Massively Violent & Decidedly Average

by Lee Howey

  The game itself was a poor one and goalless at half-time, although Wolves had been the better side. All I remember of the first half is that it was a chilly evening in March and I was being smashed into the middle of April by de Wolf. Knee in the back, elbow on the top of the head, smashed from the sides, numerous pushes. It was thoroughly unpleasant and not even subtle. The referee, Philip Wright, ignored my complaints, seeming to adopt the view that a big centre-forward should expect this sort of thing, and took no action. This was much to the delight of John, who was enjoying his impunity.

  During the interval I didn’t listen to a word that Mick Buxton said. It was remarkable when anyone ever did, but on this occasion even someone who didn’t speak like a man swallowing an ocarina would have struggled for my attention. I was seething at what had occurred in the first forty-five minutes and could think only of retribution. It was the solitary thought occupying my head and the prospect of a red card was no deterrent at all. A thunderously bad mood was heightened two minutes into the second half when Andy Thompson scored a penalty for Wolves. The de Wolf treatment continued relentlessly; elbow, knee, toe, kick, thump. None of my attempted retaliations worked. I kept missing or not connecting properly and the frustration was making me even angrier.

  But destiny called in its own good time. With an hour gone, Tony Norman put a goal kick just over the halfway line; de Wolf was standing to my left with the ball about to land closer to him than me, and I clattered into him from the side with my left arm when he was in mid-jump. He hit the ground a relatively long time before I did, so I could have moved my feet further apart to avoid landing on him – but chose not to. I landed with one foot on his knee, which was already in a brace, and the other on his calf. He was carried off and did not play again that season. My anger still didn’t subside and several other opponents could testify to this. It was back to the days of Plains Farm Club and the home crowd was incensed. I was slightly late with a challenge on their rightback, Jamie Smith, treading on his toe. Mr Wright, having taken no action when I incapacitated de Wolf, showed me a yellow card for that – and it was a complete accident.

  I wasn’t in the habit of doing these things to just anyone. But both Geoff Thomas and John de Wolf had invited retribution and duly received it. With John it wasn’t just a case of ‘he would have done it to me’; he was doing it to me.

  However, I don’t think the Wolves fans saw matters in quite the same regard. A West Midlands football phone-in on a local radio station that evening was apparently dedicated to me, although not in a flattering way like an earlier show dedicated to Slade had been. It was all about how I had done this to Geoff and John, I should never be allowed on a football field again; that sort of thing. Had I known about it I could have called and given my side of the story, but it wouldn’t have been a good idea. Not much appeasement would have come about because I would have been honest. I was neither proud nor sorry. Both Thomas and de Wolf had reaped what they had sown.

  This was the preamble to the death threats I received from Wolverhampton, although to the best of my recollection I was never actually killed. Razor blades were posted to me, as was a good deal of hate mail. Two letters stated that I would be shot if I ever returned to Molineux. Another particularly unconvincing billet-doux, purportedly from a chapter of the Hell’s Angels, threatened to carry out other unspeakable acts of a thoroughly bad-mannered type. Further threats were made against my wife and kids, even though I didn’t have any children at the time. It was all referred to the police. No one really took it seriously, but there is always that tiny piece of doubt and when we returned to Wolves a year later no one would warm up next to me.

  • • •

  The most important element of the Wolves game was not any personal tribulation. It was the bald fact of a 1–0 defeat for Sunderland. Yet another bad day. The season was deteriorating along with the standard of football we were producing.

  I remember very little of what I did personally on the pitch during the remainder of 1994–95. What I do recall is that matters for the club as a whole came to a head when we played the next game, which was against Stoke City at Roker Park on 11 March. We had only won two league games since beating Bristol City in December and were a single place above the relegation zone. Don Goodman had been sold to Wolves before Christmas with midfielder Steve Agnew the only notable recruit. The dissatisfaction was well founded.

