Playing for Uncle Sam

by David Tossell

  Hudson’s return from his first NASL season was 11 assists, many of them setting up ex-Chelsea teammate Derek Smethurst, who led the side with 13 goals after escaping his purgatory at San Diego. Former long-serving Luton man John Ryan contributed 12 goals from right-back, while Ron Davies marked the final year of his NASL career by scoring only 1 goal in 22 games. At the end of a disappointing season for the club, the Sounders’ owners suggested to coach Jimmy Gabriel that it was time to move on.

  There were several other coaching changes afoot in the NASL, including the end of John Sewell’s five-year reign at the California Surf. Former Palace teammate, Peter Wall, was asked to take over. ‘We did OK in ’78, but the crowds were not what the club expected,’ Wall recalls. ‘At the end of the year they decided the team was not attractive enough nor had enough entertaining players. There was a large German population in Anaheim and the management thought John was resistant about getting German players.

  ‘We started slowly in 1979 and the general manager called me in and said he didn’t like the way we were playing. They were going to fire John and offer me the job, but I said I couldn’t take it because John had brought me here. But they got me together with one of the main owners and, after a long meeting, I said, “OK, I will do it, but I am not going to sign a new contract. Just pay me so many dollars each time we win.” We lost six of the first seven games! I did change our style of play and had more attacking players, instead of being a more English-type defensive team who would win 1–0. I thought it was better to lose 4–3 and get the odd win.’

  Laurie Abrahams arrived from Tulsa, to whom he had been traded from New England in the off-season, scoring eight goals in ten games for the Surf. He recalls, ‘My first game at Memphis, we were two goals down in no time but won 3–2. I scored a goal and then they took me off, but it was a mistake – they were trying to take off someone with a similar number. Tampa and Fort Lauderdale battered us for six goals each but it didn’t wear the team down at all. If we had been beaten like that in Tulsa heads would have gone down, but Peter did a good job in that respect. The Surf was a young team, the guys lived there for good and the majority seemed to get on.’

  Gerry Ingram scored ten goals after a trade from Chicago and, with six wins in the last seven games, the Surf made it to the play-offs, where they were beaten in two games by San Diego.

  Another coaching change occurred in Memphis, where Eddie McCreadie handed the baton to his former Chelsea teammate Charlie Cooke, although not by choice. McCreadie, capped 23 times by Scotland, was a popular figure with the Rogues’ public, but lost the support of team owner Harry Mangurian as a result of the players’ strike. McCreadie had been left with only one regular player for the April 14 game at Detroit and his decision to put on a uniform himself for a game that the Rogues lost 6–0 was interpreted as his way of sending a statement to the stay-at-home players. Mangurian was reportedly unhappy with the way things had transpired around the strike and fired McCreadie a month later.

  Cooke says, ‘I don’t know what happened but suddenly Eddie wasn’t manager any more. By that time I had got used to the way the clubs acted. They seemed to act on a whim, whatever took the owner’s fancy. It wasn’t like in Britain where you had a contract and they stuck to it. I didn’t really know why I had been traded from Los Angeles because I thought I had been doing OK. That was one of the weaknesses of the league, that you never really knew what went on.’ The Rogues would finish with the worst record in the league, only six wins in thirty games.

  Meanwhile, a change in the regime at Minnesota did nothing to knock the Kicks off their course to a division title. Freddie Goodwin had moved into the role of general manager, with Roy McCrohan, a Norwich City stalwart during the ’50s, taking the position of head coach. The usual haul of goals from Alan Willey and Ron Futcher, 21 and 14 respectively, saw the Kicks cruise to the play-offs, where they under-achieved again, beaten twice by Tulsa.

  In his first season in charge of the Roughnecks, former Derby winger and Vancouver assistant coach Alan Hinton built a team that, despite more defeats than victories, made it to the play-off quarter-finals. Hinton had added to the British players he inherited by signing former England left-back and Baseball Ground teammate David Nish, whose £225,000 transfer from Leicester in July 1972 had made him Britain’s most expensive player. Defenders Terry Darracott and Bob ‘Sammy’ Chapman were less heralded First Division defenders at Everton and Nottingham Forest respectively, while winger Alan Woodward’s powerful shooting had earned him 158 League goals for Sheffield United. Midfielder Steve Powell and centre-forward Roger Davies had played alongside Hinton at Derby.

