Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Finishing on top of the Southern Division were the San Jose Earthquakes, where Paul Child rediscovered his scoring touch by netting 13 times in 23 games. At the Dallas Tornado, former Atoms coach Al Miller led the team to second place in the division. Top scorer for Dallas was Derby County striker Jeff Bourne, who began five successful NASL seasons with a fifteen-goal haul. Former West Brom and Scotland midfielder Bobby Hope and Luton winger Jimmy Ryan joined him in the squad.

  Former Philadelphia skipper Derek Trevis became player-coach of the new San Diego Jaws, the franchise having moved from Baltimore and changed its name. The squad included combative Welsh midfielder Trevor Hockey, who had played nine games for Wales and changed teams as often as he changed his facial hair during an eight-club Football League career that included more than 200 games for Birmingham. Peter Silvester moved with the team from Baltimore and his tally of a mere four goals was only one off the club lead.

  The Western Division of the Pacific Conference saw the Portland Timbers entering the season among the favourites once again. The team had sold 12,000 season tickets, even though many of the successful squad of 1975 were not returning, among them centre-forward Peter Withe and captain Brian Godfrey. The Aston Villa connection was strengthened, however, with the acquisition of three old boys, midfielder Pat McMahon, installed as the new skipper, and defenders Neil Rioch and Brian Tiler. In addition, current Villa goalkeeper Jim Cumbes opted for a season in the United States, putting on hold his regular summer cricket career as a seam bowler for Worcestershire. Portland once again opened their season in pouring rain, but still attracted a crowd of 22,000 for a victory against great rivals Vancouver. But after winning four of their first six games the Timbers lost five straight and never recovered, finishing fourth in the division.

  At Seattle, who finished second in the division, Hurst’s British teammates included Southampton winger Tom Jenkins, the bald former Everton full-back John McLaughlin, Scottish striker Gordon Wallace who top-scored with 12 goals, former West Ham winger Harry Redknapp and the Stoke duo of defender Eric Skeels and Jimmy Robertson, a Scottish international winger who made his name at Tottenham, scoring for them in the 1967 FA Cup final, before moves to Arsenal, Ipswich and the Victoria Ground.

  In Vancouver, Tommy Ord arrived from New York early in the season to finish as second-leading scorer with five goals, while the dark-haired Wolves goalkeeper Phil Parkes recorded six clean sheets in twenty games. When the two rivals from the north-west clashed in the first round of the play-offs, it was Hurst who had the decisive say with the only goal.

  The NASL’s new success story of 1976, following the grand entrances made by Portland and Tampa Bay a year earlier, was in Minnesota, where the Kicks – born out of the relocation of the Denver Dynamo – were clear winners of the Western Division.

  The man at the helm was 42-year-old Freddie Goodwin, whose career as a wing-half had begun during the ‘Busby Babes’ era at Manchester United and continued at Leeds. As a manager he began at Scunthorpe but enjoyed little success at the New York Generals in 1967 and 1968 before returning to England to spend two seasons at Brighton and Hove Albion. In the summer of 1970, just as a 16-year-old prodigy called Trevor Francis was poised to break into the Birmingham City first team with a barrage of goals, Goodwin began a successful five-year stint at St Andrews, achieving promotion to the First Division in 1971–72 and an appearance in the semi-finals of the FA Cup in the same season. Goodwin and Birmingham parted company in the early weeks of the 1975–76 season, by which time the club had failed to win any of their first seven Division One games, and he returned to the US to take charge of the Kicks.

  Like so many of the NASL’s most successful start-up operations, the team constructed by Goodwin was built largely around British professionals. In goal, Geoff Barnett had been the non-playing back-up to Bob Wilson in Arsenal’s Double-winning squad of 1971 before getting his chance, via Wilson’s knee injury, to play in the 1972 FA Cup final loss to Leeds. By the time Goodwin called him away from the pub he had just bought in England, Barnett could already have been a New York Cosmos player. ‘Arsenal wanted to sell me to the Cosmos and I met their people at Heathrow Airport with Ken Friar, our club secretary,’ he recalls. ‘But I always remembered something my father, who was ex-military, had taught me: if you have clean shoes and a clean white shirt you are halfway to making a good impression. I met their coach, Gordon Bradley, and he had a tatty shirt and dirty shoes. Admittedly, he had been on a transatlantic flight, but I turned the deal down, even though I had gone with my bags packed expecting to join them on tour.’

