‘When I was picking the players for the American side in the Bicentennial tournament, Eddie Firmani, the Rowdies coach, told me not to pick his goalkeeper. He said he was not ready. So the first question I get when I show up for the pre-game press conference before we played Tampa Bay was, “Why didn’t I pick their goalkeeper?” There had been a little hullabaloo about not picking him and the media had whipped it up. I didn’t want to say that Eddie said not to pick him, but Eddie didn’t stand up and say anything to help me.’
Back in New York on the back of a heavy defeat, the coach received a call at his Long Island home to attend an evening meeting in the Warner offices in Manhattan. ‘Clive and Bradley and I went up in the elevator together and we didn’t know who was going to be there. It was Steve Ross and the Ertegun brothers, Mifflin, Pelé and Professor Mazzei, and Chinaglia and his agent. I said, “What are these people doing here?” Steve said, “I want them here.” He put on the tape of the game and stopped it whenever a goal was scored. Steve said, “Whose fault was it?” I said, “Ask Pelé and Chinaglia. They were playing.” The answer was “the goalkeeper” every time they scored. The meeting finished with Steve saying, “Thanks, Ken. You’re doing a great job.” I said to him, “You have put me on the spot here. No way will I discuss a player with you when there are other players here. They have no real right to be in this meeting. I will not come to another meeting with players there.”’
Furphy led the Cosmos on a road trip to Minnesota and Portland, but rumours were growing that the powerful Chinaglia wanted Furphy removed. ‘But when he scored against Minnesota he made a point of running over to the sideline and he gave me a hug and lifted me off ground,’ says Furphy. Yet the next time the Cosmos went away from New York, events did not work out so well. After a 4–1 loss at Chicago, the team travelled to Washington, where they discovered they were to play the Diplomats in the tiny Woodson Stadium instead of switching the game to a larger venue.
Furphy explains, ‘Their coach, Dennis Viollet, pulled a fast one by changing the game to a small stadium. Ross offered them $50,000 to change to a big stadium because he wanted the share of the additional gate, but Washington wanted to get us on a university ground. There was four and a half inches of grass on the field and you wouldn’t have played a junior game on it. Our players found it very difficult and their forward, Paul Cannell, collided with Rigby, who swallowed his tongue. Our young keeper had to go in again. Late in the game, they got the ball to the outside right position and he came rushing out like mad about 45 yards from goal. There was no need to do it and Cannell chipped it in and they won 3–2. Steve Ross called another meeting. I said, “I will come but not if players are there.” He was a multi-millionaire and what he said went so I said, “Right, pay me up. I want out of here.” If you lose control it soon gets back to the players and you are dead.’
Tinnion says, ‘Furph was never going to be a “yes” man,’ while Eddy ventures, ‘Ken ruffled a few feathers and that came back to haunt him. When you have got a player like Pelé at the end of his career you have got to let him do what he wants to do. Ken was a little bit structured in his approach. If he wants to play a formation he wants everyone to play within the confines of that. You had to look at it as if we had ten men and then Pelé. Let him do what he wants.’
Bradley was asked to step back into the hot seat. ‘I was comfortable doing what I was doing,’ he says. ‘But Steve said, “I want you to do it.” I am looking at the boss of the biggest corporation in America, so I can hardly say no. And Steve was so enthusiastic about the team. When we moved to Giants Stadium, they had to put a seat belt on him to stop him falling out of the top tier.’
In the first game after Furphy’s departure, Tinnion, who had started the previous eleven games and scored in the last four, was dropped to make way for the arrival of the Brazilian Morais and would start only one more game throughout the rest of the season. ‘That’s football,’ says Tinnion. ‘They say you are only as good as your last game but sometimes even that doesn’t apply. It was Pelé’s sidekick who came in and he was not even ready to come back after his injury.’
The Cosmos embarked on a run of six wins, and a total of eight victories in ten games under Bradley put them into the play-offs. They closed out the regular season with an 8–2 rout against Miami, Chinaglia scoring five goals, before Pelé and Garbett scored in a home defeat of Washington in the play-offs to set up a return to Tampa Bay. By that time, however, team captain Eddy was struggling with a serious groin injury, which had kept him out of the game against the Diplomats.
