The new campaign for Chelsea was full of much promise. The only problem was how both Bonetti and Osgood would react to the massive let-down of Mexico. Would this lead to a cloud of depression, or would the two Peters pick themselves up, dust themselves down and get on with the business of ‘trophy collecting’? Only time would tell, of course.
The Charity Shield match-up with League Champions Everton was very much one of those ‘after the Lord Mayor show’ occasions. Much joyous singing as the team paraded the FA Cup, but as I have already outlined, not a Stamford Bridge afternoon to live in the memory.
The highlight for me was meeting DJ Ed ‘Stewpot’ Stewart, who, prior to presenting Ossie with his Striker award, paid him huge compliments: one in particular I shall always remember was, ‘maybe if he had played in the Brazil game, things could have been different’.
This Brazil theme continued later that month when I met Peter Pullen for the first time. Peter wrote for World Soccer magazine, but away from his writings on the game, he was also at the time the Brazil Sports attaché in London. Later he was part of the Brazil Football Federation’s failed bid for the 1994 World Cup, and later still a FIFA delegate.
To cut a long story short, he contacted me purely for a chat about Peter Osgood. I think I had written something for a magazine along the lines that Ossie played football in the manner of a boy brought up on the Copacabana beaches, not in the Royal town of Windsor. These words obviously fascinated Pullen, in essence because at the time in England shouts of ‘Get Stuck In!’ were common at most grounds. For many fans, sweat still counted more than improvisation, languid skill and technical ability.
Upon entering his office, I was struck by both his elegance and obvious sophistication. The dour, monochrome worlds of Ramsey and Revie were as far away from Pullen as Mars.
Reclining in his chair, he listened intently to what I had to impart. ‘It’s a shame,’ I said, ‘that Peter Osgood couldn’t play for a club in Brazil – I am sure he would be idolised out there. What do you think?’
Now, I wasn’t attempting to try to arrange a transfer to Corinthians or Santos. Life then was just not like that. The world was a much bigger place, and anyway, even though I was his agent, I was not allowed to involve myself in any contract or transfer dealings. No, I was just making a point, and I simply wanted Pullen’s immediate reaction.
His answer to my rat-a-tat-tat of a question was frank and unsolicited. ‘Peter Osgood would grace any Brazilian team,’ he replied, his voice both soft and soothing. ‘The problem we have in Brazil is all about money, so competing with what he earns in England would be difficult. What is most unusual is his style – the power that he possesses, which is typically English, but mixed in with this is finesse and subtlety, which you associate more with players from the Latin countries.’
Before I left, and as we shook hands, he reiterated his comment that if Osgood had been born in Rio, he would have made the Brazil national team. ‘Take that, Mr Ramsey!’ I said to myself as I climbed into a black cab.
The next time I shared a glass with Peter, I related to him what Pullen had said about his ability, and his eyes lit up like small beacons. He was flattered – there was no doubt about it. Like any artist, Ossie needed his ego massaged from time to time. In an environment in which you are only as good as your last game, and the chant of ‘Osgood Is Good’ was often corrupted by opposition supporters to ‘Osgood Was Good’, Peter needed his fair share of flattery.
Having lifted the FA Cup for the first time, the Chelsea players were straining at the leash to get their teeth into Europe and the European Cup Winners’ Cup.
The first round saw them drawn against the unheralded Greek outfit Aris Salonika. No problem here, we thought. But what we hadn’t taken into account was the powder keg political situation in that country at the time.
On 21 April 1967, there was a coup d’état in the country, led by an influential and ruthless group of colonels. Their military rule lasted for some seven years, during which Western-style democracy and basic freedoms were denied to the population as a whole. Essentially it was pure Fascism. Some politicians, in both Britain and America went even further, labelling it as ‘unadulterated Nazism’. The American ambassador in Athens, William Phillips Talbot, complained that the colonels’ rule ‘represented a rape of democracy’.