  Of those recruited by the Kicks to protect Barnett, Frank Spraggon had helped anchor Middlesbrough’s return to the First Division and Ron Webster had been a League Championship winner at Derby, while Steve Litt had played only 15 games for Luton. Peter Short, who had been at Denver the previous season, was adding an eighth NASL team to his résumé. To help anchor the defence, Goodwin signed West Brom’s Alan Merrick, whose move came about after he turned down a move to a Southampton team on their way to winning the FA Cup. Merrick recalls, ‘Albion had already spent the £75,000 they were expecting to get for me. Much to my chagrin, I also found out Freddie had been in to buy me four or five times for Birmingham, but Albion wouldn’t sell to the team across town.’

  The midfield included Alan West, an England Under-23 international who had been at Burnley before helping Luton to promotion to the First Division in 1974, and Middlesbrough’s Peter Brine. Up front, Alan Willey, another fringe player at Ayresome Park, and Luton’s Ron Futcher formed a partnership that would become one of the most prolific in NASL history.

  The Kicks started steadily, winning their first four home games but losing five of their first six on the road. Nine wins in the final ten games captured the division title and underscored the growing enthusiasm for the team at its Metropolitan Stadium home in Bloomington. The final home game, a 6–2 win against Los Angeles, was watched by 42,065. ‘The club had done a deal with McDonald’s where anyone going to that game could go in and get a free Big Mac,’ recalls Barnett. ‘It was the biggest redemption of its kind that McDonald’s had ever had.’ The Kicks’ average attendance of almost 24,000 was part of a general trend that saw NASL attendance rise by 38 per cent, although that still meant fewer than 11,000 as an overall average.

  Merrick recalls, ‘The marketing of the Kicks was exceptional. They had great knowledge of how to disseminate information to the public. The media relations guy was second to none in the area. He knew everybody. The public just jumped at it.’

  West, who led the team with eight assists, adds, ‘It was a unique situation that just built very quickly. We got to 20,000 in no time and when we played big teams it was 40,000. There was a great team spirit and the fact that we did very well in that first season meant it just took off. The great thing about America is that usually there are only home fans because of the distances involved in travelling. The whole atmosphere was very refreshing compared to the way things were in England at that time.’

  The Kicks achieved the maximum three bonus points for goals scored in nine games, with Willey contributing 16 goals and Futcher 14. Even Ade Coker, signed from the Boston Minutemen late in the season, chipped in with four goals in the last three games. Willey explains, ‘Ron would get stuck in and I would clean up the mess. He knocked defenders down and made them make mistakes. From day one we blended together. We read each other pretty well and with guys like Alan West around us we had good service.’

  Merrick praises Goodwin’s contribution to the Kicks’ winning formula. ‘Freddie was a smart coach and ahead of his time in some areas. He was innovative in his tactics and in the way he dealt with the players, although at times I didn’t get on with him. He created some stability there over the years. He had his central part of the team – keeper, centre-backs, centre midfield and target players – that stayed pretty much the same, so all he had to do was put in some of the limbs.’

  Over in the Atlantic C
onference, Marsh’s arrival at the Rowdies made them the team to beat in the Eastern Division, a task that no one was up to. Even the Cosmos, who were in the process of rebuilding their team around Pelé, trailed Tampa Bay by six points. As well as Marsh, the Rowdies added the former Charlton and Leicester left-winger Len Glover and Liverpool’s pock-marked destroyer Tommy Smith. The owner of a single England cap, earned five years earlier, Smith had just won his third League Championship medal, Liverpool’s battle to overhaul a stylish and surprising Queens Park Rangers keeping him in England until seven games of the NASL season had been played.

  Midfielder Mark Lindsay recalls, ‘When Tommy came over he was just as energetic and enthusiastic as if he was playing in the European Cup final. He would come up to me in a game and say, “I will kick your arse if you don’t go and pick that guy up.” The humidity and the temperature and the fact that the fields were stretched a lot more made it more difficult for defenders in general and he was exposed a bit at times.’

