by Gary Imlach
The implications for Wolves of being a goal down to Kidderminster at half-time are being discussed in grave terms. Leaving aside the pedant’s objection that there are no implications for half-time scores – no board ever sits down at the end of the season and decides to let the manager go on the basis of his appalling half-time record – I get the feeling that the upset is being willed from the studio for the sake of a decent story. Or perhaps it’s more of an editorial imperative to do the ‘Woe is Wolves’ story now, so as to get the value out of it whether or not it actually comes to pass. Either way, the dire consequences of defeat have been thoroughly rehearsed by the time Wolves score a late goal to force a replay.
How much of a meal would be made these days of Nottingham Forest’s 3rd Round tie against Tooting & Mitcham United, the only amateur club left in the 1958–59 competition? All the classic ingredients were there: the tiny ground, the frozen pitch, the butchers and bakers and candlestick-makers lining up to take on the First Division aristocrats.
Look more closely, though, and the contrasts start to fade. Any Tooting player with a decent job would have had a standard of living not very different from his professional opponent. If the club was paying him a little something disguised as expenses, he might be earning more. Press photos and pre-match television packages showing the local hero at his place of work wouldn’t have cut much ice in the Forest dressing room, or with my dad’s off-season workmates at the Co-op.
The game was between two sets of working men. The gulf in class between them was limited purely to football – and that was bridged by the conditions. Listening to the players’ recollections of the pitch as a frozen ploughed field, I’d made the usual allowances for the slow creep of exaggeration. Then I saw the Pathé News footage, which showed an impossibly corrugated surface dusted into a giant fingerprint by snow. Billy Walker told his team that the game was off. They were just sitting down to lunch before catching the train home when news came through that they would have to play.
Now, all this would be grist to the greater drama called The Romance of the FA Cup: two or three shots of the pitch inspection . . . cutaway of the sky threatening more snow . . . word with the ref . . . quick reaction from the managers if you’re lucky – if not straight into the piece to camera and back to the studio for a debate: Should It Be On or Shouldn’t It? Text us now . . .
Then, Forest fans who hadn’t made the journey south would have known what? More than I might have expected, it seems, thanks to Dennis Marshall, who had the BBC’s radio coverage of the match played over the PA system during that afternoon’s reserve game at the City Ground. ‘One of the committee men said, “We’ll be in trouble over this, Dennis, won’t we?” and I said, “I’ve spoken to the FA and I’ve spoken to the BBC and they’ve both said it’s OK.” Well, I had spoken to them and they’d both said no. I thought, to hell with it. Now there were other games on the radio, it wasn’t just Forest’s – so in the gaps we used our PA announcer, who had his own way of getting results and information. At half-time he got the wind up and said, “I don’t want to do this, we’re going to get beat.”’
Forest were 2–0 down. A Chic Thomson clearance had hit an oncoming Tooting forward who escorted the ball into the net, then a speculative punt from all of forty-five yards had clipped the underside of the crossbar. Forest were on their way out of the Cup and on to the Sunday back pages. At home my mother was in the pantry, hiding from the radio.
‘Mum, why didn’t you just switch it off?’ My question was actually prompted by a similar incident years later with the television. Unable to bear the tension of a penalty shoot-out during one of England’s World Cup games, she’d gone and stood in the garden shed. This might have been understandable when my father was alive and she wasn’t at liberty to wield the remote control. But there was only her and the cat. She claimed it was because she could still tell what was happening from the cheers and groans coming through the wall from next door. I think she needed to be as far away from the source of the torment as possible. In 1959, as a player’s wife, there was no avoiding it for long.
It’s inevitably the non-playing partners in a relationship who suffer the most, sitting helpless in the stands, marked out from the rest of the crowd by their special agenda of anxiety. My mother was always a nervous spectator, unable to really enjoy any games involving my father as a player or as a coach: ‘I get too het up.’