  Davies, a tall, gangly striker who had never quite managed to dislodge John O’Hare from the Derby number nine jersey, had been relieved to escape from Leicester, the club that had brought him back to England after a move to Belgium’s FC Bruges. Plagued by a back injury, Davies had managed only half a dozen goals in 26 games for Leicester, but he beat that total by two in fewer games in his first NASL season. Wayne Hughes, a young midfielder from West Brom, scored 12 goals, while Abrahams struck 10 times before his departure.

  Hinton, however, was not to get the chance to build on his first season, despite the efforts of his loyal players. ‘It was a strange year,’ says Davies. ‘They had promised people they would do this and that, but things wouldn’t happen. Then Alan got the sack. They said it was down to poor results and I don’t know whether that was true or not. The players heard what was coming and we rang up radio stations and spoke up for Alan and tried to pre-empt it.’

  Abrahams, however, argues that the atmosphere in Tulsa had been far from conducive to winning. ‘There was a lot of finger pointing and I am not saying I wasn’t part of it,’ he admits. ‘The players were only there on loan and were thinking about going home.’

  The Portland Timbers’ 1979 campaign was to be their last under Don Megson, who recalls an unhappy year. ‘I went over there with a lad called Keith Williams, who was a pioneer. But the money situation was becoming too much for him and he was not a multi-millionaire, so he sold out.

  ‘The new people were not really on the ball. Gates were not going up, money was not increasing for better players and I couldn’t do the things I wanted. They made me go out and look for a world star because everyone else had one. I looked at Holland’s Robbie Rensenbrink but I found out he’d just had a cartilage operation and was not ready. I said, “He is not right for us.” The next day we are sat in the general manager’s office and he says he has signed him. As a manager from an English background, that was not the way I was used to working. Besides, the Portland crowds liked players like Peter Withe because they liked to see someone jumping and challenging and heading the ball. I said, “Most people don’t know who Rensenbrink is and they don’t know the difference between him and someone who will fight all day for them.” As the 1980 season was starting, my wife’s mother died and I decided to go back home.’

  Megson may not have seen the new season in Portland, but Rensenbrink, the Dutch World Cup forward, was in place to attempt to brighten up an attack that had been led by Clyde Best’s eight goals in 1979.

  In Toronto, where a change of ownership had seen the controversial Metros-Croatia name replaced by the more acceptable ‘Blizzard’ before the 1979 season, Keith Eddy had been installed as coach, taking his team to the play-offs, where they fell in the first round to his former New York Cosmos team. The biggest name in the line-up was Peter Lorimer, whose fierce shot every schoolboy in every playground in England tried to copy in the late ’60s and early ’70s. He had scored more than 150 League goals in a 16-year Leeds career, winning 21 Scotland caps and countless medals as a part of Don Revie’s great, but unloved, team. The other British players in the team included Jim Bone, the former Partick Thistle and Norwich forward, who had earned a couple of Scotland caps, and the veteran NASL defender Charlie Mitchell.

  Eddy recalls, ‘When I took the job five weeks before the season they had two player
s and I got rid of them. It was fun for about a year and a half. I was all over the world looking for players on a shoestring. We went to play the Cosmos and I looked at my team, and my star midfielder was from Bath. Lorimer was the only real player I had. My biggest coup was going and getting him. He and Jimmy Adamson, who was manager at Leeds, hated each other and I got him for nothing. Jimmy was glad to get him out of his hair.

  ‘We started with a won-lost record of 1–7 and all of a sudden we turned it around and won seven games. It was the same goddamn team. In the end the highs were too high for me and the lows too low. It came to a head a couple of years later when my daughter came to me and said her mum had told her not to bother me if we lost. I went down to the club the next day and quit.’

