Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Garbett recalls a ‘very nice guy’ who could be ‘an absolute bloody animal’, explaining, ‘He had wonderful skill, but he was a maniac. A controlled maniac, which I loved. He was lethal. No wonder Brazil won the World Cup with players like that in the side. He had a mean streak and you couldn’t screw around with him. World soccer never gave him the credit he deserved. He and Beckenbauer used to knock the ball about in the dressing-room. They would stand either side of a bench and keep the ball up for ever. We used to watch them open-mouthed. One day we came in and Franz was stood there with the ball and Carlos was injured so me and Bobby larusci dived into the showers real quick because we weren’t going to try to kick it around with Beckenbauer.’

  By the end of the regular season, Chinaglia and Pelé led the team with 15 and 13 goals respectively, while Englishmen Hunt and Tony Field topped the assists with ten and nine. Hunt, fair-haired with a splay-footed style of running that belied his athleticism, felt he had proved a point, admitting, ‘The fact that Villa were ready to let me go after I had helped them win promotion from the Second Division really hurt. I felt they had not given me the chance to prove myself. I had a choice between joining the Cosmos or dropping down into the Second or Third Division. I chose the Cosmos and never regretted it for a moment. Going to the States was the making of me. Playing alongside the giants of the game like Pelé and Beckenbauer gave me new confidence and a better understanding of the game.’

  The Cosmos’ play-off journey began with a home game against Tampa, the team who had ended their title hopes the previous season. The Rowdies had not been the force of the two previous years, finishing only third in the Eastern Division amid the upheaval of Firmani’s departure and the ex-Chelsea man John Boyle’s appointment as interim head coach. The Rowdies won only seven of their sixteen games after Firmani quit. With Stewart Scullion and Clyde Best having moved on and Marsh scoring only eight goals, it was Derek Smethurst who carried the weight of the forward line, scoring nineteen goals in twenty-one games – many set up by South African Steve Wegerle, the older brother of future Rowdies, Luton, Queens Park Rangers and Blackburn striker Roy. Davie Robb, the former Aberdeen forward who had won five Scotland caps in 1971, added eight goals, while Australian forward Adrian Alston arrived from Cardiff to score seven.

  It was at the goalkeeper’s position that controversy reared its head at the start of the season. Arnie Mausser, one of the top American goalkeepers in the NASL, had been signed by the Rowdies from Hartford in 1976 and was rewarded for an outstanding year by selection for the league’s all-star team. While the American soccer community had to accept the relatively slow development of home-grown players, the goalkeeper’s position was the one where many of the locals could compete on equal terms with the imports. It was with some surprise, then, that news was received of Firmani’s decision to release Mausser for the 1977 season, opting to give the position back to Hammond, who was returning from Crystal Palace. Justifying the decision, Firmani said he had gone for Hammond’s additional experience, which now included helping Palace to an FA Cup semi-final in 1976.

  ‘Because of the Cup run, Malcolm Allison didn’t want me to go until the end of the season so I ended up missing the 1976 season in America,’ says Hammond. ‘Then in February of ’77, Eddie asked me if I wanted to come out full-time. I knew Arnie very well. He was a good keeper and he had a very good year in ’76. But when I got there I managed to keep the number one job and he got traded. I didn’t feel like it was anything to do with me. Things like that happen whenever you get a newcomer.’

  In front of 57,828 fans at Giants Stadium, the Rowdies were no match for the home team, Pelé scoring twice in a 3–0 win to set up a two-game series against the Fort Lauderdale Strikers, winners of the Eastern Division but two-time losers to the Cosmos during the regular season.

  The Fort Lauderdale Strikers had been born out of the Miami Toros’ decision to relocate further up the south Florida coast. After a season in California in the American Soccer League, Ron Newman was brought back to the NASL to take the position of head coach and, as he had at Dallas in previous years, set about building a team around English players. In defence were Bobby Bell, a former Crystal Palace and Ipswich man, Ray Lugg, on loan from Crewe, and Tony Whelan, a former Manchester United apprentice who arrived from Rochdale. In midfield, Dave Chadwick, a player under Newman at Dallas, was joined by Ray Hudson, who had been fighting unsuccessfully to win a regular first team spot at Newcastle, and former Plymouth and Portsmouth wide man Norman Piper. The forwards included Gordon Fearnley, ex-Bristol Rovers, and David Irving, an England youth international who had struggled to make his mark at Everton after leaving Workington.

