Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Knowing the way the system worked was, according to Smethurst, a vital asset. That knowledge paid off when the Tampa Bay Rowdies attempted to send him to the San Diego Sockers in exchange for former Luton midfielder Peter Anderson. ‘Most players thought that if you were traded you had to make the deal,’ says Smethurst. ‘But I knew they had to get your signature on a contract. They offered me what I was making at Tampa Bay and I said, “I am not making the deal.” I knew it was not a trade until I signed and I knew San Diego did not want Peter Anderson back, so they came back an hour later and made a better offer. Most guys were in fear and would sign anything.’

  Finding players willing to accept their offers of cash, cars and whatever else was not a problem for NASL teams. The art came in making those offers to players who would give their all in return. Ken Adam says, ‘There were instances where the players saw it as a cross between a paid holiday and a chance to stay in shape. The players were offered reasonable money and apartments and cars, which added to the holiday atmosphere. The better-known players were coming over with nice big numbers. But the journeyman player could make pretty decent money as well.’

  As an agent, Adam was cautious about recommending anyone he felt would see the NASL as a meal ticket and deckchair in the sun. ‘From a business and reputation point of view, you can’t send a player thinking he is going to take the money and run. You can’t always tell, but most of the players I brought over did really well – guys like Ron Davies and Tommy Smith. Bobby Stokes and Jim Steele went to Washington from Southampton and made the best of it. I brought over Alan Ball and he could play in a Sunday League game and would give it his all.’

  Former Cosmos captain Keith Eddy explains, ‘The players in New York took it very seriously, although there were instances at some teams when players didn’t do that. It wasn’t like the Football League, where there were win bonuses or appearance money. You got paid whether you won or played or not, so it was party time for some guys.’

  Scottish international Jimmy Gabriel, former head coach of the Seattle Sounders, recalls, ‘By 1978 and ’79 everyone was going for higher-class players instead of guys who just wanted to give it their all for a couple of years and then finish. We were looking at 27 and 28 year olds and it became a bit of a holiday for some. They were picking their games a bit. Also, instead of players from the lower divisions who were delighted to be playing against Pelé or Geoff Hurst, it was guys who had been playing First Division anyway. Something was left behind when they came over. These guys weren’t as willing to sign autographs, or go to places where fans were having a drink. We started losing the connection with the fans. At times you had to look at the players and say, “Are you giving me everything?” Maybe I should have sent some of them home and in the end it cost me a bit as a head coach. It got out of hand.’

  Alan Merrick adds, ‘Some players didn’t really look for opportunities to contribute. They just came over for a giggle and to get some spending money. They were detrimental to the game and we found them out pretty quickly. They were just mercenaries.’

  Whitecaps coach Tony Waiters reveals, ‘Players realised that public relations was part of the job and most of them accepted it. But one player who came from Ipswich in ’78 didn’t fit into the North American scene. He thought it was going to be a busman’s holiday, so we sent him back.’

  John Best helped to build successful teams in Seattle, as head coach, and at Vancouver, where the team he constructed as general manager was almost exclusively British. ‘We took 10 per cent of the budget for the team and put it towards scouting and recruiting. We had local scouts and we also paid guys in England. Without the budget of the New York Cosmos, I felt we needed to do better than anyone else in scouting and assessment. What was the player’s value to the team, his impact, and what would we accomplish with him? That was the basis of evaluating contracts. Obviously, the rest of the league also influenced us. Players would knock on your door saying, “If so-and-so in California is getting this, I should get this.” You could not always control your own labour costs.’

  When British players came face to face with the game in America, it was like being greeted by a relative who had settled across the water and picked up a mid-Atlantic accent and a new dress sense. The changes may have been small and cosmetic but they were the first thing you noticed and seemed to induce a complete personality change.

