Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  The tempo of the game in the second half dropped noticeably from the frantic pace of the first period, picking up again only in the final 20 minutes, with the Sounders again the catalysts. Scottish defender Dave Gillet hit a fierce first-time shot from 25 yards that Messing spectacularly pushed away and Scott forced another save moments later with a header. But with ten minutes left, Hunt, voted the game’s Most Valuable Player, stretched beyond Machin on the left and delivered a cross that Chinaglia headed in from the edge of the six-yard box.

  Pelé, whose finishing had not been equal to a couple of moments of sublime footwork around the penalty area, was too high with one last attempt to finish his career with a flourish, but as Seattle scampered to take a goal-kick the full-time whistle sounded. The sideline photographers rushed the field to capture the great man in his final moment of glory. The pictures they took showed Pelé bare to the waist, having tossed his shirt to Seattle’s 20-year-old American full-back Jimmy McAlister as soon as the game ended.

  The significance of the moment was not lost on Gabriel. ‘It was like saying, “Hey, I am handing over to the young Americans. Go and run with it.” Pelé was very thoughtful about these things. He could have handed it to anyone but he handed it to a young American kid. I was upset because we lost, but if we were going to get beaten by anyone it was great to go that way. There was nothing I could take back or say that we could have done better, although the goal we had disallowed for offside was kind of ridiculous. Overall, it was a wonderful day for American soccer.’

  13. New Kids on the Block

  If you had plotted the well-being of the NASL like a hospital patient’s graph, the start of the 1978 season would mark its peak of health. Coming off a memorable and emotional climax to the previous season, the new campaign saw the realisation of Phil Woosnam’s dream of reaching 24 teams. ‘That was as far as we wanted to go with expansion,’ he says. ‘If other cities wanted to come in, they would protect us in case we were losing a city. We didn’t need any more. It was a great satisfaction to me to achieve that number but credit goes to others as well.’

  The final foundations for Woosnam’s 24-team tower had been the successful 1977 season. Driven by the Cosmos and Pelé, NASL attendance had increased by 33 per cent to roughly 13,000 per game, with an average of more than 29,000 for the play-offs. Seven games were televised on the TVS syndicated network, the most soccer seen on US screens for almost a decade.

  There had, as usual, been changes at the beginning of the 1977 season, with the Boston and Philadelphia franchises going into receivership and several other teams moving. As well as Miami’s switch to Fort Lauderdale, San Diego went to Las Vegas, Hartford ventured to New Haven to become the Connecticut Bi-Centennials, and, most intriguingly, San Antonio became Team Hawaii under Austrian coach Hubert Vogelsinger. Among Hawaii’s new acquisitions had been Brian Tinnion, who had been told he had no future by Cosmos coach Gordon Bradley when the club made plans to sign Yugoslav forward Jadranko Topic.

  In Hawaii, Tinnion discovered a franchise doomed to failure. ‘For our second game we were at home to New York and only drew a few thousand. Everyone else was getting 30,000 for games against the Cosmos. With all the travel we had to do as well, you could tell it wasn’t going to last.’ It was fun for a while, though. ‘Some of the single lads thought they had gone to heaven,’ Tinnion adds. ‘There were plenty of pitfalls in places like Hawaii.’

  The San Jose Earthquakes welcomed an English player who revelled in the showbiz atmosphere of the NASL. Alan Birchenall had carved out a decent career as a forward at Sheffield United, Chelsea, Crystal Palace and Leicester, the final three of whom had all paid six figures for his services. Birchenall’s outlook on the game, and life, was that it should be approached wearing a smile. With his eye-catching shock of blond hair, ‘The Birch’ had been one of English football’s most colourful characters in the past decade, although injury had robbed him of his one chance of real glory in Chelsea’s 1970 FA Cup run and the missing ingredient of a Marsh or a Bowles had limited him to four England Under-23 caps.

  Legendary for his one-liners and his penchant for belting out a tune in front of a band, Birchenall was the perfect showman for the US audience. ‘He should have been a damn comedian,’ says Earthquakes teammate Paul Child affectionately. ‘He was a good player, but he was just so funny – a great guy to have on the team. He was a fantastic leader. I remember being on the road with him and if we won he would be leading the singing in the restaurant. He’d be singing “Alouette” and he would have the whole place joining in, even though they didn’t know what they were singing. The guy could damn well play as well. I used to love playing with guys like him, not a selfish player.’

