‘It was a strange one, but I got on with it. I’m in the centre circle with my assistant, checking through the session we had planned, when I notice the first two players coming out of the changing room. One gets the ball, the other wheels away. He wants it on his head. Anyway, the guy kicks it, and collapses, screaming. The other guy heads it, and is knocked out. The paint had dried and it was like a cannonball.’
Like many in his trade, he had cause to be grateful for a twist of fate, and the paternal benevolence of John Griffin who, in his dotage, was operating as Wycombe Wanderers’ chief scout. Simmonds was coaching at Dulwich Hamlet in 1999 when Brentford were owned by Ron Noades, and shared training facilities with Crystal Palace. Paul Kember, son of Crystal Palace’s chief scout Steve, was playing for him, so they gravitated naturally towards clubs which had an intimate, almost incestuous relationship.
‘I used to watch training as often as I could. John Griff would always be there, ready for a cup of tea and a chat. On this particular day, he mentioned that Stan Ternant had just left Palace. On the off chance they’d need a coach, I told Steve Coppell that I’d love to come back to the club. He said they needed some help on the scouting side, but I said “fuck that”. Steve was persistent, though. He persuaded me to try it, and it grew from there.
‘I spent more and more time with John in his tiny office, going through the box files behind his desk. He was so open with me, so generous with his time. Secretly, I was thinking: put up with this for three months and you’ll be running the reserves, but we went through players together. Gradually I became intrigued. I began to ask John more and more questions: “What do you look for? How do you compare players? What am I doing wrong?”
‘I was making classic mistakes. At half-time I would allow myself to be sidetracked. I’d be trying to imagine what the coaches were saying to the players in the dressing room or what I would be saying to them, instead of concentrating on my man or men. I realised I needed a completely different mindset.
‘Now, if you speak to me ten minutes after a game, I can’t tell you the specifics of what happened. I will only know that later, when I watch the DVD. I just don’t follow the ball. Let’s say I am watching a centre half. Providing he is on his game, I will know or sense, where the ball is by studying his body shape. Even though I have a team sheet, names and numbers are incidental to me.’
Simmonds was solicitous towards Griffin, before, during and after Fulham’s development match against Villa. The old scout sat between his nephews, Gary Johnson, the Yeovil manager, and his brother Steve, who had claimed the scout’s job at AFC Wimbledon. Simmonds had helped Griffin out the previous winter, by loaning Italian striker Marcello Trotta to Wycombe, where he scored eight goals in eight games.
Trotta, a product of the Napoli youth system, had not distinguished himself that afternoon, despite a smartly taken goal; there was a collective intake of breath from the 20 or so scouts, assembled in a small stand at the training ground, when he pulled out of a challenge with the goalkeeper. Such blatant self-preservation pandered to the stereotype. The B word – ‘bottler’ – was murmured, like an ugly secret.
The new season, in League Two, had not started well. The club was under the control of a Supporters Trust, whose responsibilities dispelled the romantic notion of a fans’ buy-out. Steve Hayes, Wycombe’s former owner, was on extended bail until May 2013, following his arrest by the Metropolitan Police as part of Operation Tuleta. In February 2013 Hayes stated that he was still co-operating with police in a protracted investigation – although he stressed he had not been charged with any offence and was confident he would not be.
Griffin was cordial, yet grim, and could not conceal his concern for his manager, Gary Waddock: ‘It’s an absolute nightmare. I promise you I am not exaggerating, but we have an entire first team on the injury list. We’ve had to play eight teenagers, and we are only five games in. We’ve had broken legs, cruciates, the lot. It’s even happening in training. I could hear someone screaming when I drove into the training ground yesterday. It was our left back. He’d done his cruciate, turning quickly.
‘We get the call at six p.m. Out for the season, quite unbelievable. I’ve never been at a club like it, in forty years in the game. It is in danger of falling apart. We’re begging for loan players, pleading to pay them a hundred, two hundred quid a week. They’re just players, not that good, but they are all we have got. The club is being run by the Supporters’ Trust. They’re fans, and behaving like them. There’s been a lot of chatter about Wadds.
