It was Hunt’s goal that settled the decisive third game in the first round of the play-offs against Tulsa. In the semi-finals, the Cosmos came up against the San Diego Sockers, who were within one series of the Soccer Bowl for the third straight year. Ade Coker, the former West Ham forward, had enjoyed a return to form with 13 goals for Ron Newman’s men, but the team from California were again denied their day in the sun when the Cosmos beat them in two games.
The Seattle Sounders, champions of the Western Division, won through to contest the Soccer Bowl and earn a shot at revenge for New York’s Pelé-inspired victory of five years earlier. Peter Ward was the spearhead of the Sounders attack, scoring 18 goals on his arrival from Nottingham Forest to win the league’s MVP award. ‘Defenders couldn’t get anywhere near him,’ says teammate Roger Davies. A prolific scorer at Brighton, where he bagged 79 League goals in 172 starts and earned an England cap as a substitute against Australia, Ward’s transfer to the European champions in October of 1980 had brought limited success.
‘Alan Hinton asked me to come over to America after he saw me score five against Manchester City in a reserve game,’ says Ward. ‘I didn’t go over thinking I had anything to prove, I just fancied it and it was a decent amount of money. After a slow start, we played well. We didn’t play any long ball stuff, we played a lot on the floor and that suited me.’
In Seattle’s midfield, the former Wolves duo of Steve Daley and Kenny Hibbitt did their best to compensate for the long-term absence of Alan Hudson, Daley setting up 18 goals during the season and scoring twice in a decisive play-off win against the Toronto Blizzard.
Southern Division champions Fort Lauderdale Strikers, for whom Brian Kidd had scored 15 goals, were Seattle’s opponents in a keenly contested semi-final series. Beaten 2–0 at home, Kidd having scored one of the goals, the Sounders kept their championship hopes alive with a 4–3 extra-time win in Florida, where Ward equalised with 43 seconds left in the 90 minutes and Davies doubled his season’s total of goals by finding the net twice. Overtime was needed again in the decider in the Kingdome before Hibbitt scored the game’s only goal.
The final in San Diego, watched by fewer than 23,000 fans, was settled when Giorgio Chinaglia, scorer of 20 regular season goals, found the net to give New York a 1–0 victory and their fourth title in six seasons. ‘They were more experienced at the top level and they were the better team,’ says Seattle goalkeeper Paul Hammond. ‘Their goal might have been my fault because I charged out and I was a bit slow in going down.’
Ward argues, ‘I thought we outplayed them, but just couldn’t score. I remember going up to Carlos Alberto, who was magnificent, and asking for his shirt. He said, “Only if you give me yours.” I thought he was kidding but he came into the locker room after the game and swapped shirts.’
Soccer Bowl ’82 was to be the last title shot for both teams. The Cosmos, who saw Hunt return to England but welcomed back Franz Beckenbauer at the age of 37, suffered a surprise defeat to Montreal to end their 1983 campaign. Their final season, with Eddie Firmani returning to coach the team and Giorgio Chinaglia departing, saw them fail to qualify for the play-offs for the first time since 1975. With crowds down below 13,000 per game, the Cosmos had even tried unsuccessfully to lure Pelé out of retirement.
For Seattle, it was an even sorrier tale, their appearance in the 1982 final marking the beginning of the end for one of the NASL’s most successful franchises. Coach Alan Hinton did not survive the winter of 1982–83 after the team’s new owner, Bruce Anderson, decided to include more local players. His drive towards Americanisation even included banning the use of the English word ‘pitch’ to describe the field. Laurie Calloway, the former San Jose defender and California coach, took over the team. ‘I had a reputation as being someone who thought we should bring in Americans quicker,’ he explains. But Calloway’s appointment was not welcomed by Hudson, who referred to ‘two clowns’ having taken over the organisation.
Calloway says, ‘Alan Hudson resented me and wouldn’t do what I asked him to do. I didn’t agree with the philosophy of the league, which had been favouring the Brits coming over towards the end of their careers and, in some cases, stealing money. Some didn’t perform. I told Alan I wanted him to be the main man, but we didn’t see eye to eye. He slagged me off but I won’t get into it with him because I have too much respect for him. He was a great player.’
