to Chester City in the old Fourth Division, where he played out his final season before retiring in 1996 at the age of thirty-eight.

  ‘I wanted to do twenty years as a pro, one more, but I’d had an injury to my ankle that we couldn’t diagnose and it was causing me too much pain,’ he says. ‘It was hard going as well. You never had the luxury of staying anywhere overnight. You’d travel for three, four hours on the coach and then get off to play in front of a thousand people at Scunthorpe.’

  In the final analysis, Regis’s career tailed off
and perhaps he was never again as magnificent as he was in those first three years at West Brom. However, the scope of his time in football was so much bigger and more significant than that – bigger than the fact of his having played over 700 games and scored more than 200 goals. To the likes of Dwight Yorke, Ian Wright, Paul Ince and the countless others for whom he kicked down the doors and showed the way, he remains a hero, an icon and a giant of the game.

  He went back to West Brom in 1997 as reserve-team coach, when the club was still floundering, but left again three years later. He says he didn’t grow to love coaching and that ‘there was a bit of pride involved as well. I was in danger of becoming the guy who got wheeled out like an old bit of furniture, the Albion legend.’ He moved on to his current role as a football agent, his first client being his nephew, Jason Roberts, also a striker. In 2006, he married his second wife, Julia, and two years later was awarded the MBE in recognition of his charity work for organisations like Water Aid. He is fifty-six now, a grandfather and at peace.

  ‘I have no regrets,’ he says. ‘Some decisions I made were right, some were wrong, but that’s the way life is. You’re young, you make mistakes. And things look different through the eyes of a 50-year-old. At the time I was playing for West Brom, all I focused on was staying in the team. Now I’m able to appreciate the impact we had. That there was a generation of black kids out there who were thinking, “If he can do it, so can I.” ’

  In 1984, Brendon Batson left the West Midlands after finally admitting defeat in his battle against injury. He says there was ‘only so much pity and sympathy that I could take.’ He moved his family to Cheshire and gradually found a route back into the game. He tried management, applying for the vacant post at his old club Cambridge but failed to even get an interview.

  ‘I find it remarkable that Brendon didn’t become the first black manager,’ says Pat Murphy. ‘Ron Atkinson had written him a glowing reference and felt he was an absolute shoo-in for the Cambridge job. I remember doing a piece for the radio and being furious about the fact he hadn’t been interviewed, because we all got a little bit more vociferous about things in the eighties.’

  As a player at both Cambridge and West Brom, Batson had been his team-mates’ union representative and progressed to being the first black member of the PFA’s management committee. In the spring of 1984, he accepted the offer of a full-time job from the union’s Chief Executive, Gordon Taylor. He proved to be one of the game’s most able and influential administrators, rising to the position of Taylor’s deputy during his eighteen years at the PFA. He championed the conception of the Kick It Out initiative in 1993 and describes its subsequent evolution into a campaigning organisation as ‘a watershed moment for football. It is without doubt the success story of the game in terms of dealing with a social issue.’

  Batson left the PFA in 2002 to take up a position as West Bromwich Albion’s new Managing Director. Like Regis, his return to the club was an unhappy one. West Brom had been promoted to the Premier League for the first time at the end of the previous season, but too soon for an inexperienced board and a labouring team to grapple with. Batson lasted a year in the job. During this time relations between the club’s new chairman, Jeremy Peace, and its manager, Gary Megson, deteriorated to the point of open warfare and the team was relegated back to the First Division. Peace terminated his contract, claiming the club’s demotion had forced him into a cost-cutting restructure.

  ‘Brendon could only do so much in an environment that was like a madhouse,’ says journalist Chris Lepkowski. ‘The club wasn’t ready for the Premier League. Megson was also a very political animal and someone who didn’t seem at all easy to work with; he also fell out with Peace’s predecessor, Paul Thompson, and with strikers Jason Roberts and Bob Taylor. You could ask him about a groin injury to a player and he’d turn it into an attack on the chairman.’

  ‘The one regret I have is that I didn’t make a success of that job,’ says Batson. ‘I was frightened when I left it. I hadn’t been out of work since I was sixteen. My wife convinced me I’d be fine. Sure enough, we were going off to our house in Spain soon after when I got call to do some consultancy work for the FA.’

