by Gary Imlach
‘Your dad was very much a push-and-run player, that was why Arthur signed him. But he had to have somebody inside him at inside-left who was used to that kind of play.
‘We had Peter Burridge, an inside-left who was a quite a goal-scorer. But he was a direct player, he needed the ball in front of him, so the balance wasn’t there. We needed goal-scorers so it was essential for Peter to be in, but that made it very difficult for your dad. We got Ronnie Allen from West Brom. In my wisdom I moved him and played him outside-left. He couldn’t run like your dad but he used the ball like a Beckham. This helped Burridge because when the ball came Peter used to run and Ronnie Allen would drop the ball right in front of him – so it was the combination.
‘But I always respected your dad’s ability. I knew what he could do – I’d seen him at Forest – and your dad was what I call a true professional, y’know. He was an absolutely true pro, he got on with his training, he accepted everything and took it in good part.’
At last, a straightforward explanation, or as straightforward as one is entitled to expect. It may have been sugared slightly for my consumption; certainly it had been refracted through forty seasons of re-remembering. But the tyrant who took Arthur Rowe’s vision of a side that could pass its way up the League in elegant triangles, and replaced it with the straight line of a long-ball game, had at least given me a direct answer.
My father spent all of 1963 – the rest of that first season and half of the next – in a non-playing netherworld, training for games that never came and moves that didn’t materialise: ‘Stewart Imlach who turned down an offer to join Chelmsford is said to have interested Fulham . . . Stewart Imlach is not to enter Southern League football after all . . . Earlier in the week Exeter made routine enquiries about Stewart Imlach . . .’
Then, for some reason – perhaps Dick Graham was trying to confuse the opposition – he found himself back in the team early in 1964, and stayed there, on the right-wing as often as the left, as Palace pushed for promotion. Dick Graham’s methods may have alienated half the team but they worked. In his first full season in charge he took Crystal Palace up into the Second Division, and my father had belatedly been a part of his strangely successful scheme. He was included in the post-season trip to Bermuda, and got the commemorative cigarette lighter for going up; it went on the windowsill, next to his Forest Cup Final ashtray.
But by Christmas 1964 he was gone. Not sold or swapped, but released and out of the League altogether. I braced myself for a hackle-raising episode of insensitivity: the back-page story that broke the news before he’d been informed, or the impersonal letter – inside the club Christmas card perhaps. Instead, I discovered what looked like an act of magnanimity. Dick Graham, knowing that he wasn’t going to keep my father at the end of the season, decided to pay up his contract and let him go early. The truth may have been that the manager just wanted him out of the way – George Petchey remembers being sacked and sent home at least twice by Dick Graham – but I prefer to take the incident at face value. In two and a half seasons my father had played twenty-nine games for Palace.
Over Christmas, me and my brothers bouncing around him oblivious, he must have known the game was all but up. He’d taken his FA coaching badge while he was still at Coventry, and actually did a spell as a part-time games master at a school not far from where we lived in Croydon, teaching himself the rules of cricket and rugby from books.
But he wasn’t willing just yet to let go of Saturday afternoon. He trained at Millwall and waited. He didn’t have a team but at least there was some dressing-room banter to see him through the week. In early 1965 he turned out half a dozen times for Dover, then his old Coventry manager Billy Frith signed him for Southern League Chelmsford City. He wasn’t short of Football League company: Tommy Wilson from Forest’s Cup Final side was at centre-forward for a spell; Roy Summersby arrived to play behind him.
It was a measure of how little difference the lifting of the maximum wage had made in the lower divisions that sides like Chelmsford could compete for players. In fact, clubs much higher up the food chain were complaining about non-league teams raiding their transfer lists, signing unsettled players for no fee and depriving them of a profit. Chelmsford’s application to join the league in 1965 was actually vetoed by Wolves, from whom they’d poached Bobby Mason – a player valued at £22,000 – three years earlier. The Football League brought in a five-year ban on admission for any non-league club that signed transfer-listed league players.