  As well as the colourful kits – ‘uniforms’, as the Americans insisted on calling them – there were the artificial pitches. In the days before Queens Park Rangers, Luton and Oldham introduced synthetic playing surfaces to the Football League, few players had experienced such conditions outside of five-a-side games in training.

  Former Aston Villa defender Neil Rioch, who played on plastic in Portland, recalls, ‘Our stadium had Tartan Turf, which, instead of having blades like Astroturf had a knitted surface. I never got used to it because the ball would bounce too high and far. Our goalkeeper, Jim Cumbes, had a terrific kick and got nicknamed Big Foot. He would kick the ball and it would bounce on the edge of the opposition area and over the crossbar.’

  Fellow Portland defender Mick Hoban adds, ‘You had to wear under-shorts because the biggest problem was getting infections from what was on the turf – dirt, grime, even cigarette ends. It required better technique because if you hit a 30-yard pass it had to go within a certain margin. If you played the ball short it bounced up around your chest. It became a midfield game. You couldn’t hit the ball inside a full-back because it ran out of bounds.’

  Former Derby centre-forward Roger Davies, who thrived in Seattle’s Kingdome, argues, ‘If you could play a little bit it suited you, but if you were a defender who liked to dive in and kick people it didn’t. The touch play suited me and if you had a bad first touch the ball went away. The only problem was that, with the field being laid on concrete, it was very hard and it took you longer to get fit again after injuries because of the pressure on your joints and ligaments.’

  Ironically, former Ipswich striker Trevor Whymark found that the Vancouver Whitecaps’ artificial surface eventually cured him of the after-effects of the knee ligament injury that had led him to quit English football. ‘Everything in my knee had dried up and I could not get full traction in the knee joint. For the first half a dozen games in Vancouver I got strange sensations in my calf and back muscles and put it down to playing on Astroturf. Then we had a training session and it was wet and I slipped over. I fell back on my knee, sat on my ankles and felt terrific pain in my knee. I thought, “Christ, it has gone again.” By the time I hobbled to the physio’s room it had eased up. It seemed to have loosened everything up and from then on I had no more problems.’

  Together with the large number of artificial surfaces on which games were played, it was the 35-yard offside rule that made NASL football different to the rest of the world. Former Arsenal and Leicester midfielder Jon Sammels, who spent two seasons in Vancouver, says, ‘You had much more space and I like to think it showed who could play. Give a bad player a lot of space and he will look bad. If you were the sort of player who relied on physical power you could not do it over there. We played against teams who had well-known British players and some of our Canadian boys couldn’t believe they were seeing so-and-so from a big English club because their game could not be adapted.’

  Phil Woosnam had been pushing for a new offside law since telling reporters in England in 1969, ‘From what I can see of football in Britain it is time for drastic changes to be made if the game is to stay alive.’ He explains, ‘The back lines were all squeezing up to the halfway line and taking all the space for the creative players. It was happening right through the First Division. Another reason for bringing in a new rule was because so many of our fields were very narrow. Good players can’t play unless they have space and they were getting squeezed both ways.’

  English football had briefly experimented in the 1971–72 Watney Cup, a short-lived pre-season competition contested by the two highest-scoring
teams in each of the four divisions. No offside was given outside of an area marked by a line drawn across from the edge of the penalty area and Woosnam was keen for the NASL to be similarly ground-breaking. ‘We had always told FIFA they could use us to experiment with the rules and they said this was the one they would like to start with, so they approved it in the first place. Then, in 1982, they said we had been trying it for several years and it was time to go back to how everyone else was doing it.’

  Opinions are diverse over the success of the experiment. Keith Eddy says, ‘I loved the offside rule. Now I only had to get to the 35-yard line and I found it a stroll. I could have played until 40. After every game at Sheffield United I was mentally and physically drained, but I could have played two games at a time in the NASL.’

