Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  ‘I lived my childhood on the beach. For a kid, living in Blackpool was like being in a giant playground. It was fantastic: slot machines, roller coasters. It was nice to grow up in a place where everybody was reasonably happy because they were on their holidays. People of a working-class background went on an annual pilgrimage to the seaside: the Scots, Welsh, Brummies and Geordies were everywhere. I remember thinking I didn’t want to live anywhere else. The rest of the country seemed normal, whereas Blackpool was exciting for a young boy.’

  Robinson’s parents were working class.

  ‘But they had aspirations to be middle,’ he interrupts. ‘I was ten when I went on my first holiday – a cruise around the Iberian Peninsula. Cruising was a holiday that boarding-house owners in South Shore tended to do.

  ‘I was never really influenced by my parents in terms of ideologies, because they weren’t deep thinkers on such issues. Blackpool was a Conservative oasis or a dark corner depending where you come from politically. But I had more empathy with the left. My dad was a devout capitalist – a businessman with a 90 per cent mortgage. The family needed capitalism to survive. But it also needed the money from working-class people, many of whom came to Blackpool as socialists. There seemed to be a lot of geography teachers wearing brown corduroy trousers.’

  Robinson went to Palatine High School, an institution that in 2002 was targeted as a hotspot of teenage pregnancy by the local council. He says not much has changed since his time there.

  ‘Whereas kids from most secondary schools in the area would go on to further education or industry, the primary destination from my school was jail. It was an extremely violent place. We used to win the local schools football league every season for the main reason that three of the other schools wouldn’t turn up to play us. That was the Blackpool way. On the surface it was a cheery place, but beneath that there was an undercurrent of local thuggery. Most of it probably started at Palatine.’

  The football bug caught Robinson earlier than an Ian Rush opening goal at Goodison Park.

  ‘It was in my blood. My dad [Arthur Robinson] had played professionally with Brighton, Aston Villa and Wrexham before the Second World War came along, where he fought in Holland. He spent most of his six years behind enemy lines and was later decorated by Queen Wilhelmina. My brother was a fine player too.

  ‘Coming from the north-west meant there was always lots of teams to watch. Dad supported Villa, but they were too far away, so on a Friday night I’d go and watch Southport, who were in the Football League. Then Saturdays it’d be either Blackpool or Liverpool. I worked as a bagging boy at Blackpool train and bus stations to finance my trips to Bloomfield Road. It meant wheeling a trolley halfway across town with holidaymakers’ luggage to B&Bs and hotels. I was like a poor taxi driver with no wheels. Because I was a lot cuter than my older brother, he pushed me forward: “Carry your bags, miss?” It worked.’

  Robinson went to Anfield for the first time as a six year old.

  ‘It was 1963 and Liverpool played Burnley,’ he recalls instantly. ‘I remember a near-post header from St John, which flew into the net. It sounds romantic, but my dad tells me that I’d fallen in love with football before the teams came out. We stood on the Kop and the crowd were singing, “We love you, yeah, yeah, yeah – with a team like that, you know you can’t be bad.” My dad says I was totally enveloped by the atmosphere and ten minutes before the kick-off I told him I wanted to be a footballer.’

  The journey to Merseyside became a regular thing.

  ‘Every fortnight seemed like Christmas Eve. I always insisted to my dad or brother that we be there at least an hour and a half before the game so I could get my place on the Kop. Half of the time, I didn’t know what was going on. But the noise and the sound made my hairs stand on end. I’m not religious, but Anfield was my cathedral. I was a devotee to something and that was the red shirt.

  ‘I used to show off my experiences when I went to school. All of my inspiration for games on the yard or the beach came from Anfield. I was desperate to one day be one of those protagonists that walked out of the tunnel and received the adulation of the supporters who pledged their lives to the greatness of the club. Again, I know it sounds romantic, but when it later happened it was no less romantic than I ever envisaged it to be.’

  Robinson started playing competitively when he was seven.