By 1970, this odious regime was probably at its most potent. Political parties had been dissolved, and torture of political opponents was widespread, with Amnesty International representative James Becket declaring in 1969 that ‘a conservative estimate would place at not less than two thousand the number of people tortured’.
The Greek citizens’ right of assembly had been overturned and political demonstrations were declared verboten. Widespread surveillance was commonplace, which understandably resulted in people looking nervous and tense in bars and cafés, as any political discussion or even minor criticism of the government was outlawed.
The men at the helm of the junta were by no means purely and simply mindless thugs. They were subtle, and realising that such entertainments as the odd rock concert and the showing of an occasional liberal film would garner the regime some semblance of credibility, they set about what they regarded as a PR campaign. But it was all a vast sham.
Initially the monarchy was retained, and in December 1967, King Constantine II launched an unsuccessful counter-coup. Eventually after hiding out in various villages, he and his family decamped to Rome, eventually ending up in London where they lived in comparative anonymity in Linnell Close, Hampstead Garden Suburb. I lived opposite the ex-King for some twenty-four years, and I was struck almost immediately by the personae of the Special Branch men that kept guard outside his front door. They were so archetypal it wasn’t true – dark suits, dark glasses – the whole Hollywood Secret Service baggage – the lot.
So, arriving at some ungodly hour at Luton Airport on 15 September 1970, this was the land that I was to encounter in a matter of hours. I was with a small group of ‘Chelsea People’ plus a few journalists, most notably former captain of Spurs and Northern Ireland Danny Blanchflower, then putting pen to paper for the Sunday Express.
I was dressed in a light blue King’s Road three-piece suit – flared trousers of course – and shod with yet another pair of wet-look loafers complete with obligatory buckle. My hair was long and I sported an impressive – well I thought so anyway – drooping but well-nourished Viva Zapata moustache.
The journey on the plane was, to put it mildly, eventful. There was just the one female attached to our group, a perky Lulu-lookalike who walked in the manner of a fashion model, often wiggling her neat bottom à la Marilyn Monroe. She was a kind of courier, and she wore a perpetual smile. Needless to say, the men became her number one fans.
Also on board for some unfathomable reason was a paltry party of Coventry City people on their way to Bulgaria for a European Fairs’ Cup-tie against Trakia Plovdiv (they won 4–1), so we were obliged to stop off in Sofia for a few hours.
By today’s high-tech standards, the plane was rickety and looked past its best-before date. Therefore, like the tie itself, our journey was a two-legged affair. Sofia, the capital of the then hardcore Communist country Bulgaria, was those days locked in a Stalinist shroud of repression, and the airport itself was rudimentary with a capital R.
It was just like walking on to the set of some Cold War spy movie shoot. You half-expected a well-preserved Californian film-maker, all trendy shades and perma-tan, to come out of the shadow of an antiquated plane and bellow: ‘Action!’
But this was no film-set; this was colourless Communism down to the seedy bar, with a smell of what I hoped was just cabbage, where we had to twiddle our thumbs drinking, or trying to drink, weak-as-water Bulgarian beer – ‘gnat’s pee’, as someone wryly observed.
The surly, sour-faced woman behind the bar became quite animated when she thought we might be in possession of the odd Deutsch mark or US dollar, but when she discovered that all we had (apart from Greek drachmas, of course) was good old British sterling, her cracked-face smile reverted back to a half-hearted snarl.
Eventually she softened a shade and agreed to hand over the beer, giving us worthless Bulgarian currency in our change. It was during this what seemed interminable wait that I got into conversation with the articulate and erudite Blanchflower.
Chatting with the Northern Irishman over this dubious Bulgarian brew, we soon got round to chatting about Chelsea and Peter Osgood in particular.
‘So, you are his agent then,’ he said.
‘Yes, I’m doing my best to promote him,’ I responded nervously, for the pills I had swallowed to counteract my fear of flying were, in conjunction with the alcohol, making me extremely dopey. ‘Sometimes it’s not that easy because being in my early twenties, so many of the people I have to deal with are very sceptical about my qualifications.’