  Fifteen minutes into the Stoke game, thousands of fans held up red cards to visibly display their disapproval. The protest was aimed mainly at Bob Murray, the owner (although he wasn’t chairman at this time). Late in the game I won a free kick when I was clattered by Stoke’s goalie, Ronnie Sinclair. Derek Ferguson delivered the free kick and Andy Melville got just in front of me to head the only goal of the game, which softened the mood in the stadium. Slightly. The protest continued outside the Main Stand after the match had ended. It was all becoming very ugly.

  I was still being run into the ground by training as a first team as well as a reserve player at Mick’s insistence. I never bothered to complain again and, as always, remained happy just to play when I was given the opportunity. Nevertheless, there was a limit to my natural compliance, and something happened that truly infuriated me. We bought Brett Angell from Everton. He would prove to be one of Sunderland’s more ill-fated signings of the 1990s.

  Brett had been quite a prolific goal scorer at Stockport County and Southend United before joining Everton in 1994 (strangely, Stockport had already loaned him to Everton twice). He was out of his depth in the Premier League, scoring one goal in over a year on Merseyside. He would later return to Stockport, where he resumed his impressive goal ratio, as he did at several other clubs too. By the end of a fairly successful career he had done well at most of his many clubs, but there were two glaring exceptions: Everton and Sunderland. He was loaned out three times by Sunderland before making a permanent move back to Stockport in November 1996. He would score just once for us too, and that was in the League Cup.

  Everton paid £500,000 for his services, which raised more than a few sniggers considering his goal scoring record there. Sunderland then took him off their hands – for £700,000 – so both player and sniggers were transferred from Merseyside to Wearside. This was still a significant investment and made him one of our more expensive signings and 117 times more costly than I had been. He would therefore have to play, which meant that I wouldn’t. After signing, he started all eight of the season’s remaining games while I didn’t even make the bench for any of them. Brett never looked like scoring in any of those matches except his first one. What little confidence he retained after his Everton experience dissipated further.

  Only a year remained on my contract and Brett’s arrival looked, at the time, to signify the end of me at Sunderland. This was mightily annoying and I demanded to speak to the manager about it. After a brief and failed attempt to fob me off by his secretary, I barged into Mick’s office, which was in the Main Stand at Roker Park, overlooking the car park and with an unrivalled view of the Citroën garage. He was sitting in his usual Napoleonic splendour, slurping tea from a Popeye mug.

  He looked up and made a guttural noise that sounded something like: ‘Gyerr fnn urr, Lee’. He may have been eating a custard cream – perhaps even two (honestly, the debauchery of the man).

  I was undeterred by his gilded eloquence and launched into a tirade about how I was working myself into the ground, playing in two positions, training uncomplainingly more than anyone else at the club for first team and reserves (I hadn’t forgotten his ‘tiredness is all in your head’ shite), only for him to go out and buy an expensive striker. He may as well have told me I wasn’t wanted and that I should look for another club. I had not been dealt with openly and honestly. Brett’s arrival seemed to denote that my life was about to be completely rearranged, because when a footballer changes clubs he doesn’t just have a new employer, he usually has to find another home in another town too.

  New arrivals and a
dded competition for places are an accepted part of football. Players are bought to improve the squad (even if it doesn’t always work out like that). If it’s you who is shunted out, then tough. That’s life. What sparked my anger was no one having the courtesy to keep me informed that a pricey new signing was apparently about to make my already limited first team chances even more difficult.

  I really did lose it. After I had threatened to give Mick an even better view of the Citroën garage by putting him through the office window, he finally managed to speak a few words. Of English.

  ‘Calm down man, Lee. Take a seat.’

  ‘Calm down!? I will; I’ll put you through that fu—’

  ‘It wasn’t me who signed him.’

  This temporarily threw me sideways, but it didn’t take long to regather my thoughts and I still retained a keen interest in his literal defenestration.