‘Trust me, this manager is good. I’ve worked with Terry Venables, the best, and this guy is fantastic, an absolute diamond. The vultures are gathering. Managers looking for work are suddenly turning up to watch. I see them in the stand. I don’t blame them. That’s what managers do. I don’t know what’s going to happen, but we play AFC Wimbledon on Saturday. If we don’t win that Wadds’ days are numbered.’
The sadness of the veteran scout was telling; his prescience was equally poignant. Wycombe marked their 125th anniversary celebrations by losing 1–0 at home to Wimbledon on September 22. They were booed off at half- and full-time. Reserve goalkeeper Elliott Parish saved a penalty, but sustained a cartilage injury. Waddock was so upset he needed 45 minutes to compose himself before attending a press conference. He began by apologising, but his farewell speech was soured by empty defiance and bitter recrimination. ‘The players have let the club down, let themselves down, and let me down,’ he said, before going off to meet his fate. He was sacked that evening.
‘All the people in the game are telling him he’ll get another job,’ reported Griffin, who took things too personally for his own good. ‘They know what a terrific manager he is, but chairmen will only look at us getting relegated, and struggling this season. I don’t know whether I’ve still got a job but that doesn’t seem particularly important at the moment, to be honest.’
Employment news was bad, and didn’t get any better. The obliteration of Watford’s scouting staff, following the club’s absorption into the empire of the Pozzo family, owners of Udinese in Serie A and Granada in La Liga, caused a surge of resentment. Headlines condemning Watford as ‘a snapshot of all that is wrong with the modern game’ found a receptive audience.
The ironies of the situation were galling. Gino Pozzo, the son of Giampaolo, who bought the Championship club for £15 million, paid homage to the art of scouting while culling an 11-man team headed by Brian Greenhalgh. ‘There is no cosmic mix to enable us to win, but we understand what works,’ claimed the Italian interloper. ‘Fifty per cent is good scouting, fifty per cent is good management.’
No one could deny the effectiveness of his business model, dependent upon a core group of 50 scouts, trawling under-utilised markets for young players at a critical phase of their development. The poster boy for the Udinese project is Alexis Sanchez. Spotted as a teenager in Chile, playing for Cobreloa in the Atacama Desert mining city of Calama, he was nurtured in Argentina and Italy before being sold to Barcelona in a deal worth €37 million.
Yet this was a question of faith, a challenge to the belief that something as ultimately insubstantial as a football club has significance beyond the binary certainties of the win–loss column. Watford was the club which nurtured me, personally and professionally. It was where I discovered the illicit thrill of bunking in via the allotments, to stand on a shale bank on the bend beside the Rookery End at Vicarage Road.
My heroes were not household names, and were quickly assimilated into the communities which once worshipped them. A season spent as a ballboy at Watford was a formative experience, an insight into the game’s splendour and cruelty. I began my career on the local newspaper, where I played darts with Watford’s owner, who wore a pink satin suit and shape-shifted personalities between Reginald Dwight and Elton Hercules John. Forgive the indulgence, but these are two teams which matter to him, to me, and a few fellow travellers:
Walker, Welbourne, Williams, Lugg, Lees, Walley, Scu
llion, Garbett, Endean, Packer, Owen. Sub Garvey
Sherwood, Bardsley, Price, Taylor, Terry, Sinnott, Callaghan, Johnston, Reilly, Jackett, Barnes. Sub Atkinson
The former lost 5–1 to Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final in 1970, on a moonscape of a pitch at White Hart Lane. They had beaten Liverpool 1–0 in the previous round with a bellyflop of a diving header by Barry Endean, a centre forward who was bought for £50 and became a builder in his home town of Chester-le-Street. It was 14 years, two months, and five days before the latter team represented Watford in their first FA Cup final. I still cannot bring myself to watch a recording of the 2–0 defeat to Everton.
My alienation with the club, which once espoused family values and rallied around a ringmaster named Graham Taylor, was complete. A minority of Watford fans were concerned about a loss of identity under the new regime, but the majority were as spellbound as natives blinded by the sheen of a silver penny. They didn’t care about Greenhalgh, and the brutality with which he had been despatched.