So the standard was probably half-decent, sort of a soccer Senior Tour or Masters Tennis with a few youngsters heading in the other direction mixed in. As a second Christmas passed without any interest from a league club, my father must have realised that this was where it was going to end. Weymouth, Bedford, Hastings, Tonbridge: his final game was going to be against one of these, perhaps without him knowing in advance that he was running out of the tunnel as a player for the last time.
Then, in the first week of 1966, just as my father turned thirty-four, Crystal Palace sacked Dick Graham. Results had been bad, but the Palace board were equally concerned by the growing pile of transfer requests from disaffected players and Graham’s latest decision to dismiss George Petchey as first-team coach. Arthur Rowe, who’d stayed on the payroll doing a little scouting, was re-installed as the team figurehead, with Petchey recalled as his assistant to share the stress and take the coaching.
A fortnight after taking over, Arthur Rowe asked the Palace board for permission to sign my father for a second time. ‘I should very much like to have him back. He is a good honest character and tries hard all the time. He will be a good influence to our youngsters and apprentices with whom he will be mixing.’
After some discussion the directors agreed to pay Chelmsford £1,000 for the man whose contract they’d paid up thirteen months earlier. The idea was that he would help to bring on Palace’s promising crop of young players, combining appearances in the reserves with the start of a coaching career. Instead, he went straight into the first team and stayed there until the end of the season, turning in a string of dazzling performances so implausible it was almost as though his teammates were too dumbstruck to capitalise on them: ‘IMLACH INSPIRATION WASTED’, ‘IMLACH SO NEAR TO TAKING BOTH POINTS FOR PALACE’, ‘OH THOSE MISSED CHANCES, SIGHS SPEEDY IMLACH.’
After three and a half seasons of being tagged on to the end of match reports as an injury update or a transfer rumour, my father spent February to May 1966 in 24-point type. It was like a long-delayed retake. This was the season he was supposed to have had when he arrived in 1962; could have had if it hadn’t been for brawny Burgess. Then it might still have led to something more than just the end of his career. Now he must have known it wouldn’t be long before he walked down the tunnel and peeled off permanently towards the boot room instead of the dressing room. But instead of finding – like so many players before and after him – that his top-flight career was over before he’d had time to appreciate it, I like to think that events conspired to make it impossible for my father not to appreciate his.
No one limps down into non-league football on a badly repaired knee then gets summoned back for a Second Division curtain call at the age of thirty-four. The six-year game of pass-the-parcel that Billy Walker started at the end of the 1959–60 season had seen my father fall into some unsympathetic hands. But Arthur Rowe, whose plans for him the first time round had been postponed by injury and ill health, contrived at least to let him come back and say goodbye to the professional game properly.
My view of the Palace manager may be clouded by sentimentality, but from four decades away it looks like a piece of benign plotting on his part. He persuaded the board to take my father back as a coach, then picked him for the first team the week he arrived. He coaxed from him a string of wonderful performances that my dad probably didn’t believe he was still capable of. He even made my father captain for a friendly against Nottingham Forest in which he led the team to a 4–1 win. It couldn’
t have been more like a farewell tour if the club shop had been selling team bomber jackets with his crew-cut caricature on the back.
Second Division Crystal Palace, not Southern League Chelmsford City, would be the final club on my dad’s playing CV. Sadly, Arthur Rowe wouldn’t be his last manager. Early in April 1966, a few weeks after the Forest friendly, the stress of football management became too much for him again and he asked to be relieved of his duties.
The 1965–66 season didn’t so much end as segue straight into the World Cup. Football was well established as the nation’s favourite game, but this was the first time it had shown serious signs of colonising the cricket season. Its players were heroes, but television had yet to turn them into full-blown celebrities. 1966 was the year it set about the task in earnest.
On 24 May, the BBC aired the pilot of a show called Quiz Ball. Teams of four representing a club – three players and a star guest – were tested on their general knowledge by David Vine, with the winners progressing through knockout rounds to a grand final at the end of the series. It ran for five years, before giving up the popularity battle with A Question of Sport and slipping into an obscurity beyond the reach of even TV list programmes.
