Teenage Revolution

by Alan Davies

  I hadn’t been up to Manchester for that game; instead I’d gone with Jill to Selhurst Park, to watch her team, Barnsley, win 1–0 away at Crystal Palace. Seven months later, in August 1987, I was on the terraces at Old Trafford waiting for the game between United and Arsenal to start. Beneath my feet was a newspaper, which I picked up. On the front was a headline about the Hungerford massacre in which a lone gunman had committed matricide, slaughtered fifteen more people and finally shot himself. All this in a town that hadn’t seen a murder in over a hundred years. It was horrifying and shocking. My dad said:

  ‘Why on earth would he kill all those people? I can understand him killing his mother, perhaps she was nagging him or something, but why all those strangers?’

  Usually, if Arsenal weren’t playing at home, I’d drive to Gillingham, twenty-five miles up the A2 from Whitstable. The Priestfield stadium had an open terrace, at the Gillingham End, where it was easy to find a barrier to lean on one minute before kick-off. Crowds were rarely above 3,500 and most of those would pack into the noisy Rainham End.

  My old mentor from the Bobby Moore Soccer School, Harry Redknapp (who received a princely £1,000 as Bell’s Manager of the Year), was in charge of Bournemouth, who were running away at the top of Division Three, being chased by Bruce Rioch’s Middlesbrough. 1986–87 was to be the first season in which play-offs were used to decide the last promotion place. The fifth team in Division Three had to play the fourth-bottom side from Division Two over two legs. If they won they played the winners of a tie between the third- and fourth-placed sides. The intention was to have fewer dead fixtures, as there would be the chance for teams to make the play-offs. It was perfect for Keith Peacock’s Gillingham, who had a habit of finishing fourth or fifth.

  Well over 5,000 people crammed in to the Priestfield to see the last two home games, against Wigan and Bolton. Tony Cascarino, the Gills’ young, tall, thickset centre forward, scored the only goal of the game against Bolton to put Gillingham into the play-offs by a point (Bolton went in to the play-offs at the other end and were relegated to Division Four).

  The Gills were to play Sunderland, from Division Two. The first leg was at the Priestfield and 14,000 people turned up. It was as if half the population of the Medway towns was trying to find a way in. Much of the Gillingham End had been given over to the travelling support from Sunderland. I squeezed into the Rainham End, near the corner flag.

  Early in the game a Sunderland shot was goalbound when Gills’ Paul Haylock threw himself across and just reached it with his right fingertips, diverting the ball on to the crossbar. A brilliant save. Unfortunately, Haylock was the right back, not the goalkeeper. There was no mandatory red card for handling on the line then (players were very rarely sent off ) but Sunderland scored from the penalty and were one up at half time.

  During the second half, the player nearest to our corner was the Sunderland left back Alan Kennedy, who three years previously had won a second European Cup with Liverpool, in Rome. He received no end of stick from the Kent football public. Sunderland had never played outside the top two divisions and the Priestfield was not what Kennedy had in mind when he signed for them. Kicking towards the Rainham End, Gillingham pushed Sunderland back and Cascarino equalized with a looping overhead kick. The ground erupted into manic, chaotic, screaming bedlam.

  TO-NY! CAS – CARINO! TO-NY! CAS – CARINO!

  Cascarino headed a second and then slid in for his hat trick, to give the Gills a 3–1 lead. Delirious uproar! The game finished 3–2. It was the third most exciting night I’d ever experienced in a football stadium.

  In the second leg, played in front of 25,000 people at Roker Park, Gillingham scored first but then Alan Kennedy put former England international Eric Gates through to equalize. Gates then headed in his second and the aggregate scores were level at four all. Paul Haylock made another save on the line, and again escaped a sending off, but Mark Proctor’s penalty was saved. Eventually, two more goals from Tony Cascarino, including one in extra time, meant the game finished 4–3 to Sunderland for an aggregate score of six all.

  The Football League, in their wisdom, had decided that away goals would count double and Gillingham were through by virtue of scoring three away goals to Sunderland’s two.

