Lost Without You: Loving and Losing Tanya

by Jones, Vinnie

  Holmsund were knocked out in the semi-final but by then I was heading back to England in any case – because Dave Bassett wanted me to sign for Wimbledon.

  And I needed to be ready to meet Tanya Lamont again, though I couldn’t have known it at the time.

  Back then, one of the top teams in Sweden were Malmo FF and they were managed by none other than Roy Hodgson. He called Dave Bassett and told him that he wanted to sign me at the end of the Swedish season. Dave’s response was to tell Roy that first he wanted to have a look at me, and then he’d decide.

  So, I headed back to England and Wimbledon. They had just made it to the old First Division, not even a decade after they’d been elected to the Football League. When you think of how football has become so fossilized now, you can’t imagine a little team making it from non-league to the Premiership, well, ever, right? I just don’t think it could happen now, not with how much money is in the top of the game. But, just 30 years ago it was possible, and I was heading back to Wimbledon to see if I – and if they – could really make it in the top flight.

  People talk about me, Dennis Wise, John Fashanu, all of them, being the Crazy Gang, but the original Crazy Gang was the Wally Downes team that had fought their way up the leagues. We just inherited the title.

  But before I could make the Crazy Gang, I had to get in the team – and it was touch and go.

  I was brought back for a month’s trial. In fact, I’d still play for Wealdstone on Saturdays but train with Wimbledon during the week. During one practice match at Feltham, we found ourselves playing on a plastic pitch – horrible things, plastic pitches. (They don’t play ice hockey on wood, or basketball on ice, so why does anyone play football on plastic? I just don’t get it.) Anyway, I’m at centre back and the game is a disaster.

  We were being watched by David Kemp, one of the Wimbledon coaches, and after the game he was talking to Derek French, one of the Wimbledon physios and a guy I’d known since I was a kid – in fact, he’d give me a ride to training every day, which meant that I got there two hours before everyone else, which was fine by me. But at the Feltham game, when the subject of Vinnie Jones comes up, Kemp said that it was clear I was not cut out to be a centre back at this level. Derek French did a head spin. ‘Centre back?’ French said. ‘Vinnie Jones isn’t a centre back. He’s a centre midfielder, always has been.’ Frenchy knew his football, and everyone knew Frenchy knew, thank god.

  And then perhaps the most important stretch of my young career began.

  A week or two later, on Tuesday 18 November 1986, there was another practice game, this time against Brentford. I was still a trialist, but now they’d put me in midfield and I managed to score twice in a 3–0 win. I also took the throw-ins and found I could hurl them as far as the penalty spot (I had no idea I had such a knack, but it was to serve me well). Luckily for me, the clubhouse was behind the field, and Dave Bassett, Dave Kemp and Frenchy the physio had been leaning out of the window, watching the game.

  Wednesday was a day off; Thursday and Friday were jotted down for tactics, team selection, all that, ahead of the first team game at the weekend, which was against Nottingham Forest. At the time, Forest were a top team (they’d end the 1986–87 season eighth) – they had Neil Webb, Franz Carr, Cloughy’s kid and Johnny Metgod, to name just a few. But Wimbledon had a player crisis: Stevie Galliers had been sent off in the previous game and Lawrie Sanchez was injured. Wally Downes was just coming back from injury, too. At the Thursday morning training session, if you got a blue bib, you were playing in the first team. Bassett threw Wally one … and then he threw me a blue one too. All the lads went, ‘Fuck, mate, you’re in!’ Nottingham Forest away on Saturday.

  At the end of the training session, I immediately went upstairs to Bassett’s office. He said, ‘Alright son, you’re on 150 quid a week, 50 pound a goal, and 50 quid an appearance. I’m going to give you the rest of this year and next year. That’s an 18-month contract to get into the first team and stay there.’

  I was almost speechless, just about stammering out, ‘OK.’

  Then, when I managed to ask about a signing bonus, Bassett simply said, ‘Go ahead and fuck off.’ And that was my contract talks to join Wimbledon F.C. No agent, no photographers, no press conference, no Jim White going on about what a difference I’d make. Just a handshake, and a ‘go ahead and fuck off’.