It did, though, make one enduring contribution to the vocabulary of the game: Route One. When the Palace players complained to me about Dick Graham’s tactics, they were using a term that hadn’t existed when he first screamed at them from the dugout to stop fannying about and get the ball upfield. Route One was the direct path to goal on David Vine’s large electronic football pitch, a single all-or-nothing gamble on getting the right answer. Route Four was the Arthur Rowe approach, a series of simpler questions strung together towards the same end. Palace actually reached the final of Quiz Ball in the late ’60s, although sadly there’s no record of whose tactics they used.
There’s no surviving footage either of my father’s appearance on the very first show, but he did keep his copy of the contract, signed by the Head of Artists Bookings, Bush Bailey. The fee was twenty-five guineas, almost certainly the only time in his life that he was paid in the denomination of the upper classes. Guineas were for gentlemen not players. The sum – still a week’s wages or the best part of it for many of the League’s footballers – must have opened his eyes too. There was more on offer here for turning up and simply being a footballer for an hour or so than he’d been able to earn sweating at the business of playing football for most of the weeks of his career.
There was no benefit match when my father stopped playing – he’d never stayed anywhere long enough to merit one. In any case there was no official announcement or date to hang it on, just a slow fade off the team sheet and on to the coaching staff. But his last recorded appearance in a Crystal Palace shirt was a testimonial in October 1966, for his teammate Terry Long.
The timing – in the long afterglow of the World Cup – and the quality of the opposition ensured a packed house and a decent profit once the groundstaff had been paid. George Cohen was there from the World Cup-winning team along with fellow England squad members Jimmy Greaves, George Eastham and Ron Springett. Johnny Haynes turned out; so did the former Palace favourite Johnny Byrne, and a sprinkling of Chelsea stars like Eddie McCreadie, Marvin Hinton and Bobby Tambling.
Listed in the paper but not the match programme was Sir Stanley Matthews. He had demanded a fee that would have put a serious dent in the night’s takings. The maximum wage had been unfair on every professional footballer, but on him perhaps more than most. There were old players I’d spoken to who still sounded less aggrieved at having suffered under the maximum than they did guilty for having taken home the same money as Stan Matthews every week. At least he hadn’t retired the year before it was lifted, like Tom Finney. But then Finney had stopped playing when he was thirty-eight. Matthews only earned a belated fraction of what he was worth by carrying on until he was fifty.
In 1965 he’d become the first footballer ever to be knighted, the same year that George Best opened his first boutique. Then he’d watched England’s World Cup winners step straight off the field at Wembley into a world of vast and widening commercial opportunity. Stan had managed his fair share of endorsements during his long playing career, but nothing like this. Sitting at home with his knighthood and seeing what younger, lesser players were earning made him very conscious of his own market worth, and determined not to undercut it. So, Sir Stan wasn’t there for Terry Long’s testimonial – he left it to the new generation flush enough to turn out for expenses.
At most levels of the game the benefit match has become an anachronism at best, at worst a borderline obscenity. For Terry Long it meant a degree of security after ten seasons’ service. ‘It enabled me to buy the house I’m talking to you from now,’ he told me over the phone. ‘In those days you didn’t want to have a mortgage because you didn’t know when your £20 a week was going to finish, so rather than have a mortgage and worry about getting sacked from football and thinking, what are we going to do?, we thought we’ll buy the house without the mortgage and at least we’ve got somewhere to live.’
Terry cleared just over £4,000, although it could have been more. It was the first testimonial game Palace had ever staged. They guessed at the likely crowd and printed 12,000 programmes, but more than 17,000 people turned up. The game was the usual goal feast, with the fans treated to the novelty of endless personnel changes. According to the match report, ‘Stewart Imlach came on for 45 minutes and was as popular as ever with the crowd.’ The final score was 7–5 to the Internationals. My dad got Palace’s fifth in the eighty-sixth minute. ‘It must have been him that got in my way then because they were trying to let me score. Y’know what it’s like on testimonial nights – they’re all trying to tee it up and you sort of trip over it or mishead it or something. I never did score.’