‘Towards the end of the season I took a goal-kick for our keeper, Shep Messing, because he couldn’t get the ball out of the damn area,’ he recalls. ‘I slipped and fell and my groin niggled at me for a while. The surgeon who had done Joe Namath’s knee said I had a major problem. I was under a lot of pressure to play against Tampa because we thought that whoever won that game would win the championship. I said, “I can’t play. I can’t run. I can’t finish the game.” Pelé came to see me and said, “Keith, I really want to win the championship. Please play.” They flew the doctor in and I had a Novocain shot before the game and another at half-time. At the end of the game I couldn’t get on the bus. Whatever was wrong, I did it no good at all. I tore the tendon away from the groin. I had an operation but there was a 50 per cent chance I’d end up a cripple. I regret playing with those shots, but it was my own fault. It was my decision.’
New York, even with Eddy playing through the pain and Pelé getting on the scoresheet, were beaten 3–1. ‘Our team was not very impassioned from what I could see and we didn’t have the quality of players to dominate,’ Garbett admits. ‘We could have won most of our games, but sometimes we were like a non-league team.’ The Cosmos clearly still had much work to do if Pelé’s deadline was to be met.
12. Farewell to the King
The final Sunday in August 1977 may have marked the start of the last week of America’s summer – before Labor Day brought it abruptly to a halt – but in Portland it seemed as though autumn had arrived early. Dark, dreary skies left the threat of rain hanging ominously over the Rose City, although not even the prospect of a good drenching could deter the 35,000 people who had squeezed themselves into Civic Stadium.
Americans viewing the scene on their television screens were greeted by commentator Jon Miller informing them earnestly that they were about to witness ‘the most dramatic, emotion-filled Championship game in the history of the NASL, Pelé’s last competitive game’. Announcements had been scarcely less solemn 12 days earlier when newscasters had imparted news of the death, at age 42, of Elvis Presley.
In contrast to the serious tones in the commentary booth, the chatter of anticipation going round the ground indicated the large number of youngsters in the crowd and gave the event the feeling of a summer fair, a very different atmosphere to the intimidating, tribal pre-game chanting to which British players were accustomed.
Soccer Bowl ’77 was destined to be part-sport, part-melodrama, with 21 players on the field merely supporting actors to Pelé, the man attempting to win the one championship that still eluded him. Both teams were already lined up on the field when the star attraction jogged onto the worn-looking plastic surface, his sturdily built figure showing little sign of footballing middle age as he trotted around the centre circle waving to the crowd. Observing from the sideline was Seattle Sounders head coach Jimmy Gabriel, whose tough-tackling career at Everton and Southampton had contained little room for sentiment such as this day would yield. His pre-game interviews had spoken of a belief in his team’s ability to beat the Cosmos, but as he now looks back over more than a quarter of a century to the finale of the NASL’s season, he is forced to admit, ‘There is no way God was going to let Pelé go out a loser.’
Over the winter of 1976–77, while English fans followed Liverpool’s journey toward European domination, the Cosmos had been adding the finishing touches to a team capable of ruling North America. There was n
o doubt they had the clout to match their ambition as they announced a move into Giants Stadium, the new 76,000-capacity venue in East Rutherford, New Jersey. But the soap-opera atmosphere that had pervaded the previous season continued, a predictable result of the club’s volatile mix of personalities, politics and power.
Coach Gordon Bradley remembers it as being a world away from Carlisle’s Brunton Park, where his career had begun. ‘It was exciting every day,’ he says. ‘I remember the Cosmos offices were in one of the nicest parts of New York City, on 52nd Street. To think I could park my car ten yards away from Warner, where otherwise it would cost $60 a day, showed the power of these people. All these nice things came to us because of their power.’