He played, she worried. Later on, we all played and she worried. Outnumbered four-to-one in her own home, my mother was the family repository of worry. It wasn’t just the fear of my father getting hurt or dropped or sacked – although that was always there – it was everything else she had to think about while he concentrated on football.
‘I don’t worry about things I can’t do anything about,’ he would say to news of her latest concerns over money, or us children, and sink into a deep and immediate sleep. Yet he kicked her through every night of their married life. Something was going on while he was unconscious, and it manifested itself as a game: a replay of Saturday’s just gone, or a rehearsal for this Saturday’s coming. Perhaps it was his way of dealing with the forces he could do nothing about. Perhaps he just dreamed at dog level, chasing through-balls every night instead of rabbits.
I don’t know how long my mother spent in the pantry, but Forest came back in the second half to scrape a draw. One of Tooting’s frozen ruts betrayed them, diverting a back pass away from the keeper and into the net, then the referee gave a penalty for something only he had seen. 2–2. The replay at the City Ground kicked off pessimistically early to allow for extra time, but on a level playing field that could take a stud Forest won 3–0, with my father scoring the third.
It’s become a cliché, a staple of every team’s successful cup run: the early-round scare, the game they should have lost that – in retrospect – becomes a turning point. But we no longer have the patience for retrospection. In 1959, FA Cup upsets either happened or they didn’t. Now, there’s too much money invested in the game for everyone concerned not to extract maximum value. So the giant-killing story is told in advance, as a hedge against it not being supported by the facts once the game begins. That way we can all enjoy The Romance of the FA Cup before reality arrives to reclaim the plot. Of course, once all the narrative machinery of press, radio and television has been brought to bear on the build-up, anything less than the storyboarded outcome can only be a letdown. But in the FA Cup the letdown is the massive ante-post statistical favourite.
The chief giant-kill in prospect for the 2004 3rd Round is Liverpool at the hands of Yeovil Town. Proud traditions are evoked, precedents are cited from 1949, and the whole business of extrapolation begins. A good thirty minutes before kick-off Liverpool have lost, Gerard Houllier has been sacked and the big question is where does this proud club go from here and who’ll be the man to take over. At half-time they’re a goal up and cruising. In the tunnel, the reporter is under instruction not to give up the ghost of giant-killings past. He ropes in the Yeovil manager for a quick séance before the second half: ‘There’s a touch of mist – just as there was in 1949 . . .’
Forest’s close 3rd Round shave happened and was then reported. Our attention span won’t allow games just to happen now; they have to be nudged into one of a handful of narrative shapes set aside for the purpose. The stories are standing by, waiting for the facts to coincide: ‘And if that had gone in it would have been the quickest World Cup goal . . .’ ‘If Roy Keane had scored in his Sixth FA Cup Final it would have been a great story – although Andy Marshall is a good story himself . . .’
Of course, the game has always been full of stories, brimming over with them. We don’t watch just to marvel at cold technique. But now the stories are driving the game, or at least the way we’re invited to think about it. Half the old pros I talk to say they watch with the sound turned down.
Forest went on to beat Grimsby, Birmingham, the cup-holders Bolton Wanderers and Aston Villa – the magnitude of their 3
rd Round escape at Tooting & Mitcham growing quietly in the rear-view mirror round by round.
Chapter Eight
Players’ Pool
IN APRIL 1959, SHORTLY after Forest beat Aston Villa in the semi-final, Billy Walker was the guest speaker at a meeting of Nottingham businessmen. On the verge of his second FA Cup Final as a manager – an astonishing twenty-four years after the first with Sheffield Wednesday – he’d been invited to talk about the secrets of successful man-management, perhaps, or his own professional longevity.
But he had most to say about the Players’ Union portrayal of its members as slaves. His players were better dressed than he was – indeed, better dressed than the committee men who ran the club. Sixteen of them had cars. ‘A fortnight ago,’ he told the assembled businessmen, ‘the majority of our “slaves” picked up £38 in one wage packet.’
