by Lee Howey
Enter the famous Mr David Dandy, consultant orthopaedic surgeon of the renowned Addenbrooke’s Hospital, sixty miles away in Cambridge; a man with an international reputation as a kneesorter-outer. Eminent? He couldn’t be eminenter. He was the author of Arthroscopy of the Knee – A Diagnostic Colour Atlas. It’s one of those books that I have never quite got round to reading. But he is probably best known in football as the bloke who put Paul Gascoigne back together following his infamous, serious and wholly self-inflicted injury following a ludicrous lunge at Gary Charles during the 1991 FA Cup final. Mr Dandy carried out the work on my knee too.
While I was becoming compos mentis as the general anaesthetic wore off post-surgery, he told me that I was finished and that I could not play football again. As you will appreciate, this information did not immediately penetrate. I lay there for three or four hours during which time I concluded that his previous visit and dire prognosis had been an unpleasant dream (I was rendered even more woozy having been ‘nil by mouth’ for quite a while).
The Ipswich physiotherapist, David Bingham, came in and asked: ‘Have you spoken to Mr Dandy?’
‘He came in. At least I think he came in. I’m not sure if I was dreaming.’
David must have realised what had happened, because he looked directly at me and said: ‘Oh, Lee. He’s taken all the cartilage out. You can’t play again.’
• • •
There didn’t seem much point in arguing with Mr Dandy. He was one of the world’s leading orthopaedic surgeons, whereas I could only manage a ‘U’ in my O Level biology. My departure from Ipswich Town FC was imminent.
John Duncan was horrible. He gave me no indication that he cared in the slightest and seemed to regard me as an inconvenience. The most consideration he showed was when he asked me if I had insurance. Aged nineteen, my life was over, or so it seemed. In exchange for this I was given £1,500 from the PFA and a month’s salary from Ipswich. Even in 1988, this wasn’t going to tide me over for long.
Duncan said dismissively: ‘It’s probably for the best. D’yer know any other trades?’
He barely made eye contact and his whole manner was one of nonchalance. I am aware that there wasn’t a great deal he could have done for me, but the merest suggestion of sympathy would not have gone amiss. None was given. In 1990 this twat became the first ever Ipswich manager to be sacked. I guarantee I was less upset about this than you were – and you probably don’t even remember him. Our paths would cross again and I would enjoy the meeting immensely.
I had a discussion with David Bingham and Brian Owen; unlike Duncan, he was kind and attentive. Brian suggested a programme for recuperation and said: ‘Look, you can’t play professionally but you might be able to play part-time – if you look after your knee.’
I had returned to Sunderland and begun to look for work when John Carruthers contacted me again. He’d had a chat with Blyth Spartans, the famous non-league club twenty-five miles away in Northumberland, who were interested. I agreed to play for them for their final few games of the season. But every time I played the knee swelled up and I had no option but to pack it all in.
Apologies in advance for the bad language, but sometimes only swearing will suffice. I was not downhearted, despondent, dejected or even melancholy.
Try fucking distraught.
CHAPTER 3
BELGIUM
I had little option but to return to the parental home and renew hostilities with Norman and Yvonne.
This was expectedly difficult, but at least I was now old enough to come and go as I pleased and this was exactly what I did, regularly lurching in at daft o’clock in the morning after a night out with the chaps (in my defence, cribbage evenings in Sunderland do occasionally get out of hand). I was accused, understandably but with nothing like originality, of ‘treating the place like a hotel’. The compensation I received from Ipswich and the PFA was dwindling and it was time to get a job. I almost became a policeman.
We had a family friend, John Yearnshire, who was an officer in forensics for Northumbria Police. He loved football and photography, so when he wasn’t capturing the best side of a corpse, he would take action pictures of kids’ football games and hand out copies to grateful parents – free of charge too, because he did it purely for enjoyment. That was how we got to know him. His wife was (still is) Steph Yearnshire MBE, a senior officer who rose to be superintendent. Wheels were put in motion and I was given a date for an interview to join the ranks of the police. This was during the summer of 1988.
My knee was on the mend, so in the meantime I took up an offer to sign for Gateshead FC. My time there was brief but successful. That is to say, it was successful on the pitch.
I was promised £90 per game by the Gateshead manager Dave Parnaby (father of the future Middlesbrough and Birmingham defender Stuart Parnaby), which was to be paid monthly. So my plan was to earn a few quid playing football while waiting to begin a completely new career as a copper. I began to visualise it too; no villain would rest easy when Howey of the Yard was on the case. What could possibly go wrong with this plan?
Kidney disease, that’s what. During the close season and some weeks before I was to be interviewed by the police (in a good way), I was admitted to hospital after realising that I was pissing blood. First I was put in Sunderland General, where any reassurance I might have felt was expunged when the bloke in the next bed died during my first night there. I was petrified. I was then moved less than a mile away to a kidney ward in the Victorian non-splendour of another hospital, the Royal Infirmary. This was something of a misnomer because no one who was royal and infirm would have trusted their luck in that dump. The merely infirm had less say in the matter. It was demolished in 1996 with no lament.