  However, it was the Rowdies forward-line, with Smethurst scoring 20 goals, Marsh 11 and Clyde Best and Stewart Scullion 10 apiece, that gained most attention. In back-to-back games early in the season, Smethurst scored hat-tricks as Tampa Bay stuck five past Hartford and New York. Then, in a six-game stretch later in the season, the Rowdies scored twenty-five goals, including four tallies of four and a 7–0 crushing of poor old Hartford, Smethurst getting four this time. In the first of those games, Best scored a hat-trick in a dramatic 5–4 loss in New York, for whom Pelé scored twice. Lindsay recalls, ‘We were 3–0 up at half-time and it was in the bag. All we had to do was keep possession.’ The Rowdies’ revenge over the Cosmos came in the play-offs, when Smethurst, Scullion and Marsh scored in a 3–1 home victory.

  Washington’s third place in the division behind Tampa and New York owed much to the form of Paul Cannell, the Newcastle striker, who scored 13 goals. Meanwhile, the Philadelphia Atoms had an unhappy season. Owner Tom McCloskey’s interest had been waning since he was awarded the rights to the new NFL franchise in Tampa Bay (although he later declined the ownership) and he eventually sold the Atoms to a group called the United Club of Jalisco, an amalgamation of four Mexican First Division clubs. Club president Jose Cardenas released all the players before the 1976 season and started from scratch with players drawn from Mexico and the USA. Finishing below the Diplomats and Atoms in the division were the Miami Toros, whose new additions included the former Liverpool and England right-back Chris Lawler and the ex-Manchester United centre-half Jim Holton. ‘Six foot two, eyes of blue, big Jim Holton’s after you,’ was the song the Stretford End came up with for the man who went on to win 15 Scotland caps. But the Toros often had barely 2,000 people inside Tamiami Stadium to strike up a chorus. Miami were not alone in their struggles at the gate and for every Minnesota, Portland and New York there was a San Antonio, Hartford and Philadelphia.

  As the season began it had appeared that the big challenge to the Rowdies and the Cosmos in the Atlantic Conference would come from the Boston Minutemen, who were rivalling New York’s spending in a bid to win the Northern Division. German coach Hubert Vogelsinger put together what had the potential to be one of the strongest teams the NASL had seen. Among the stars on the Minutemen roster were Portuguese legend Antonio Simoes, ex-Bayern Munich midfielder Wolfgang Sunholz, striker Ade Coker, goalkeeper Shep Messing and former Ipswich and Wolverhampton centre-half Derek Jefferson. But after six wins from ten games, owner John Sterge announced his money was running out and decided to offload his players, including Coker’s trade to Minnesota and Jefferson’s move to Washington. Boston, who began the season in front of crowds of around 7,000 ended up playing in front of fewer than 1,000, losing their final 12 games and using a total of 31 players.

  Boston’s self-destruction allowed Bill Foulkes’s Chicago Sting to top their division, although they were beaten in their first play-off game by Toronto Metros-Croatia, who had signed Eusebio away from Boston before the season started. In mid-division, the Rochester Lancers were joined by the Hartford Bi-Centennials, for whom former Newcastle and Middlesbrough winger Alan Foggon joined a squad that included Chelsea and later Watford goalkeeper Steve Sherwood, West Ham midfielder Geoff Pike, former Hartlepool forward John Coyne and defender Bobby Thomson, who had played for Wolves in the USA back in 1967.

  Having disposed of Rochester and Chicago in the early rounds of the play-offs, Toronto were expected to meet their match against the Rowdies in Tampa Bay in the Atlantic Conference final. Surprisingly, however, the free-scoring Rowdies were shut out for the first time in 16 games and Eusebio put the Metros-Croatia on the way to a 2–0 victory.

  The final, in Seattle’s Kingdome, saw Toronto as underdogs once again against the Kicks, who followed their division title with overwhelming home wins in the play-offs. With top scorer Willey sidelined by a bout of tonsillitis, Coker had continued his late-season surge by scoring twice in the 3–0 defeat of Seattle and he and West had each been on target in the 3–1 victory against San Jose, a game that attracted a crowd of 49,572. Earthquakes striker Paul Child claims, ‘It was a fantastic game and it was incredible to see that many people but we got ripped off big time by the ref. We were ahead and scored what would have been a second, but he disallowed it.’

