Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Meanwhile, England had begun their programme by losing to a last-minute goal by Brazilian substitute Roberto in Los Angeles before taking on Italy in New York. Playing what would prove to be his only 45 minutes of international football, Arsenal goalkeeper Jimmy Rimmer saw two goals flash past him in the opening 20 minutes before making way for Manchester City’s Joe Corrigan in a pre-planned half-time switch. Corrigan watched from the other end as England scored three goals in seven minutes, with stand-in captain Mick Channon scoring either side of a header by Liverpool defender Phil Thompson.

  England did not award caps for the game against America in Philadelphia, where Scullion scored the host team’s only goal of the tournament. By that time, however, Kevin Keegan had scored two goals and captain Gerry Francis had added a third. Brazil’s 4–1 win against Italy in a game that saw three players sent off made them the winners of a tournament that attracted average crowds of 45,000 and further raised the profile of the soccer scene in the United States.

  11. Furphy’s Law

  If Pelé’s arrival in New York in 1975 had proved anything other than the man’s pulling power at the gate, it was that one player, not even the game’s greatest, could win a championship on his own. By the time Toronto were being crowned as surprise winners of the 1976 Soccer Bowl, the Cosmos were halfway through a two-year project to build a team worthy of Pelé’s stature and their own rocketing ambitions. Yet it was clear that there was still a long way to go if the task was to be completed in time for him to sign off the following year by winning the NASL title.

  The rebuilding programme had begun in the build-up to the 1976 season, which saw the Cosmos back in their original home of Yankee Stadium. Another part of the plan had been to move Gordon Bradley, the Englishman who had coached the team since 1971, into the role of vice-president of player personnel and development. ‘There was a tremendous amount of work to be done,’ recalls Bradley, who had discussed the new role with the Cosmos’ general manager, another Englishman, Clive Toye. ‘We felt I could do a better job on the organisational side, taking charge of the players,’ says Bradley. ‘It meant that we needed a new coach.’

  The man chosen was 44-year-old Ken Furphy, who had recently been sacked as manager of Sheffield United. Born in Stockton-on-Tees, Furphy carved out a career as a wing-half, playing more than 300 league games for Darlington before moving on to Workington and Watford, filling the role of player-manager at both clubs. His most famous achievement at Vicarage Road was taking Watford to the semi-finals of the 1970 FA Cup, where they went down to eventual winners Chelsea after beating Liverpool in the quarter-finals. After Watford came spells in charge at Blackburn and Sheffield United.

  Furphy was available for the Cosmos after his tenure at Sheffield United came to a surprise end early in the 1975–76 season. ‘When I went to Sheffield in November of 1973 they were third from bottom of the First Division and we managed to get clear, even without Tony Currie, who’d had a knee operation,’ he explains. ‘The next year, with little money to spend, we finished joint fifth and missed out on Europe on goal difference and I was asked to manage the England Under-23 team that summer. So I certainly didn’t think I was ready for the sack.

  ‘We had been asked to go out to Tunisia in pre-season and we would get £10,000. I said it was no good going there; the grounds were too hard and the team would not be ready. I wanted to go to Europe as usual. But we went after only seven days’ training and, sure enough, our three key players, Keith Eddy, Alan Woodward and Tony Currie, got injured. The season started and we drew against Derby, the champions, and lost to Arsenal, Manchester United and Everton. But there was no panic and I told the press I was not worried about relegation. I said, “I am not paid to worry about it, I am paid to make sure it doesn’t happen.” The club obviously didn’t like that and I was told my services were not required.’

  The phone was soon ringing with an offer to visit the Cosmos. ‘I went out there and was interviewed upstairs at Warner by Steve Ross, the chairman. He didn’t know anything about football either and he said he wanted me to go away and come back with a list of 12 things they had to do to make the club one of the biggest in the world.’

  Furphy’s plan included signing more world-class players at the end of their careers, setting up a reserve team of local players, and buying a small club in Ireland to use as a youth team to develop more American talent. The Cosmos liked what they heard and, announcing Furphy’s appointment, Toye told the New York media that the club had found ‘the kind of aggressive, progressive coach to take us on to the next stage of our build-up to becoming a powerhouse, not only in the NASL but in the world.’