Hudson was gone after one game of the 1983 season, while Davies was traded to Fort Lauderdale before the new season kicked off. Davies recalls, ‘After I won the MVP award I tried to get a no-cut, no-trade contract, but the general manager, Jack Daley, had said, “You won’t need that as long as I am here.” But then he got sacked. They got rid of me and Alan because we were the highest-earning players.’
As the 1983 season progressed, it was clear that the Sounders, with their attendance down by several thousand on previous years, would struggle to make the play-offs, despite thirteen goals from Ward, nine by well-travelled English forward David Kemp and the signing of former Manchester City and England goalkeeper Joe Corrigan. And there were concerns off the field. ‘The owner wanted to save money but probably should have done it more slowly,’ says Calloway. ‘The team had financial problems and there were doubts about the guy’s ability to keep the team going. In the end people were not being paid. I had to be a counsellor to wives asking me when their money was coming. We were playing to get into the play-offs in the last two games and the wives went in for their money and there was none. Joe Corrigan said, “You don’t expect us to play with no wages.” We got them to play but their hearts weren’t in it and we lost two games we could have won. If you don’t get paid, some players are just going to say, “This is bollocks.” A couple of weeks later the team folded.’
Peter Ward recalls, ‘We’d had an inkling, but none of us had been around that kind of situation and atmosphere, so we didn’t really believe it. We’d seen players in England wondering if they were going to get a new contract, but not this. It was a shock because we’d still done OK with the crowds.’
At least the Sounders had made it into the 1983 season, which is more than could be said of the Edmonton Drillers, Jacksonville Tea Men and Portland Timbers, who all played their final seasons in 1982. In Portland, crowds hovered around 7,000 in what had once been ‘Soccer City, USA’.
The signing of Scottish World Cup star Archie Gemmill, a League Championship winner at Derby and Nottingham Forest and holder of 43 international caps, had been unable to drag Noel Cantwell’s Tea Men from the foot of their division and dissuade them from dropping down to the American Soccer League. Mark Lindsay, signed from San Jose, recalls, ‘It was the most volatile team I played for. We had Argentinian players and Archie made a couple of comments they didn’t like. There were more fights there than at any other period of my career.’
The Montreal Manics were another team who would not see the end of the NASL era. After making the play-offs in 1982, they were there again the following year. Top scorer Alan Willey and Tony Towers each scored in a 4–2 win against the Cosmos and more than 20,000 in the Olympic Stadium saw a shoot-out victory complete a surprise series win. But defeat against Tulsa in the semi-final series was the club’s last action.
The Roughnecks, tucked away from the spotlight in the media outback of Oklahoma, had long been many people’s tip to go to the wall. Instead they were on their way to their finest hour. In 1982, Terry Hennessey’s players had forced their way into the play-off field on the back of 17 goals by Laurie Abrahams and a team-high 11 assists by David Bradford. A year later, they rose to the top of the Southern Division after Ron Futcher arrived to partner Abrahams. The ex-Luton man scored 15 times in the regular season and his double in the second game of the first round series was enough to kill off Fort Lauderdale, where David Chadwick had returned as head coach and Kidd had once again been the star performer with 18 goals. Abrahams recalls, ‘Ron was lucky to be on the field for the second game because he had chased after s
omeone earlier on.’
In the first game against Montreal, the Roughnecks prevailed in a shoot-out after Futcher scored their only goal in a 1–1 draw and former Luton midfielder Lil Fuccillo had been sent off. ‘He had been booked for a nothing foul and then got another card,’ says Abrahams. ‘We lucked out with a draw.’ A defeat at Montreal set up a deciding game back at Tulsa’s Skelly Stadium, where Futcher struck twice in a 3–0 win to put the Roughnecks through to Soccer Bowl, to be played in Vancouver.