  Arsenal’s Littlewood’s Cup semi-final was against Spurs, who won the first leg at Highbury, with a goal from the expert goal-poacher that Arsenal had swapped for Kenny Sansom in 1980, Clive Allen.

  Spurs had Hoddle and Waddle to run the show. They were quite the double act as they were soon to demonstrate, hilariously, on Top of the Pops as Glenn and Chris. Hoddle’s extraordinary counter-soprano murdered the chorus of an already awful song called ‘Diamond Lights’, while Waddle murmured into a microphone like the embarrassed Geordie he was, having possibly agreed to the whole thing when he was drunk. For Arsenal fans it was the funniest moment of television from 1987, regardless of Victoria Wood pipping Spitting Image at the BAFTAs.

  The second leg at White Hart Lane saw Arsenal cast as underdogs. Spurs were on their way both to third, one place above Arsenal, in the league, and to an FA Cup Final. Clive Allen scored again to put them two up on aggregate. At half-time, whoever was in charge of the Tottenham public address system played ‘Spurs Are on Their Way to Wembley’ by Chas and Dave. They also made a euphoric announcement about ticketing arrangements for Spurs fans for Wembley. All around me, on the terrace behind the goal, Arsenal fans were furious.

  The Arsenal players, in particular the big Irish centre forward Niall Quinn, were incensed in the dressing room. They could hear the tannoy. In the second half, Quinn and Viv Anderson scored to give Arsenal a 2–1 win. There was pandemonium in the Arsenal end. It was the second most exciting night I’d experienced in a football stadium.

  The Football League, in their wisdom, had decided that away goals would not count double in the Littlewood’s Cup semi-final. George Graham and the Spurs manager David Pleat came out on to the pitch to toss a coin to decide the venue for a replay. The coin stuck on its side in the mud so they tried again. David Pleat stepped out and, with a dramatic sweeping gesture using both hands, indicated that the game would be on Spurs’ pitch. A huge cheer went up from the home fans.

  The replay was three days later. I went with my dad since I missed out on tickets for the Arsenal end. He managed to pick up two for the terrace under The Shelf. Surrounded by Spurs fans I was in agony as Clive Allen scored again. With eight minutes left, Ian Allinson squeezed a shot in at the near post to equalize. Extra time was looming when Allinson fired a ball low into the Spurs penalty area, it ricocheted and fell to David Rocastle who controlled it instantly before squeezing it under Ray Clemence with his, usually dormant, left foot. I controlled the urge to jump, flinching and jerking slightly as I tried to stay still. Arsenal won. My dad went home. I stood there in ecstatic silence, unsmiling, with litres of adrenaline circulating through me. Two lads came up as the terrace was emptying and said:

  ‘Are you Arsenal?’

  Perhaps I wasn’t as unsmiling as I’d hoped. I weighed up the risks and said, ‘Yes.’

  ‘So are we! Great, isn’t it?’

  It was the greatest night I’ve ever had in a football stadium. I went back to Whitstable after the game and was still on a high two days later when I had a party for my twenty-first birthday.

  Gillingham’s play-off final was to be over two legs against Lou Macari’s Swindon. Jill came with me to the Priestfield. When we arrived we found that the match was all-ticket. We bought a spare from someone and, just before kick-off, came across a drunk Gills fan slumped in an alleyway. Holding his ticket out to us he slurred:

  ‘Have it. I’ll never make it.’

  ‘Do you want any money?’

  ‘No. You go. Go in. Come on, you Blues…’

  Our two tickets were for different sections of the ground but the woman on the turnstile, with much encouragement from all the lads behind us, let us in together. Gillingham won 1–0.

  Th
ey lost the second leg 2–1, conceding a goal a few minutes from the end. The Football League, in their wisdom, had decided that away goals would not count double in the play-off final so, while away goals were good enough to relegate Sunderland, they were not good enough to promote Gillingham. I went up to Selhurst Park to watch the Gills lose the replay 2–0 with Swindon’s star player Dave Bamber in form. It was a huge disappointment made worse because, bizarrely and against any geographical logic, Swindon and Gillingham were fierce and hated rivals. The Gills stayed in Division Three where they would play against Sunderland, who won the championship at the first attempt.