  Toronto, the club who had defied the NASL by keeping the ethnic part of their nickname (commentator Jon Miller was forbidden by league officials from saying ‘Metros-Croatia’ on the air) were to cause another upset. They went ahead late in the first half when Eusebio’s powerfully struck free-kick was deflected into the Kicks’ goal. Merrick, the unlucky defender, says, ‘I keep on seeing that ball going in. Eusebio grazed my right shoulder and it just ballooned over Geoff Barnett’s head. At the end of the season Toronto had suddenly brought in about five top-notch players that no one had seen. They came out of nowhere. They were quality players and they gave them that boost.’

  Barnett adds, ‘We got a bit of a shock. By the time we met them in the final, they were a different team to the one we had played in a bruising battle earlier in the year. We probably didn’t go in with the right attitude. The way we beat Seattle and the way we were playing, we thought we were better than we were. We were a good skilful team and Astroturf suited us because we were a good passing team. But we didn’t play well.’

  Toronto added two more goals in the second half and Willey, back in the team but forced to play wide on the right because of the form of Coker, admits, ‘We were over-confident and they beat us pretty handily. It was a tough finish to the year for me. I had missed practice and lost some weight because of my illness and was stuck out on the right. I didn’t play in the middle in the final until the last ten minutes.’

  West adds, ‘It was disappointing to lose 3–0, but I don’t think it was such a big blow because we were a brand-new team and it was a fairy-tale just to get there. We were so thrilled at the season that the disappointment evaporated and we just savoured what we had achieved.’

  English sporting eyes had turned towards America early in the summer of 1976, diverted from the West Indies’ impending domination of the cricket season by the staging of an international tournament to celebrate the 200th anniversary of the country’s independence. With no European Championship finals to look forward to after finishing behind eventual winners Czechoslovakia in their qualifying group, Don Revie’s England were invited to join Italy and Brazil in the Bicentennial Cup.

  The fourth contender for the trophy was Team America, a hybrid of the best American players and the NASL’s leading international stars, under the guidance of New York Cosmos head coach Ken Furphy, the former Watford and Sheffield United boss. So it was that Pelé and Bobby Moore came to be lining up together on the international stage.

  A newcomer to the NASL, Furphy consulted Tampa Bay coach Eddie Firmani before selecting a training squad that also included George Best, Rodney Marsh, New York’s Northern Ireland international Dave Clements, Welsh defender Mike England, ex-England defenders Bob McN
ab and Tommy Smith and Tampa Bay forward Stewart Scullion.

  Newspaper reports claimed that Marsh and Best pulled out when Furphy refused to guarantee them a place in the starting line-up, but Furphy supports Marsh’s denial of that story. ‘I picked George and Rodney to come to our training camp and George didn’t turn up. Rodney took part but always seemed a bit of an unwilling participant. He had no real desire about him and I decided I could not have players who would wander about, so I didn’t pick them in the squad. I rang up Phil Woosnam and told him that George didn’t turn up and Rodney didn’t want to play. Woosnam said we have got to bring them even if they don’t play, because of their publicity value. I said, “I want players available to play, not guys who won’t play.” But Phil said we had to pick them. We sent out notification to them and neither of them turned up. I phoned Rodney and he said he felt only Americans should be picked. I never got an explanation why George never turned up.’

  McNab recalls the uniquely American circumstances that kept him out of the tournament. ‘We were playing in temperatures of 120 degrees in San Antonio. At half-time, we would come into an air-conditioned dressing room with a good sweat on and the temperature would drop to 70 degrees. I was cooling down too much and then not stretching and I pulled a calf muscle five minutes into the second half of one game. I did it about three times before I realised what was causing the problem.’

  Furphy’s team kicked off the tournament in Washington DC against Italy. ‘I told our guys, “Stay together and play together. Let’s keep everybody tight in a 4–4–2. Don’t rush forward and leave holes because, Smithy and Clements, you’ll never get back.” For 25 minutes it worked well, but then we lost the ball and they had a one-on-one against the keeper, Bob Rigby. He had been taught to come out with his feet first, not sideways to make himself big.’ The goal was scored and Team America went on to lose 4–0. In the next game, America halved the deficit against Brazil, with Furphy claiming, ‘We nearly beat them because they weren’t used to Astroturf.’