  The squad that was put together for the 1976 season was a mix of the exotic and the experienced. Falling into the first category were two Santos midfield players, the Peruvian Ramon Mifflin and Brazilian Nelsi Morais, who broke his leg on tour in Sweden and spent the winter and the first half of the new season at home regaining fitness. Signalling their intent to buy the best available players, whatever their nationality, the Cosmos spent $100,000 to acquire the NASL’s leading Americans from the collapsing Philadelphia Atoms, goalkeeper Bob Rigby and defender Bob Smith.

  Many of the other new signings spoke of Furphy’s grounding in the no-nonsense business of the Football League – like full-back Charlie Aitken, who had played more than 600 games in a 15-year career at Aston Villa. To supplement the South American flair in midfield came Dave Clements, winner of 48 Northern Ireland caps during a long career at Coventry, Sheffield Wednesday and Everton, and Terry Garbett, who followed Furphy from Watford to Blackburn and Bramall Lane. Tony Field was signed by Furphy for the third time in his career, having scored goals for him at Blackburn and at Sheffield United, while winger Brian Tinnion, a Wrexham player for eight years, had begun as a youth-teamer under Furphy at Workington.

  Joining his former coach in New York had been a long way from Tinnion’s mind when he confronted Wrexham manager John Neal after being substituted in a vital end-of-season promotion battle. Neal explained that the Cosmos had made an offer for him and Tinnion went to meet Furphy in Sheffield. Tinnion explains, ‘I went back to John and said, “I don’t want to go and my wife doesn’t want to go. Do you want me to go?” He said, “Yes, I do. For the £22,000 they have offered I can get three players who are better than you.” So he signed Dai Davies from Everton’s reserves to play in goal, got Dixie McNeil from Hereford, who scored loads of goals, and signed Bobby Shinton from Cambridge. They got £100,000 for him from Manchester City a few years later, so it was a brilliant deal.’

  Garbett, meanwhile, considered himself ‘washed up’ as a player after three knee operations and considerable disillusionment during his two years at Sheffield United. ‘I didn’t like my time at United,’ he confesses. ‘The prevailing attitude in the team was that it didn’t really matter. Everyone was just cruising. When Ken called, I had never even heard of the Cosmos and, to be honest, I went to see America, not to prolong my career. But Ken believed I could battle back and do something useful for him.’

  To captain the side, Furphy turned to another faithful servant in Keith Eddy, who played more than 250 games for Watford before a four-year spell at Sheffield United. Furphy explains, ‘When I asked Sheffield about Garbett, the manager, Jimmy Sirrell, said, “Do you want your mate, Keith Eddy?” I couldn’t believe it. He was the rock the team was built around. He was very arrogant at times but that made him an even better player.’

  Eddy remembers, ‘Ken was fired and the next thing I knew I was sat there talking to the Cosmos people. My first reaction was, “Why the hell would I want to go?” I was 31 and captain of Sheffield United. But then I realised that my next move was probably to Crewe. The money was attractive and a big selling point was that they had Pelé, so I went home and told my wife, “It looks like we are moving again.” She said, “Where now?” and when I told her it was New York she just looked at me with her mouth wide open. The intention was to go for a short while, make the mig
hty dollar and get the hell out if it.

  ‘New York were one of the first teams to come in and buy players outright and Dave Clements and I were the first two to be bought by them. My first impression was of the size of everything. I remember walking round Manhattan looking at the buildings, and even the people seemed big to me. It was the land of the giants.’

  After the first game of the season, a 1–0 win at Miami, Eddy, to his surprise, discovered that he was to inherit the role of penalty-taker from Pelé. ‘We were winning 1–0 and we got a penalty with ten minutes to go,’ says Eddy. ‘Pelé picked up the ball and rolled it straight at the keeper. I said to him, “Obviously you don’t like penalties.” He said, “No. People expect me to do something special with them because of who I am.” From then on I took them. We had nine more that season and I scored eight of them. Ninety per cent were for fouls on Pelé.’