I remembered him as a underwhelming forward in an underwhelming Watford team. He played 18 times, scored a solitary goal, and promptly ended a journeyman’s career, which had encompassed spells at Preston North End, Aston Villa, Leicester City, Huddersfield Town, Cambridge United, Bournemouth and Torquay United. ‘I wasn’t enjoying it,’ he recalled. ‘I was thirty, my legs were going, and I thought “what’s the point?” It was time to get a proper job.’
Greenhalgh worked as a sales rep, sourcing orders for biscuits, cheese and butter in North London, while he dabbled as a part-time coach. He was introduced to scouting at Everton, initially for petrol money, and eventually spent nine years as chief scout to Howard Kendall, with whom he had been an apprentice at Preston. He returned to Watford, to work under Graham Taylor, before his instinctive fears were realised.
‘I’d been at the club that long, I saw it coming. When the previous owner was looking to sell I thought: hang on, there could be trouble here. When it became clear the Pozzos were taking over I said to myself: that is it. Game over. They are bringing in an entirely different system. They’ll do the job their way, and let’s see how they come to terms with the mentality of the English game.
‘What worries me is that Watford has been seen as a very good example of how to run a football club for football reasons. Now there is a completely different business model. That ignores, totally, the club’s stature in the community, and its history. You walk into these scenarios with the best of intentions, but they treat you as a piece of paper. It is a tick box mentality. I have come through the old school. I have a certain feeling for the game. These people want a different club.’
If Greenhalgh was reconciled to his fate, others were prepared to take up the cudgels on his behalf. Simmonds was unequivocal: ‘I have had a fantastic relationship with the Pozzos in the past. In fact we nearly took Yohan Mollo, a French winger, from Granada last year. But I had an agent, highly connected to them, ring me yesterday. I told him I was not the only one unhappy with the way Watford have conducted themselves. People are talking about not helping them.’
Solidarity, in the shadow of the sack, had an obvious relevance and resonance. Simmonds was acutely aware of his longevity at Fulham; only three other chief scouts in the Premier League – Robbie Cooke at Everton, Steve Rowley at Arsenal and Jim Lawlor at Manchester United – had longer service records. It was no coincidence that each worked for dynastic managers. Simmonds accepted his relative vulnerability, and harboured no illusions:
‘It’ll be a black bin liner job. It might be next week, next month or next year, but these things usually end one day. The only inevitabilities of life as a scout are birth, death, taxes and the occasional bin liner to clear your desk. As long as you accept that you will be allright. What do they say about the drowning man? The third time he goes down is the most peaceful.
‘The more I live this life the more I see the parallel with the foot soldiers, the poor bloody infantry. They are acceptable casualties. It is the sort of job which chooses you. You tell yourself it’ll only be a month or so, until that coaching job comes up, but you blink and you’ve spent years in the game. I’ll always remember that line, by Paul Newman, in the film The Road to Perdition: “This is the life we have chosen.” That’s us.’
It was a great line, but the quote was slightly inaccurate. Newman’s character, Irish mob boss John Rooney, actually said: ‘This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see Heaven.’
You will be able to spot the football scouts, if you reach the celestial gates. To merge Hollywood images, they will be the angels with dirty faces.
14
The Loneliness of the Long-distance Walker
THERE IS A profound poignancy about a footballer dying before his time. The cause may be medically mundane, but premature loss is the stuff of legend. It confers an intimate form of immortality; the stricken player leaves a legacy of images in a multi-media age, but continues to exist, most powerfully, in the imagination of those who watched, and wished they could be him. At Arsenal, one word is sufficient to stir the soul.
Rocky.
David Rocastle was just 33 when he passed away on 31 March 2001, a month after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer which attacks the immune system. He died on the morning of a North London derby against Tottenham at Highbury. Most fans heard the news just before kick-off. Despite the tribal tensions of the fixture, the minute’s silence was broken only by the unmistakable sound of weeping.
