The Kicks took second place behind the dominant Chicago Sting in the league’s Central Division – the two-conference system having been scrapped. Ron Futcher scored 14 goals, supported by Don Masson, the ex-Queens Park Rangers and Scotland World Cup midfielder, and Steve Heighway, the leggy former Liverpool and Republic of Ireland winger. ‘Heighway was unstoppable,’ says Kicks defender Stewart Jump. ‘Defenders had more space to cover over here and he could take them on and skin them. He was a good player at Liverpool and even better in America.’
But when a pair of 3–0 defeats against Fort Lauderdale ended their season at the quarter-final stage, the Kicks had played their final games. Municipal Stadium was scheduled to give way to a new indoor venue, the Metrodome, and the club was unable to negotiate a lease with the new facility. Sweet, who accused the NFL’s Minnesota Vikings of squeezing the Kicks out of the Metrodome, claimed he had lost more than $1 million and the Kicks went into liquidation.
‘I was in Europe scouting at the time,’ says Barnett. ‘I said to the owner, “What the hell am I doing here if you are folding the team?” It was a real tough time. Phil Woosnam was looking at prospective buyers and I was trying to keep the team together because if the players didn’t get paid they would become free agents. We had about three champagne parties because we thought we had been saved. When we went it was the start of the demise of the league.’
Defender Alan Merrick, brought back to Minnesota by Barnett, says, ‘We were still drawing crowds of 28,000. But the new ownership tied the club up in so much litigation.’ A distraught Heighway, who had been building a house in the area, said, ‘My world is falling upside down. I can’t believe the Kicks would be allowed to just die.’
Futcher recalls, ‘We knew something was going on about four or five weeks earlier. We had not been paid for about ten weeks and we thought the team might be sold. It was a terrible time. If you found another team they had to pick up your back-pay, but you lost all your money and went home if you did not find a new team. I remember Chico Hamilton ended up selling everything, including his car, in a garage salé.’
The Kicks’ remaining assets were sold, including Futcher, who fetched $45,000 for the club’s administrators when bought by Portland. Other sales ranged from the $58,000 received from Toronto for striker Ace Ntsoelengoe to $70-worth of megaphones.
Atlanta, California, Dallas, Los Angeles and Calgary were also playing their final seasons, the Chiefs winning the Southern Division on the back of 22 goals by former Manchester United striker and future United and Leeds coach Brian Kidd. The Chiefs could not survive the first round of the play-offs, however, beaten by the Jacksonville Tea Men, for whom Alan Green scored twice in each game. Green had enjoyed another productive season with 16 goals and coach Noel Cantwell says, ‘I had him as a kid at Coventry. I liked to have pace up front, otherwise you had to be very organised. He gave us that pace.’
In California, the Surf went under after a season that had seen the departure of Peter Wall, the latest English coach angered by interference from on high. Wall explains, ‘We had new ownership, the Segerstrom group, and after the first year they brought in a general manager who had been at a Six Flags amusement park and knew nothing about sport. He sold himself on telling the ownership we would get crowds of 20,000. He told me our team was not entertaining enough. It was a long and heated discussion. I said, “If you need a better team you have got to spend more money on players, but we won’t get 20,000 even if we win Soccer Bowl.”’
Wall’s plea for the club to spend $180,000 for Tampa Bay’s Jan Van der Veen fell on deaf ears. ‘A week into the season I was told we needed entertaining players – Brazilians – and was told they were going to make a Swedish guy called Tom Lilledahl player-personnel director. I said, “As long as I am coach you are not.” Seven games into the season they wanted to bring in Carlos Alberto. We didn’t need him. He was a lovely man but he was coming to our club for the money. I stood my ground and said I didn’t want Carlos or Paulo Caesar, who they also wanted. We came to a financial agreement and I walked out in May. Within a week they had signed Van der Veen along with Carlos and Paulo.’
Surf player Mark Lindsay remembers, ‘They went out into the community and asked what brand of football people would rather watch. The South Americans and Mexicans said, “We don’t like this English shit.” Lilledahl introduced himself in a hotel room by saying we were not going to play an English style and that everyone was going to be traded. Peter was dumbfounded.’