  The most familiar name signed by Newman also represented his biggest gamble. Gordon Banks, England’s goalkeeper in the 1966 and 1970 World Cups and undisputed in his status of number one keeper in the world, had not played a competitive game of football since 21 October 1972. The next day, while driving home for Sunday lunch, he had been involved in a head-on collision with a van. Surgeons fought unsuccessfully to save the sight in his right eye, and a career that spanned 73 international appearances and had seen him named Footballer of the Year only months earlier was over. Or so it seemed. As the years went by, Banks found that his basic goalkeeping instincts had remained intact. ‘I had mentally accepted the fact that I would never again be able to play as a top-line goalkeeper,’ he wrote in his book, Banks of England. ‘But while taking part in kick-about training matches and friendly fixtures it slowly dawned on me that even with one eye I could still do a useful job at the back of a defence.’

  Banks’s progress had not gone unnoticed and Newman made his move, convincing the proud former England man that he would not be treated as some kind of freak in the promotion-driven world of American soccer. Newman admits, ‘It was a huge risk. But we needed someone of Gordon’s calibre to attract other good players. I had seen he was beginning to play again, so I went to England and thought, if I could get him, I would have a name and reputation to sell to the other players. And I could afford him – it cost only $20,000 for the whole year. That was our top money. We could only sign players to seasonal contracts and we were up against the Cosmos, who were spending millions.’

  Aware that the American media might not be familiar with the ability of Banks, and would be dubious about the signing of a one-eyed goalkeeper, Newman used their knowledge of Pelé to introduce his new signing. ‘I found this brilliant story in the centrefold of a magazine about the save he made against Pelé in the Mexico World Cup. I made about a hundred copies and covered them in plastic and used them as place mats at the lunch we held for the media so they could read about him before I presented him. It worked.

  ‘Banksy was terrific. I tried to cut our training short and everyone would be leathering the ball at him. I’d walk away and Banksy was still there stopping the ball. I’d have to say, “Banksy, I’m trying to save you.”’

  Chadwick, the team’s assistant coach, adds, ‘Gordon was unbelievable. He never talked about his injury and I was real worried when Ron signed him. He showed good authority and he adjusted. He still had the ability to read the game and the ability to throw the ball out and start an attack. His overall positional sense was just incredible. We played in Las Vegas and it was 104 degrees on the Astroturf at eight in the evening. You could feel your feet burning. He was unbelievable. He got to balls and flung himself from God knows where. I was training him and I said, “You tell me what you want.” He said, “I want one good session a week. I can’t take a beating every day like I could. Give me one good session and the rest of the time I would like to play with the guys and run.” That’s what we did.’

  Based further north in Florida, Rowdies keeper Hammond remembers having many opportunities to watch Banks in action. ‘It was amazing what he could do with one eye, tremendous the way he could work his angles. I tried it once, playing with my hand over one eye, and all the angles were wrong. He was always a positional goalkeeper a
nd great at communication.’

  Banks would end up being named as the NASL’s leading goalkeeper for 1977, admitting, ‘That gave me a lot of pleasure and satisfaction. I knew I was only 75 per cent of the player who had won a World Cup medal with England in 1966, but this accolade was a tremendous boost to my confidence.’

  Accepting that he could not afford the great individual talent that the Cosmos had acquired, Newman made sure his team could match anyone in the physical side of the game. ‘I realised that with the level of quality on my team, our biggest advantage was coping with the heat in the second half of games. I ran the players on the sand and between the piers in Fort Lauderdale. They could have run up Mount Everest.’

  The results bore out Newman’s methods, opening the season with four wins and clinching first place in the Eastern Division by winning twelve of their final fourteen games for a league-record nineteen victories in all. The goals were shared around, with former Oldham left-back Maurice Whittle top scoring with six. Although a defender, scoring goals was nothing new to the team captain and penalty-taker, who had notched more than 40 in his career at Boundary Park and had gone six years without missing from the spot. Standing only 5 ft 8 in., and weighing less than 11 stones, Whittle packed enough power to have his shots timed at 70 mph and earn the nickname ‘Thunderboot.’