That quote gave the Daily Express its headline: ‘FOREST SLAVES GO BY CAR TO PICK UP £38’. I think Billy Walker may have underplayed his indignation by a pound. The previous season the maximum wage had gone up to £20 a week – although not year-round as the players had been expecting – and the win bonus to £4. Two days after beating Villa, Forest had put five past Preston North End away in a league game. On top of the wage and the win bonus, a cup semi-final was worth £15, making a grand total of £39.
In any event, it was an interesting choice of subject matter for a manager whose side was weeks away from its biggest ever game. His examples of player affluence were telling too. Nice suits? Cars? These were things that he and the club’s committee men had enjoyed for years and took for granted. His wages were double theirs.
Billy Walker wasn’t accusing the players of wealth beyond the dreams of avarice, just beyond their station. Elsewhere in the same paper, an FA Council member was objecting to England players travelling in first-class railway carriages where the officials sat. And Mel Charles, brother of John, was being vilified for using an agent to try to negotiate his transfer from Swansea. The Football League President, Joe Richards, called it ‘a sickening business’, and promised that the agent would not be recognised by any clubs.
There was no public response from the Forest players to Billy Walker’s outburst. They hardly needed to justify their earnings under the League’s mandated wage scale. And anyway, they understood the real reason for his irritation. After the semi-final win, the manager had taken his players away for a few days to a hotel in Blackpool. He’d called a meeting and offered to act as their agent for any commercial opportunities that might come their way as cup finalists. The players had turned him down.
‘I mean, Billy Walker was the kind of guy, he’d ask you for half-a-crown for the porter when we were going on the train to away games. And the first two or three times you’d actually fall for this. Then you’d be chasing him for the money back, for your half-a-crown.’ As one of only two players in the side with a medal of any sort at senior level, Chic Thomson’s opinion carried a lot of weight, but the No vote seems to have been unanimous.
‘Well, he was a likeable crook,’ Johnny Quigley, the Glaswegian inside-right told me, ‘a likeable rogue, but he wouldna gi’ you too much, man.’
The players set up their own pool. They posed in their kit with the dray horses of the local brewery – ‘The Two Popular Favourites’ – they opened fêtes, they held a Forest players’ dance. Jeff Whitefoot, who’d had big-club experience at Manchester United, was in charge of going out and looking for business. Jack Burkitt signed the cheques along with Chic who was treasurer.
‘I remember the pre-cup final dance. Jeff Whitefoot was taking tickets at the front door and flogging them at the back door – incredible. But we didn’t make much. The likes of United and these people, they would be making tons more, but it was a battle with Mr Walker because he wasn’t getting his pennies.’
If the players had needed justification for their decision to earn themselves some extra cash, the sports pages were full of it. Nine days after their semi-final defeat by Forest, Aston Villa announced that they were sacking sixteen players. Half their squad would be made redundant at the end of the season – without the benefit of redundancy money. A cup final appearance might have saved Villa’s season and a few players’ jobs.
The following day there was more serious news. My father and his teammates were to undergo tests for polio, along with half a dozen other teams who’d played Birmingham City in the previous six weeks. Birmingham’s England international right-back, Jeff Hall, was seriously ill in hospital. There was talk of the Easter fixtures being postponed. My father had lined up against Hall three times in nine days: a pair of 5th Round draws and a 5–0 Forest rout in the second replay.
The tests were all negative. But the brevity and fragility of an athlete’s career was made frighteningly real. Polio was rare; broken legs and torn ligaments happened weekly. Jeff Hall died two weeks after being admitted to hospital.
Nobody now can remember how much money the players’ pool generated. Whatever the sum, Billy Walker had been denied his agent’s commission. On 16 April, with less than three weeks to go until the final, the manager called his players together for another meeting, and afterwards issued a public statement: ‘All fundraising activities are suspended from now on. We’ve got to get down to football and nothing else before the final. Soccer is no longer going to be a sideline. They are tired from all their outside commitments – it has got to stop.’ It was true that Forest had suffered a drop in form, but no one inside the club believed that was the sole reason for the ban.
