by Tony Evans
September was a dreadful month for international football. Wales faced Scotland at Ninian Park with both nations still in contention for a place in Mexico. The BBC had passed on the England game but ITV eagerly embraced this British showdown. The match was screened live – a rare treat these days for the viewing public.
The Scots needed a draw but were 1–0 down at half-time. Jock Stein, the Scotland manager, found out at the break that Jim Leighton, his goalkeeper, had lost a contact lens during the first half and had travelled to Cardiff without any replacements. With World Cup qualification on the line, there was uproar in the dressing room. It was a footballing crisis that could break the hopes of a nation.
The 62-year-old Stein was used to pressure. He had built the Celtic team that brought the European Cup to Britain for the first time in 1967. He had been feeling the strain in the run-up to the match, though. He looked pale and had little appetite, which was unusual.
With nine minutes left, Scotland were going out and Wales advancing. The Scots threw men forward. Graeme Sharp nodded the ball into the opposition penalty area and David Speedie knocked it on in a hopeful but aimless manner. David Phillips, a Welsh defender, unwisely closed the striker down with his arms in the air and the ball hit his elbow. The Scottish team appealed and the referee awarded a spot-kick.
Davie Cooper, on as substitute, scored the penalty and sent Scotland through to a play-off against Australia. That controversial moment should have been the night’s talking point but it was overshadowed by what happened next.
Stein mistook the referee blowing for a free kick for the final whistle. He moved to shake hands with Mike England, the Wales manager, and barked angrily at photographers who were gathered to capture the moment of triumph and defeat. What the snappers got was unimaginable. Stein suffered a massive heart attack and despite speedy medical attention was dead within minutes.
Stein was one of the great triumvirate of Scottish managers who dominated the post-war game in Britain. Along with Matt Busby at Manchester United and Bill Shankly at Liverpool, ‘Big Jock’ was in the game’s top rank of managers. At Celtic, Stein created sides that were feared all over Europe. His loss at an early age was keenly felt across British football.
An even more tragic World Cup story caused headlines barely more than a week later. A massive earthquake hit Mexico City, where the final was scheduled to be played in just ten months’ time. More than five thousand bodies were recovered from the rubble but estimates of the death toll were as high as forty-five thousand.
FIFA announced within three days that the disaster would not affect the 1986 tournament. It had already moved once and was going to go ahead whatever the circumstances.
The night England were edging towards Mexico, Handsworth in Birmingham was burning. Racial tension had been building all summer and heavy-handed policing in the area sparked three days of rioting less than half a mile from the Hawthorns. Two people died and Enoch Powell’s dangerous fantasy began to be talked about again. Things then got worse.
At the end of the month, Brixton was aflame, too. Days later, Broadwater Farm in Tottenham achieved infamy when police constable Keith Blakelock was hacked to death during ferocious violent disturbances on the council estate. In an echo of Thatcher’s delusional stance on football hooliganism, the Prime Minister’s advisors Oliver Letwin and Hartley Booth wrote a memo on the ‘real’ causes of social disorder. They were quite a pair to claim they had their fingers on the pulse of urban Britain. Letwin, who later became an MP, was educated at Eton and Cambridge, the perfect places to gain an understanding of ghetto life. Booth was a Methodist lay preacher. It is worth quoting their opinion at length.
The root of social malaise is not poor housing, or youth ‘alienation’, or the lack of a middle class. Lower-class, unemployed white people lived for years in appalling slums without a breakdown of public order on anything like the present scale; in the midst of the depression, people in Brixton went out, leaving their grocery money in a bag at the front door, and expecting to see groceries there when they got back.
Riots, criminality and social disintegration are caused solely by individual characters and attitudes. So long as bad moral attitudes remain, all efforts to improve the inner cities will founder.
The Tories had found their answer. It was black people and their ‘bad moral attitudes’.
Football is a reflection of society. Little wonder the black players making their way in the game were finding life tough.