  Today, Batson runs his own successful sports consultancy business and holds a number of directorships, among them the chairmanship of the Professional Players’ Federation. He is widely acknowledged as one the most impressive and respected figures in the game and was awarded an MBE for his services to football in the New Year’s Honours List of 2000. As a player, he survived the worst the sport could throw at him, and its occasionally treacherous political machinations as an administrator. The same strength and resolve got him through his grief at the shattering loss of his rock, Cecily, who was taken from him by cancer in September 2009.

  ‘At the times when I needed it, my wife was always the one who gave me the right advice,’ he says. ‘She never doubted me or my abilities, even when I doubted them myself. Losing her changed my life and the life of my family forever. Things will never be the same. But I’ve got two children, five lovely grand-children and no complaints. I wouldn’t change anything.’

  During the years since he retired from the game, Batson has also felt the pangs of another significant loss in his life. In 2003, he co-founded the West Brom Former Players’ Association with the club’s 1968 FA Cup-winning captain, Graham Williams. The organisation has more than 100 members and meets at regular social functions and fund-raising events. These have brought back together the boys of 1978–79, reigniting their shared memories of the time when they were filled with hopes and dreams and came within touching distance of greatness. For Batson, they are also haunted by the ghost of the man who is no longer among them. The one of them who promised most of all, but fell furthest and hardest, and left them on a summer’s morning in 1989.

  Chapter Seventeen: Swansong

  All things considered, 1982 was an awful year for Laurie Cunningham. His 1981–82 season at Real Madrid had been wiped out by injury, and as a result he was omitted from Ron Greenwood’s England squad for the summer World Cup in Spain. His anticipated participation in the tournament had been one of the driving factors that took him to the country in the first place, but he was a mere spectator when it kicked off in his adopted homeland. Here was especially withering evidence of how wrong it had gone for him in Madrid, and he was dealt a series of other savage blows in the coming months.

  The first of these was the loss of his most accommodating supporter at Real Madrid. Failure to win back La Liga or a European prize had cost Vujadin Boskov his job as head coach and he was replaced by Alfredo Di Stefano. One of Real’s greats, the Argentinian was also a notoriously severe and unforgiving character. In particular, he was intolerant of footballers whom he viewed as shirkers or dilettantes and whom he saw as taking a relaxed attitude to their physical conditioning.

  He brooked no challenge to his authority. The Brazilian playmaker Didi arrived at Real in 1959 as a World Cup winner and as the club’s first black player. Didi was a terrifically gifted footballer, but his journalist wife wrote an article criticising his team-mate Di Stefano’s influence at the club. In response, Di Stefano ostracised the Brazilian and he was forced out of Real at the end of his first season. There was no doubting that as a coach Di Stefano’s kind of player was going to be Uli Stielike and not Cunningham.

  If this was wounding to Cunningham, Nicky Brown’s departure from Spain and the ending of their relationship was ruinous. Brown had been the one constant in his life since they were both teenagers, when he was starting out in the game. She had shared in his highs and lows, helped him to fight his battles and encouraged his dreaming. The two of them had agreed long ago on the terms that bound them. They had an understanding that if one of them ever decided to leave the other then there would doubtless be a good reason for it, given how tightly locked together they were. The abandoned party was to respect this and not attempt to change the other’s mind or follow them.

  ‘I didn’t
want to lead that kind of life anymore,’ Brown says now. ‘It was like living in a goldfish bowl. I also wanted Laurie to get out of football. He’d had too many injuries. We had enough money to go around and didn’t need it. We’d realised how happy we were back at Orient and with our parents. Laurie’s goal was always to help other people. We used to lie in bed at night discussing what we were going to do. He wanted to build villages that would offer a home life to the kind of kids we’d seen at children’s homes in London.

  ‘If I left, I thought he’d come with me. I didn’t realise how tied up he was. It was a huge mistake on my part. We thought we’d betrayed each other, but we’d not. We’d just done what the other one wanted. I was waiting for my prince to come and get me, but he couldn’t because of what we’d agreed. We couldn’t talk to each other for the first three months after I left, it was too painful. But we never lost touch. Then things changed rapidly for him.’

  Dave Harrison, who’d ghosted Cunningham’s column for the Evening Mail when he was in his pomp as a player at West Brom, remembers running into him in a nightclub in Madrid during the World Cup. It was in the weeks immediately following Brown’s leaving and Cunningham appeared to Harrison more animated than he’d ever seen him during the time the two of them were working together. He was talking a mile a minute and showing off his Michael Jackson moves on the dance floor. Yet there was also something lost and needy about him.