Terry Long spent another seven seasons at Selhurst Park after his testimonial, but it was my father’s farewell game. He wouldn’t have known that then, but I know and I have no compunction about hijacking it for him: co-opting Greaves and Haynes and Eastham to his cause, all of them turning out to make sure that my dad’s last match was against opposition of the highest possible quality; football’s first £100-a-week player applauding him back to the halfway line after he’d knocked in the final goal of his final game; the man who took on the retain-and-transfer system shaking hands with him at the whistle and wishing him all the best.
There’s no mention in the match report of who was in the crowd, but I put Arthur Rowe in the directors’ box, happy and relaxed. Not worrying about the result for once, just enjoying the game.
Chapter Fifteen
Coaching
THE DEAD ALL HAVE their regular spots at Goodison Park. I can’t remember seeing any when we used to walk around the ground as kids, but the place is full of them now.
Percy Harwood (1904–2001, Goodison Regular 1913–2000) is behind the goal at the Park End, just along from John Wagstaff (Age 67, Simply The Best). The narrow wooden skirting that surrounds the field has a cordon of commemorative plaques, facing back towards the crowd like stewards on match day. Ashes are usually scattered in the centre circle or the goalmouths; players taking throw-ins stand over the urns buried around the perimeter. All but one are fans. Of the men who graced the pitch in life, only Everton’s first great goalkeeper, Ted Sagar, has come back to be interred beneath it. Still, it’s popular enough as a final resting place that the groundstaff have had to call a halt. Season tickets for eternity are sold out.
My father’s ashes went on Formby Golf Course, the one club that never sacked or sold him. His career, though, like so many careers of his generation, had finished back at ground level. Groundsman level. The old man marking out the pitch or putting up the nets – barely noticed by the kids eager to get on with their game and ignorant of his brilliant past – has become a stock character. A period character too. The reason so many men of that era stayed in the game is because they had nowhere else to go. Playing football for a liv
ing is famously poor preparation for doing anything else, and the stories are legion of players who found that once the exoskeleton of the game had been removed, their lives were as shapeless and vulnerable as some sea-jelly without its shell.
For every man like my father with a marketable trade and a willingness to use it, there were others who never planned ahead, couldn’t face any of the alternatives to playing, and went down fast once their celebrity – and their money if they’d managed to save any – ran out. I vaguely remember the hand-wringing there’d been over Tommy Lawton at Notts County when I was seven or eight. My dad wasn’t keen on calling in the police to deal with the club’s most illustrious ex-player. But when things started disappearing from the pockets of County’s teenage trialists as well as from the coaches’ room, there’d been no choice.
As late as 1967 my father had still had been registered as a player with Crystal Palace. But he was effectively coaching full-time when the offer came in March that year to return to Nottingham as assistant manager with Notts County.
It wasn’t just a footballing move; here was a chance for my parents to return to the community where they’d felt most at home and plan for a life beyond the game. My father invested his entire savings from football in a friend’s chain of newsagents, with a view to the pair of them going into partnership. He even did a spell behind the counter while he was still at Meadow Lane to prepare for the transition. But the partnership didn’t materialise and the cash was never returned.
I can’t imagine him running a shop anyway, not for long. For my father, football wasn’t an escape from growing up like it is for some players, but it was, I think, an escape from growing bitter or frustrated. When he left the game to work outside full-time, his impatience and intolerance of fools could be things of corrosive, ulcer-forming intensity. I’m sure it wasn’t that his patience had never been tried by fools inside football – just that the game itself had always been there to save him: an outlet for frustration, a glorious distraction and a simple, unpolluted pleasure which never failed him, whether it was ninety minutes on a Saturday or half an hour’s five-a-side to finish training. Perhaps his erstwhile friend did him a kind of cruel favour – condemning him to years longer in the game where he’d be happier and poorer.