Englishman Laurie Calloway, whom Wall had appointed as his number two, was next in line as head coach. ‘I told Laurie to take the job if they offered it to him,’ says Wall. ‘But I warned him he wouldn’t have any say and by September there might not be a club. It was a circus.’
Calloway recalls, ‘We were basically a British and American team and had a good esprit de corps. They wanted to bring in all these foreigners. In the end we had an Egyptian putting his prayer mat down in the dressing-room praying to Allah and a Dutchman getting offended. Carlos and Paulo were unbelievable at times, but they thought they were playing with Brazilians. We had John Craven, who was as hard as nails and a brilliant defender, but couldn’t trap a bag of cement. He didn’t want to be playing short one-twos out of the box.’ The Surf, who included Charlie Cooke on the wing, won only 11 out of 32 games, but the on-field problems came to an abrupt end with the closure of the team.
In Dallas, the Tornado won only five games under English coaches Mike Renshaw and Peter Short and, after 15 years in the league, owner Lamar Hunt decided he had seen enough. Meanwhile, qualification for the play-offs was not enough to save the Los Angeles Aztecs and Calgary Boomers from extinction.
The Montreal Manic were the surprise success of the season, drawing average attendances of more than 20,000. Eddie Firmani’s team was spearheaded by Gordon Hill, who had been transferred from Manchester United to Derby for £250,000 and won six England caps since first playing in the NASL during his Millwall days in 1975. Hill registered 16 goals and 12 assists and former Manchester City man Tony Towers anchored the midfield with 9 assists. In the play-offs, Hill’s four goals, including a 91st-minute penalty in the deciding game, helped win the best-of-three series against Los Angeles. But two more strikes from Hill and a couple of goals from Alan Willey could not stop a 2–1 series defeat against the Chicago Sting, who made it all the way to the Soccer Bowl, powered by the prolific goalscoring of German Karl-Heinz Granitza.
Chicago’s first play-off victims were the Seattle Sounders, for whom former Norwich defender Kevin Bond, the penalty taker, was the leading scorer with 16 goals. Joining the familiar line-up of English faces in Seattle was midfielder Steve Daley, who had been Britain’s most expensive footballer when he moved from Wolves to Manchester City for £1.5 million in September 1979 during a period of extravagant spending by Malcolm Allison. English goalkeeper Paul Hammond was a late-season addition.
Departing from Seattle during the season was Bruce Rioch, who recalls, ‘During the winter I was corresponding with Roger Davies, who was playing in the indoor season. He said the atmosphere was not as good as it had been in my first year. He warned me to bear that in mind if I had thoughts about going back. I went out again but it wasn’t as enjoyable, so when I was asked if I would like to go back to be player-coach at Torquay, I took the job.’
The Sounders achieved some success in an otherwise disappointing season by winning the transatlantic Challenge Cup after beating Southampton and Celtic in Seattle and drawing at the New York Cosmos.
In Vancouver, where former Leeds legend and ex-West Brom and Republic of Ireland manager Johnny Giles was in charge of the team, a won-lost record of 21–11 suggested that a second Whitecaps championship in three seasons might be possible. Giles had brought in several new, but familiar, faces, including two old Leeds teammates, Terry Yorath and Peter Lorimer, and ex-England and Queens Park Rangers winger Dave Thomas. Yorath became one of the few British players to maintain an international career
from across the Atlantic when he jetted back to lead Wales against the USSR at Wrexham. ‘As far as the pace of the game is concerned there is no problem,’ he said. ‘Where you must gear up is your level of concentration. When you return and face a side as good as the Russians you appreciate the gap.’
Ray Hankin scored 12 goals for the Whitecaps and Alan Taylor, the injury-prone striker who struck both of West Ham’s goals in their 1975 FA Cup final victory, added 11. Only Peter Beardsley, a 20-year-old forward who scored 13 goals after being bought from Carlisle United, bettered those records. It was the first of Beardsley’s three years in Canada, a residency that would be punctuated by a brief spell at Manchester United and would end with him finding a permanent home at Newcastle, from where he would launch his England career.