  Birchenall explains his decision to go to America. ‘I’d had a few problems at Leicester, a disagreement caused by personalities really. I was about 31 and in those days when you got to 30, no matter how fit you were, they considered you on your last legs. In those days it was a barrier. Jimmy Bloomfield said five clubs had asked about me and he had no objections. I didn’t fancy Chicago, but I remembered “Do You Know the Way to San Jose?” and chose the Earthquakes.’

  On arrival in San Jose, Birchenall was instantly presented with his company Cadillac. ‘I got my car straight away at the airport so I knew that I was well thought of, but a lot of guys came and went without getting anything after playing a trial. There were a lot of names who came over and had apparently played for Yugoslavia in internationals or for Holland. Where they had caps from, I don’t know. I think they must have embellished their careers a bit.’

  Birchenall scored only three goals in seventeen games and did not always see eye to eye with Manadaric about the role he had been signed to play. ‘I was having a bad game against Las Vegas and Eusebio, who had dodgy knees by then, brought me down. A few of our fans started throwing cans at him. Tony Simoes, who was Eusebio’s pal, came over and said, “Birchy, get up if you are not too bad or else we could have a riot on our hands.” I got up. Because we were so near the crowd you could practically touch them, so, to take the heat out of the situation and take their attention from Eusebio, I picked up a couple of empty cans and pretended to drink, then staggered up the line. The crowd loved it, but the owner, Milan Mandaric, didn’t see the funny side. He banned me from a road trip and fined me.

  ‘I still carried on the way I had been all my career. I loved the game, but I liked to live life. They had an image of English people being dour and I was something different. I would be joking with fans during the game and I was such a one-off to them. The Yugoslav owner did not have a great sense of humour.’

  Eusebio’s transfer from Toronto to the Las Vegas Quicksilver made him a teammate of Englishmen Gerry Ingram, top scorer with seven goals following his transfer from Washington, and Chris Dangerfield, the former Wolves and Portland forward. ‘I could have gone to Hawaii, but Vogelsinger had a reputation for curfews and other crazy things,’ Dangerfield remembers. ‘Eusebio could still do stuff on free-kicks, but with his bad knee he could not do as well as some of the other older players.’

  Englishman Derek Trevis failed to last the season as Las Vegas head coach, being replaced by the former Southport and Philadelphia centre-forward Jim Fryatt as the Quicksilver slumped to the foot of their division. Bill Foulkes was another English coach replaced during the season, his coaching job in Chicago going to the American Willy Roy. The Sting team included the Scottish midfielder Jim McCalliog, who had won the FA Cup with Southampton a year earlier to round off a top-flight career that took in Sheffield Wednesday, Wolves and Manchester United. He, like Tranmere forward Ronnie Moore, who scored a team-high eight goals, was playing in his only NASL campaign. Meanwhile, Scotland international winger Willie Morgan, who had made a high-profile move from Burnley to Old Trafford shortly after Manchester United’s European Cup triumph, was in the first of his four seasons in America, splitting his years between the NASL and Bolton Wanderers. West Ham forward Bill Jennings, part of the Hammers team
that beat Fulham at Wembley, gave the team another recent FA Cup winner.

  The Connecticut Bi-Centennials saw one English coach, Bobby Thomson, make way for another, Malcolm Musgrove, who, in his playing days, had been one of West Ham’s famed academy of future coaches and had gone on to be assistant to Frank O’Farrell at Leicester and Manchester United.

  Former Philadelphia coach Al Miller led Dallas Tornado to the Southern Division title, with English keeper Ken Cooper recording the league’s lowest goals-conceded-per-game average. Former Scotland centre-forward John O’Hare, a Football League champion under Brian Clough at Derby and soon to win another title at Nottingham Forest, finished second in the team with ten goals, one behind the American Kyle Rote. Ten years earlier, O’Hare’s final action for his first club, Sunderland, had been in Vancouver as part of the United Soccer Association.