How different it was in 1970 to today’s society in which everything we listen to, read or watch is geared totally towards the ‘yoof’ market.
I then did my best to get away from all things Stamford Bridge, and asked him about his own career – he was extremely unassuming about it – and he told me of his early days as a player with Barnsley in the 1950s and how he had upset the Oakwell hierarchy with his forthright opinions.
It seems incredible to relate, but in those less-enlightened times, players were never given the ball in training. They were told in no uncertain terms that being deprived of this so-important sphere would make them hungrier for it on a Saturday afternoon! Danny expressed his dismay at such archaic training methods and opined his concerns to the coaching team. These concerns were met with cries of ‘we know best’.
When Danny went on to inform the manager that ball retention and technique were how it was done abroad, again his viewpoint was pooh-poohed.
He was man born before his time, that there is no doubt. A professional who displayed intellectual leanings and articulate thought in an era when these working-class heroes were essentially slaves to their clubs, earning a pittance even though week-in-and-week-out they would attract crowds in excess of 50,000.
All-told Danny won 56 caps for Northern Ireland, and he also managed the national side for three years between 1976 and ’79. His crowning moment came at Wembley in 1961 when he captained Spurs to a 2–0 victory over Leicester City, thereby becoming the first twentieth century club to complete the League/Cup Double.
In 1978, he had a short and unsuccessful go at managing Chelsea, but it was as the fulcrum of that great Tottenham team that will forever remain in the memory.
Clambering aboard plane number two at Sofia Airport, I was by this time out on my feet. ‘Are we ever going to get to Greece?’ was the question that kept running through my brain, which by this time had more than a touch of the scrambled egg about it. What I needed was a pick-me-up, and fast!
Arriving at Salonika Airport, two things struck me: firstly, the heat. Boy, was it intense! There I was dressed up to the nines in my new suit, complete with waistcoat, walking, or should I say staggering, like some out-of-condition zombie into this oven. Later, a local told me that even by Greek standards, the temperature levels were exceptional for the time of year.
The second thing that caused some alarm bells to ring was this posse of machine-gun-wielding soldiers of the junta, looking mean and obviously itching to shoot someone. It was with trembling hands that I approached the passport area. I’m no coward, but these gun-toting guys with their dead eyes gave me the creeps.
Arriving at the desk, I was confronted by this smiling official: well I say smiling, it was more of a leer. He looked at my unkempt hair and moustache and was about to demand from me, in his quirky version of the English language, the full SP about my political affiliations. Thankfully, before I could point out that I was here with Chelsea, someone in authority spoke to him sotto voce in Greek to tell him of my Chelsea affiliation, and with a friendly wave and a Cheshire cat-style grin he waved me through. However, before he did so he did tell me that I would have to hand over my passport at the hotel, and it would be returned to me upon departure.
Once I was ensconced in the coach to ferry me to the team hotel, I was informed by the driver – who spoke extremely good English – that essentially long hair and what were termed ‘Revolution Moustaches’ were a big no-no as far as the junta was concerned. I thanked him and made some quip on the lines of: ‘Well, more than half the Chelsea team resemble Che Guevara!’
Arriving at our hotel, I was impressed by its luxury. The bar in particular was outstanding, and needless to say, having handed over my passport at the desk as requested, found my room and unpacked at 100mph, I was soon sitting with a few of the players, imbibing tall glasses of gins and tonic.
To the sound of clinking glasses, I began chatting to Ossie. He smiled affectionately at me, as he did every time I had a glass in my hand. In a matter of minutes, a thirty-something English couple, obviously intent on talking to us about Chelsea’s chances in the game, sat down and joined us.
Soon it was bonhomie all round. The guy – he was one of those typical golf club blokes of old – and Ossie soon built up a real rapport; he was good like that with fans, he always made them feel special, a rare talent. After a while, the stranger and his wife disappeared and we were left to our own devices. Despite all its drawbacks and inconveniences, this was undoubtedly my favourite football excursion. I had more adventures in Salonika than were good for me – but what fun. Or as Joe Gargery put it so succinctly in Great Expectations – what larks!