In the papers, the players were being cast as a bunch of spivs. The reason had nothing to do with fundraising dances or adverts for the local brewery. It was because they were selling their tickets.
Profiteering from the trade in scarce commodities had sharp and unpleasant associations for working-class football fans who’d suffered through shortages that had persisted well beyond the war. Less than five years earlier, when my father had signed for Derby, he’d shared front-page headline space with the news that butter was off the ration for the first time in fourteen years. No doubt many supporters thought the team had earned the right to make extra cash out of their achievement in reaching Wembley, maybe they’d even bought tickets to the Forest players’ dance. Tickets to the match, though, were a much more emotional subject.
Wembley famously held 100,000. By the time the FA had taken care of the great and the good, the blazered and bewhiskered, the two finalists received 15,000 tickets each. Just over half of these were distributed among the 72,000 Forest fans who applied for them, via a bizarre display of public transparency by the club. ‘Yesterday three anonymous blind men drew from a 75-gallon red-painted barrel the letters of about 8,000 fortunate fans . . .’ began the report in the Evening Post. That left 64,000 or so ticketless members of the Nottingham public to compete for the remainder with corporate hospitality firms, travel agents and the usual assortment of sheepskin-coat wearers. For all of them the chief source of tickets was the club, and soon stories began circulating about the team’s own distribution system.
Each player got a dozen or so tickets – half of them seated, half standing – with the option to buy more. In with their allocation was a slip of paper from the FA warning that all the serial numbers were on record. But players selling their comps was a football tradition. After Forest’s 5th Round tie at Birmingham two City players, Trevor Smith and Dick Neal, had been accused of personally hawking their tickets outside the ground before the match. Once they were in the Final players didn’t need to leave the house. Fans knew where they lived because they lived alongside them, and plagued their doorsteps like carol singers out of season.
The Forest players used to congregate in a café near Trent Bridge after training; Notts County players used a slightly scruffier one on the other side of London Road. In the weeks before the Cup Final a few of the Forest squad seem to have crossed the street to County’s café to talk to the owner, Bob Green, who was buying and selling tickets in large quan
tities. The fall guy in the story varied depending on who was telling it – it was Peter Watson, the reserve centre-half; it was Tommy Wilson, the centre-forward; it was Wilson acting for half the team – but the name of the villain didn’t. Bob Green took delivery of an unspecified number of cup final tickets from a Forest player who naively agreed to call back later for the money.
Dennis Marshall is certain it was Tommy Wilson: ‘Tommy went at the agreed time and when he got there the woman behind the counter said, “Oh, he’s just gone out – he said could you leave the tickets and he’ll give you the money when he gets back.” Tommy said OK and he left the tickets and went and fed the bloody swans on the Trent. When he went back, not only had the café owner and the woman gone, but it was all boarded up and they never did see him again. And the police never found them either.’
Bob Green had been making copy in the national press for weeks. He was openly advertising tickets in the café window and selling them over the counter. It was the usual grubby tout’s tale – and now it included Forest players. Once the police were called in, at the insistence of the club secretary, Noel Watson, there had been no keeping the story quiet. As late as the day of the Final itself, the Daily Express caricatured the Forest team as a group of briefcase-carrying businessmen.
My father hadn’t been involved in the café fiasco but he did make a profit on his tickets. After he’d taken care of family and friends, his allocation went to Jack Watson, a local builder who’d done jobs on the house. He kept one ticket for himself, sold the rest and the pair of them split the proceeds.
Lower down the food chain, some of the Forest staff were doing the same. The committee magnanimously gave almost everyone associated with the club not only Cup Final tickets, but return rail packages to ensure they could afford to make the trip. In the week after the final, the club’s travel agent received a spate of refund requests from employees who’d been ‘unable to go’ for one reason or another. They’d sold their tickets, but the travel vouchers were in their names.
