by Paul Rees
‘He made such of fuss of me that night,’ says Harrison. ‘I think that might have been a reflection of the fact that he was lonely and looking for a bit of company. We chatted for quite a while and then he asked me if I wanted to come back to his place. I’d got an early start in the morning, so I declined. I’ve wondered ever since if we’d have driven down the road he was killed on.’
Soon after the World Cup, Cunningham’s old sparring partner Bobby Fisher visited him in Madrid. Fisher was immediately confronted with a vision of all that his friend had been in Spain and also proof of the trajectory that he was now on. When Cunningham arrived at the airport to pick him up, Fisher looked on agog as he was clapped through the arrivals lounge by the waiting crowd. A more shocking sight met him when he got to Cunningham’s once palatial home in Las Matas. It seemed to Fisher like a ‘war zone’. The outdoor swimming pool was filled with rubbish and unusable. Inside, the first two floors of the three-storey house were near-derelict. Cunningham had confined himself to the kitchen and the master bedroom on the third floor.
‘He told me he’d hired some Spanish builders to come and sort the place out for him, but that they’d never turned up,’ says Fisher. ‘It was desperate. That was my first point of thinking that there was something not quite right about the situation, and especially with Laurie. He’d split with Nicky and got this freaky Spanish girl living with him. She didn’t speak a word of English and he didn’t speak Spanish. She was just there for the sake of being there.
‘I spent a week with him and we went out every night to different clubs, but I never once saw Laurie smile or laugh. He was like a dead soul. In many ways, I was glad to get away from him. He’d lost the one person that could ground him and I think he’d just bought into all that bullshit, living that kind of false life. The clubs we went to and the people we met were all false. None of it was real. He didn’t find it easy to make friends and all these people wanted him for was football. Laurie never wanted to be the archetypal footballer. He’d talk about the game for five, ten minutes, but then want to get on to something else. The frustration he must have felt being out there would have been horrendous. He seemed to me a really lonely figure.’
Whatever torment Cunningham was going through, he continued to present a positive face to his brother. Keith Cunningham also came out to Madrid that summer and remembers his younger sibling seeming in good spirits. He was shocked at the news of Brown’s going, but Laurie Cunningham otherwise avoided the subject. Normally, Keith would bunk up at Las Matas for weeks at a time. However, on this occasion his visit was brought to an abrupt and dreadful end.
In the depths of a Sunday night in July, Keith received a phone call at the house from police back in England. He was told that his partner, Norma Richards, and two of her three daughters from a previous relationship had been found murdered in the home the couple shared in Dalston, north-east London. Richards, twenty-seven, was raped and stabbed to death. Nine-year-old Samantha Richards had also been stabbed and seven-year-old Syretta Richards drowned in the bath. Their four-year-old sister, Rhodene, had spent the weekend with her grandmother and was spared. The two of them discovered Richards’s naked body and those of her children when Rhodene was returned home. The interior of the house had also been daubed with National Front slogans.
‘I told Laurie, he went straight to the football club and they got me a flight back home,’ says Keith. ‘It was a Monday morning when I got back to London. That’s when I found out the full story of what had happened for the first time.’
Laurie Cunningham never got to see the case resolved. It remained open and its horrors ever present for twenty-eight long years. In December 2010, Wilbert ‘Tony’ Dyce, who’d been a casual acquaintance of Keith Cunningham’s and Richards’s, was convicted of the murders and sentenced to life in prison. Dyce had a history of sexual assault and had followed Richards home from a club. He was black, but had left the National Front graffiti in her house to cover his tracks. It had worked until advances in DNA technology finally linked him to the crime scene.
With events in his career and personal life lurching from crisis to catastrophe, Laurie Cunningham appears to have been desperate to bring about some form of normality. In short order, he entered into a relationship with a Spanish girl, Maria, and had a daughter with her, Georgina. He soon split from Georgina’s mother, but just as quick met Sylvia Sendin-Soria, a petite brunette and a familiar face around the fringes of the football club. The couple were married within a year and subsequently had a son together, Sergio. Belatedly, Cunningham offered up to Real Madrid the image of a stable family life that the club preferred for its players.