  ‘I was a striker but for some reason given the number 6 shirt and that disappointed me greatly. It wasn’t very glamorous. I wanted 9 or 8. But Dad said it was a number of responsibility. “Look at Bobby Moore,” he told me. It felt like some kind of consolation, because in the playground I was the kid that scored all the goals. Although any Liverpool fan reading this interview may struggle to believe it, I was by far the best player of my age in the junior leagues around Blackpool, so I became the number 6 that went everywhere and did everything. A lot of managers at every level now want to control everything a player does on the pitch. Luckily, I was blessed by not having a tactical schoolmaster like the guy from Kes. We were allowed to develop naturally and enjoy ourselves.’

  At the age of 12, Robinson had a few clubs asking him to sign schoolboy forms. He went on trial to Chelsea.

  ‘I played in the same team as Ray Wilkins and Steve Wicks. I stayed in a really posh hotel on Gloucester Road in Kensington, and they really made an effort. But I missed home an awful lot and soon had a go with Man City and Coventry. But on both occasions I had problems with homesickness. I was a bit of a tart.’

  Robinson has ‘romantic’ memories of the moment he agreed to sign for Preston.

  ‘Coronation Street was my barometer of time in the evening because I had to go to bed at eight o’clock. By 7.30 I had to have my pyjamas on. Corrie was in the advert break and the doorbell rings. I went to answer it and there was a small guy who introduced himself as Jimmy Scott. Then there was another guy who looked just like Bobby Charlton. “Are you Michael?” they asked.

  ‘“Yep.”

  ‘“We’d like to speak to your dad.”

  ‘So I shut the door on them and told him that there was a guy who looks just like Bobby Charlton who was after him.

  ‘As it turned out, Jimmy Scott was the chief scout of Preston North End and the baldy guy was Bobby Charlton – the club’s player-manager. They immediately offered my dad a contract. I was sent upstairs and my dad, looking all embarrassed because Bobby Charlton was inside his house, followed me up to get a tie on. In all the commotion, I missed the end of Corrie and it was well past eight when I was called back down.

  ‘My dad said, “Mr Charlton thinks you might have a future in football and wants to know whether you’d like to become an apprentice professional with North End.” Being a diligent son, I said, “But, Dad, aren’t I going to St Anne’s College of Further Education?” He said, “You’re not listening to me, son. Bobby Charlton thinks you’ve got a future in the game,” then looking at Bobby, he added, “Sorry, Mr Charlton. My son can be a bit thick at times.”’

  Robinson played under three different managers at Preston, then in the old Second Division.

  ‘Preston treated Mr Charlton rather shoddily. He took over in the Third Division and brought through great players like Mel Holden, Mike Elwiss, and Tony Morley before having the carpet swept from beneath him. Newcastle came in with a bid for our centre-half, John Byrne, and Mr Charlton said that if the club accepted the offer he would leave, because he was trying to build a team. Until then he had an immaculate if all-too-brief managerial career, and he had no option but to resign. He was a very human character.’

  In Charlton’s place, Harry Catterick was appointed and soon gave Robinson his first-team debut.

  ‘Catterick was a very dour, hard man and I didn’t get on with him at all,’ Robinson recalls. ‘I rubbed him up the wrong way and he did the same to me. It was a shock after Mr Charlton, because they were completely different people. Harry treated me badly and didn’t really know how to manage youngsters. He was a bit out of
touch, and it was no wonder he gained a reputation as a completely miserable human being – even amongst the Evertonians that were supposed to revere him. Harry put me in the first team but dropped me back down quickly, and it didn’t seem like I was going to get another chance because of the way he kept himself distant. I suppose that wasn’t just me, it was everybody. But as a young professional, it was hard to understand.’

  Eventually, the lugubrious Catterick was sacked.

  ‘Nobby Stiles was the reserve-team manager and got a promotion. All I can say for Nobby was that he was a players’ manager and got the best out of me. He decided to throw me back up into the first team. I repaid his faith by scoring a dozen or so goals, and at the end of that season Man City came in with a huge offer.’

  Robinson’s first contract at Preston was a modest one, but the move to Maine Road reportedly made him the game’s wealthiest teenager.