  I screamed: ‘What do you mean you didn’t sign him? You’re the manager. A fucking useless one, but you’re still the manager’– and further abuse to go with it.

  ‘I never signed him. The chairman did.’

  I didn’t know whether he meant the chairman, John Featherstone, or the owner, Bob Murray, but this didn’t matter much to me either way. A deal had been struck between the boards of directors at Roker and Goodison and that was that. Mick had no input and so cannot be blamed for the disaster that was Brett Angell’s move to Sunderland; and a disaster it was for all concerned – except Everton.

  It was all most unfortunate. Brett became an unwittingly comical figure. In training, whoever was deemed to be the worst performer in practice games was made to wear this yellow vest. Brett never seemed to have that vest off his back. This didn’t do much for my confidence either because he was playing ahead of me. It was at this point I realised that my future was likely to be as a centre-half.

  Brett became a fulcrum of amusement for the fans too. He would be loaned out twice the following season, to Sheffield United and West Bromwich Albion. He appeared as a half-time substitute for Albion against Sunderland in our final home game, a game that secured the championship for us, and was mocked most cruelly by the crowd when he came on. It must have been embarrassing enough that Sunderland had given West Brom permission to play him against us, as he was not considered much of a threat. That was before the Sunderland fans gave a huge mocking cheer when he ran onto the pitch and then just laughed. Not the snarling, derisory laughter they would have given to someone like Alan Shearer or Steve McManaman; it was the type of laughter you might hear when someone falls down a manhole. His humiliation at Sunderland was then complete. Nothing went right for this man.

  Poor Brett. He was a lovely fellow. A gentleman. I’m glad to say that he did well after his nightmare couple of years at Sunderland and Everton and scored many goals in what was, overall, a very decent career. He was a good striker when he had a bit of confidence. Indeed, he had scored four times against Sunderland before he joined us. What didn’t kill him made him stronger.

  But it all might have been so different had he made a good start. He very nearly did. His Sunderland debut was against Barnsley at Oakwell on Friday 24 March 1995, a game played in a ridiculously high wind. I wasn’t even on the bench (I don’t suppose that my recent threat to lob the manager from his own office window had enhanced my claim to more first team opportunities).

  With the score at 0–0 we took a throw-in deep in their half, which ended with the ball in Barnsley’s net. The ball may or may not have skimmed Brett’s head. No one else touched it. If Brett did make contact, it was a goal; if he didn’t, it remained goalless as per the laws of the game. The referee said that the ball had been thrown directly into the net, so no goal. The final score was 2–0 to Barnsley. We were in serious trouble and only one place above a relegation spot.

  Additional farce was injected into the occasion by the first and last appearance of the defender Dominic Matteo in a Sunderland shirt. He was then a twenty-year-old, highly rated prospect and it was something of a coup to bring him in on loan from Liverpool. But in yet another pantomime scene, it transpired that his registration had not been completed in time and that he should never have played at Barnsley. Perhaps no one at Roker Park knew how to operate the fax machine. Maybe the club pigeon had been shot. Whatever the reason, Bob Murray had to plead our case with the FA. They accepted it as an honest mistake that hadn’t benefitted us because we had lost the game anyway. They let us off with a £2,500 fine and ordered Dominic back to Anfield. This was fortunate as they could have deducted points, with potentially ruinous consequences.

  Mick Buxton was not responsible for signing Brett Angell, or for the Dominic Matteo fiasco, but he was sacked soon after the debacle at Oakwell. Out the window anyway, so to speak. Even his charisma couldn’t save him.

  There were no goodbyes; he just disappeared. The first I knew of his departure was when someone mentioned it in the changing rooms at training. Barnsley was our fourth defeat in a row and we were only going one way. We were the biggest club in the league, but had lost to (sorry if this sounds patronising) the likes of Grimsby, Millwall, Swindon, Tranmere, Southend and Luton. The fans were embarrassed and angry and Mick had paid for those results. There is more to management than simply not being Terry Butcher.