Such influence meant that more stars to match Pelé’s stature were on their way to New York. After nine games of the season, the Cosmos would welcome Franz Beckenbauer, whose elegant, visionary defensive play and inspirational leadership had helped West Germany to win the World Cup in their own country three years earlier. But as the 1977 season approached, Pelé himself, nearing his 37th birthday, seemed less bothered about whether or not he won the championship in the final year of his contract than the media, who were making it the season’s storyline. Unhappy that a winning team had not yet been built around him, he skipped the entire pre-season and reported to the club overweight only a week before the real action began. He and Giorgio Chinaglia immediately resumed their feud, while the Brazilian’s business interests seemed to be of greater importance to him than events on the field.
Apart from the impending arrival of Beckenbauer, the New York squad’s most significant signing of the off-season was another English player, Steve Hunt, a 20-year-old left-winger from Birmingham who had started only four games for Aston Villa before being sold for £30,000. Another English import was not exactly what was needed to end the inter-nation feud that was still eating away at the club’s harmony. While the South Americans continued to ignore opportunities to pass to the Europeans, the three leading Americans on the team, goalkeeper Shep Messing, defender Bobby Smith and Yugoslav-born Werner Roth, complained about the British influence on the club. Smith was even suspended by Bradley after throwing a tantrum when he was told he was to be left out of the line-up.
English midfielder Terry Garbett says, ‘The Americans didn’t want the British influence and there were a few comments. Smith and Roth used to moan about it. When Smithy was told he had been dropped from the side he went crazy, bashing the blackboard and screaming at Gordon. He thought he had a promise that he was playing but Gordon was a straight guy and would have hedged his bets. I thought we were going to have a big fight. The Brits all thought Smith should never have entered the building again. Now I have seen how Americans treat their players and they can get away with anything. I thought it was bad for discipline and team respect. In America, the players were allowed to talk back, but you would not have got away with it in England at that time.’
Messing was also benched briefly in favour of Turkish keeper Erol Yasin – a move inevitably linked to the influence of Nesuhi and Ahmet Ertegun – and Clive Toye, the long-time general manager of the Cosmos, decided he’d had enough interference. ‘Before Pelé signed, the Cosmos staff was me and Gordon Bradley, plus a marketing and PR guy and one secretary,’ he recalls. ‘We were a pissy little club getting three or four thousand to our games if we were lucky. The next day we were a world-famous club with more media than we’d sometimes had people in the stand. We had to hire more people, but the people at Warner were still hands-off and I got everything I wanted.
‘That lasted until after we had signed Beckenbauer and moved to Giants Stadium – over the strenuous objection of Warner. Then we drew 52,000 and suddenly everybody wanted to pick the fucking team. One day I got a phone call saying that everyone was going over to the stadium: Steve Ross, the Erteguns, several others. We all charged outside into a stretch limo to be driven to the heliport and flown across the river, where there were more limos waiting for us – just so we could argue about whether Shep Messing or Yasin should play in goal on Saturday.
‘We would play a game and next day I would be told to go to the 32nd floor, where Steve Ross would be looking at the tape again. From some angle he’d see what he thought was a mistake by the referee and would be saying we had to protest. The year before, we’d been three goals down at half-time against Tampa Bay at Yankee Stadium and had correctly had two goals disallowed. I was told that Steve was going to tell the team not to go out for the second half in protest. I found him pacing outside the locker room and I had to plead with him, to point out the stupidity of not playing the second half. I told him it would ruin the game and the league – particularly when the referee was right. He agreed, but said, “You have to announce over the PA that the Cosmos are going to play the rest of the season under protest.” So I had to go on the microphone and make this asinine comment. Then Pelé scored a wonderful goal and we ended up winning.’
The final straw for Toye was when Nesuhi Ertegun asked to see Toye’s list of potential player targets. ‘There were 11 players on the list. Nesuhi looked at the list and ticked off four names and said, “We’ll sign them.” Three of them were left-backs! I finally wrote a memo and said they either let me run the club the way I wanted, or else. They chose “or else”.’