It was a remarkable achievement by Hennessey’s team, who had the lowest payroll in the league. Says Futcher, ‘Our team spirit was fantastic, even though we didn’t have the best players technically. Everyone played at the top of their game and teams could not deal with the humidity in Oklahoma. We were winning games in the last 20 minutes because they were knackered.’
Even more amazing than the Roughnecks’ success was the league’s decision to allow Futcher to play in the final. ‘I was booked in the semi-final, which took me to the number of yellow cards you needed to be banned,’ he explains. ‘But our owner complained that it would devalue the final if the better players did not play.’
Citing the ‘best interests of the game’, the NASL rule-makers allowed Futcher to take the field in front of a crowd of 60,051. The striker continued his scoring spree with the second goal in a 2–0 win against Toronto as the Roughnecks were crowned as one of the NASL’s more unlikely champions. Abrahams concludes, ‘Overall, we were very, very fortunate to win it. Montreal had done us a favour by beating the Cosmos, who we couldn’t beat. They were our bogey team.’
Toronto, champions in 1976 but rarely in the hunt since then, had begun their own resurgence with the appointment of Bob Houghton as head coach in 1982. Houghton, a former Fulham junior who decided early in his career to turn to coaching, had come to prominence in his native England when, still only 30, he led Swedish side Malmö to a 1979 European Cup final place against Nottingham Forest. He returned home for an unsuccessful spell as manager of Bristol City that lasted less than two seasons. His Toronto team, which included former Manchester United and Northern Ireland full-back Jimmy Nicholl and ex-Liverpool ‘Super Sub’ David Fairclough, advanced to the play-offs in his first season. The feat was repeated a year later when David Byrne, son of former England and West Ham forward John ‘Budgie’ Byrne, led the individual points list with 13 goals and 18 assists.
The signing of Nicholl, born in Hamilton, Ontario, before his family moved to Belfast, had been significant for the Blizzard in light of the regulations introduced by the NASL before the 1982 season. Players like Nicholl, who had Canadian citizenship, enabled teams to meet their quota of home-based players without loss of quality, but did nothing to hasten the development of the US and Canadian national teams.
With that in mind, and in a development that smacked as much of desperation as innovation, 1983 saw the introduction of Team America to the NASL. Based in Washington DC, the club was intended to give the US national side the experience, training and cohesion that would help them on the international stage – as well being a patriotic marketing ploy. Defender Alan Merrick, who had been in the US long enough to acquire American citizenship, jumped at the chance to represent his adopted country. ‘I knew I wasn’t going back to England and I felt like an American,’ he says. ‘It was a novel opportunity.’
But many of the better American players, like New York Cosmos midfielder Ricky Davis, chose not to leave successful teams for an experimental one. ‘I thought he had let us down,’ says Merrick. ‘The concept was good and it needed guys like Ricky to help the United States Soccer Federation’s marketing, to give it a focal point.’
Other newly qualified Americans were striker Alan Green and goalkeeper Paul Hammond, who recalls, ‘One of the highlights was meeting Ronald Reagan in the Oval Office. I sent the pictures back to my mum in Nottingham. But everyone wanted to beat us and there was a bit of animosity because we were not really the US team.’
Former NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam adds, ‘About six teams would not release their players. They couldn’t visualise that if the national team does well, then suddenly the sport is important for the media and the kids.’
Lack of quality players, a won–lost record of 10–20 and average crowds of 11,000 ensured that the new team was a one-year experiment only. Bizarrely, the Montreal Manic management liked what they saw enough to announce that they would act as Team Canada in 1984. It was a suicidal move in the pro-French city of Montreal at a time of great activity among Quebec separatist movements. As the crowds drifted away, the club’s fate was sealed and the new team would never see the light of day.
If Team America’s failure was a disappointment, it was nothing compared with the blow suffered by Woosnam, the NASL and the cause of American soccer during the winter of 1982–83. In his role as vice-president of the USSF, Woosnam had been the driving force behind the American bid to stage the 1986 World Cup finals after Colombia decided it could not fulfil its commitment to host the event. ‘We had been inviting big names to present the trophy at Soccer Bowls, like Sir Stanley Rous and Sepp Blatter from FIFA and Henry Kissinger. We staged the world all-star game after the 1982 finals. All of it was done with the thought that one day we would be ready to hold the World Cup.