With a low centre of gravity, outstanding balance and ball control, Beardsley’s potential was obvious to Hankin. ‘Peter was a breath of fresh air,’ he says. ‘He had fantastic talent and made it so easy for me. He had quick feet and he could go past three or four defenders at a time.’
After the arguments and unrest of the previous season, Hankin also remembers the changed atmosphere at the club under Giles. ‘Johnny changed the training format and how we played. His methods were very different to Tony Waiters’, who had thrived on hard work. With Johnny we did a lot of ball work in training and he made it fun.’
But a single goal from Carl Valentine, the fourth Whitecaps player to have scored in double figures in the regular season, was all Vancouver had to cheer in two defeats against the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the first round of the play-offs. ‘We had the quality in the team to go on and win,’ says Hankin. ‘We were the best team in the NASL but we blew it.’
While the Whitecaps had won their division, the Rowdies had only qualified for the play-offs thanks to a system that allowed a team finishing last in its division and losing more games than it won to enter the tournament field. The Rowdies had begun the season without former Luton midfielder Peter Anderson, who fired some parting shots at the club when returning to England to become player-manager at Millwall. ‘My players at Millwall are treated better than those at Tampa,’ he said. ‘When we toured England last summer we had £2 a day spending money and had to do our own laundry.’
Kevin Keelan had arrived from New England to take over the goalkeeper’s position, while former Tottenham full-back John Gorman would play well enough to be named in the league’s all-star team for the third year running. The responsibility of providing the goals had fallen to former Swindon winger David Moss, on loan from Luton, and the 32-year-old Birmingham striker Frank Worthington.
While Moss scored nine goals and assisted on eleven, former England forward Worthington, whose previous NASL season had been in Philadelphia two years earlier, totalled 11 goals and 16 assists. Dubbed the ‘Yorkshire Striker’ by local media with a topical, if macabre, sense of humour, Worthington had arrived in Tampa talking about winning back his England place when he returned home. ‘I feel I’ve done enough in the past to justify my claim,’ he argued. But by the end of Tampa’s inconsistent season, he was saying, ‘The team has been unsettled and we’ve not put our game together. The service hasn’t been as good as I’d like. I need the ball played to me and it hasn’t been happening.’
The Tulsa Roughnecks, where former Wales midfielder Terry Hennessey took over from Charlie Mitchell as head coach, were helped to a play-off berth by 14 goals and 16 assists from the much-travelled and highly-skilled Duncan McKenzie, whose Football League career had just finished after stops at Nottingham Forest, Leeds, Everton, Chelsea and Blackburn. Less heralded was Dean Neal, a 20-year-old who scored 12 goals after signing from QPR.
Meanwhile, Ron Newman’s San Diego Sockers and Vic Crowe’s Portland Timbers had won through to a play-off meeting that was won by the Sockers. But San Diego missed out on a place in the Soccer Bowl when they came up against Chicago, despite winning the first game of the series through a pair of goals by former Polish World Cup captain and Manchester City midfielder Kazimierz Deyna. Predictably, the Sting’s opponents in the final were the New York Cosmos, for whom Giorgio Chinaglia scored 29 regular season goals and 6 more in the play-offs.
New York’s toughest opponents on the way to the final had been their old rivals from Tampa Bay. Few had expected the Rowdies to dispose of the Whitecaps, but Moss and Worthington contributed towards a 4–1 victory in the first game and a Moss free-kick and Keelan’s safe hands secured a 1–0 victory in game two.
The first game of the quarter-final series was played in Tampa Stadium, where a burst of four goals midway through the game set up a 6–3 Cosmos victory. Having taken a two-goal lead in the second game in New York, the Rowdies were angered when Keelan was ruled to have allowed a shot to slip over the line to halve their lead. The keeper’s heroics helped to keep the Cosmos in check for a further 40 minutes until New York broke through to equalise with five minutes remaining. The Rowdies edged the shoot-out and, with the mini-game system having been scrapped, the teams reassembled four days later in Giants Stadium, where the Rowdies’ resistance was ended in a 2–0 home victory.