  Bob Murray finally realised that appointing someone on the basis that they were already conveniently employed by the club was an approach that was considerably more easily implemented than it was productive. He was about to enlist the services of someone who would at last transform the club and leave a lasting legacy; a man who, certainly in terms of league position, would become Sunderland’s most successful manager since 1955 – and I would get to play my part.

  Before all that, he had to keep us out of the third tier of English football.

  CHAPTER 9

  PROGRESS AND PETER REID

  The situation that Peter Reid inherited was not as desperate as it had been two years earlier, but still indisputably precarious. Not only were Sunderland one place above the relegation zone, we were sinking.

  As a player, Peter’s credentials were not in dispute. He was a famously tenacious midfielder, but skilful too. His best days were at Everton where he won two league titles, an FA Cup and a European Cup Winners’ Cup. European Cup glory may have awaited Everton had not English clubs been booted out of Europe following the Heysel Stadium disaster of 1985. He was also an England international, including appearances in the 1986 World Cup.

  His only previous job in management had been at Manchester City between 1990 and 1993. His three top-flight finishes there were fifth, fifth again, then ninth. Four games into the 1993–94 season, he was sacked after three defeats and a draw. This seemed harsh at the time. In retrospect it seems incredibly misguided. By 1998 City had dropped down two divisions and been through another five, less successful managers. They would not return to anywhere near fifth in the Premier League for many years; this was a few hundred million quid later in the late 2000s.

  Peter joined Sunderland on an interim basis until the end of the 1994–95 season. I don’t think it’s a plot spoiler to mention that he would be there until October 2002. He had turned down several job offers before coming to Roker Park. His appointment was made quickly; in fact, he appeared before us unannounced. I don’t recall any speculative talk about who the new manager might be; there was no time for that.

  His personality was markedly different from that of Mick Buxton in that he had one. Peter was full of energy, chat and infectious Scouse enthusiasm. You always knew when he was anywhere within the vicinity; you could hear him. He gave the place an instant lift that we desperately needed because he only had seven games in which to save us.

  I was happy that such a well-known, respected and buoyant figure had arrived. There was just one problem: I didn’t even make the bench for any of the seven games. Trevor Hartley was still at the club and had Peter’s considerable ear. Trevor saw little merit in big old-fashioned centre-forwards. Everyone is entitled to their
opinion but, whether or not it affected his judgement, the fact that Trevor and I had never really got on too well can’t have helped my cause. Even if my appearances on the pitch had been sporadic since joining the club in 1993, I had always at least been in and around the first team squad. Now I wasn’t.

  A couple of days into Reidy’s tenure, I knocked on his door and introduced myself. I was relieved to discover that he at least knew who I was. I was seeking some sort of reassurance. I had never been certain to start games and had now been ejected from the first team squad altogether.

  He said: ‘Look. I only took the job five minutes ago and I don’t even know how long I’m going to be here. Let me get my feet under the table and then we’ll have a look.’

  He delivered on his promise. Although I personally had no part to play for the remainder of 1994–95, I was back on the bench for the first game of the following season. In the meantime I could only be a supporter; hoping like everyone else that the other lads could pull it off. They did.

  Peter Reid’s first game in charge was at home to Sheffield United on 1 April 1995; my twenty-sixth birthday. United were a decent side and fourteen places above us in a play-off spot. Given the respective positions of the two clubs, the Sunderland fans would probably have been satisfied with a draw. Then Craig Russell came off the bench for Brett Angell. With two minutes remaining and the score at nil–nil, we attacked. Craig, a Jarrow lad and Sunderland fan, scored what was probably the most important goal of his career. His shot was half saved by Alan Kelly. It then seemed to take about a fortnight for the ball to trundle over the line. It was one of those that appeared to have been inhaled into the net by the Fulwell End, but in it went for the only goal of the game.