Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Pelé missed the first nine games of the 1975 season and would also be absent for the final four. Yet the foundation had been laid for future years. In their final home match before Pelé’s debut, the Cosmos attracted only 5,227 for a contest against the Hartford Bi-Centennials. The figure jumped to 22,500 when the club’s new signing took the field against Toronto. The effect was the same on the road. Fewer than 5,000 Toronto fans had turned up when their team faced New York in May, but when the Cosmos returned with Pelé two months later almost 22,000 ventured out. The Washington Diplomats went from a crowd of 35,620 for the Cosmos game to 2,140 against Philadelphia three days later, although a 9–2 thrashing at the hands of New York had done nothing to encourage fans to return.

  But while the crowds were flocking to see the Cosmos, results on the field were disappointing. The New York team of 1975 consisted largely of South American players, one of the exceptions being Mike Dillon, the former Tottenham reserve centre-half who had played for Montreal in 1972. For the last few games of the season, he acquired an English teammate in Tommy Ord, signed from Rochester, for whom he had scored 14 goals. Ord, who played three games for Chelsea in 1972–73 after joining from non-League Erith and Belvedere, first played in the NASL for Montreal in 1973. A late-season replacement for Pelé, Ord got both goals in a 2–0 win on his debut against the Lancers, but defeats in the next two games, including a 5–0 thrashing at Boston, ended New York’s hopes of a play-off place.

  While Pelé had been considering life in the Big Apple, another renowned star of the world game was already on his way to America, although Eusebio’s signing for the Boston Minutemen had only a minimal impact. The Portuguese striker had been top scorer in the 1966 World Cup finals and spearhead of a powerful Benfica side throughout that decade, but with a series of knee injuries behind him he played only seven games for a Boston team that finished on top of the league’s Northern Division. He was overshadowed by Ade Coker, top scorer once more with ten goals, and Geoff Davies, on loan from Wrexham, who added six.

  In the Central Division, the new Chicago Sting franchise had former Manchester United centre-half Bill Foulkes as their coach. To provide the flair going forward, Foulkes brought in another former Old Trafford figure, Ian Storey-Moore, a quick and skilful forward with an eye for the goal, whose career had been plagued by a series of injuries. He had scored 105 goals for Nottingham Forest but had been limited to just 1 England cap before United pulled off one of the biggest and most controversial moves of the 1971–72 English season, snatching him from under Derby’s noses after Brian Clough had even introduced him to the Baseball Ground fans. Storey-Moore played only 39 League matches at United and had spent a year out of football before joining Chicago, for whom he played ten consecutive games in the first half of the season before making only four appearances as substitute in the second half of the year.

  The Sting, however, were well catered for up front by future United player Gordon Hill. Only 21, Hill, an explosive left-winger, joined on loan from Millwall and was one of the players of the season, scoring sixteen goals and adding seven assists. By November of 1975, Hill, his reputation flourishing, was on his way to Old Trafford in a £70,000 transfer, helping Tommy Docherty’s team rebuild their tarnished image with an exciting brand of football that took them to a place in the FA Cup final and third position in the First Division. Eddie May, the veteran Wrexham central defender, was second-leading scorer for Chicago with seven goals.

  The Denver Dynamo brought in former Miami Toros coach John Young as part of their makeover. On the field, 31-year-old Southampton midfielder Hugh Fisher provided his renowned competitive streak, while nomadic defender Peter Short joined a team otherwise made up of little-known Brits, Americans and South Africans, whose number included former Atlanta striker Kaizer Motaung.

  Denver won fewer than half their games and finished with an identical record to the Dallas Tornado, who finished the season by parting with their former championship-winning coach, Ron Newman. ‘We had a lot of injuries,’ he says. ‘Lamar Hunt was a stickler for keeping the roster to 17 players. He said you didn’t need more. But you did if you got injuries in the same position. We fought over the fact that I could not bring in extra players and in the end I was fired. Lamar said, “We are going to find the best coach in the world.” I said, “You have just fired him.”’ Newman, however, would be back.