10
Blond ambition
Frank McAvennie’s moral attitude was straightforward. The West Ham striker wanted to have fun. He bleached his naturally ginger hair blond, believing he would get more attention. ‘I didn’t bother with toner; I just used bleach,’ he said. ‘I was determined to get myself noticed in London.’
What got noticed in the dressing room is that things didn’t quite add up about the new signing. ‘We found out in the showers,’ Tony Gale said. ‘Downstairs he was ginger. He had ginger pubes. We nicknamed him “Lulu”.
‘Then we found out his immaculate teeth were false. They were all capped.’
To carry off such a look in the East End – and in Upton Park’s dressing room – required the Scot to deliver on the pitch. In his home debut against Queens Park Rangers, the new boy scored twice. Yet as much as the goals, it was McAvennie’s work rate and attitude that endeared him to the 15,530 fans inside the Boleyn Ground. The striker was keen to make his mark early in the game – on opposition defenders. He won the crowd’s approval when he whacked QPR’s Ian Dawes with a late challenge and sent the defender flying into the East Stand’s wall.
‘I wasn’t very big,’ McAvennie said. ‘I was bigger than TC [Cottee] but that’s not hard. But I got stuck in. You’re a centre forward. You’ve got to put yourself about.’
The crowd loved this. On the pitch, there was nothing artificial about the Scot.
As August turned to September, McAvennie’s name, if not his face, became increasingly familiar. He scored nine league goals and one in the Milk Cup. Everyone was keen to know who this goalscoring sensation was.
ITV’s Saint and Greavsie programme eventually got him on television. A camera crew and reporter took McAvennie across Waterloo Bridge – where he went unnoticed – and then asked members of the public what they knew about West Ham’s new goalscorer. After hearing their answer, the presenter introduced the player to the surprised interviewees.
He was quickly a familiar face in the capital’s nightclubs.
Despite bringing a fiancée to London – a model, of course, who operated under the name Anita Blue – the striker was as determined to score as often off the pitch as on it. ‘I enjoyed myself,’ he said, remembering those days with relish. ‘It’s not often you get to do anything in life you enjoy so much.’
That applied to football even more than carousing but more than one wag observed that Stringfellows was as much McAvennie’s club as was West Ham.
Soon, many of the here girls and wannabe glamour models who thronged Stringfellows were on intimate terms with McAvennie. By December, the goals were still flowing – 18 in the league – and the Scot made his own TV blackout-busting appearance on Wogan just before Christmas. The BBC chat show attracted as many as 15 million viewers at its peak.
Dressed in Gucci clothes and Cartier shoes, McAvennie was interviewed alongside Denis Law. The exchange with Terry Wogan illustrated the curious mix of confidence, wit and vulnerability that served McAvennie so well when on the pull. ‘Your name’s on everyone’s lips,’ the host said. ‘Why?’
‘Because it’s so hard to say?’ the West Ham striker shyly offered in response.
‘It was embarrassing,’ he said. ‘The state of me! Khaki suit, tie, shoes … I looked stupid.’ For a Glasgow boy, there was always going to be an element of self-consciousness in the environment of a massive talk-show appearance but the effect of such exposure was huge. ‘It was life-changing,’ he said. ‘Wogan was a turning point. All
the women who didn’t read the back pages knew me now. I loved it.’
Wogan was just the start. Before long, McAvennie was being pictured on the set of EastEnders, the most popular BBC show of the era. The soap opera was regularly watched by more than 20 million viewers and its cast had rapidly become tabloid sensations. A new kind of celebrity was developing and McAvennie muscled his way into the spotlight in a manner no other footballer was even close to doing.
Soap stars became household names in a matter of weeks. Leslie Grantham, the actor who played ‘Dirty Den’ in EastEnders, leapt from obscurity to become one of Britain’s most famous men almost overnight. Grantham was pictured heading a ball with McAvennie in the Queen Vic pub on the soap-opera set. The two men indulged in a bout of celebrity one-upmanship. ‘You’re the Frank McAvennie of the acting profession,’ the Scot said. ‘No,’ replied the thespian, ‘you’re the Dirty Den of football.’ Either way, the pair were more than famous. They were notorious.