  Pelé had posed some interesting pre-season problems for his new coach, including showing up a week late for pre-season training. ‘He was out in Africa and got caught up in a civil war,’ says Furphy. ‘It shows you the power of the Cosmos that Steve Ross got Henry Kissinger to fly a private jet out there and they managed to hustle him to the airport and get him out. When he arrived he hugged me. Where I came from you didn’t hug each other. It wasn’t a manly thing to do!’

  Before leaving chilly New York for a pre-season tour in some of the country’s warmer states, Furphy was taken to one side by Toye. ‘He told me that the discipline in the team, particularly among the South Americans, was dreadful. One of the players brought his wife with him without permission.

  ‘On the first day of training I told the boys to be downstairs at 10 o’clock for the bus and if they were not there by 10.15 we would go without them. By 10.15, Pelé was not there and I decided I had to go without him. I thought that if I didn’t treat him the same as everybody else we would have trouble. He eventually turned up in a taxi with his mate, Professor Mazzei. I told the Professor, “You warm him up and we will fit him back into the training session.” The next day he was late again, so we went without him again. This time I said he was not training with us and told the Professor to train him on his own. I asked, “Why is he late?” The Professor said, “When he comes out of his room, there is a queue of people asking for an autograph – bartenders, waiters, guests. It takes him half an hour to get through the hotel.” I said, “Well, get him up half an hour earlier.” He was never late again. I got on well with him and he used to invite me along when he got asked out to dinner by millionaires.’

  After the Miami victory, the Cosmos made a stuttering start to their home programme, losing two out of three games at Yankee Stadium. It was time for a new injection of talent – a player who had started his professional career by suffering rejection at Swansea and who would become the greatest goalscorer in NASL history.

  Giorgio Chinaglia was eight when his parents left Italy for Britain in search of greater employment opportunities, eventually settling in Wales. It was at Vetch Field that Chinaglia served his football apprenticeship, only to be released after starting four League games because he was considered lazy and difficult to work with. Returning to Italy, he rebuilt his career in the lower leagues and in 1969, three years after being kicked out of Swansea, signed for Lazio of Rome for £140,000. In 1974, Chinaglia cemented his place in the hearts of the local fans by leading Lazio to their first Serie A championship. He also earned selection for Italy’s World Cup squad, but marked the end of his international career by making an obscene gesture – the Italian version of ‘fuck off – to coach Ferruccio Valcareggi after being substituted against Haiti.

  In the fallout of his self-destruction in West Germany, life in Italy became intolerable and Chinaglia decided that America was where his future lay. Buying a mansion for his family in Englewood, New Jersey, in the spring of 1975, Chinaglia was forced to become a transatlantic commuter in order to play out the 1975–76 season for Lazio while he searched for an NASL team prepared to match his idea of his worth.

  Aware of the opportunities Chinaglia presented to tap into New York’s huge Italian population, the Cosmos pounced. Bradley, who travelled to Italy to see Chinaglia score a Serie A hat-trick, says, ‘He already owned a mansion house in New Jersey, not far from Giants Stadium. When word got around that he wanted to play over here I persuaded him to come to New York after spending time with him in Italy. I persuaded Warner we needed a goalscorer to go alongside Pelé, although Pelé wasn’t particularly thrilled about it.’

  The Cosmos gave Lazio $750,000 and Chinaglia began his sometimes turbulent, mostly triumphant, career in New York. ‘We did not have that good a team,’ recalls Eddy. ‘But when they signed Chinaglia things started to look a little more rosy.’

  According to Bradley, it took time for the new Cosmos line-up to gel. ‘It was difficult to get the players together. For example, Chinaglia was everything for Lazio but when he came here he was not the number-one man. He didn’t set the world on fire to start with like Pelé did. Chinaglia felt a little bit out of it.’