Five Chinaglia goals in two semi-final games saw the Cosmos overpower the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, for whom Ray Hudson, with 10 assists in the regular season, had once again played a key supporting role to more illustrious names like Teofilio Cubillas, scorer of 17 goals.
Soccer Bowl, played in front of 36,971 in Toronto, saw Chinaglia kept at bay, however, as the Sting finally overcame the defending champions in a shoot-out after 120 minutes of frustrating, scoreless action. ABC had not even aired the game live – showing it at lunchtime the following day – and it was no surprise when the company announced it was not renewing its contract for 1982.
The loss of its major television contract and the closure of several teams were not the only worries for the NASL. Although overall league attendance held steady at around 14,000, the Cosmos continued to decline, dropping to 36,000 per game, while Chicago had been one of the few teams able to capitalise on the summer’s baseball strike to increase crowd figures.
Another ongoing threat to the NASL’s stability was the emergence of the six-a-side version of the sport, played indoors on an enclosed field in an ice hockey-type environment. The Major Indoor Soccer League (MISL) had got that particular ball rolling in 1978–79 and had seen its most successful franchise, the Philadelphia Fever, average crowds of 8,500, more than some NASL teams could manage outdoors. As well as feeling obliged not to leave the field clear for a rival organisation, the NASL owners saw an opportunity to get their money’s worth from players signed to 12-month contracts and a chance to keep the franchise in the public consciousness during the off-season.
The NASL’s own indoor competition, therefore, had kicked off in 1980–81. But despite devoting resources and finances towards marketing their indoor teams, the NASL was being beaten at the gate by the MISL, which had also been quick to secure winter rights to NASL players not committed to year-round deals. Whitecaps general manager Tony Waiters argues, ‘When indoor soccer raised its ugly head it was like mixing apples and oranges. The owners decided to take on the upstart MISL, so now teams were losing money in the winter as well as summer.’
By 1981, all but Philadelphia and New York of the NASL franchises had participated in the winter’s 18-game schedule, but Woosnam admits, ‘Indoor football split the ownership. Some thought it was the way to go, some didn’t. The Cosmos didn’t want to go into it and if you couldn’t get the big guys it was a problem.’
Meanwhile, threatened with expulsion from FIFA, the NASL reluctantly bowed to pressure to drop the 35-yard offside experiment for the 1982 season and attempted to encourage the development of more home-grown players by increasing the number of Americans or Canadians fielded by each team to four. For years the rule had been three, but many teams had effectively reduced that number by fielding internationals who had qualified as American citizens, Giorgio Chinaglia in New York being an example. ‘We need honest Amer
icans in the league, not European thieves or phonies,’ said US national team coach Walt Chyzowych.
With the NASL having dropped from 24 teams to 14 in 2 years, budgets being slashed around the league and reductions being imposed on imported players, the British professionals’ great American adventure was drawing to a close.
21. All Over
On the NASL’s diminishing number of playing fields, the league’s final three seasons would feature yet another triumph for the New York Cosmos, a surprise success for the Tulsa Roughnecks and a second title for the Chicago Blitz. Away from the action, there was evidence of desperation as the NASL fought to halt its depressing march towards extinction.
Inevitably, the Cosmos remained the team to beat, their 1982 squad featuring the return of Steve Hunt for the first time since helping them win back-to-back titles in 1977 and 1978. His transfer to Coventry after the second of those victories had not produced the England recognition he had craved, and it would not be until he was back home again with West Brom that he would win his two international caps. ‘I was told that a few experienced players would be added to the Coventry squad,’ he said during another of the club’s frequent relegation battles early in 1982. ‘But that hasn’t happened. It’s difficult to make an impression with a side that’s out of the spotlight. I miss playing in America. It is much more exciting and more geared to attacking play. I was an out-and-out winger there and I prefer that to the midfield role I’ve had to take on in England.’
Hunt’s wishes were fulfilled when New York moved to get him back in Cosmos colours. This time he sported a neat, clean-shaven look instead of the long hair and moustachioed surfer style of years earlier. His impact, however, reminded everyone of his earlier spell at the club as he scored nine goals.
Playing for Uncle Sam Page 28