Budgie - The Autobiography

by John Burridge

  I used to try anything that would get my mind focused on the game. I went to what they now commonly refer to as a sports psychologist. A lot of athletes use them these days, and there is nothing unusual about using their services to get you in the zone. Clubs pay psychologists thousands now on a regular basis. But in the early 1980s they were regarded with great suspicion – they were seen as ‘psychiatrists’, and I think everyone thought I was a bit mental for going to see him.

  As was pretty much always the case, I didn’t give a toss what other people thought of my quirks, so I stuck at it. I went along to see him, told him my life story, about my upbringing, and I confided in him that I found it confusing why I could be strong in my mind one week, then a bit defeatist the next. He told me that it’s all down to body rhythms – he explained it to me, broke it all down and it made perfect sense. This guy was brilliant for me. During our sessions, we decided that a course of hypnotherapy might also benefit me. He couldn’t just click his fingers and put you under, it’s not as simple as that; you’ve got to WANT to be hypnotised. I just wanted to be strong-minded every week, so I was willing to give it a go. He went ahead and hypnotised me. I had six two-hour sessions, which cost me £1,500 – and if I told anyone that at the time, they thought I was most definitely mad! The therapist would tell me a story then put me to sleep. He made me a motivational cassette as well and people used to laugh at me, because on the way to games on the team bus I’d slam it into my personal stereo and listen to the tape. I was in a trance-like state, but I could hear the boys taking the piss and calling me ‘Alice in Wonderland’. But I was totally calm, and my mind was in the perfect place. Whenever I was playing – especially a big game at Anfield or Old Trafford – I wasn’t nervous in the slightest, because in my thoughts I’d already been there and conquered any lingering anxiety I might have had. I was mentally ready for anything.

  It became an essential part of my pre-match build-up – everything needed to be perfect in my mind when I was preparing for a game. I’d dabble in a bit of meditation too – and no matter what abuse I was getting from the lads in the background, I’d be able to shut them out of my mind and concentrate on the job in hand. What is regarded as normal today, I was doing in the late ’70s and early ’80s, yet I was regarded as a bit of a weirdo at the time. Having a manager like Terry helped me believe in what I was doing, because he encouraged all this. Other managers would have just dismissed me as a headcase and ordered me to stop doing it, but he recognised that there was method in my madness.

  Terry kept pushing me to Ron Greenwood, saying that I deserved an England call-up, and although I didn’t get any full England caps I was in the squad for select games against Holland, China and Australia.

  Although I’d missed out on a trip to the United States with Palace while I was getting my shoulder sorted, I made up for it later in my career by taking Janet and the kids there for our holidays. Naturally, I couldn’t switch off from football – and by watching ‘soccer’ in the States I drew a lot of inspiration for some of my tricks, like sitting on the crossbar. I just loved the way they presented their sports events and all the showmanship involved. It was outrageous but it put some fun into the game. I would go and see Tampa Bay Rowdies games, and I used to train with them while I was there. What the Americans were doing in the 1970s and early ’80s is similar to what Sky Sports are doing now, adding a bit of glamour and razzmatazz. Football is meant to be an entertainment industry after all. Yes, first and foremost it’s a professional game and you need to win, but if you can add a bit of entertainment to the mix then the paying public are getting a smile on their faces. Everyone loves a jackass. If you’re the type of player that just goes out there all serious, keeps his mouth shut, and keeps himself to himself, then no one is ever going to remember you. I didn’t want to be like that, I wanted to be a showman. If you’re a bit of a jackass and you’ve got the guts to go out and do something a bit different then I would say go out and do it – stand out from the crowd. At the end of the day you have to win the game, but if you can win it with all the trimmings then it’s so much sweeter. Give those fans something to remember. But the thinking towards me in the seventies was that I was an idiot – a show-off. I wasn’t like that at all though, it was just charisma, and I was never big-headed, because I always knew that you were only as good as your last game.

  Everything I did was dedicated to making myself a better goalkeeper and doing well for the team, but the trimmings were important to me too. I was always looking for that little something different that might make me that bit better. To give you an example – nobody ever thought about diet in those days, but I would always find out what was good for you, when was the right time to eat it, and doing my homework on sports science and nutrition. I even studied the diet of African tribesmen to try to work out the secrets of their strength and agility. Players would usually eat fish and chips or a sandwich before a game, but I thought to myself that can’t be right for football. I thought there had to be something better.

  I was always questioning things. I wasn’t always right, but a lot of the time I was decades ahead of my time. I was the first one to be blending apples, oranges and pears and drinking it before a game – that’s known as a smoothie now, but it was just dismissed as ‘Budgie’s strange brew’ then. They used to think I was crazy, but I would actually take my blender along to the ground, go to the kitchen and make myself a cocktail packed with sugar and goodness. That would be my pre-match dinner. I’d also make sure I ate plenty of carbohydrates, including jars of baby food, which as you know are full of vitamins and iron. People used to disagree, saying: ‘Don’t eat potatoes, don’t eat pasta,’ but I’d looked into it and realised it was the best thing to give you reserves of energy. Players would be tucking into a big fat steak, but I didn’t want one – it made me feel bloated, so I would do my own thing. I was regarded as a nutter for eating pasta or having a glass of water instead of a cup of tea. I didn’t do it just for the sake of being different; it was all done for the sake of playing well. And while me doing somersaults might have been frowned upon, I only did it to entertain people. The fans were paying good money to be entertained, and I was only too happy to oblige them. I wouldn’t have done it if we were losing right enough, because I would have looked a fool, and I always understood that the bottom line is that you have to win.