  Arsenal won the Littlewood’s Cup against Liverpool with two goals from Charlie Nicholas and in so doing became the first team to beat Liverpool when Ian Rush had scored. Kenny Sansom held up the first trophy I’d seen them win. Rocky Rocastle played superbly down the right.

  Where I stood at Highbury, on the open northwest corner of the North Bank, there was a group who would break into the Rocky theme whenever Rocastle began to dribble. He won two league championships with Arsenal before Graham sold him to Leeds. He was in tears when he left.

  Several years later I saw Rocky at an awards do. I went over to tell him he’d always be a legend at Arsenal. He said that meant a lot and thanked me. In 2001, aged thirty-three, he died after a short illness.

  The fans still sing his name at every match.

  Ian Botham

  When England played Pakistan in the Fifth Test at The Oval in the summer of 1987, they were one down in the series and had to win to tie. Pakistan batted for two and a half days. Javed Miandad scored 260 over ten hours and they were finally all out for 708. England made 232 and were asked to bat again. By the end of the fourth day England had lost three second innings wickets. When Chris Broad was out on the fifth and final day, Mike Gatting, the England Captain, was at the crease and needed someone with dogged determination to drop anchor, bat all day for the team, not do anything flash, self-indulgent or reckless and forego personal glory to save his country. Next man in? Ian Botham.

  I. T. Botham, the free spirit of the England game, easily bored, a tempest rarely becalmed, virulent scourge of opponents for over a decade, responsible for a series of sustained down-the-order shot-fests of towering power and ferocity. Gatting was a fine stroke player but had to restrain himself as, with no chance of winning the match, they boarded up for the draw. At the other end was the brilliant Pakistani wrist-spinner, Abdul Qadir, who had already taken ten of the fourteen England wickets to fall.

  At close of play Gatting was 150 not out and I. T. Botham was still there after well over four hours with fifty-one to his name. Reining in all his instincts, he’d proved again that his reputation for selfish indiscipline was unfair. Yet, the previous summer it appeared that Botham, England’s greatest ever player, might never play for his country again.

  Beefy, it turned out, in the summer of 1986, liked a spliff, a bifter, a reefer, a joint. His friendship, born of many years playing together for Somerset, with West Indies batting legend Viv Richards possibly went beyond cricket and into other Caribbean pastimes.

  Botham acquired the habit of wearing a red, gold and green wristband perhaps from Richards, an Antiguan with a keen interest in his African heritage. The red, representing the blood shed on African soil, the gold, symbolizing the riches plundered from Africa by imperialists, and the green, for the lush fertility of the African land, is the most important symbol of Rastafarian culture and the three colours make up the flag of Ethiopia as well as being used in many African and West Indian flags. Richards had to deny that he was a Black Power advocate when he displayed the colours.

  Botham wore them too, not just on his wristband, but also on a jumper playing golf, or in blazers worn by him and Richards at a special cricket match organized by his then manager. The man portrayed as a hard-drinking, womanizing, angry bruiser had brushed up close to the easy-going reggae culture of the man he regarded as his older brother, Richards, but it only led to more trouble for him when it came out that he’d made acquaintance with cannabis.

  He revealed his love of a toke in an article in the Mail on Sunday, which seems an astonishing misreading of the possible consequences. The readership of the Mail on Sunday had, at that time, voted en masse for Margaret Thatcher and would do so again in 1987. They had previously shown little interest in a liberal attitude to drug use and didn’t care to be reminded that the world beyond their net curtains was not as they would wish it to be.

  Botham triggered an immediate ‘disgusted of Tunbridge Wells’ backlash, coupled with moralistic attacks in all the other newspapers (whose noses may have been put out of joint by Beefy’s exclusive deal with the Mail on Sunday). There was more to the story than met the eye, inevitably. Botham was forced to settle with the Mail on Sunday, having previously tried to sue them and did so by providing them with a confession, of sorts.