‘After Colombia threw it back in December ’82, I knew we were ready because if you put on a competition like that in this country it is successful. The person at FIFA we dealt with more than anyone else said, “If you put the best presentation together you will get it.” I spent all my time on the presentation. I got another guy out of the league office and we ran all over the country getting stadiums, mayors, everything. Our presentation consisted of two thick flip-books, with photographs, statistics and God knows what. But the nine-page, hand-written presentation from Mexico won the day. You would never have believed it. Getting the World Cup would have counter-influenced the negative things that were going on. From then on I knew it was going to be tough.’
He was not wrong. By the time the 1984 season rolled around, the NASL, which had gone from 14 teams in 1982 to 12 a year later, was down to 9 clubs. And Woosnam himself had departed.
The man whose energy helped to keep the NASL in business in the late ’60s and had, wisely or otherwise, driven it towards expansion throughout the ’70s, cleared out his office after the 1983 season and said farewell to the organisation that had been his life for a decade and a half. For the previous year, Woosnam had been kept around the league’s New York headquarters mainly to help his replacement find his feet after the NASL owners decided that a new face was required to front their business. While Woosnam was working on the American World Cup bid, Howard Samuels had been installed as the league’s new commissioner.
‘You have to accept it. It happens in all walks of life,’ reflects the Welshman, his baritone voice still resonating more of the valleys than the Atlanta suburbs where he makes his home. ‘I stayed on to help the new guy and then I tried to look onwards and went and did the marketing for the USSF.’
Samuels came from a military background, which apparently made him ideal for the trench warfare that NASL survival had become by the time he was installed as league president and chief executive officer in June 1982. Later that year, the NASL owners had decided to save on Woosnam’s salary by adding commissioner to the role of a man who had been an aide to three US Presidents.
As the 1984 season approached, Samuels was bent on introducing a salary cap and raising the number of North American players required on the field to five. He and the team owners went as far as warning the players’ union that the league would fold unless they accepted a reduction in squad size from 24 to 19, a 15 per cent pay cut for any player earning more than $40,000 and an overall team salary budget of $600,000 – although there was scope to have one star player’s salary fall outside of that figure. The players initially rejected the offer before finally, less than three weeks before the season kicked off, agreeing to everything but the individual salary
reduction.
Along with wages, the season was also shrinking, from 30 to 24 games, to allow for a longer indoor season. That change of emphasis saw the Fort Lauderdale Strikers head north to Minnesota, where a better indoor venue was available. The Strikers took Alan Willey back to the city where he had been such a force for the Kicks and his 15 goals, plus 8 by Brian Kidd, helped them win 14 of their 24 games, although that was not enough to make the 4-team play-off field. The support for the team was disappointing compared to the 20,000-plus who had consistently turned out to support the Kicks. There was one huge crowd, a 52,621 turn-out for the game against the Tampa Bay Rowdies, but that was a somewhat false figure.
Coach Dave Chadwick recalls, ‘The Beach Boys were in concert right after the game. We won it with a Brian Kidd goal and we had won four of our first five games. We were on a great run. But next game we had only 6,000. Where the hell had everyone gone? You could see the players as they came of out of the tunnel. It was horrific. They were all fired up to play and it was like a needle in a balloon.’
Occupying the top two places in the Western Division above the Strikers were the San Diego Sockers and Vancouver Whitecaps. San Diego’s division title meant a fourth semi-final place in five years and owed much to Ade Coker’s 16 goals.
The Whitecaps had endured a frustrating three seasons. In 1982, they had won more games than anyone in their division but finished only third because of their failure to pick up as many bonus points for goals as their rivals. What goals they did score had been spread around between Ray Hankin, with 11, and Peter Lorimer and Carl Valentine, who scored 10 apiece. Former West Brom skipper John Wile was the linchpin of the defence.
Playing for Uncle Sam Page 29