  Another important thing I added to my repertoire was that I would always run to the fans at the end of a match. I especially did it away from home. Palace used to get a massive travelling support. When we used to go up north, sometimes 5,000 fans had followed us up there. I would get down on my knees in front of them and blow them kisses. Some players used to just walk off and not acknowledge the fans, but I would never have done that. I used to run from one end of the ground to the other where our fans were. The way I saw it, people had paid a lot of money to come up from London and follow us. I used to cajole all the other players to go over and do the same, and to be fair most of them did. I did this throughout my career. An extract from the Herald newspaper in 1992, when I played a game for Hibs at Dunfermline, nicely sums up the way I would behave:

  Off-stage, the star of the afternoon was John Burridge. Hibernian’s goalkeeper had nothing to do and he did it with incessant gusto. He was never still. He paced his area like a caged leopard. He did bending exercises. His tongue never stopped. He was always waving and shouting. When he ran out of other occupations, he re-dug the trench he had made at a right angle to the goal-line out to the penalty spot. It was hard to keep the eyes off Burridge.

  Conspicuously, he was the only Hibernian to go and salute the travelling supporters at the end. He made so thorough a job of it that before he had completed his tour most of the fans had drifted away. Burridge was unabashed. He continued to applaud what the late Eddie Waring in a rugby commentary once called the ‘empty crowd’.

  There was nothing false about it; I always did it from the bottom of my heart. Mind you, if we’d just been beaten t
hree or four-nil, I needed the hide of a rhino to go over and see the fans at the end of the game. But I was never the type to only sing when we were winning; it wasn’t the result I was reacting to, it was the fact the fans had paid their money to watch their team. The fans get a raw deal in football all the time and are still taken for granted, so to go over and say thanks for their support wasn’t much to ask.

  When I was at Palace, football was changing rapidly and I was keen to be at the forefront of any changes. We had been over in Bilbao for a tournament and I’d seen a keeper try these new gloves. We were still mainly using our bare hands in dry weather – which may seem unthinkable now because you wouldn’t see any keeper without gloves these days – but this foreign keeper was ahead of his time and had gloves that he would wear in dry weather as well as wet. After the game, I went up to the keeper and asked him all about his gloves. They had special grips and were made of latex, whereas the ones we used on a wet day were woolly. They were fantastic for catching the ball. There were still no gloves available in England like that so I got on to Terry and asked for some, badgering him to get me a batch. I was the first keeper in England to wear them on a dry day.

  It quickly caught on and before long every keeper in the country was suddenly wearing gloves on a dry day. I had found out where they were made and I rang Adidas in Germany to sort out some supplies. They were £25 a pair – a lot of money for 1979 – so I asked for Terry to go the board and get them to agree to order £500-worth. At first, I was the envy of other keepers in the league – I started getting calls at my house from Peter Shilton and Pat Jennings asking me where I had got them. You’ll no doubt have heard all the stories about Pat Jennings having big hands like shovels, but he actually came to my house to try them on and when he put his hands in the gloves, they were just normal size – it was all a myth. What a disappointment! Word was getting round and all the keepers were turning up at my house to get them. If I’d thought about it I could have patented them in England and made a fortune.

  I remember we were playing against West Ham one day and Mervyn Day was in goal. We beat them 1-0 and Mervyn made a right howler. Straight after the game, I went up to him with a pair of gloves and said: ‘Try these, son.’ He thought I was being a smartarse, taking the piss out of him after his mistake, but I was only trying to do him a favour. Adidas had cottoned on, and were giving me extra pairs to pass on to other keepers because I was promoting their product. It got to the stage where I was giving the opposition keeper gloves at the end of every game. After that they started coming into the shops and were freely available to buy, but I was the first one to ring Germany and get a box sent to England. I broke the mould. It was the end of goalkeepers playing with bare hands.

  CHAPTER 12

  PAIN ON PLASTIC

  ‘Queens Park Rangers turned their pitch into an airport runway.’

  I had a fantastic time at Crystal Palace, playing under a great manager, but then the team started to lose a bit of its sparkle. We had risen to the top of the First Division in the early weeks, and we were even being tipped to make an unlikely challenge for the title, but the big boys – Liverpool, Man United, Arsenal and Ipswich – had the experience we lacked, and we started to get bogged down a bit in mid-table.