  Bradley explains that steps were taken to ensure that players signed for New York would fit in. ‘We spent some time with these players before they came over. Some of those we tried to get might not want to come over at first but then they realised that the team was owned by one of the biggest businesses in the world. Once you have signed a player, maybe some teams don’t do as much for him as he thought they would. But that was not the case at the Cosmos. They were recognised as top players and treated like it. But there were times when we struggled with Chinaglia. There were times when we had it out with him because we thought he could play better. True to his nature, he said once that he had a bad back before a game and that he couldn’t play. We knew he was fit.’

  Things could not have gone better on the Italian’s debut, a 6–0 victory over George Best’s Los Angeles Aztecs. Both Pelé and Chinaglia scored twice but it is the Brazilian’s contribution that is remembered by Eddy, who grabbed two goals himself. ‘Pelé was sensational. Playing against Best brought out the best in him. There was another game around that time when he ran onto a through ball on Astroturf and he beat the goalkeeper and two defenders without even touching it. There were a few body fakes this way and that way and he got credit for the goal, even though he didn’t touch it.’

  The combination of the Brazilian and the Italian looked as though it could not miss. Tinnion says, ‘It was great. There was Tony Field on the left and me on the right and sometimes we were glorified spectators. Those two would play give-and-goes up the middle and when we did get the ball wide and crossed it, they got on the end of it.’

  But, according to Furphy, Pelé took time to get used to the role that Chinaglia’s arrival forced upon him. ‘Playing in South America, I don’t think Pelé had caught up with some of the changes that were going on in the game. Coaches would assign a player to sit on him and mark him and it took a bit of getting away from. I asked him to drop back into the hole so he would pull players away from Chinaglia and I don’t think he was familiar with the role.’

  The Cosmos management had to contend with a less than brotherly relationship between the two superstars. The fact that it was Pelé who was known everywhere the team travelled did not sit well with Chinaglia, who, says Eddy, ‘had the biggest ego in the world’. Eddy adds, ‘I liked the guy, but he would talk in the third person. “Chinaglia thinks this. Chinaglia thinks that.” I said to him, “Use ‘I’ for heaven’s sake.”’

  Furphy recalls, ‘I had a message one day from the kit man saying Chinaglia wanted to throw his shirt to the crowd at the end of games. We’d ordered 100 shirts for Pelé so he could do that, but not for Chinaglia. Giorgio also didn’t like the fact that everywhere Pelé went he got a suite. Chinaglia wanted the same treatment.’

  Garbett’s abiding memory of Chinaglia, apart from being ‘the best scorer I have ever seen’, was that ‘I saw him hit more people than Muhammad Ali.’ His victims included English teammate Steve H
unt, who was to join the club in 1977, and a team of stadium workers. ‘There were a group of them cleaning the seats during one practice and they started jeering. Giorgio went up there and started beating on them. He was racing along the aisles after them. About ten of their guys went to join in and our guys went up there to pull Giorgio out. Ninety-five per cent of the time he was great, the other five per cent it was like he was on pills! I went into a nightclub in Rome with him and we had been in there one minute and he was fighting.’

  Chinaglia’s moods were something that those around him would learn to live with. More serious for New York’s chances of success over the next two years was a recurring divide in the camp between the British contingent and other factions in the team. Off the field, Garbett recalls going to parties at Ramon Mifflin’s house and says, ‘Generally we all got on well.’

  But Eddy says, ‘On the field we did have a situation of South Americans against the English. The South American guys would only pass to Pelé. In midfield we had Mifflin, who had been captain of Peru, where he played as sweeper. He couldn’t tackle a dinner. Brilliant on the ball, but couldn’t do any defending. There was a real contrast in the philosophy of the game. I tried to be a peacemaker. If you win games it is not a problem at all, but we had had good games and bad games and there were still some holes in the team.’

  One of those bad games was at Tampa, where goalkeeper Rigby pulled out of the game shortly before kick-off and inexperienced replacement Kurt Kuykendall, an American, was beaten five times. ‘We’d been looking for another keeper but Gordon Bradley couldn’t find one,’ recalls Furphy, whose visit to Florida had got off on the wrong note after a grilling from local reporters about the Rowdies keeper Arnie Mausser.