‘Me and my mom went out there for the wedding,’ says Keith Cunningham. ‘I asked him what he was getting married for, but he wouldn’t discuss it. He hadn’t been with her long. I think it was a little stunt. I think the club wanted him to get married, but he didn’t. Cyrille had told him that he should come back to England and finish his career here. He didn’t have to stay in Spain.’
‘Laurie’s old friends never got to know Sylvia too well,’ says Fisher. ‘It seemed to us like the ending of a big old chapter when he got married. We’d always seen it as being set in stone that Nicky and he would be together. The two of them parting was like the ravens leaving the Tower of London. Right away I felt that nothing good was going to come of it.
‘I think Laurie also sensed that he wasn’t going to be able to finish football with a great name and the power to get out all those other ideas that he had going on in his head. It’s a horrible thing to say, but I felt he knew he couldn’t get his old life back and so settled for second best. I may be completely wrong and he might have been very happy, but I really don’t think so.’
However much Cunningham appeared to have conformed, it cut no ice with Di Stefano. UEFA’s regulations at the time permitted clubs to have two overseas players in their squads and during the summer Real Madrid signed defender Johnny Metgod from the Dutch side AZ Alkmaar. Di Stefano paired the Dutchman with the German Stielike down the spine of his side and exiled Cunningham. He was left to brood until almost the end of the season and then sent out on loan to Manchester United. This reunited him with Ron Atkinson and also with Bryan Robson and Remi Moses.
He featured in five games at the tail-end of a campaign that United finished third in the League. Now and then at Old Trafford he was able to flash and flare, though it was clear enough to his former colleagues how much he’d been curtailed by his catalogue of injuries. He could still enhance a game with a flick or a trick and use his experience to buy himself space and time on the ball. However, it was beyond him now to shape and change the course of a match.
‘I hadn’t stayed in touch with Laurie after he went to Spain, but we roomed together when he came to United,’ says Robson. ‘He’d changed. He wasn’t as flamboyant on or off the pitch and was even quieter. There wasn’t any sort of drama with him about what had happened in his career. He kept it to himself. But then, I never got the impression he was a deep thinker.’
United’s last game of the season was the FA Cup final against relegated Brighton at Wembley. Atkinson still thought enough of Cunningham to pencil him in for a role in the game. Given the biggest stage he might even then have been lifted up and restored, but it wasn’t it to be. His body again denied him. He pulled a muscle in training and failed to recover in time for the game. United went on to win the cup 4-0 after a replay. Cunningham went back to Spain to nurse his physical ailment and deeper, more painful psychological scars.
The pattern was set for the rest of his career. At twenty-seven, cameo roles were all that were left for him, quickening moments in the spotlight. He was like an old gunslinger riding from town to town, drifting from one club to the next. Never putting down roots and all the while knowing that a time was bound to come when he would get too slow, too broken and it’d all be over for him.
In the summer of 1983, Cunningham went to Sporting Gijon on Spain’s north-west coast
. Gijon is the largest city in the mountainous province of Asturias and the football club had been central to it since 1905. True glory hadn’t been won at Sporting, but the club had been competing in the top division of La Liga since 1944 and finished runners-up in 1979. They played their football at El Molinon, the oldest surviving football stadium in the country. It was hundreds of miles and a world away from the Bernabeu.
Cunningham spent a season at Sporting. He was fit enough to manage thirty games for the club and scored three goals as they finished thirteenth in La Liga. The next season his contract with Real Madrid came to an end and he went to Marseilles in the south of France. Compared to Gijon, Marseilles was a teeming and cosmopolitan metropolis, but its football club had been under-achieving for years. Marseille had last won the French title in 1972 and wouldn’t do so again until 1989. The club was in such a dysfunctional state that Cunningham played under three different managers during his one season with them. He got through another thirty games and then moved on once more.