  All Botham’s chickens came home to roost and he was banned for nine weeks over the summer, which would mean missing several England Test matches. Plenty of time for barbecues and big fat joints in the garden then.

  Botham’s rubbishing of the establishment figures that ran the game led to trouble within cricket and his newsworthy exploits outside cricket sold newspapers. When he lost his place in the England team it was the first time he’d been dropped since he made his debut in 1977. That had also been the year of John McEnroe’s breakthrough at Wimbledon, and, like McEnroe, by the time Botham finished his playing career he would be unarguably among the best of all time, and would upset the entire establishment running the game in England on the way. He would also become the most popular sportsman in the country. There will never be any cricket team, never mind just an England side, that would not be improved by the inclusion of Botham.

  The spirit of rebellion was in the air in 1977 as the Sex Pistols were barred from BBC radio and prevented from reaching number one in the charts with their contribution to the Queen’s Silver Jubilee, ‘God Save the Queen’. Botham was not channelling Johnny Rotten though, as he bashed his way around England’s cricket fields. His rebelliousness didn’t appear to be a calculated thing. He seemed to have more energy, vitality and gusto than anyone else. The relatively sedate pastime of cricket was too frail to hold him. There is just too much time, with too little to do, at a cricket ground. Too much time for Botham’s inner rubber band to wind and wind itself taut, before spinning him into a confrontation, a row, or a boozy release.

  In 1977, my dad sometimes put my brother and me on a train to Southend to watch Essex play cricket. We were also taken to Lord’s to see England. We had been taught to score, in little cricket scorebooks, while sitting at the boundary line at Woodford Wells CC. None of the club players were known to us so my dad would give them nicknames based on their appearance.

  Long drives on summer holidays were made to the accompaniment of Brian Johnston on BBC Radio’s Test Match Special. We were also taught a solitary cricket game, known as ‘Dob Cricket’. Using a pin, the player sticks it into a page of newsprint where the lettering is densely packed (the Daily Telegraph obituary section was best), each letter of the alphabet was equivalent to some action in cricket. If the pin landed in space it was a dot ball (the dot referring to the cricket scorer’s notation of a ball from which no run is scored and no wicket taken). A variation of this game can be played with dice. Using a cricket scorebook filled with made-up teams and made-up games, hours of time alone can be filled. These carefully devised games successfully recreated the to and fro of a cricket match. Scores were realistic, even though it was not possible for the pin or the dice to differentiate between a batsman who was a clueless number eleven and the great Viv Richards. The game was good enough for a schoolboy anyway and fostered a love of cricket.

  No game devised though could have incorporated the talents of Botham, who changed the parameters of what is possible on the field of play. It was 1981 when Botham redefined cricket excellence and set a standard by which every hapless Engl
ish cricketer has been judged ever since, casting a shadow over the sport in his country in the same way that Don Bradman had in Australia and Gary Sobers had in the West Indies.

  Botham was leading England in the Ashes against Australia. He was playing poorly and England were one down in the six-match series when Botham quit as captain after the Second Test.

  His natural talent and restlessness made him an inappropriate choice for captain, traditionally the role given to the most mature, clear-thinking player in the team. Those who had appointed him were quick to announce that they were about to sack him anyway, which seemed unhelpful. He was by far England’s best player and his confidence was shot but they still felt inclined to humiliate him. It was by no means certain he’d be selected for the next match. His failure as captain appeared to delight those who thought him fortunate to be blessed with talent but without the intelligence to make the most of it. Others sympathized with the plight of a man cast as the scapegoat.

  The Australians held Botham in high regard and wouldn’t have minded too much if he’d been dropped from the England team altogether. A few years later Botham is reported to have told the Australian batsman Allan Border that he was contemplating emigrating to Australia. Border allegedly told him he’d receive a passport quicker than Zola Budd (the South African distance runner who was shamelessly fast-tracked into the British Olympic team as a medal hope in 1984 while her home nation was banned due to apartheid).