  Newman was named NASL Coach of the Year, one year after achieving the same honour in the American Soccer League, and by winning their division the Strikers avoided the opening round of the play-offs, which had been expanded to include 12 of the league’s 18 teams. They eventually headed to New York for what proved to be one of the most memorable games in the league’s history, although the Strikers were only too keen to erase the events of 14 August 1977 from their minds. On the day after Kenny Dalglish made his debut as Liverpool’s new number seven in a goalless Charity Shield at a packed Wembley, a comparable crowd of 77,691 – an NASL record – saw the ball find the net 11 times in Giants Stadium. ‘I’d always said I’d bare my rear end in Woolworth’s if we filled that place,’ says Garbett. ‘It was downright amazing. I arrived two hours before the game and I remember thinking there must be a big event at the race track because all the parking lots were full. They had to delay the kick-off half an hour.’

  With many fans exposed to the torrential rain that fell on the Meadowlands, what transpired in front of them left Ron Newman claiming that the Cosmos were beginning to wield too much power over the American soccer scene. ‘After looking at the forecasts we expected rain, which was always difficult on Astroturf,’ he explains. ‘We were familiar with the type of shoe we needed. There were no special shoes made for Astroturf at that time, we just used to wear worn-down studs. We knew if it was wet we needed a newer cleat, a sharper image.

  ‘I’d heard that Pony had come up with brand-new shoes that were brilliant for Astroturf in the rain. I asked if they could supply us if it rained at Giants Stadium. We trained on Astroturf, but the shoes they had sent us were terrible. They had small cleats with a lot of little edges and the players were coming through the shoes. When they stopped, the foot came right through it. The soles were all right but no one could wear them. There was no time to do anything about it, so we wore old shoes with old cleats. Banksy was slipping and sliding everywhere and Steve Hunt was cutting round us like an ice skater.’

  The result was an astonishing 8–3 victory for the Cosmos, with Chinaglia scoring a hat-trick and the sure-footed Hunt adding two goals. Newman continues, ‘After the game, I said to the Cosmos, “Can I see your shoes?” They were the Pony shoes we had tried. They had the same moulded cleat, but they had been made with kangaroo leather. I have no proof, but I believe pressure might have been put on them not to supply us with the most up-to-date shoes they had. I wouldn’t put it past the Cosmos. They were big-time, they had to win at all costs.’

  At least in the format of the play-offs, an 8–3 loss was no worse than defeat by one goal, so the Strikers were still in with a shout four days later at Lockhart Stadium. Even so, it was a daunting task for a such a collection of unremarkable players to take on the all-star squad of the Cosmos. Irving, who only went to America as a late replacement when Sunderland striker Vic Halom’s wife became pregnant, recalls, ‘We were so unknown that when Ron Newman came to meet me and Maurice Whittle at the airport he didn’t know who was who. But we were all good players, good solid pros, and we felt like gunslingers because we weren’t meant to be there. Playing on Astroturf was a big advantage for the Cosmos because you couldn’t get close to them and they kept the ball away from you. But on grass you could get close and shut them down and they were not as effective.’

  Following goals from New York’s big guns Pelé and Chinaglia and Fort Lauderdale’s lesser names Irving and Whittle, the game went into overtime. The teams could still not be separated, so it was on to the new shoot-out introduced by the NASL at the start of the season, where, instead of taking traditional penalties, attackers advanced one-on-one against the goalkeepers from the 35-yard line and had five seconds in which to attempt a shot. New York prevailed and Pelé’s dream of a fairy-tale farewell was still alive.

  ‘We all knew he was going to retire and we wanted to fight for him to win the championship,’ says Garbett. ‘He is the nicest guy you would ever want to meet in the whole world. If I had asked him he would have tied my shoelaces for me. I suppose that when you are driving a Ferrari you don’t have to prove you can beat a Ford. He could be nice to everybody because he had nothing to prove to anyone.’