  The 1978 MVP, Tea Men striker Mike Flanagan, remained in England in 1979, where he finished the summer by signing for Crystal Palace for £722,000, thus setting up his partnership with Clive Allen – a dream for all those headline writers old enough to remember the days of the music hall. Without their leading striker, the Tea Men failed to score as they lost their first five games. They missed out on the play-offs, Keith Weller finishing as top scorer with nine goals.

  By the time Weller arrived in Fort Lauderdale during the 1980 season, the Strikers had parted company with Ron Newman. After three seasons in which the Strikers qualified for the play-offs every year, Newman was removed from his position at the completion of the 1979 campaign following a clash with owner Joe Robbie. ‘The press were saying we should have won the championship with players like Best, Müller and Cubillas,’ says Newman. ‘Those players would give the fans something to watch and could add something to the team, but they would not help you win a championship.

  ‘I was asked to go to a meeting with the owner. There were other things I was upset about and needed straightening out. The meeting became a focal point in the media and everything the press said in my favour, Joe thought I was saying. He hated me more and more but he didn’t want to fire me because he would have to pay me. They wanted me to accept the position of director of player personnel to get me out of my coaching contract and they called a press conference about it. I told the press, “It’s an important position so I guess it must have an attractive contract and I am looking forward to seeing it. But I can’t do that until the old one has been satisfied.” They had no intention of offering me a better contract. They would have let me hold the new position for a month and decided it was not working out and got rid of me.

  ‘Eventually it came down to our attorneys to sort it out, but it was like sharks versus minnows. My attorney told me that my contract was watertight but said that Robbie was so wealthy he would just keep it in the courts rather than pay me. Which was exactly what he did. It seems that Robbie would only be liable for my contract between jobs and, as I couldn’t afford to be out of work for long, his plan worked and by the time I paid attorney fees I only got a few dollars. An interesting side story was that while the court case was going on, the radio announced one morning that a top attorney of Robbie’s had been stabbed seven times by a house guest. I remember jokingly warning people not to mess with me! The attorney survived.’

  The Strikers’ British players mourned Newman’s departure. ‘There was no reason for Ron to go; it was a bad decision,’ recalls David Irving. ‘We lost a lot when Ron left. He was a big part of the Strikers and, even if not in a coaching capacity, he could still have been there. He put his heart and soul into the club and it was a sad day for the Strikers when he went, and poor business.’

  Overall, the NASL’s 1979 season was one of ups and downs. Many feared the early-season strike would have a lasting effect on the public’s support for the league, although attendance showed only a slight dip and the season reached an exciting conclusion with the Vancouver Whitecaps ending the New York Cosmos’ two-year dominance.

  But there were obvious problems developing at some franchises. The large turnover of coaches demonstrated that – as do Steve Earle’s memories of the Tulsa Roughnecks’ winter trip to Europe, which ended up as chaotic as a Sunday League team’s end-of-season jaunt to Majorca. ‘By the time we got to Holland they were selling off the players. We started the tour with 18 and only had 12 when we got to England. People were interested in young Wayne Hughes and the club needed the money, so we kept giving him the ball to make him look good. He had a nightmare. He went from a £100,000 player to £60,000 in one game. We were due to play on a Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday at Leicester, Derby and Lincoln. We got Jon Sammels, Keith Weller and Kevin Hector to play and drew with Derby and Leicester. They’d had enough and didn’t go to Lincoln. We were left with a bunch of Americans and old farts like me and we got beat 9–2.’

  Despite such problems, the NASL would open its 1980 campaign with an unchanged line-up, maintaining a 24-team format for a third, and final, year. But the bubble was about to burst.

  18. We Can Be Heroes

  The list of the highest individual scorers in North American League history includes four British players. But there is no place for Best or Marsh, Tueart or Francis, or any of the other household names from the Football League. Instead, the quartet of Brits enshrined among the NASL’s most prolific players comprises Alan Willey, Ron Futcher, Paul Child and Laurie Abrahams. All were either toiling in the lower divisions or fighting for first-team football when they crossed the Atlantic to find goals, celebrity and longevity. The fact that their feats remain largely overlooked when fans back home remember the star-studded NASL is something they have learned to accept.