Late nights, gallons of beer, jeroboams of champagne and more women than he could remember might have affected McAvennie’s appetite for football but his lifestyle did not disrupt his game. ‘We were mates but never socialized together, so I didn’t see what he got up to,’ Tony Cottee said. ‘But he was a great trainer whatever he’d been doing the night before. He never turned up pissed for training.’
The wild lifestyle would eventually have a negative effect on McAvennie’s career. Drink and cocaine addictions lay in the future but in the autumn of 1985 he developed a celebrity status that transcended football. He brought a rough-edged glamour to the game. As well as the West End, McAvennie and his teammates gathered at the Phoenix Apollo, a Greek restaurant on Stratford Broadway. It seemed a rather unglamorous venue but it was where the West End came when it went east. It became McAvennie’s headquarters.
EastEnders actors like Nick Berry frequented the nightspot, as well as other sportsmen like Frank Bruno, the boxer. The inevitable legion of here girls were always present. McAvennie’s fame drew people to him. The time of footballers pretending to be accountants had well and truly passed.
‘I loved going to the clubs,’ McAvennie said. ‘There’d be Elton John, Rod Stewart, George Michael. It was a great time to be in London.’
The attention occasionally caused friction. At the West Ham annual Christmas party, the club broke with tradition and invited wives and girlfriends. It unbalanced the laddish atmosphere of team get-togethers and McAvennie was at the centre of the awkwardness. One of the women reacted to the striker’s ‘banter’ by pouring a pint of beer on his head. Another was accused by her husband of flirting with the Scot and delivered her spouse a slap on the face by way of reply.
Showbiz and sport were intersecting and the West Ham forward was perfect fodder for the red-top tabloids and their gossip columns. He leapt out of the sports pages on to the front sections of the newspapers in a way few players had done before. Billy Wright had flirted with non-football celebrity when he married Joy, one of the Beverley Sisters, in the 1950s. The Wolves and England captain was close to the end of his career, though, and the 36-year marriage was solid. There was no salacious aspect to Wright’s crossover fame.
George Best had become a symbol of the Swinging Sixties. The Northern Irishman was the most talented player Britain had produced and his ‘El Beatle’ nickname illustrated the Manchester United forward’s cultural and global impact. Best had already earned fame and glamour on the pitch before the headlines became more concerned with his private life than his football life.
McAvennie came from nowhere. Five months after arriving from Scotland, he was the most notorious footballer in the English game. For many people – among them the tabloid newspaper editors – the goals were almost immaterial. The his-and-hers topless photo sessions with model girlfriends and the tales of a wild, high life were an end in themselves. The age of instant celebrity was beginning.
Some thought McAvennie was prosecco to Best’s vintage champagne but he was an indication that the game was not dying. Football was merely mutating and the Scot was a harbinger of the quick-hit stardom that would come to characterize the game.
If McAvennie’s star was on the rise in the autumn of 1985, there was little to lift spirits on Merseyside. Manchester United’s winning start to the season continued, with Liverpool and Everton trailing in their wake. Liverpool were nine points behind Atkinson’s side after ten games. It was worse for Everton.
The champions had lost three times and trailed the leaders by 13 points. Long-term injuries to Peter Reid and Derek Mountfield meant Howard Kendall’s resources were stretched. At least the Everton manager was not struggling as badly as Liverpool City Council.
The city was fast running out of money. Because the council had refused to set and collect a legal rate, the coffers would be empty by Christmas. To buy time and forestall legal action against the councillors, the decision was taken to issue 90-day redundancy notices to local authority employees.
It was a public-relations disaster. Despite every effort to make it clear to the recipients that the notices were merely a ploy and livelihoods were not being threatened, their arrival caused panic and dismay across the city. The situation was exacerbated because the council used a taxi firm to deliver the messages. In the short term, it meant that the council could keep its credit lines open and its members would not be surcharged. Unfortunately for Derek Hatton and co., many people misunderstood and mistrust of the local politicians grew stronger.
Within a week, the district auditor removed the 49 councillors from office and fined them £106,000, the lost interest for the period during which rates had not been set.
Worse was to come as the party conference season began. Neil Kinnock, the Labour leader, used his keynote speech in Bournemouth to lambast Liverpool Council and launch an assault on the Militant Tendency.
Kinnock dismissed the city’s attempt to confront Thatcherism as a quixotic dream:
I’ll tell you what happens with impossible promises. You start with far-fetched resolutions. They are then pickled into a rigid dogma, a code, and you go through the years sticking to that, outdated, misplaced, irrelevant to the real needs, and you end in the grotesque chaos of a Labour council – a Labour council – hiring taxis to scuttle round a city handing out redundancy notices to its own workers.
As a piece of rhetoric, it was a masterpiece. The repetition and emphasis of ‘Labour’, the use of ‘scuttle’ and the contemptuous Welsh tones made it perhaps Kinnock’s greatest speech. In Liverpool – and in Downing Street – it was seen as the final surrender of socialism and resistance to the government.
‘The speech changed everything,’ Hatton said. ‘Before it, we were going to meetings all over the country – Sheffield, London, Manchester – and getting crowds of two, three thousand. None of the local politicians were getting crowds anywhere near this and they wanted us on the same platform. It felt like we were at the forefront in the fight against Thatcherism.’
The battle was over. ‘From that moment, Labour leaders didn’t want to know. Kinnock convinced the party that his way was the only way to get rid of Thatcher. Well, we all know how that turned out.’
On Merseyside, even those who opposed Hatton and his colleagues were downcast. The mood of the dominant south of England was summed up in an editorial in The Times:
Nothing must let the Liverpool councillors off the hook they fashioned for themselves two years ago when they announced their intention to ‘confront’ [the government]. Liverpool, this sad city, must be an object lesson of the consequences of irresponsible administration: if its people return a Militant-dominated council, they must be first witness of the result.
Later, Hatton bumped into Teddy Taylor, the Conservative MP who had warned that the government would come looking for Liverpool after the miners had been quashed. ‘Taylor was laughing,’ Hatton said. ‘He said, “Margaret got the shock of her life when Kinnock did her work for her.”’
Liverpool, the city tha
t fought back, was beaten. The struggle would continue but there was never any doubt after Kinnock’s speech that the Militant era was over. The city council’s quest to build houses and maintain jobs and services had been fatally undermined.
Peter Hooton, who had seen the council’s good work first hand, was appalled. ‘It was a proper people’s council,’ he said. ‘They addressed the problem of housing, cleared the tenements and built real houses for people.’
It was not about dogma, despite Kinnock’s words. Hatton may have been the face of local Labour politics but Tony Byrne, the chairman of the finance and housing committees, was the brain. He was a clever strategist and even the Spectator called him ‘a splendid financier’. When forced to sell off council houses to tenants by the government, Byrne sold the mortgages to a French bank and used the money to build more civic accommodation.
‘Tony Byrne had a regeneration strategy and cleared the slums,’ Hooton said. ‘At elections, turnouts were high and Labour kept increasing their share of the vote. Instead of seeing this as a template for resisting Thatcherism, Kinnock attacked it. The national Labour party was trying to undermine the local party.’
These were bleak times for the city but one correspondent found humour in the situation in a letter to the Echo by evoking football and the great wide players of Anfield and Goodison’s past.
‘I reckon Neil Kinnock is very inconsiderate attempting to deprive Liverpudlians of our left-wingers,’ wrote a G. Ormesher. ‘After all, we have not had the privilege of being entertained by men in that position since the days of Eglington, Liddell, Thompson and Morrissey.’
But even football was piling on the pain. The only thing that could make things grimmer on Merseyside was Manchester United winning the league and it increasingly looked like that was going to happen.