  The Los Angeles Aztecs looked to a pair of Football League veterans to shore up their defence, signing Phil Beal, veteran of 330 League games and various cup successes for Tottenham, and Terry Mancini, whose lack of finesse sometimes matched his lack of hair, but whose great humour and spirit had endeared him to fans at Watford, Orient, QPR and Arsenal. After play-off wins against San Jose and Dallas, the Aztecs’ season was ended by Seattle in the Pacific Conference Championship.

  Minnesota’s English contingent repeated their previous year’s division title success, Alan Willey top-scoring with 14 goals, but the Portland Timbers, meanwhile, won only 10 games under new head coach Brian Tiler, who had succeeded his former Aston Villa manager Vic Crowe. In Washington, Dennis Viollet failed to get the Diplomats into the play-offs with a squad that now included Southampton FA Cup heroes Bobby Stokes, scorer of the Wembley winner against Manchester United, and Jim Steele, the big Scottish defender, plus former Saints keeper Eric Martin. Top scorer with nine goals was Coventry City forward Alan Green.

  John Sewell’s St Louis Stars finally opened the door to more foreigners, with ex-Tottenham right-back Ray Evans and Crystal Palace’s Peter Wall bolstering the defence sufficiently to help St Louis to a play-off berth. Wall recalls, ‘St Louis was traditionally the country’s soccer centre, but eventually they realised they needed to bring in other players to compete. If it caused problems with the American players, it was never shown. Deep down, I am sure some were disappointed that they were now on the subs’ bench, but most were willing to recognise we had something to offer.’

  With overseas players having been accepted in the American heartland of St Louis and some brand-new teams on the scene, excitement surrounding the NASL had never been greater than at the start of the 1978 season. The Colorado Caribous, Detroit Express, Houston Hurricane, Memphis Rogues, New England Tea Men, Oakland Stompers and Philadelphia Fury were the brand-new kids on the block, while several other teams moved to new neighbourhoods and Connecticut evicted themselves from the league entirely. Hawaii became the Tulsa Roughnecks in Oklahoma, coached by Bill Foulkes, while Las Vegas and St Louis headed to California to become the San Diego Sockers and the California Surf, who played on Walt Disney’s doorstep in Anaheim.

  The league featured an American and National Conference, each with three divisions, and a 30-game schedule. A major television contract was still absent, with the NASL having to settle for a nine-game package with TVS Sports, for which ratings would be disappointing. Some games were not shown until late on Monday nights. For some observers, the rush to expand and the bank-breaking attempts of teams to keep pace with the Cosmos without the support of major television money would mark the start of the NASL’s slippery slope. Critics of the spend-for-success philosophy felt it was more important to develop American talent and, in the meantime, to set on-field objectives that were in line with realistic team budgets.

  Former Sheffield Wednesday defender Don Megson, the new coach of the Portland Timbers, says, ‘I looked at it as though we would have success if we won our division. You could have a good year and win something without getting to the Soccer Bowl. I saw that as being a bit like the FA Cup, something extra, because it was a bit optimistic to think we could turn over the likes of the Cosmos and Tampa Bay. The way the league worked meant it was possible for everybody to achieve a little success.’

  Megson had been an interesting acquisition for the Timbers, the first English manger to quit a Football League job to take a post in the NASL. During five seasons at Bristol Rovers he had led the team to promotion from Division Three and had taken his team to Portland for an end-of-season friendly. ‘I liked it right away. Portland is a beautiful place and I saw that they had a good training facility.’

  Jim Smith, on the move from Blackburn to Birmingham, had been the club’s first target, but when they could not sign the man whose nickname of ‘Bald Eagle’ would have made him the perfect choice for an NASL job, they turned to Megson. ‘I had a call from a guy called Keith Williams who said he was booked into the hotel at the side of my home and did I want to meet for breakfast? I think I had gone as far as I could with Rovers. It was very exciting when we won promotion and had the best team in the division, but in the Second Division our team was not quite good enough and everything was negative. It was really difficult to compete and we were hanging on week in and week out, trying to claw results. It can get you down after a little while. And the Timbers were offering me twice the money I was on at Rovers, so obviously that was a consideration.’