  ‘Could I have been the same in England? I don’t know,’ says Willey. ‘But I do know I would not change a thing. I am proud of what I achieved. The guys that people recognise when you talk about the NASL had already made their names and came over at the tail end of their careers. We were trying to prove ourselves. Those star players didn’t have to push as hard.’

  Elected in 2003 to American Soccer’s Hall of Fame, Willey, in third spot, is the highest-placed of the British players in this top-ten scoring list (goals are worth two points and assists worth one point):

  If timing is one of the strengths of a striker, then Willey proved he had it in abundance when Minnesota Kicks coach Freddie Goodwin made a trip to Middlesbrough during the 1975–76 season. ‘He went to see Frank Spraggon in a reserve game, but I scored a couple of goals and he said he was interested in me as well. I was only 19 and Middlesbrough was the furthest I had ever been from Sunderland, where I was from. I had not long made my debut for Middlesbrough and I was coming on as sub for ten minutes at a time, so Jack Charlton, the manager, thought it would be good for me to get some playing time in America.’

  Despite his immediate success in the NASL, scoring 16 goals in his rookie season, Willey was not expecting to return. ‘I was back in Middlesbrough and I was leading scorer after five or six games with five goals. We went to Liverpool and Jack left me out because he wanted to play defensively for a point. We got a 0–0 draw and from then on I was in and out and back to where I was a year before.’

  Willey was unable to win a regular place in a forward line of David Mills, Alan Foggon and John Hickton, so when Goodwin called again he decided to return to Minnesota. The goals flowed once more, 14 in 20 games. ‘I think I was successful because I was getting a chance to play more,’ he explains. ‘It was hard coming on as substitute and getting into the rhythm of the game. The pace was not as fast as in England and there was not as much pressure in America. The fans didn’t know much about the game and would always cheer you. If you have a bad game in England, the crowd is on your back. And at that time I was about 165 or 170 pounds and the fields in England were like quagmires, which made it hard for a smaller player like me.’

  Returning to England, Willey realised his days at Ayresome Park were numbered under new manager John Neal. ‘I went back after the ’77 season with Stan Cummins, who played for the Kicks that year, and we got back on a Saturday. Middlesbrough were at home and Neal asked who we were. He said,
“Why don’t you come in and let’s see how fit you are.” We had just walked off the plane after a full season and now we had to do 12-minute runs. I got into the first team a couple of times and scored five goals against Rotherham, but I was not on the team sheet the following Saturday.’

  Willey moved back to Minnesota on a permanent basis, scoring 21 goals in the regular season of 1978 and adding another seven play-off goals, including his incredible five-goal performance against the Cosmos. In 1979, he matched his total of the previous year.

  Kicks teammate Alan Merrick describes Willey as ‘one of the most underrated players ever to come out of England’. He claims, ‘He was everything Michael Owen is. A great striker of the ball, great attitude and work rate. A quality player that nobody in the world knows about. He was head and shoulders above any of the other young English players over here.’

  Ankle injuries slowed Willey’s production to seven goals per year in 1980 and 1981, when he was sold to the Montreal Manic after only six games. ‘The team had been sold and Freddie Goodwin was on his way out,’ Willey explains. ‘One of the last things he did was to trade me. We were at practice and Freddie came over and said, “Can I have a word?” I knew what was coming and he said they had traded me.’

  Willey produced returns of 15, 13 and 15 goals in his final three NASL seasons, the last of which was back in Minnesota for the relocated Strikers. Having settled in the state as a computer systems engineer, he admits that one team in England would have had him boarding a plane to England without a moment’s pause during his successful NASL career. ‘I would have gone back to Sunderland in a heartbeat. That was my team. If I was not in the Middlesbrough team on a Saturday I would go to Roker Park. There was talk of it at one time but then they had a change of manager.’