  That night, I told my mate, Mark Robins, that I couldn’t see him on Saturday because I’d be playing at Notts Forest. His dad, Basil Robins (god rest his soul), reportedly said, ‘Vinnie needs help. He’s a fucking lying little bastard and if he’s blatantly fucking lying like that, well, to repeat, he needs some fucking help.’

  On the Friday, I had to run to London to buy a suit. Bassett loaned me £150 to get it; it was my first suit (I’ve since bought a few more, bespoke). We travelled up to Nottingham that night, where the lads hazed me by sending a notorious woman called Amazing Grace to my room – somehow, I got her out before any harm was done, but not before she had sung a few rounds of ‘If you’re happy and you know it clap your hands’ stark naked.

  I suppose that’s why they were known as the Crazy Gang.

  I don’t remember much about my first game, to be honest, which is a good thing, as I had a mare. We lost 3–2; I gave away a penalty after just 20 minutes, and in the most comical way you can imagine. And that wasn’t even the worst part.

  The penalty came about when the ball was crossed in from the left. I was tracking Neil Webb, or trying to – I’d been told he was future England captain material and my job was supposed to have been to mark him out of the game, but his movement and passing was just too good for me that day. After about 20 minutes we were one up, but then after a quick exchange of passes, Webb ran away from me in the box and swift-as-fuck Franz Carr whipped the ball in. I knew it was over me, and I wasn’t having Webby bury it, so I just punched it away. I still remember all the Wimbledon lads going, ‘Aww …’ and turning away in resignation.

  It was a long ride home. Back then, after away games we’d make a quick detour to drop Derek French off at his house and, because we were stopping anyway, we’d all pile into a pub called the Bell in Bedmond – right by where the M1 meets the M25 – before the bus made its way back into London to deposit the rest of the lads. That night in the Bell, I overheard one of Bassett’s mates, Joe McGilliat, say, ‘Harry! How can you put a fucking hod carrier up against Neil Webb for fuck’s sake?’

  I was devastated. I knew then it was over. Done. See you then. I’ll let myself out. Just shy of 22 years old. One game for Wimbledon; punched the ball for a penalty; lost 3–2; Neil Webb for England; bosh.

  But when the next week came around, injuries were still an issue. I learned much later that if Lawrie Sanchez had passed a fitness test, I wouldn’t have played the next game and who knows if I’d ever have been able to get into the team ever again. But Lawrie failed his test and I was picked again. This time, it was at home against a little-known team called Manchester United.

  At the time, United were struggling a bit; they’d sacked Ron Atkinson after a bad start to the season and they’d just hired a guy called Alex Ferguson from Aberdeen. The match on 29 November 1986 was only his fourth in charge (he went on to be their boss for 1,500 games!).

  I remember that Saturday morning I had to go and buy some new boots – I can’t remember what had happened to mine, but I had to run to a store called Peter Spivey’s in Hemel Hempstead and buy some Nike boots (the store is still there). The boots were £27.50, I’ll never forget. They weren’t even leather.

  It didn’t matter though, as I scored the only goal of the game, with my head. We’d got a corner and, as Glyn Hodges swung the ball in, I leaped over Kevin Moran – the Kevin Moran, Irish international and first man to ever get sent off in a Cup Final – and hammered a header goalwards. Little Remi Moses was on the line and tried to clear it but I’d banged it so hard with my nut that I think it took a little bit of my scalp with it when it hit the roof of
the net.

  My celebration was ridiculous – I did a kind of Cockney knees-up thing then threw myself up against the railings (this was pre-Hillsborough) and tried to climb over. Someone pulled me down, thank god. The ref lost his shit and ordered us all back to the half-way line sharpish and then I spent the rest of the match praying it would stay at 1–0. Bryan Robson even came on for them with about half an hour to go, but it was to no avail.

  Wimbledon had beaten Manchester United 1–0 and I’d scored the only goal of the game in my second match ever in the First Division. A few months earlier I’d been playing for Wealdstone. Now, I’d just handed Alex Ferguson his second defeat as Man United manager. Clearly it wasn’t going to work out for him there; everyone could tell.