I was in there for almost three weeks, during which time I lost weight quickly and quite dramatically. This was all the more alarming for someone who had been a fairly skinny specimen to begin with. I was also as yellow as custard. A doctor said he would run a few tests, with a view to possibly starting dialysis at the end of the first week if there was no sign of improvement. Oh boy, did I pray the night he told me that. Mercifully I began to mend. My condition, which was never properly diagnosed, began to improve of its own accord and dialysis was unnecessary.
My brother Steven was by then an apprentice at Newcastle and, in a seldom seen display of compassion, would come and visit me on his way home to Thorney Close and tell me how his career was progressing. I had no appetite and was admonished by the nurses for not eating properly. I evaded further censure with his help; he would eat my meals for me.
Guzzling a pile of sausage and mash on someone else’s behalf does not perhaps put him among our foremost humanitarians, but I was grateful at the time.
• • •
I seemed to be as far away from being a footballer as ever, so I was extremely glad to be discharged and free to turn out for Gateshead, even in the unforgiving maelstrom of the Northern Premier League (they had been a Football League club until 1960 when they were, quite outrageously and grossly unfairly, voted out of the league under the nonsensical re-election system).
My teammates there included another ex-St Aidan’s lad, Joe Olabode, and Simon Smith, who would play over 500 games in goal for the club. The captain was John Carver, who had not quite made the grade at Newcastle and Cardiff City, but was a pretty decent midfielder at this level, strong-willed and a leader on the pitch. Many years later, in 2015 to be precise, he managed Newcastle United to Premier League safety. Only just, but he succeeded where Alan Shearer failed in 2009 and Rafael Benitez in 2016.
Due to my skiving kidneys, when the 1988–89 season began I was thinner and weaker than I had been in years. Nevertheless, I was put up front where I played five or six times, scoring about the same number of goals. As I said, my time there was brief and successful. It was brief for a reason.
It was now mid-September. My interview for Northumbria Police was due and I was confident I would be accepted. I was due to be
paid the £90 per game for Gateshead I had been promised, which was for expenses incurred rather than wages. I was claiming unemployment benefit, so I wouldn’t have accepted wages, come what may. Heaven forfend. After Tuesday night training, money was being handed round the squad by Mr Parnaby and it was about an hour before he got to me, during which time I had mentally invested my few hundred quid on Guinness, kebabs and disreputable women.
Eventually, and looking decidedly sheepish, he handed me an envelope which contained exactly – a fiver. It was a nice crisp new fiver too, but that did not seem to me to be the most salient point. When a man has O Levels, not only in maths but also in economics, he can sometimes sense, almost instinctively, when he is being paid seventy-two times less money than has been agreed. This seemed like such an occasion.
A fiver was purportedly all that was left in the kitty and I was seriously pissed off. Mind you, the year was 1988 and in those days five pounds could buy you… almost bugger all, the same as now. There were still two players in the queue behind me who were given a fiver less than I had received, although this did not make me feel especially fortunate. I had played my last game for Gateshead.
• • •
The following day I received a phone call from a gentleman named Kenny Ellis, who had played for both Hartlepool and Darlington. He was now an agent for football clubs in Belgium, where he had also played. I didn’t know him, but he knew my dad and was aware of me as a footballer. He was in the process of arranging for five lads to travel to Namur, a city in central Belgium on the River Meuse, for a trial. He asked if I would be interested. I would.
‘Great. I’ll pick you up at 6.30 tomorrow morning,’ said an enthused Kenny. This was a problem, because this trip to the continent would coincide with my scheduled interview for Northumbria Police. What to do?
Something inside me resolved the dilemma by making me want to try my luck on the continent. Why not? You’re only young once and all that. My police career would be put on hold, where it remains to this day. The North East’s criminal underworld could hardly believe their good fortune.
Having made my apologies to the police, I headed for the airport that Thursday morning where I met the other trialists including Mickey Robinson, cousin of the Mickey Robinson I had been at school with. I also saw Danny Olson, the most absurdly self-confident person that Whitley Bay had ever produced and who was with me at Ipswich. We arrived in Namur a few hours later, found our digs and took part in the trial match the same evening.
The game was against Union Royale Namur in their home ground. We would nominally be an Éghezée XI; Éghezée being a village ten miles north of Namur. The trial was part of quite an ambitious project; it featured players trying their luck from various parts of Europe, Africa, Turkey and now the westernmost region of Thorney Close.
Danny had a superb game in midfield and did not need to remind everyone present of how well he was playing; but he did anyway. Each incisive pass he made was met with effusive self-praise such as ‘Look at that pass, man, I’m fuckin’ brilliant, I am’ and ‘I’m better than Zico, me’. He wasn’t what you might call reticent. Those who could speak English were no less bewildered than those who couldn’t.
I, on the other hand, barely touched the ball. Even then there was the distinctive continental pass, pass, pass, pass style of football which didn’t quite suit a big English centre-forward who was waiting impatiently for a decent cross to be placed on his bonce. So the game passed me by somewhat. Yet in the bar afterwards I could see Kenny Ellis schmoozing, talking up my talents to local bigwigs, including a father and son called Louis and Stéphane Gemine.
Louis was a portly fellow who would have been fairly tall, had Nature made it possible for him to be rolled out like Plasticine. As it happened, he was a short-arse. However, for the benefit of those among you who may be unfamiliar with the Belgian business community of the late 1980s, he was also a wealthy and influential short-arse, the president of a nearby club called AS Hemptinne (l’Alliance Sportive Hemptinne) and owner of a local company called Hydrocar. I believe Louis is still head of the firm today, supplying asphalt, paving blocks and suchlike. He barely spoke any English and I spoke even less French, but Stéphane, slightly older than me, was fluent in both.
After a fairly tortuous translated conversation, it was agreed that AS Hemptinne, based in the village of Hemptinne twenty-five miles south-west of Namur, would take Danny and me for a three-month trial period, which would bring us to Christmas and the winter break (so beloved of football leagues virtually everywhere in Europe except Britain).
We were to be put in digs that would be paid for by the club and given wages of, I think, slightly under a couple of thousand Belgian francs per week, which worked out at approximately £180. Not a fantastic salary even then, but it must be said a considerable improvement upon the fiver that Gateshead had offered me. Despite having never heard of AS Hemptinne, Danny and I were excited by the prospect of a new life ahead of us, and agreed. We then headed back to the digs with Kenny to change clothes for a night/morning out to celebrate. In fact we stayed for several days while contracts were being sorted. Namur on that Friday 18 September, was a sight to see. The city centre was lined with tables and crammed with revellers. It was reminiscent of Sunderland on black-eye Friday, but without the black eyes.
Kenny knew all the best places but I soon realised that he was not a big drinker. He was way beyond that; in fact, he was an alcoholic. Indeed, the booze killed him in 1992 while he was still only in his mid-forties.
Instead of heading straight back to the North East, we flew to London in order to call in at the FA’s headquarters at Lancaster Gate, where we could sort out our registration. Inevitably, this was followed by another big night on the razzle in the capital. I don’t remember where we stayed or what it was called. What I can confirm is that it was a special kind of shit-hole. The image of Kenny, snoring on his back in his antiquated undies, is one that I retain with the utmost clarity. Believe me when I say that I wish it was otherwise.
• • •
I returned to Namur on the Monday. Training took place on Tuesdays and Thursdays with matches played on Sundays. My pay might not have taken very long to count, but I could hardly complain of being overworked. The light schedule was also very good news for my dodgy knee.
The Belgian football league pyramid had the first division or Pro League at the top, featuring the likes of Anderlecht and Club Brugge. Then there was a second division, with the third division – the Provincial League – split into the north and south of the country as had been the case in England until 1958. When we were promoted in 1990, AS Hemptinne went into the south league, although geographically we were slap bang in the middle of the country. Before then we were in the Southern Province or, to anglicise it, the Belgian Conference.
After attending to business in Blighty I was looking forward to living the high life in Belgium, mindful of what a fabulous Friday night out we had enjoyed when we first arrived. But my social life was dealt a double blow. First, Danny informed me that he had changed his mind, deciding that he wanted to stay in Whitley Bay with his other half. This left me alone in Namur, unable to speak a word of French and pondering whether I had done the right thing in duffing the police interview.
I slept on the matter and decided that for three months I may as well give it my best efforts and try to enjoy the experience. After all, things were still looking decidedly rosier than they had just a few weeks earlier when I had been lying in a hospital bed, wondering if my kidneys were about to drop out and relying on Steven’s minimal better nature to eat my tea for me. As Francis Bacon said, to Norman Collier I believe, adversity is not without comforts and hopes.
However, none of this up-and-at-’em attitude could prepare me for my first sighting of AS Hemptinne’s ‘stadium’ when I reported there for my first day of training. I had naively expected something similar to where I’d played the trial game in Namur where they had a decent little ground.
Whatever the ground capacity might have been was neither here nor there as only around 500 people lived in Hemptinne anyway. The stand could hold about a fifth of the population, while everyone else could just congregate wherever they liked around the pitch. Unsurprisingly, there was no concern over ‘crowd’ congestion or hooliganism. The most serious safety risk for spectators was if any of them should step too far back from the pitch, as they might then absent-mindedly lean against the electric cattle wire and have 150 volts sent through their arse cheeks.
On the positive side, the Hemptinne squad comprised a really good set of lads. I was introduced to them and, apart from feeling slightly discomfited at being kissed on both cheeks by other men for the first time in my life, rubbed along with my new colleagues very well (for the benefit of the truly unworldly, it was the upper cheeks). A few of them spoke English, which was obviously useful on the training pitch, but also helpful in assuring me that none of my new teammates actually fancied me. The coach, Fernand Brabant, spoke English about as well as I spoke French, but apart from that, all was well on the playing side.