He returned to England and went to Leicester City in the East Midlands. It was his most transparent step down to date. Leicester were traditionally one of English football’s yo-yo clubs, too strong for the Second Division, not good enough for the First, and trapped in a purgatory of forever ping-ponging between the two. At the point of Cunningham joining, the club was embarking on a third consecutive season in the top flight, which counted as success. However, their most prolific player, striker Gary Lineker, had been sold to Everton and this left them toothless.
Leicester’s 1985–86 campaign was a war of attrition. Battling against relegation, they won just two of their first fourteen League games and required a 2-0 victory over Newcastle in their last match of the season to keep them up. West Brom was one of the three teams that were worse off than them and went down instead. Attendances at their creaking Filbert Street ground averaged 11,000, and they also gave their supporters nothing to cheer in either of the two cup competitions, exiting both in the first round.
In this grim, grey environment, Cunningham’s light was turned down low. The statistics show he had fifteen games for Leicester and no goals, but speak nothing of his torment. He was falling through the cracks and scrambling for something to hold onto. Much later, his wife Sylvia told the TV documentary First Among Equals that ‘there were days when you saw him low. When a man has been so high and has to settle for less it shows.’ Most often he kept his tumult buried deep and hidden from view. He put up, shut up and carried on.
‘The injuries had fucked him up, but he didn’t cry about it,’ says Keith Cunningham. ‘My brother wasn’t a moaner or a weakling. He just got on. He was cool with it. It didn’t make a difference to him which team it was for, so long as he was playing football, which he loved.’
‘Guys don’t talk about stuff like that with each other, not at that age anyway,’ qualifies Cyrille Regis. ‘You don’t ask how someone’s feeling and what’s going on in their life. I didn’t know what was going on inside with Laurie, because we didn’t talk on that level. It was more about football, partying, birds and having a laugh. We were blagging it.’
Cunningham’s next stopping off point was Rayo Vallecano, the third of Madrid’s professional football clubs and in the shadow of Real and Atletico since its founding in 1924. Rayo was located in the working class Usera district to the south-east of the capital and wore its proletariat roots and left-wing leanings like badges of honour. It was an otherwise humble club with a small stadium and as fitful in Spain as Leicester was in England. Cunningham arrived during one of Rayo’s frequent spells in the second tier of La Liga and left them fifth in the table at the end of the 1986–87 season.
From there his odyssey took him on to Belgium and Sporting Charleroi, in the industrialised south of the country. There was an odd echo given that Charleroi was historically a steel and mining city and known by locals as ‘Pays Noir’, the Black Country. It is likely Cunningham never found this out, since he was there just long enough to play a single game for Sporting and then gone again. Off to a club that was as far from the vision of balletic grace he had once been as was possible: Wimbledon.
Wimbledon Football Club was the ugly duckling of a leafy corner of south-west London best known for its spacious common and annual tennis tournament. Founded in 1889, the club wasn’t elected to the Football League until 1977, but had since enjoyed a meteoric rise. Wimbledon had won promotion to the First Division in 1986 and finished sixth in their first season in the top tier, but the set-up and spirit of the club remained that of a lower-league underdog.
Their home ground was Plough Lane, a small and ramshackle arena that belonged to an earlier era of the game. Under impish manager Dave Bassett, the team had established a style of basic, bruising football that was as effective as it was simplistic. Wimbledon’s approach to the game was two-fold: to hit the ball long and often, and to rough up the opposition whenever and wherever possible. Their sheer coarseness earned them the unofficial nickname of the ‘Crazy Gang’, which was ideally suited to some of their more combative players, most especially midfielders Vinnie Jones and Dennis Wise. Jones was a footballer of limited talent, but boundless aggression. With his close-cropped hair, tattoos and an expression that seemed to snarl even in repose, he was like a cartoon villain. The rodent-like Wise had more to his game, but a mean streak that suggested he would be able to start a fight in an empty room.