  One of the year’s most interesting signings was Jimmy Johnstone, a hero to Celtic and Scotland fans, who turned up at the San Jose Earthquakes. The little flame-haired winger was one of the famous ‘Lisbon Lions’, the team that had become the first British club to win the European Cup when they beat Inter Milan in 1967. Still not 31, ‘Jinky’ was recruited to provide the service for English forward Paul Child. However, Johnstone’s run of ten games in the second half of the season included a seven-game losing streak. Child, whose four goals represented his least successful NASL season, failed to score a single goal alongside the ex-Celtic man.

  Child recalls with a chuckle, ‘They brought Jimmy in for his first game in a white Rolls Royce. He was very, very average. He was a great talent and at times he could do things that mesmerised us. Being so small and fragile, you wondered how he got away with it all his life. He was so quick he could fake you out. But he came in during a very frustrating year and he was obviously on his way out.’ According to teammates, Johnstone was not the most diligent attendee when it came to training sessions, and defender Laurie Calloway says, ‘There were times when you saw the magic, but there was only one game when he did it the whole time and then he absolutely terrorised the full-back.’

  While Portland’s British legion was ruling in the west in 1975, it was another expansion team built on Football League foundations that was emerging as the NASL’s challenger from the east. The Tampa Bay Rowdies’ first attempt to grab national attention was thwarted when Buffalo Braves basketball star Randy Smith, who had played soccer at college, was prevented by his employers from spending the summer kicking a football. But there was no gimmickry involved as coach Eddie Firmani made the rounds of London’s clubs to construct his team.

  Born in Cape Town, South Africa, Firmani was taken to London by Charlton Athletic after being spotted in a junior game. A skilful inside-forward, his 51 goals for Charlton captured the attention of several clubs in Italy and in 1955 he moved to Sampdoria. Thanks to his Italian background he was selected to play for his new country and he was involved in further transfers to Inter Milan and Genoa before returning to Charlton. After one season at Southend, he was back at The Valley to begin his managerial career, where he spent three seasons in charge.

  The defence Firmani built for the Rowdies included former Orient centre-half Malcolm Linton and long-serving Chelsea utility man John Boyle, languishing at Orient after ten years at Stamford Bridge. Further forward, John Sissons, the former Chelsea and West Ham winger, and Stewart Scullion, ex-Watford and Sheffield United, were the men who would support Clyde Best, the Bermudan striker signed from West Ham, and Derek Smethurst, a South African who had played for Chelsea and Millwall. Signed as a job lot was a trio of players that Crystal Palace manager Malcolm Allison had released on loan: goalkeeper Paul Hammond, former Stoke centre-half Stewart Jump and 20-year-old midfielder Mark Lindsay.

  Jump recalls, ‘Eddie Firmani came over looking for players and spoke to Malcolm about us. The three of us did meet together but I don’t think it was a question of all going or no one going. Eddie sold it well and Tampa looked like a nice place. I felt the game in England was becoming a bit of a grind and a slog, and not as enjoyable as when I first started.’

  Jump and his teammates responded to the more relaxed atmosphere of playing in the Florida sunshine. Lindsay explains, ‘It was a real adventure for a 20 year old. At that time, Florida was a dream trip because not many people from England were going there. There was no other sports franchise in Tampa so we were in the media a lot – on the front pages of the sports section and on TV. I even did my own radio s
how once a month.’

  There was, of course, the usual payback. ‘When I got to Tampa I discovered that the PR was much more intense than we were told,’ says Lindsay. ‘We were going to schools after training in mid-afternoon and for the most part it was 95 degrees. And in the evenings we coached the parents.’

  Hammond admits, however, that it was not all work. ‘Because most of us were English it was like a social club. We treated it as a bit of a holiday. We were typical Brits and went out partying.’ The partying proved to be a boon to the local licensed trade, as Lindsay recalls. ‘I met a guy after I finished playing who said he used to own a bar in Tampa. He said, “I was dying there until one day in the middle of summer, when in came 20 foreigners.” We used to go down there two or three nights a week. That infusion of money helped him make the bar a success.’