  In the Eastern Conference final, another two-game series, Chinaglia and Hunt scored in a 2–1 victory at the Rochester Lancers before the Italian added two more – giving him eight in five play-off games – to help the Cosmos to a 4–1 win in front of a home crowd of 73,669.

  It was the Seattle Sounders who battled through the Western Conference to confront the Cosmos in Soccer Bowl ’77 at Portland’s Civic Stadium. The team was now under the leadership of Jimmy Gabriel, promoted from player and assistant coach when John Best moved on to become general manager of the Vancouver Whitecaps. There was no Geoff Hurst in 1977 and his former West Ham colleague Harry Redknapp played only the first month of the season, but Seattle brought in several other new British faces to help them to the play-offs, even though they finished only third in the Western Division. They included Mel Machin, a versatile Norwich and ex-Bournemouth player who made the all-league team at right-back, and Steve Buttle, a midfielder who arrived from Bournemouth. Another ex-Dean Court man, Mickey Cave, was the team’s top scorer with 12 goals. An important late-season signing was the much-travelled Tommy Ord, who arrived from Vancouver after scoring only three goals all season and proceeded to hit five in his six regular season games for the Sounders.

  Seattle began their play-off run with Machin and Ord scoring in a 2–0 win at the Whitecaps. Ord was on target in each game as the Minnesota Kicks were dispatched in two matches, meaning the Sounders had knocked off the two teams who had finished ahead of them in their division. The Los Angeles Aztecs were then beaten in two games, Scottish forward Jocky Scott getting the only goal in a Kingdome victory that clinched Seattle’s place in the final.

  Before the Sounders and Cosmos did battle, there were some formalities to go through when Pelé was honoured at a banquet at the Portland Hilton. Commissioner Phil Woosman stood up and told the audience, ‘He put his reputation on the line. Deep down inside this man is a missionary zeal that very few people have. Tonight we would like to pay tribute to Pelé, the man who gave us credibility.’

  With such a build-up, the Sounders could have been excused for feeling like the team who toured the world with the job of losing every night to the Harlem Globetrotters. But Gabriel recalls that his team, watched by 12,000 travelling Sounders fans, were determined to do more than make up the numbers. ‘We’d hit a rich vein of form and beaten some good teams on the way, so the players felt very confident we could do it. The game was on Astroturf, which suited us, and we played really well,
as well as I could have hoped for. The plan was to get out there and get at them. I never coached a team that sat back. If they force us back that’s one thing, but tactically I don’t like sitting back and I wasn’t going to do that.’

  The Sounders lived up to their coach’s promise, forcing the green shirts of the Cosmos back towards their own area with waves of high-tempo attacks. Cave headed wide from a good position and then had a goal disallowed when he was ruled offside following up a rebound, before Pelé made his first contribution by firing wide from a free-kick. The occasion seemed to be earning the Brazilian some sympathy from the referee, with Machin penalised for high kicking when Pelé had clearly bent down into the Englishman’s boot and no foul being awarded when Pelé chopped down Jimmy Robertson on the edge of the box

  Ord was close with a header, but, against the run of play, the Cosmos took the lead after 19 minutes, thanks to the quick thinking of Hunt. Canadian keeper Tony Chursky had taken the ball off the winger’s feet, but made the mistake of rolling it in front of himself with his opponent still in the vicinity. Alert to the possibility, Hunt stole the ball and smuggled it into the net.

  But minutes later, with the US viewers watching a commercial, Cave robbed Beckenbauer in the Cosmos half and some slick passing around the edge of the box set up Ord for a low drive past Messing’s right hand to level the score. Then Robertson, causing concern as he switched from one flank to the other, almost gave Seattle the lead after cutting in from the left and firing over.

  As the rain poured down during the interval, Firmani told Garbett he was being taken off and word was spread to the media that the midfield man had an injured groin. But the player reveals, ‘I was not injured and I was very upset at being taken off. I was playing quite well compared to some of them, who were playing bloody useless. Seattle were a tough and uncompromising team and we couldn’t get the game going. Thank goodness for Steve Hunt, who was absolutely dynamite. It was an astonishing exhibition and a great goal. He was powerful and strong and, boy, could he run.’