  ‘I was 19 when City offered £750,000. Trevor Francis, an experienced player and a great player, had moved shortly before from Birmingham to Forest for a world-record £1 million fee. I became the most expensive teenager. I’d started out at £6 a week with a pound a point bonus at Preston, then moved up to £8 when I reached the first team. I finished there on £30 per week, but the City contract blew everything away. They gave me £330.

  ‘I was built up to be a wonder boy. The season opened with a game against Arsenal, and I was playing Alan Ball – a Blackpool legend. He was a World Cup winner and had moved for a fraction of what I’d gone for when he left Everton for Highbury. He was a great player and I was a nobody.’

  Robinson had a rough time at Maine Road.

  ‘It was an absolute fucking nightmare,’ he reflects, chugging on the butt end of what is already his third cigarette. ‘There was such a divide between the older players and the younger players, and there seemed to be a lot of jealousy from the older ones towards me because of the figures involved in my transfer. I was young and did not know how to deal with it.

  ‘I’ve always aligned myself with a certain cause. With the greatest respect to Manchester United, I grew up loathing their arrogance. The option of signing for City was an attractive one because it gave me the opportunity to beat United – I identified their downfall with a social vindication. I later enjoyed playing for Osasuna because it was pseudo-Basque and the supporters had a way about them that identified them as separate from others. I chose City after Preston even though half of the clubs in England wanted to sign me. But it was most unfortunate that I never got around this log rhythm that was playing football for Manchester City. Because that’s what it was – a bloody log rhythm, a fucking nightmare. I lived in Wilmslow in a house that was upside down. I spent my afternoons upstairs and slept downstairs because people would come looking through my window by day. I was frightened to go into supermarkets. I couldn’t handle the pressure. It sent me round the bend.’

  Robinson didn’t get on with boss Malcolm Allison.

  ‘Big Mal was round the fucking bend too. I couldn’t understand him and neither could anybody else. Some of the tactics that he tried to apply were most certainly strange. He used to cut the pitch up into zones, bring in ballroom dancers to teach us about movement, use basketball coaches for jumping and even an East German swimming instructor for lessons on how to limber up our muscles. He brought a sweeper in from Serbia called Dragoslav Stepanovic from a strange German club called Wormatia Worms that nobody had heard of before. Malcolm wanted him to break forward from the back and play forward and wide in order to leave space for other players to move into. I couldn’t relate to him and my relationship with him was the worst I’ve shared with any manager.’

  In 1985, Robinson made his peace with Allison at a PFA convention.

  ‘In my first season at Brighton, we played Manchester City in the league and there was a war of words before the game. I scored, and maybe it’s not very bashful from me, but it was a wonderful goal. I ran towards the dugout and slid on my knees right in front of Malcolm. I was a young, stupid boy and it was very disrespectful, but it felt right because he did nothing to help me at City.

  ‘He was a sworn enemy, but I went up and shook his hand at the awards ceremony. I realised that a lot of the stuff he’d told me only slotted into place later in my career. Malcolm made the mistake of not realising that many of his footballers were really adolescents and incapable of grasping something new. When you’re judged by an immediate result, it is judged by black and white, wrong and right. Unfortunately, it didn’t work for him.

  ‘It was only years later that I realised some of the stuff he told us was quite correct. Some of his ideas were pooh-poohed by the players – including me – but I was a teenager who hadn’t accrued any information about football. The senior ones like Willie Donachie, Mick Channon, Paul Power and Joe Corrigan all hated him too. They all laughed at his methods. But bugger me, as the years have passed, I’ve realised he was ahead of his time and it was the senior players that were wrong. Only now I realise that in some ways Malcolm Allison was a visionary – it was us players that were the idiots.’

  Having scored eight times in thirty league games in a season where City finished six points above the relegation zone, Robinson signed for Brighton in the summer of 1980. On the south coast, he found solace.

  ‘It was my rehabilitation,’ he says. ‘At City, I’d fallen out of love with football and seriously contemplated what I was going to do with my life.’ He met Alan Mullery. ‘Alan realised I was a bit of a softie at heart and knew how to manage me. Alan was a real gentleman and he saved my career. Brighton was the right place to go for me at the time, because I was fed up with the pressure. Brighton had and still has no real great football criteria. People used to go the Goldstone Ground and fill it every week as if they were going to the cinema or the theatre. There was no long tradition down there and it just seemed to be happy people rolling up every Saturday afternoon to watch a dose of First Division football.’

  Waiting for Robinson on the south coast was Mark Lawrenson.

  ‘I played with Mark for Preston North End, Brighton, Liverpool and Ireland. We grew up in the same area – in the same age group, roughly – but we never really became friends. We had nothing in common. I think he didn’t get me. Mark used to play Sunday-league football for Bispham Juniors when I played for their main rivals. He was a timid left-winger and nine times out of ten would be the sub. Mark was the sub that never got a game. Mark’s stepfather, Tom Gore, was a director at North End, and when I was an apprentice at the club he’d come down in the school holidays to get cones out, arrange bibs and set pitches out for five-a-side.

  ‘In the Central League, we opened one season with an away game at Villa. We stopped off at the Post House on the way there and ate egg on toast. Nobby Stiles was the player-manager of the reserves, but the food gave him the squits and he couldn’t play. There was only one sub and Mark was in the travelling party, sitting next to his stepdad on the bus. Because we had nobody else, Mark had to take his [Stiles’s] place on the bench.

  ‘Within minutes of the kick-off, one of our players got injured. Nobby encouraged him to carry on, but it was clear he had to come off. Remembering that Mark was a timid left-winger that couldn’t get a game for Bispham Juniors, Nobby brought Mark on and tried to hide him at left-back. Immediately, the Villa tried to get at him. But Mark was absolutely fucking superb.

  ‘The next week, there was a match against Bury. Again, superb. A couple of months went by and David Sadler had arthritis and couldn’t play for the first team. Throughout the week, they tried different people at centre-half to play alongside John Byrne. But nobody convinced. By the Thursday, they tried Mark. He was told not to go back to school and, immediately, they gave him a professional contract at 17. That was unheard of. But to be fair, he was superb again.

  ‘Mark started the year as this willowy winger that couldn’t get a game for Bispham Juniors, who was only at Preston’s training ground because his director stepdad knew he was a footba
ll fan who wanted a kick-about in his school holidays. Nobody would have imagined he would become a top defender. At the end of the season, he went to Brighton for £100,000.’

  For the first time in his career, Robinson became part of a drinking culture at Brighton.

  ‘I was too young to really go out at Preston, although I could see the older fellas drank,’ he continues, gulping on a large glass of Estrella Damm. ‘Then at City, there was no team spirit, no dressing-room banter and no drinking culture because everybody was miserable. I had no friends there. At Brighton, there was a lot of fooling around with drink, and when I think back now I wonder how sometimes we ever got on the pitch. Because it wasn’t a town obsessed by football, we could go out a lot more and not get hassled.

  ‘Alan Mullery liked the players to relax and trusted their ability in knowing when to draw the line. It changed slightly when he was replaced by Mike Bailey, who was a wonderful man but slightly more reserved. I wouldn’t say I was thrilled about his football ideals either, because I was a centre-forward and wanted to score goals. All he cared about was keeping a clean sheet. It showed, because in his season in charge we drew a lot of games 0–0 and it infuriated the crowd. The entertainment value that the Brighton crowd enjoyed seemed to disappear, while the novelty of being in the First Division also ran out. Fewer people went to watch the matches, whereas underneath Alan we played gung-ho and the supporters loved it.

  ‘Brighton were the only club where the players and management were on a crowd bonus. For every 1,000 people through the turnstiles, we’d get a few quid in our back pocket. We were on fortunes. It was wise in some ways, because it made everybody happy. We scored lots of goals, won games and we entertained the crowd, who were in it for the showbiz element of football, and the club and its staff made a lot of cash in the process. It was perfect. Then under Mike we became a proper team – more diligent – and we did what we had to in order to survive. Yet we became slightly boring and the crowds fell and the board worried themselves about how they’d pay the players. So they fired him.’