  Firmani’s interest, of course, was in making sure his players were contributing to the health of the Rowdies’ Eastern Division challenge rather than the wealth of the local hostelries. ‘Eddie was very intense, a very proud man,’ Lindsay explains. ‘His approach was, “We don’t have to worry about anybody else if we go out with the right attitude.” It was so easy to lose your focus out there when you were being invited out to barbecues and God knows what. There were people offering you drinks the night before a game. Eddie would remind us, “We need to go to bed early tonight.” Some of the lads said, “Bollocks,” and were still going out. Eddie’s attitude was just to go for the jugular. There were not a great deal of tactics, but everybody knew their job.’

  Jump adds, ‘I think perhaps we were treated differently as players than we would have been at home. There was not as much pressure. Eddie let you go out and play and, of course, winning relieves the pressure. There were no big egos, everyone wanted to play and promote the game.’

  Lindsay continues, ‘We would go 1–0 up and other teams would self-destruct. They were fighting on the field; they didn’t have the cohesiveness we had. One of the things that helped us was that teams would go to Miami to play on a Friday, have a tough time in 90 degrees and get injured, and then they would come and play us on the Sunday when they were still tired.’

  The Rowdies never looked back after Smethurst scored an overtime winner to beat Rochester in the franchise’s inaugural match – in which Firmani appeared as a substitute while he awaited the arrival of many of his squad from England. They won 15 of the next 18 games and the division title was already secured when they lost their last three regular season matches.

  The main source of goals was the tall, dark-haired Smethurst, whose move to Tampa had been an escape from four frustrating years at Millwall. Although he appeared as a substitute in Chelsea’s Cup-Winners’ Cup final victory against Real Madrid in Athens in 1971, Smethurst played in only 14 League games in almost three years at Stamford Bridge. He transferred to Millwall for £33,000 in search of first-team football, but admits, ‘Millwall was a shock to my character. People there wanted you to kick guys into the stadium. You could nutmeg a guy, sell a dummy, curl the ball round two players, smack it into the net and you’d get a little round of applause. If you whacked a guy into the stands like Harry Cripps used to, they would cheer you off the pitch.’

  Smethurst’s return from his Millwall career was a disappointing nine goals in sixty-six league games, but he explains, ‘Benny Fenton, the manager, wanted me to become a midfielder and then I was out for a long time because I had torn a thigh muscle. I did it on a Saturday but they made me play in the League Cup a couple of days later. I took three or four steps and tore it again. Eddie Firmani had seen me play at Chelsea and knew I was being played out of position. Gordon Jago, who was the new manager, said he would let me go for free to America, but if I stayed in England he would ask £80,000 for me. Eddie asked me to go and told me what was involved financially and I jumped at it. It took me two seconds to decide. I knew if I went I could get fit. It was warm weather, Bermuda grass and I knew Stoke and Nottingham Forest wanted me, but didn’t want to touch an injured player. I thought it would be three months at Tampa Bay and then I was coming back.

  ‘I didn’t feel I had failed in England. I felt people knew I could play and I saw it as a chance to prolong my career and produce. And in Tampa we drew an average of 12,000 in our first year. Millwall couldn’t do that at that time. When I saw the excitement I could see that the opportunities for me, both in playing and after, were 100 times more than in Britain and South Africa. Rodney Marsh hit it right on the head when he talked about English football being grey. The ball players weren’t honoured in those days. George Best should have played seventeen years in the Football League instead of seven. I felt he was drinking because of the pressure of not being accepted. That was a hard thing to overcome and it made me think, “Why don’t they honour their players?” And I remember getting taxed at 35 per cent in England!’

  Smethurst proved emphatically that, at the age of 27, he was far from being a spent force. His tally of 18 goals was the second-highest in the league and included 12 in the final 10 games. ‘I was knocking in goals left, right and centre. What helped me was playing up front with Clyde Best. He knew when to hold it up and when to release me so I could get into the space and finish. We got on immediately.’