Toye would resurface as general manager of the Chicago Sting and, after two years, move on to take charge of the Toronto Blizzard. Bradley recalls, ‘It was a difficult time. The Ertegun brothers didn’t see eye to eye with Warner and Clive and I didn’t see eye to eye with them. One of them thought he could play soccer just because he was from Turkey. They loved the team, but they were acting like they wanted to pick the team, move the stadium, everything. Clive left and took the position in Chicago. Who put the pressure on him? Chinaglia might have had a part to play. The Ertegun brothers loved Giorgio.’
Against such an unstable background, the Cosmos started the season slowly. But 10 wins in a stretch of 12 games, coinciding with Beckenbauer’s introduction to the team, meant they were always play-off bound, even if the division title was beyond their reach. Former skipper Keith Eddy was not to be part of the season beyond the opening few games. ‘The start of the year was very exciting with the move to Giants Stadium. Crowds doubled overnight. Yankee Stadium was a shit hole. I wouldn’t let my wife go to the games there, but Giants Stadium was a great facility. But it was looking more and more like I was on the way out. I was injured and Beckenbauer was on his way.’
The captaincy passed to Roth and, before long, Bradley was gone from the touchline, meaning the club’s English trio of general manager, head coach and team captain had vacated those positions in quick succession. Bradley had taken a huge risk by leaving out Chinaglia for the home game against Los Angeles, which was won 5–2 thanks to a Pelé hat-trick. Eddy recalls, ‘Giorgio was having a bad time. He was not getting the service and he was making excuses and I said to him, “It’s just not working for you at the moment. You have to work hard.” If I had been the coach I would have left him out. Before the game, Steve Ross came into the locker room and said to him, “Why aren’t you dressed?” Giorgio said, “Because I am not playing.” Steve said, “Yes, you are,” and told him to get changed, but to be fair to Giorgio, he didn’t.’
Chinaglia returned and after a couple more games Bradley was moved back to his role behind the scenes, to the delight of those fans who had taken to bringing ‘Bradley Must Go’ banners to the games. The coaching position passed, amid considerable bitterness, to Eddie Firmani, who had suddenly resigned a few weeks earlier from arch-rivals Tampa Bay Rowdies. Keith Eddy tells a story that shows the influence Chinaglia wielded. ‘Giorgio was so into the ownership that after my injury I had a call from him, asking, “Would you like to coach the team?” I said, “One, I don’t want to and, two, you are not in position to ask me.” He said, “Oh yes, I am. And if you don’t do it I will get Firmani.” A few days later, Eddie was in the job. Whatever Giorgio wanted, he got.�
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Firmani had reportedly been seen dining with Chinaglia the night before he resigned from the Rowdies and Bradley recalls, ‘Firmani and Chinaglia were best friends.’
The Rowdies players were far from surprised when Firmani, who walked out after the team won seven of their first ten games, accepted the Cosmos job. Goalkeeper Paul Hammond says, ‘There were rumours that he had been talking to New York a month before the season. One day out of the blue, he just left. They were weird circumstances. It upset our chemistry a bit.’
One man, however, was pleased to see Firmani move on. Rodney Marsh had never seen eye to eye with a coach who always seemed to be urging a player renowned for his artistry to become more of an artisan. ‘We disliked each other as a player and coach,’ said Marsh, ‘although I liked him as a man.’
Firmani’s first act in New York was to reinstate Smith to the Cosmos defence, but that won him few points with the English players and the perception grew that Chinaglia was pulling the strings. Garbett argues, ‘To be honest, what the hell do the Cosmos need a coach for anyway? How are you going to coach those players? Give them the ball and let them knock it around for an hour – that was generally how it was. There were no supreme tactics. Where Eddie was good was that he was a great picker of a team. He knew where to put people, knew different players could do different things. If we needed someone to come in he would find the right player.’
The Cosmos made their final personnel move with less than a month remaining of the regular season, when former Brazilian skipper Carlos Alberto arrived to take over the role of sweeper, meaning that New York now included the last two captains to lift the World Cup. Eddy states, ‘Carlos Alberto was the most outstanding player I ever saw play in America. He never lost the ball. I thought I was composed, but this guy made me look like a raving idiot. And he couldn’t even get a team in Brazil to sign him at that time.’
Playing for Uncle Sam Page 15