  Another English manager on his way back to the NASL was Gordon Jago, whose acceptance of an offer to coach the Tampa Bay Rowdies had been precipitated by the BBC. After returning from his ill-fated stint as the Baltimore Bays head coach, Jago was appointed manager of Queens Park Rangers early in 1971, leading them back to the First Division before resigning in September of 1975. Less than a month later, he was installed as manager of Millwall.

  Tampa had come calling after Eddie Firmani resigned in 1977, but their bid to secure Jago’s services reached its turning point in December of that year, when Millwall’s hooligan element was highlighted on BBC’s Panorama programme, a show that took viewers inside the violent world of groups who revelled in names like F-Troop and Treatment. ‘It was a disgraceful programme,’ Jago recalls angrily. ‘That killed it for me. We had worked so hard to try to change the image of Millwall, with identification cards, supporters’ trains, open days for the fans to meet players, a Sunday morning market, going to clubs and schools. I was in the New Cross area virtually every night because it was all part of changing the image. Panorama asked if they could do a feature on what we were trying to do.

  ‘It was my impression that they had produced a concocted programme. I even heard a rumour that they took people to a pub in Catford and got them drunk and interviewed them. That was F-Troop. We had one problem against Chelsea around that time but we were winning the battle. It was a carve-up job. I knew then that no one would come to Millwall to see their team play, which would hurt us. Instead of 15,000 with visiting fans, we would get 10,000. We needed the extra revenue to make the club run.

  ‘We went to see the BBC. Ted Croker, the FA secretary, was there, so was the producer of the show, a head guy from the BBC and Denis Howell, the Minister of Sport. Between the BBC guy and the minister I have never heard two people insult each other so well with their use of the English language. The Millwall chairman, Herbert Burnidge, turned round at the end of the meeting and said, “Your programme has cost me my manager and if I could I would resign.” The club let me out of a year and a half of my contract to go to Tampa.’

  Jago’s arrival led to several Rowdies stalwarts departing the club, including the old Palace trio of Paul Hammond, Stewart Jump and Mark Lindsay, who all found their way to Houston. Coventry’s Mick McGuire and West Ham FA Cup-winner Graham Paddon were brought in to strengthen the Rowdies midfield. Lindsay, who still lives in Tampa, explains, ‘Eddie Firmani asked me if I wanted to go to New York. Where would I play? I was happy in Tampa and I got married in ’76 and we had built a house. But it was Jago’s decision to bring in his own players and,
being naive and immature, I said a couple of things I shouldn’t have. I was negotiating a new contract but Gordon had no intention of me signing it. My beef was that they should have told me if they were not interested. “If you want Paddon and those guys, that’s fine. It’s part and parcel of football, but don’t keep me coming into work and negotiating a contract.” It was tough leaving Tampa. The Rowdies were a much tighter organisation than any I played for after that.’

  Striker Derek Smethurst recalls, ‘I went in to renegotiate in ’78 and found out they were going to spend several hundred thousand dollars on an unproven player. It didn’t happen in the end, but I knew I had hit a nerve and I doubled my salary.’

  But Smethurst and his salary were soon on their way to San Diego in a trade for former Luton midfielder Peter Anderson. The striker’s memories of the Sockers and coach Hubert Vogelsinger are not happy ones. ‘Nobody knew who was fighting who at that team. And I ran into a coach who could not trap a bag of cement. He was like sandpaper to my whole character. The players knew he knew nothing as well but wanted to stay living in San Diego.’

  Smethurst’s transfer would not have happened at all if his alternative career move had worked out after the 1977 season, when he tried out as a kicker for the NFL’s Tampa Bay Buccaneers. ‘I was winning the job, but I tore a thigh muscle. I’d told them I needed a two-week rest because of a thigh injury but they made me carry on and I tore a quadricep muscle.’

  Replacing Smethurst in the Rowdies’ forward line was the Brazilian Mirandinha, who managed only one goal in 14 games. But the Rowdies, with Marsh recording 18 goals and 16 assists, comfortably made the 16-team play-off field by finishing second in their division behind the New England Tea Men, one of two expansion teams led to division titles by British coaches.