  Lindsay adds, ‘Derek had the ability to get across people and get his head in the right place. He scored a lot of goals at the near post with his head. Later, Rodney Marsh said he was one of purest strikers of the ball he had ever seen. His volleys rarely missed the target. We had games we should have lost, but he would pop up in the last 30 seconds and score.’

  The Rowdies showed their defensive capabilities as well as their forward power during their play-off run, which began with a 1–0 home victory against Toronto, Best scoring the goal. Miami, who had disposed of Boston, were the visitors to Tampa Stadium for the semi-finals. Lindsay explains, ‘One of the first games we played was down in Miami and I got sent off with one of their guys for a scuffle. The next game against them was five days later. There was a big press conference and one of their guys said there was going to be blood. Our crowd for that game went up by about 6,000 and they beat us. So there was a lot of publicity about the play-off game and in the end we gave them a right good pasting.’

  Tampa Bay’s 3–0 win, in which Boyle, Scullion and Smethurst found the net, set up a trip to San Jose to face the Portland Timbers for the NASL championship. The choice of venue did not sit well with Portland, who had been involved in an unpleasant game at Spartan Stadium earlier in the season. Timbers striker Peter Withe explains, ‘There was a loose ball and I went through on their player and he went down injured. One of their supporters ran on the pitch and had a swipe at me. I remember out of the corner of my eye seeing him throwing a punch and as he came through I pushed him and he went down over my leg. We ended up winning the game in overtime, and then we were locked in the dressing-room with all these fans screaming at us. It turned out the guy was the mascot’s brother. This mascot, Crazy George, was the mascot for the final as well and he was trying to bait the crowd.’

  Tampa Bay’s Lindsay agrees that it was an unsuitable venue for the championship decider. ‘The ground was rock hard. The field was tight and there was dust everywhere. They should have played the game somewhere else. It was a very scrappy game and I cringe a bit now when I look at it on tape.’

  Even though his team had not reached the final, the NASL’s newest and biggest star, Pelé, took his seat among the 17,009 crowd and, once blues singer Lou Rawls had performed the national anthem, the action began. The Timbers’ fears that the narrow field would deny them attacking options were quickly proved correct. Withe says, ‘It was only a 55-yard pitch and it nullified the wing threat of Jimmy Kelly and Willie Anderson. On the bigger pitches we had played on we were a superior team, but we could not get into position down the flanks to get crosses in, which was our strength. It was a lot easier for them. It was disappointing because we had done so well during the season.’

  The Timbers, p
re-game favourites, found it difficult to break down the stubborn Rowdies defence and in the second half the Rowdies’ Haitian substitute Arsene Auguste broke the deadlock when he slammed home a shot from 30 yards. Then Best, the man his teammates called ‘Big Daddy’, added a decisive second goal. The Rowdies held out for victory, keeping the Timbers scoreless for only the second time since their hastily arranged opening game of the campaign.

  One of the keys had been Jump’s success in his duel against Withe. ‘They were a very English-style team,’ says the defender. ‘It suited me to be marking a big centre-forward and defensively we did well. They didn’t make too many chances. At the end of the game someone came up to me and said I was going to get a trophy for being the MVP. I said, “What’s that?” I didn’t know MVP meant Most Valuable Player.’

  In truth, the NASL’s most valuable asset had been watching from the stands. But his time would come. Eventually.

  9. George and Rod’s Excellent Adventure

  Phil Woosnam’s words sum up the feeling around the NASL in the winter of 1975–76: ‘If Pelé could do it, anyone could.’ While Liverpool were marching towards their first League Championship under Bob Paisley, the NASL commissioner watched some of the biggest names in English football find their way onto the shopping lists of clubs eager to buy the instant credibility enjoyed by Pelé’s New York Cosmos.

  By the time the 1976 NASL season kicked off, England World Cup stars Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst had signed for the San Antonio Thunder and Seattle Sounders respectively. Both were huge names, big coups for their teams, but the league’s critics could point out that both were a decade removed from their finest hour. No one, however, could argue with the validity of George Best and Rodney Marsh. No players had captivated English crowds in the manner of those two in the previous ten years.