However, the Wimbledon side had a smattering of craftsmen as well as warriors. The young John Scales would evolve into an accomplished defender and Lawrie Sanchez added a degree of finesse to their midfield. Straddling both sides of this divide was John Fashanu, a centre-forward with a sometimes deft touch, but also so imposing he was known as ‘Fash the Bash’. Fashanu was one of a handful of black players to have been brought up at the club. Among the others were three more regular first teamers: centre-halves Eric Young and Brian Gayle, and full-back Terry Phelan. Bassett resigned the summer before Cunningham’s arrival and Bobby Gould had been handed the reins. Gould rescued his diminutive ex-Coventry striker Terry Gibson from an unfulfilling spell at Manchester United, but otherwise followed Bassett’s blueprint.
The 1987–88 season was another good one for Wimbledon. They were comfortable in the top half of the table and on a run to the FA Cup final when Gould signed up Cunningham to complete the season with them. He featured in their last six League games and scored a couple of goals, but seemed a fish out of water – rather like a sleek sports car that had lost its top gear and was being forced to participate in a demolition derby. He nonetheless found a surrogate for Regis in the form of Fashanu and showed enough glimpses of his old self to win over most, if not all of his new team-mates.
‘He was a gentleman,’ says Phelan, who was then twenty-one. ‘In terms of the way he presented himself, very elegant, smart and clean cut. To tell the truth, I was bowled over to be sat next to him in a dressing room. I suppose it would be like a kid today being sat next to Lionel Messi. He was struggling a little bit with his knee, but still in great shape. He often used to come in and say to me he wouldn’t be training that day because he’d got gout.
‘One morning, I asked him if he’d show me how he took those corners with the outside of his foot. He said, “No problem.” All the lads just stood there and watched him curling in one ball after another, left and right side. It was absolutely brilliant. He gave me a smile and a little wink afterwards. He seemed a happy chap, but he was in a different league to the rest of us.’
‘We had nothing in common,’ says Sanchez. ‘He was pally with John Fashanu and I wasn’t. If you weren’t in that camp then to an extent you didn’t have anything to do with them. I don’t even recall having a conversation with him. He seemed very humble and shy. He glided when he was on the ball. You could tell he had ability, but he certainly wasn’t outstanding.’
Laurie Cunningham’s swansong in English football was the FA Cup final at Wembley on 14 May 1988. The month before, he’d been a substitute
for Wimbledon’s semi-final victory over Luton Town at Spurs’ White Hart Lane stadium and made it onto the pitch at the end of the game. Gould again selected him on the bench for the final against Liverpool, who were chasing the second part of a League and Cup double.
On a sweltering day and across the wide expanse of Wembley’s pitch, it was thought that Liverpool would retain the ball, exhaust Wimbledon and beat them at a canter. However, their expected procession never got going before the watching Diana, Princess of Wales. Wimbledon stopped them in their tracks, scratching and scrapping, no lambs to the slaughter. They took the lead as half-time approached through a Sanchez header. Liverpool came at them in the second period, but Wimbledon soaked up the pressure and held firm. The result was assured when goalkeeper Dave Beasant saved a penalty from Liverpool’s most reliable poacher of goals, John Aldridge.
Cunningham made his entry in the fifty-sixth minute. He had such a minimal impact on the game that both Sanchez and Phelan now wrongly believe that he didn’t make it onto the pitch until its last seconds. His involvement added up to filling the space down which Liverpool sub Craig Johnston might have gone raiding, and a teasing moment when he slipped his marker and ran with the intent and poise of old, but into a dead-end.
At the final whistle the Wimbledon team were united in their exaltation at a famous triumph. However, one has to look hard at the surviving TV footage of the contest’s aftermath to pick out Cunningham among them. He’s there in the line of players waiting to receive the trophy from Princess Diana and as they group together on the pitch for a gaggle of press photographers, but like a silhouette or a ghost in the machine.
‘Laurie had taken Brian Gayle’s place in the squad for the final,’ says Sanchez. ‘Gayley was gutted. I remember seeing him in tears before the game. It was a bit naughty of the manager to have left him out. He’d been an integral part of the club since we’d got up into the top division. The whole team was being paid a pittance, but he got a pittance of a pittance. Laurie had been at the club for two minutes. He only touched the ball once or twice in the final. But there you go, he got a cup winners’ medal.’