  At the end of the game I broke away from the lads as we made our way to the changing rooms and headed to the boardroom. I knew Joe McGilliat liked to hang out in there after games. I still had my kit on, my new boots, everything. But I didn’t care. I charged into that boardroom, went over to McGilliat and said, ‘I’ll bet you’re glad I weren’t fucking hod carrying today, weren’t ya, you fucking bastard?’

  That same weekend, a million miles from me (at least emotionally), Tanya Terry was about half-way through her pregnancy with Kaley.

  The rest of the season for me at Wimbledon was a mixed bag. After the United game we went to Stamford Bridge and won 4–0, and I’d scored again. Next game, Sheffield Wednesday came to Plough Lane and I scored again in a 3–0 win. After that the goals stopped, though, and I was about to get into my first real trouble on the pitch.

  Arsenal came to Plough Lane and, before the game, curly-permed and mulleted Graham Rix had said that Wimbledon didn’t deserve to play on the same pitch as the Gunners. (Let the record show that Arsenal ended that season fourth with seventy points and Wimbledon ended sixth, four points behind. So much for that theory, Mr Rix. And to show how much times have changed: Leicester City, who won the Premier League in 2016, and Manchester City, who won it in 2018 and 2019, were both relegated in 1987.)

  Anyway, Rix’s comments pissed me off, and I was determined to put him right. Maybe I did him with an elbow because my kit that day was sponsored by J&R Wrought Iron & Steel Construction; whatever it was, I clearly didn’t heed the words of Dave Bassett in the matchday programme:

  The game [against QPR] was marred by John Fashanu’s dismissal, an event I hope will make him a wiser person … All players are aggressive, it’s their nature, but John unfortunately gets more criticism than most … It doesn’t help that he has a name that is a headline writer’s dream. How many times have we seen ‘Fash the Bash’? What we should do is change his name by deed poll to Arbuthnott-Jones then see what happens.

  Weird that he’d pick Jones as a new name for Fash, because I was about to put my first mark on what would come to be a long list of moments that, when taken together, gave me the reputation for being a nutter.

  We just thought, how dare you walk over us and think we’re a piece of crap on your shoes? We took it personally; that was the Wimbledon way.

  It was a tough school at that club back then. Legend has it that one poor player was initiated by his teammates by being tied to the top of a car and driven down the A3. You either grew a backbone or you dissolved. There were fights on the team bus – amongst ourselves. Alan Cork’s car – a SEAT Toledo – was torched because Dave Bassett wouldn’t give him a raise, so Cork was able to claim third party fire and theft.

  But it was a family, of sorts, and right when I needed one. Bassett was the dad – or, more exactly, the chief warden. He would steam into you, but also be kind in other ways. Sam Hammam, the chairman, was a great and a kind character, too. Every Monday morning he’d sit with his solicitor in the transport café next to where we trained, waiting to find out what kind of trouble we’d gotten into that weekend and what he could do to fix it.

  We weren’t alone anymore; I had ten blokes behind me, and everyone else had ten blokes behind them. A few of us had had difficult upbringings. John Fashanu had been a Barnardo’s kid; Dennis Wise had grown up without a lot of money. Wimbledon gave us a chance to prove ourselves, to be part of something.

  So, for Graham Rix to suggest we weren’t deserving of our place in the top flight … well, Fash had given me a nickname – the Butcher – and I suppose I was taking that moniker a bit too much to heart. With Rix’s slur running through my head, I threw an elbow his way early doors, but referee John Martin was having none of it and sent me off.

  That was Saturday 17 April 1987. Bassett was so pissed off at me that, after I’d served my three-match ban, he refused to pick me for the final three games of the season, the first of which we won 1–0 at Old Trafford. It was a career-changing event for me.

  And, though I didn’t know it at the time, four days earlier, on the previous Tuesday 14 April 1987, Tanya Terry’s life had changed forever, too.

  5

  A NEW HEART

  There are so many odd connections in the world; I think all you have to do is be open to seeing them, really. My life with Tans taught me that there are coincidences everywhere you look that can’t be explained, but that, if you’re paying attention, can mean something important. Tans was certainly magically connected to these weird forces in the world – she often talked about her late grandad Tommy as though he was still alive, still present – and sometimes I felt I was just along for the ride.