  Veteran Football League midfielder Terry Garbett felt he had taken up a brand-new sport when he joined the New York Cosmos. ‘I was surprised at the lack of pace. I remember in one of our first games getting the ball and knocking it off. All of a sudden someone shouted to me that I had plenty of time. Next ball, I turned and looked and there was no one near me. After years of players pounding on top of you, to turn around and have seven or eight yards of space was a strange experience.’

  Striker Derek Smethurst describes the NASL offside system as ‘the greatest thing that ever happened’. He adds, ‘Even people who were intimidators on the field had a hard time because it opened up the field so much. But I think some of them liked it because it gave them the chance to play. You would not bypass players, so even guys like Tommy Smith would get the ball a hundred times. I didn’t hear a complaint about it.’

  Smethurst clearly never spoke to Steve Earle, who argues, ‘It was the biggest fallacy in the world that it would create more goalscoring chances. If you are a forward who relies on pace and likes to get behind defenders you couldn’t because there was no space. If you played alongside a big man, all his flick-ons went straight to the keeper. I saw some guys come over and it ruined their game because they couldn’t spin and get balls over the top.’

  Former Chelsea winger Charlie Cooke adds, ‘I used to get frustrated with the way they experimented with things without any qualms. I am old-fashioned. I didn’t think the offside rule made any difference.’ Ex-Derby and Nottingham Forest forward John O’Hare concurs, saying ‘Because the league was full of people who played with the old rule all their lives, they didn’t change their game that much. I didn’t think it was that beneficial.’

  Bob McNab, Arsenal and England full-back, contends, ‘The 35-yard offside rule was like communism – a great idea but it did not work. You just ended up with three defenders versus two forwards on each 35-yard line. There was so much space and teams would just drop back behind the ball. It was extremely difficult to hit long through balls into space behind the last defenders because on Astroturf the ball just keeps rolling through to the goalkeeper. As a defender you are always conscious of the deep threat, but you could mark tighter because you were not worried about the ball over the head.’

  Another identifying element of the NASL was the sudden-death shoot-outs that were introduced in 1974 to eliminate drawn games. At first it was a penalty kick competition after 90 minutes, changing the following year to allow 15 minutes of sudden-death extra-time before resorting to spot kicks. In 1977, the rule changed again to introduce the 35-yard against-the-clock competitions that became one of the NASL’s trademarks.

  Unlike the offside rule, the shoot-outs were enjoyed by most players. And Woosnam pointed out their success, noting that in the three seasons immediately before their introduction 33 per cent of games ended level after 90 minutes, but in the five years after the introduction of sudden death the figure had dropped to 18 per cent. Woosnam cited the elimination of the desire among coaches to play for a draw.

  Don Megson says, ‘To be sat on the line watching the shoot-out gave you a huge adrenalin rush. The first game I was involved in was against Seattle and the league had brought over a referee for his first season. He was disallowing goals because the ball had not gone over the line inside five seconds. He didn’t know the rule was that you had to get your shot away in five seconds.’

  Alan Birchenall adds, ‘I liked the shoot-out because there was a bit of skill there. Do you take the keeper on or try to slide it past? The Americans were 25 years ahead with that rule.’

  According to Smethurst, ‘Sudden death destroyed the idea of being defensive. When you played for a draw it was for the opportunity to win the game. I don’t remember missing too many in shoot-outs. You could hit them from ten yards or there were guys who would chip it, which keepers used to dread. I used to run left of the ball and stroke a bender two feet off the ground to the right and try to get the keeper caught on a forward step. It didn’t have to be 60 miles an hour, guys like Jimmy Greaves knew that all their lives. A short, quick, forward release without back swing. Players like that, and chippers, didn’t have too much bother. I have never met a player who likes penalties, but the shoot-out was different. There was not the same tension because you were released from that as you were running.’

  Scotland international goalkeeper Bobby Clark played in the NASL for San Antonio in the final season of traditional penalties and says, ‘It was one of those things you lived with and it was exciting to do it. It was a chance to be a hero. I remember one game at Hartford and we had this enormous thunderstorm in overtime. They cancelled the game and we came out next morning for the penalty shoot-out. We won and then flew off somewhere else. I must have had an early night that night.’