  The First Division was hard, and it was impossible for a team like Palace to be winning every week. Terry was still doing some brilliant work, but there was tension simmering at boardroom level and it was seeping into the team’s performances. We finished the season 13th, which was a bit of a disappointment after hitting such dizzy heights in the early months. I was involved in another pay dispute at the start of the 1980/81 season, and morale at Palace plunged further when the club let Kenny Sansom go to Arsenal, receiving Clive Allen and a rival keeper, Paul Barron, in exchange – a terrible bit of business.

  The man behind the unnecessary meddling was our chairman Raymond Bloye, a butcher from Croydon. The Palace fans still blame him for not realising what a good thing he had at that time and failing to invest in the club. Terry was looking for more money to allow the club to realise its true potential, and rumours and reports were flying about that he was starting to get disillusioned with the lack of encouragement he was getting at boardroom level. Everything was in place for Palace to be massive – big crowds, a team packed with brilliant young players who had won two FA Youth Cups a couple of years earlier – but it all started to turn sour. The 1980/81 season started badly and we chalked up a run of seven successive losses.

  One day I picked up the newspaper and Terry had gone – he was going to take over from Tommy Docherty as the new manager of QPR in west London. You might have thought I would have seen it coming, but it was all very sudden. Sometimes that happens in football; one day a manager is there and then, without the slightest warning, you turn up at training the next day and he’s gone. I was gutted to see him go.

  Our coach Ernie Walley took charge of the team on a caretaker basis for a few games, and did reasonably well, but in truth he was never going to be high-profile enough to become Venables’ permanent replacement. The man they eventually chose to fill Terry’s shoes was a familiar face at Selhurst Park – Malcolm Allison, who’d been manager of the club between 1973 and 1976 before Terry had started his four-year reign. ‘Big Mal’ was a good manager, but was a bit flash for me and wasn’t as dedicated as Terry. I had my own ways, and I was used to being allowed to get on with them under Terry, but Malcolm was a little bit old-fashioned and he would start to question my methods a little bit and this made me feel a little bit insecure. I became unhappy with him because I was no longer getting my own way. I played on for a month or two, then one night I got a call from a middle-man asking me: ‘Would you be interested in going to QPR with Terry Venables?’ The thought of working with Terry again appealed to me, and I said I would love to.

  A few days later at training, Malcolm Allison called me over and said Terry had asked to see me. QPR were in the Second Division, and their goalkeeper was Chris Woods, the England under-21 international, so I wondered why they would want me. But Terry was keen on bringing me to Loftus Road, having worked with me and trusted me at Palace. Chris went off to Norwich City and I was bought as a straight replacement. I took it as quite a compliment that Terry had bought me for a second time – it showed that he valued me and had faith in me. Terry would later try to sign me when he was manager of Tottenham and I was at Southampton, but that was one deal that couldn’t be finalised.

  When I met Terry to thrash out the QPR deal, I quickly sorted out my salary, but I also asked for a signing-on fee, in cash, before I signed. Again, it was a case of me trying to make as much money as I could from my career – not only for me, but for Janet and the family. Terry said he had to speak to the chairman, which would be no picnic because the owner of QPR at that time was Jim Gregory, who had a reputation for being a man you didn’t mess with. He reminded me a bit of the character Bob Hoskins played in The Long Good Friday! Terry fixed up a meeting between the three of us to sort it out, so I headed to Loftus Road to see him in his office. Gregory wasn’t a very tall man, but he had this big massive swivel chair, which I think he used to make him appear physically bigger. He didn’t waste any time getting down to business.

  ‘There’s your contract and there’s your signing-on fee,’ he said, as he laid a bag down in front of me. Inside, there were five bundles of cash. I said: ‘Mr Gregory, no disrespect, but I had agreed on an amount with Terry.’ ‘Take it or leave it,’ he said. ‘Okay then, I’ll leave it.’

  So I got up and started to walk towards the door of his office, with my back to him, worried he was going to come flying after me and wondering already if I’d made a massive mistake for the sake of a few readies. It was all about saving face, though. I couldn’t turn round, I would have looked pathetic. As soon as I put my hand on the door handle, he said: ‘John, come back.’ He opened the drawer and chucked another bundle of cash on the table. He had been testing me, and although my heart was pounding it
had been worth digging my heels in. I signed the contract there and then in his office, took my money and off I went – with my nerves shot to pieces.

  I had arrived halfway through the season and QPR were near the bottom of the Second Division. Terry had quickly worked his magic the moment he was in the door, winning his first three games and guiding QPR up to eighth by the end of the 1980/81 season – nothing short of remarkable given the dire position they had been in before he was appointed. He already had guys like Glenn Roeder and Simon Stainrod in place, but soon he bought players of the calibre of Terry Fenwick and Gerry Francis and started to put a very useful side together.

  But for some unknown reason that summer QPR decided to rip up their turf and put a plastic pitch down in its place. I couldn’t understand it. They grabbed all the headlines for being innovative and at the cutting edge of technology, but it didn’t make any sense to me. I was preparing for an exciting new season and hopefully a promotion push, and we were getting some really good players through the doors for the season ahead – including John Gregory from Brighton, Clive Allen and Mike Flanagan from Palace.