  Take a guy called Magdi Yacoub, for example. You may not have heard of him, but you really should have; he’s far more important than any celebrity or politician or footballer. In fact, he was like a god in Tans’ life because he gave her life, and so much more of it than she could ever have hoped.

  Magdi Yacoub was born in 1935 in Egypt – his father was a surgeon and the Egyptian government moved them around a lot, so Magdi’s early life was spent all over the country. It was a hard time to be going from place to place as a little kid, especially with war approaching. But Yacoub was a smart boy – he started school at three and by the time he was fifteen years old, he was deciding whether or not to be a doctor himself. His dad wanted him to do something else, but then something terrible happened, and it’s one of those things that’s a connection to a different time and place but which echoes down through our lives still.

  Magdi’s aunt – his dad’s sister – sadly died in childbirth. Her heart had something relatively minor wrong with it, but the stress of the delivery and the fact that the simple fix for her problem wasn’t available in Egypt at the time meant that they lost her. This tragedy finally convinced Magdi to be a heart surgeon, and all because a woman had heart trouble giving birth.

  Fast forward decades, and Magdi is the main guy at a hospital called Harefield, in Hertfordshire. By the time Tans met him, he was an incredibly eminent man. He’d done the first heart and lung transplant on the planet, in 1983; and though I wish Tans had never had to meet Dr Yacoub, as she reverently called him, thank god he was there when she needed him.

  I wish we had more of Tanya, more stuff to keep close, more things to hold, even more photos and mementos and videos to cherish. One thing we do have as a family, and which we feel so lucky to have found, is a diary she kept in the late 1980s about her heart transplant.

  Kaley and I have been reading it in the months since we lost her and I’m going to share a lot of it here because it reveals just how brave she was, what she went through and how close we were to losing her then. She was so young; it’s incredible to think that she faced her own mortality so early, and I think that’s what ultimately made her what she was: someone who loved life so hard because it had almost been taken away.

  As 1986 turned into 1987, Tans was approaching 21 years old, and she was pregnant for the first time. She’d been married for about a year to Steve and she was so excited to be having a child. She had been feeling a bit breathless in the later stages of her pregnancy, but doctors didn’t pay much heed to it; it was probably just the baby squeezing out Tans’ lungs a bit. But the baby
was healthy and in the right position and that was all that seemed to matter.

  In her diary she wrote:

  From January to April of ’87, I was so full of love and happiness. Pregnancy gives you natural contentment … I was round, glowing and loved everyone. I was always leaving little messages for my unborn child. I had more love in me for my living bump than I’d ever experienced before. Everything made me smile … Reading my diary of that time, I feel like I’m reading about someone else. I had such patience; I felt so calm and relaxed. I actually had everything. There was nothing I could have wanted except a secret yearning for a pretty little girl to spring into this world.

  Tans went into labour on her actual twenty-first birthday if you can believe it: 14 April 1987. No snows that day; dry and warm. In fact, it was a perfect spring day.

  Tans had started the day with breakfast in bed brought to her by Steve, and then had gone to see her nan, Ella, and her mum and dad. The weekend before she’d hung out with her posse of close friends – she always had so many close friends; that was Tans – and in her diary she lists them all: Joanne, Paula, Nicola and Julie. But by later on Tans’ birthday, Joanne – who was herself engaged to Lee Sinnott, another Watford player – and Tanya’s mum thought she was probably going into labour, so her mum took Tans to Watford General, the hospital literally next door to the Watford ground on Vicarage Road and the place where I’d been born too.

  And that’s when everything went wrong.

  At the hospital, Tans was in a lot of pain, so they gave her an epidural. Tans always maintained that the epidural was what caused the problems (there are very rare cases where epidurals can cause heart issues). All it takes is for a nurse or doctor to get the insertion of the needle a little bit wrong and boom, major trouble. She said that after her epidural her body went tight and stretched and she felt her brain was going to pop out of her head. She could barely breathe, and this was before the baby had even started coming. That was her heart collapsing, but nobody realized. But she didn’t want to panic because of the baby and, Tans being Tans, she pushed on through. By the next morning, Kaley was born: