by Greg Tesser
Gordon’s literary relationship with Venables prospered later in the decade with the launch of the first of their Hazell books, written under the bizarre nom de plume of P.B Yuill.
‘My name is James Hazell and I’m the biggest bastard who ever pushed your bell-button.’ Those words essentially encapsulate Hazell’s persona: a cocky cockney version of Raymond Chandler’s Philip Marlowe or Dashiell Hammet’s Sam Spade. The books were well received and in 1978 made an extremely successful transition to the small screen with twenty-two one-hour long episodes, running for two years.
Nicholas Ball starred as Hazell, and there were several in-joke names used in the series. For example, Hazell’s lawyer Gordon Gregory worked for ‘Venables, Venables, Williams and Gregory’; reference here to the two authors and QPR’s chairman at the time, Jim Gregory. One of the villains is named Keith O’Rourke – the surname the same as that of QPR striker John O’Rourke. A former Chelsea player, by the way, he was also at Arsenal. For a short while I was his agent, but that’s another story.
The most riotous evening I ever spent with him was at his flat somewhere in Chelsea. The living room was large – you could have described it as a drawing room without being called a snob – and I was there with Marsh and Venables. We had had a long, liquid lunch at Pizza Express, and for some reason found ourselves at Gordon’s gaff. The drink continued to flow, and after an hour or three both Rod and Terry left. I stayed with Gordon, and we talked, or more accurately he did, because he possessed a beautiful turn of phrase. I loved his Scottish accent, which reminded me so much of Charlie Cooke and also of those days of watching The White Heather Club on the box on New Year’s Eve.
He was entertaining, and I probably sounded very young and very naïve to this man of the world, who had seen life at a level that I had never experienced during my feather-bed existence. Someone once told me that Gordon had once been a card-carrying member of the British Communist Party, but I never did manage to suss out his political leanings. Anyway, in my estimation some of the best people were at one time in their lives full-blown Commies.
We spoke, naturally enough, about Chelsea and Ossie and Charlie Cooke. I told him how much I admired Charlie’s intellect and what a change it was to meet a professional footballer who was actually excited about literature. I explained that Cooke was a Hemingway man, and he expressed surprise. As glasses were recharged and then recharged again, the conversation deteriorated into that typical limbo land when everything that is said seems on the surface either pithy or witty, before drunkenness itself sets in.
The next thing I know, Gordon is offering me a joint. Not any old joint, but one packed with the Beluga of cannabis resin, and as easy to drag on as a handmade gasper. More chat; probably more nonsense from me. Then suddenly I sort of come round and announce that I had better head home. So I telephoned for a minicab – it was Meadway Radio Cars, based in London NW11 – and waited, still puffing, almost dementedly, on the grass.
What with the booze and the joint, I was by now in ‘pretentious moi’ territory, saying things to Gordon like: ‘Art is like a drug in the sense that perceptions are altered.’ Well, my perceptions were being altered, but it had nothing at all to do with art.
By now I couldn’t care a sod about anything, so when old Gordon handed me a tin of the stuff to take back with me, I thanked him profusely, and proceeded to light up another joint. Still gassing away, we were, when the cab arrived. There was a big smile on my young face as I held this illegal cigarette in my right hand, which by now had gone out.
The Meadway driver was one of those cockney drivers of the old school: friendly, polite and at the same time talkative. He was also a bloke not worried about ferrying a ‘dope fiend’ in his car, because as I relit my joint and told him naïvely what I was doing, he didn’t bat an eyelid.
During the journey we somehow got on to the subject of football, and when I told him of my relationship with some of the Chelsea players and Peter Osgood in particular, his sleepy-looking eyes lit up. Yes. He was a fan. It was very late and the London traffic was light, but I got the impression my driver was taking me the long way round primarily because he wanted to talk football.
Eventually we arrived in the genteel, quiet serenity that is Hampstead Garden Suburb, and I said farewell to this chatty cabby. Still clutching my elongated joint, I handed him a hefty tip.
Meadway Radio Cars: not a name to conjure with, but it does have one claim to fame. Back in the 1980s, at the height of Maggie Thatcher’s ‘loads o’ money’ yuppies, one of the company’s founders, a corpulent character lacking in intellect but blessed with a barrow boy’s innate sharpness called Harry Shulman (a rough diamond who was more ‘rough’ than ‘diamond’), was – as was very often the case – short of ready money. The reasons for this were numerous, but his main problem was that, amongst other things, he was a gambling addict. He would win and lose vast sums on the tables at the Sportsman Casino on Tottenham Court Road. In fact he once sold the number plate of his way-past-its-sell-by-date Jaguar, YUP1, for over £20,000 just to fuel his habit!
FOURTEEN
EUROPEAN GLORY
AND THE ATHENS TRIO
Chelsea’s final three league games in 1971 were undistinguished affairs: a 2–1 home win over Coventry City. Then a mere forty-eight hours later, a 1–0 defeat at the hands of Burnley at a sparsely populated Stamford Bridge – the attendance was just 14,356 – and the season was rounded off with a goalless draw at Ipswich. So, come 1 May, and the table saw the Blues in sixth spot, just behind Liverpool on goal average, having suffered nine defeats.
Arsenal finished top of the tree, fifteen points clear of Sexton’s boys. They also lifted the FA Cup, collecting their first-ever double. But there were no Champions’ League places to be obsessed about in those days, and it is worth noting that Chelsea’s points tally was just one shy of third-placed Spurs.
There was a small incident which involved me turning my ankle over in a pothole in Hampstead. This ‘nothing event’ confirmed to me what I had always thought about the so-called cocky, Jack the lad merchants such as Os, Marsh and Venables.
To the fans on the terraces these were ultra-confident young men, who revelled in showing off. Some people called them ‘flash bastards’, but I knew this was far from the truth. Anyway, let us get back to my ankle turning: it blew up like a balloon, which necessitated the wearing of a decrepit slipper, and utilising an old hand-me-down walking stick which belonged to my father.
The first time Os saw me walking with a pronounced limp, battered slipper on my right foot and clutching my stick, he gave me the nickname of ‘Hoppy’. Walking along the Strand one afternoon towards Fleet Street, he even helped me across the road in the manner of a Good Samaritan assisting some doddery elderly lady. I tried to tell him there was nothing seriously wrong with my foot, but he insisted on doing what he obviously felt was the right thing. I felt somewhat of a fraud, and when I protested, he just smiled and continued to call me ‘Hoppy’.
Now, this insignificant event confirmed what I always knew. These guys were brimful of compassion and genuine warmth: their on-stage persona was just a performance in the manner of an actor or a singer. Gordon Williams summed it all up neatly when he said that Terry Venables, for example, was ‘a very serious introverted guy – the cheeky cockney chappie was a total act’.
Athens on 19 May 1971 gave the impression of being a much more democratic city than Salonika. Eight months had passed since that edgy and bizarre opening tussle in UEFA’s number two tourney, and the Fascist junta continued to run the show in the country that, ironically, gave birth to democracy.
However, the European Cup Winners’ Cup Final was a major event in the country’s capital, and with all the UEFA big cheeses in attendance plus other dignitaries, the Greek authorities were determined to put on what they considered their ‘kinder liberal face’.
The stars of Real Madrid were in a perverse way the perfect opponents for Chelsea. At the time Spain was still
being ruled by Fascist dictator, General Franco, who incidentally was himself a fanatical fan of Real. So, despite the glossing-over of the venue and its nasty political overtones and such things as censorship and torture by so many politicians who prided themselves on being democrats, the VIP areas of the stadium were full of self-confessed Fascists. You could say that the game’s powerbrokers lacked any semblance of moral gumption.
45,000 supporters were packed into the Karaiskakis Stadium (plus the phalanx of Fascists). The stadium was part of Greek history, having been built as a velodrome for the first modern Olympics in 1896. It was named after a Greek hero, General Georgios Karaiskakis, who helped to defeat the Turks in the revolution of 1821. He was eventually slain not far from the environs of the stadium complex itself.
The Chelsea players knew they would be in for a tough encounter, but as Alan Hudson told me: ‘They (Real) were obviously a very good side, but a mere shadow of their predecessors. I saw the early ’60s version, when they made the European Cup their own personal property. Di Stefano, Puskas, Gento, Kopa and Santamaria: they were a football Hall of Fame.’
Francisco Gento was a dazzling winger who collected 43 caps for Spain and won the European Cup on no less than six occasions with Real Madrid – an unmatched record. But come the Chelsea face-off, he was now three years off forty, a bit on the portly side, and much of his famous oomph and zest had dissipated.
One Real Madrid player more than any other tickled Hudson’s fancy: ‘Easily their best player was midfielder Pirri, who was beautifully balanced and played the game as I like it played. Chess again. He used his teammates like pawns, working gambits. At the very highest level of a European competition, it really was like playing chess in a top championship: a battle without armour, a war without blood.’
Jose Martinez Sanchez, aka ‘Pirri’, represented Real Madrid for fifteen years from 1964–1979, winning ten La Liga titles, and the 1966 European Champions’ Cup. He gained 41 caps for Spain and after retiring, qualified as a doctor, working for his club’s medical staff.
Looking back through the mists of time, Huddy told me that ‘Pirri began running the first half – he looked in complete control. But Os put us in front with one of his beauties, and for a very long time it looked as if that would win us the final, but Pirri had other ideas, by pushing on his troops with some masterly football, and with just twenty seconds left, they hit us with an equaliser, Zicco capitalising on a mistake by John Dempsey’.
It has to be remembered that this European showpiece took place some years before the days of penalty shoot-outs and an unhealthy reliance on television money. But even when this is taken into consideration, my mind boggled when I learnt that the UEFA blazers, in their infinite wisdom, had made no plans for a replay!
After a great deal of bureaucratic humming and hawing, it was decided that the rematch should take place two days later at the same venue. This caused problems aplenty, not just for the Chelsea faithful that had made the trip via various packages costing up to £24 (serious folding stuff in ’71), but also for players and media people.
One incident, which highlights how times have changed in over forty years, revolves around Chelsea’s John Hollins, and was told to me by Alan Hudson. It seems that Hollins was due to be best man at a wedding, and his mother told him he couldn’t stay for the replay!
I’ll let Hudson take up the story: ‘Thursday was ordered as a rest day. Dave Sexton gave instructions that although we needed liquid intake, alcohol was banned. I went off to the market, with drinking the last thing on my mind. I was struggling with an injury to my thigh, and the thought of facing Pirri with a dodgy thigh and a hangover would have been very costly. That long Thursday was solitary and had an almost surreal quality about it because as lunchtime approached, Os, Charlie and Tommy (Baldwin) strolled up to the pool bar at the Athens Hilton, as if on a mission. I cannot in my wildest dreams think of who suggested such an afternoon and why, or can I? Of course I can, it was Osgood, and only because he thought he’d score again. He did!
‘It must have been about ninety degrees and there they were downing these tropical punches like they were on an end-of-season-tour or family holiday. Surely they couldn’t have forgotten about tomorrow? Here we were, going into the most important match in our lives, and these three were throwing these drinks down them as if tomorrow never came. And had Dave been tipped off, they would have been on the next flight home. I swear when I looked at them I had to check my own head, for they looked like we had won the match the night before and were celebrating.
‘Os was wearing a striped shirt that I think he wore after the match the following night, with a pair of Chelsea shorts and sandals. As I left, he raised his glass one last time and said, “Rest your leg, son, don’t worry, leave it all to me”.
The three mavericks were three completely different characters, but as Hudson has said, ‘If you put them together you had a very powerful concoction’.
Alan did actually challenge Peter Osgood about his eccentric pre-match build-up for what was probably Chelsea’s most important ever fixture. But he simply sent Hudson back to the hotel with these words: ‘Go home and have an early night, son, and leave it to me. I will win us the game.’
In Hudson’s own words, ‘It was the most frightening confidence, bordering on the ridiculous and arrogance, a sort of blindness, but he had done it time and time again. Absolutely nothing and nobody fazed him.’
And come match number two, Os was true to his word, putting away with aplomb the Blues’ second goal, which proved to be the winner. Chelsea’s first goal had come from an unlikely source: centre-half John Dempsey, who fired home with a venomous volley. Os’ goal was instigated by the battling Baldwin, who passed to the King, and he thundered the ball into the Madrid net.
It was ‘squeaky bum time’ for Blues fans in the second half, with Fleitas halving the Londoners’ advantage with just fifteen minutes left. Then, right on full-time, Bonetti made a save that showed why he bore the nickname of ‘The Cat’.
Hudson has christened the threesome ‘The Athens Hilton Party’, and admitted to me, ‘They in fact probably stole the show. They were involved in both the goals that put us on the brink of the club’s first-ever European success. They made a mockery of everything surrounding how to prepare for a football match, and they broke every rule in the book along the way. These three players just sat there relaxing with the look of holidaymakers who had earned a long awaited summer holiday. We playboys had now broken new ground in my first two seasons!’
Chelsea’s defeat of Real Madrid 2–1 – even a Real side shorn of the class of bygone years – never quite received the accolades that it deserved. But what it did confirm was that if manager Sexton could keep this squad together and somehow manage to instil more consistency as well as that ‘it’ factor – the ability to prevail when performing badly – then the future at Stamford Bridge looked to be a bright one; one dominated by a constant lifting of trophies. The fact that this never transpired was the fault of men not attempting to understand the human psyche.
It was Groundhog Day down the Fulham Road, as the players drove in triumph past their adoring fans holding aloft their European prize. It didn’t quite have that feeling of unadulterated euphoria that so dominated the post-FA Cup-winning revels, but it still was something to behold.
By now the 1960s’ atmosphere, which had continued to pervade the early years of the ’70s, was changing; not markedly at first, but as the 1971–72 season approached, life in Britain was starting to have a starker look about it, as class confrontation and strikes reappeared on the landscape with ever-increasing frequency and seriousness.
In many ways, Chelsea’s season mirrored that of the fortunes of the country: so many what ifs: so many let-downs. One point from the first four First Division encounters of the new campaign was a paltry return for such a talented squad.
In Europe, their opening game in the Cup Winners’ Cup was easy-peasy in its truest sense, as Os smashed a
ll the net-finding records with a hat-trick in the first leg of the tie with Luxembourg outfit Jeunesse Hautcharage in an 8–0 canter. And then in the second leg, he bagged five in Chelsea’s all-time European record score, which stands to this day, of 13–0.
I watched this travesty of a football match against the amateurs from the Duchy (who included in their line-up a guy with one arm, and another wearing spectacles) from the old stand up in the stars that made the protagonists on the park resemble Subbuteo figures. I sat there in the company of Os’ sister Mandy, herself a footballer of outstanding ability, bewildered by what I was witnessing on the pitch: these amateurs from the land of the radio station (208 on the medium wave) that enlivened so many teenagers’ lives in the 1950s and early ’60s were in all honesty of pub-team class.
Frankly, the lifting of the Luxembourg Cup by Hautcharage was a miracle in itself. The club was based in a picturesque village of some 700 people, and participated in the country’s third tier. The 4–1 extra-time victory over one of the Duchy’s football superpowers, Jeunesse Esch, was pure David defeating Goliath, and the owners of a local brewery were so overjoyed by this unprecedented success that it offered free beer to the village for three days! Their own dinky home ground was far too small to host the first leg, having a capacity of no more than a 1,000 or so. As such, it was decided to move the game to the national stadium in the capital and 13,000 spectators paid through the turnstiles to witness what was in effect lambs to the slaughter.
Next up were Åtvidabergs of Sweden. Despite being several classes above the bakers and candlestick makers of Luxembourg, a comfortable passage to round three was predicted. But the inconsistency that had dogged Sexton’s charges since day one of the season continued unabated.
A 0–0 score line in Sweden was a dour affair, but Ossie and co were expected to up the ante at the Bridge in the second game. That they failed to do so was down to their profligacy in front of goal, highlighted by John Hollins’ failure to convert from the penalty spot. The final score was 1–1, with Hudson notching for the Blues, but the Cup holders went out to an outfit of part-timers, on the away goals rule. The 25,000 fans went home shaking their heads in disbelief. Was this new era of glory about to implode?