Rocastle had Everyman qualities. His audacity allowed him to chip Peter Schmeichel from 25 yards at Old Trafford. He was born a generation too early: his pace and technique, strength and nimbleness, were suited to the modern game. He won two League titles and a League Cup for Arsenal, but is loved for who he was, rather than what he achieved. He was precious because he shared so readily the deep joy he derived from his game. His name is still chanted at the Emirates, where he is one of 40 club legends depicted, arm in arm, in groups of four on huge murals which circle the stadium’s exterior. His image is reproduced on countless tee-shirts, printed on basement presses.
He played 14 times for England. The shirt he wore on his debut, a 1–0 win against Denmark on 14 September 1988, is framed, and dominates the neat, narrow dining room of an unprepossessing pre-war house in North London. An angular grass stain, faded to a faint lime-coloured smear but unmistakable across the bottom left-hand corner, proves it has not been washed. The inscription above the Three Lions badge, in capital letters, appears to have been written in black felt tip pen. ‘To Terry,’ it reads. ‘Top Scout’.
Terry Murphy lingers. Silence stimulates the senses. I’m aware of a faint aroma of furniture polish, evidently applied to a small oval table, and a glass-fronted cabinet containing other items of football memorabilia. Murphy, a courtly, gracious man in his 73rd year, is lost in momentary contemplation. ‘I told David to keep it, or give it to his family,’ he says, quietly, ‘but he wanted me to have it.’ He leads me into the kitchen, where two cups are ready on coasters beside a modern, tubular kettle, without breaking the spell.
We progress through to the lounge, where a symmetrical arrangement of biscuits, Digestives, Ginger Nuts, Garibaldis and Rich Tea, await on a plate on the coffee table, alongside a bowl of mint imperials. Memories well up, like a child’s tears. Murphy remembers the first time he saw Rocastle play, on an astroturf pitch on Market Road, where Holloway, the school at which he was a PE teacher, were hosting Roger Manwood Secondary from Brockley Rise in South London. The visiting boy was 13, and the scout sensed, immediately, that he was exceptional:
‘David was the difference between the sides. He was so comfortable on the ball. He had tricks; even as a youngster he would do his step-overs and drag-backs. He was a talent, but it wasn’t just me who knew how good he would be. There were other clubs around. I quickly spoke to his mother and brother. This is when it comes down to selling your clu
b to the family. It wasn’t hard in those days to sell Arsenal as a club, because you could talk about good training facilities, good coaches, good players to play with. You could talk about opportunity, and point to the first team. At times we had eight players in the first team who had come through the youth squad.
‘David was easy to talk to. Some youngsters won’t come close to you at all, they’re distant. But David was very friendly, talkative. We just got on well. Sometimes, if your characters are compatible, it helps with a relationship. I don’t try to butter anybody up. I always believe in speaking the truth and whatever I would say to David I would say to other people because that’s the way I am. Players react differently to conversations, some players listen, some players don’t.’
Rocastle listened, learned, and never forgot. His bond with Murphy sustained him throughout a career hampered by injury, and was renewed on his death bed.
‘When David was in hospital, no one was allowed to see him. I didn’t realise that when I went up there, but he said, “No, I want to see him.” This was two days before he passed away. It’s very difficult to say how special the relationship was and why it was special. It was just the personality that he was. We seemed to click together.
‘You like to feel that Arsenal is a family. Once the boys are there you don’t just say “right, we’ve got the player, that’s it, forget him” and go on to someone else. I would always maintain contact with the parents and the players themselves. I can go back twenty or thirty years and I’m still in contact with them. But David was special. Yes, very special.’
He paused, and refocused. A celebratory DVD, a compilation of Rocastle’s greatest moments, was stacked neatly beside the television, to the left of the deep, high-backed peach-coloured armchair which enveloped him. The house contained fragments of a football life. Two brass cannons, symbols of Arsenal’s heritage, faced one another in the grate. The walls were studded with small photographs, taken in moments of private exultation.
The Nowhere Men: The Unknown Story of Football's True Talent Spotters Page 20