  Paul Hammond, who played in the 35-yard shoot-out era, says, ‘I didn’t like it but I agreed with it being introduced. Some guys would just blast it. I would try to stay on my line as long as possible and come out in the last few seconds and block them.’

  The American sporting obsession with statistics also found its way into the NASL, with everything from assists to goalkeepers’ goals-conceded-per-game averages being logged. Noel Cantwell felt it could be counter-productive for the players, especially the Americans. ‘People there were very interested in stats and thought they had played well if they had an assist. But coaches knew who had helped to make a goal or who had been to blame.’

  The weather during American summers presented another big difference for players who learned their trade in the hard school of bitter English nights in mid-winter. Former Crystal Palace defender Stewart Jump, who had to adapt to the heat of Tampa, says, ‘We would play at home in 94 degrees and 80 per cent humidity, and I remember one game in Washington when it was 107 degrees on the field. The players had heatstroke at the end. Astroturf held the heat and you could feel it through your shoes.’

  Ex-Everton forward David Irving’s abiding memory of a short spell in Tulsa is the heat. ‘It was 100 degrees at night and the heat on the Astoturf was 130 degrees. On TV they were actually frying an egg on the pitch before the game to demonstrate how hot it was.’

  Alan Birchenall remembers playing a game for San Jose at Hawaii, where ‘at one end all you could see was the crossbar shimmering in the heat’. But he also remembers one of the advantages of football in warm weather. ‘Every weekend there would be four or five pool parties going on. And you had to train in the evenings so you would finish training at nine o’clock and then go out with the lads. It was tremendous.’

  For Scotland striker John O’Hare, training sessions during his two hot summers at the Dallas Tornado proved tougher than he had been accustomed to under Brian Clough at Derby and Nottingham Forest. ‘Cloughie didn’t work his players hard,’ he recalls. ‘We worked hard in pre-season, but once the season started we didn’t have too many hard slogs. But our coach in Dallas, Al Miller, was really disciplined and the heat made it difficult.’

  With the huge distances between teams, training sessions had to be scheduled around the demands of travel, one of the less attractive aspects of the NASL for the visiting player. Charlie Cooke says, ‘I loved playing in America, but the travelling took some of
the fun out of it at times. You were playing twice a week and playing all over the country. It was not like a bus trip from Milwall to Chelsea. It is not just the time on the plane. There is getting to the airport, checking in, waiting for luggage. When you are three-quarters of the way through a season you are getting a little tired of it.’

  To relieve that boredom, the British players created a school-trip atmosphere. Public relations director Vince Casey highlighted Chris Turner as the practical joker of the New England Tea Men in media releases and the former Peterborough defender rarely failed to live up to his billing. Casey recalls, ‘We had a guy on our staff called Arthur Smith. He was a balding guy who smoked and he could put on an austere British-type manner. On one trip we had to walk out to the tarmac to get on the plane and Chris had put Arthur in a wheelchair. He was flopping over to one side with a cigarette hanging out of his mouth. Chris told the guy taking the tickets, “This is my father, he has been very ill. Can we get him on the plane early?” They got a big runway for the wheelchair and after getting everything ready the airline guy opens the door and Chris and Dennis Viollet just let go of Arthur and he goes shooting down and crashes onto the tarmac. I thought the attendant was going to die and he thought he was going to lose his job. Arthur lies there for 30 seconds and then gets up and marches up the stairs into the plane.

  ‘Turner was also master of the 50-cent trick. As somebody was rushing through the airport for their plane Chris would flip the coin so that it would ping off the ground. Ninety per cent of the time the guy rushing to get the plane would stop, thinking the money had fallen out of his pocket. They would insist it was their half dollar and sometimes Chris would argue and sometimes let them have it.’