Later I was to say to Alan Hudson, ‘How the hell did we fit all that ‘stuff’ into one night?’
He just chuckled and said quietly: ‘Well, we just did.’
Before talking about the game, let us look at the environs of the Harilaou Stadium. Walking jauntily to the entrance, I was struck first of all by the amount of police and soldiers on duty. These were grim-faced guys with the expressionless eyes of psychopaths. Each one had some kind of automatic weapon over his shoulder. Some even clutched machine guns. The stadium itself had the look of Stalag Luft 111 in the classic British war movie The Wooden Horse: all Everest-high barbed wire and soldiers, and there was a moat as well – it was the eeriest football ground I had ever visited.
As for the game itself, it was a particularly poisonous encounter, which included some of the worst on-the-pitch behaviour I had ever witnessed. Without sounding too biased, I am, of course, referring to the ‘tactics’ employed by the Salonika players.
I’ll let Alan Hudson describe some of the Salonika ‘tactics’: ‘The Greeks weren’t smart at all. There was all this spitting, and the worst thing was when they lifted you up if you’d fallen down in a tackle and then they would pull the hair under your armpits.’
After the game, Ossie also condemned the Salonika players’ behaviour to me, as indeed did Ian Hutchinson, who as usual had been as brave as the proverbial lion.
The match was not one to savour in any aesthetic sense, but there was much admiration for the Chelsea players from the media, taking into account all the provocation they had to endure from first whistle to last.
Around 50,000 screaming Greeks (with the odd Chelsea fan) were packed into this fortress of a ground, and the noise was deafening when Alecos Alexadis put Aris ahead. Late on, Hutchinson deservedly levelled, and the verdict was that it had been a ‘thoroughly professional job’ in which Sexton’s men had displayed both patience and restraint, words that certainly could not be used about the hours that followed on this hot and sultry night in Thessaloniki.
Once the dust had settled and the Chelsea party was back at its hotel, it became like a scene from the Keystone Cops as player after player spruced himself up. Suitably suited and booted, they were ready to face their hosts at a banquet laid on by representatives of the Greek FA and Aris Salonika officials.
It was a lavish affair, and much wine was quaffed. Sexton, displaying surprising friendliness and warmth told me I could sit down with the Chelsea squad at the Downton Abbey-type dining table, laden with all kinds of sumptuous goodies, in one of the hotel’s largest private rooms.
Considering all the nastiness that had gone before, the dinner was all sweetness and light. Each Chelsea player was given a couple of gifts each. Whether the Greek football powerbrokers knew who I was, I wasn’t sure, but my place setting was empty – no gift. However, Ian Hutchinson put that right.
Hutch was a hard man on the field of battle. He never shirked a challenge, and after retirement his body was testament to all the bashings and beatings it had taken. However, off-stage, so to speak, he was a softly spoken ‘nice guy’. He always struck me as someone whose sensitivity could be taken advantage of by some sweet-talking, smooth operator. Anyway, seeing that I had been left out of the gift stakes, he smiled at me and, handing me a bottle-shaped wrapped parcel, said: ‘Here, Greg, you take one of mine.’
We all unwrapped our parcels like some mass Christmas Day Morning present-fest for children, and inside ‘mine’ was a bottle of Metaxa Greek brandy, which proved a good friend to me for the remainder of this strangely surreal trip.
How much food we ate, and how long this dinner lasted; all these facts are now buried in the mists of time. But, having put on a good show of British diplomacy and phlegm, we slowly but surely left the room for more hedonistic pleasures,
I teamed up with Ossie and full-back Paddy Mulligan. I didn’t really know Paddy at all, but he was good fun and an extremely matey guy. What we were going to do, I hadn’t a clue, but somehow Osgood had been given some info about a nightclub in downtown Salonika.
A bit about Paddy first: born in Dublin, he was signed by Sexton for £17,500 from Shamrock Rovers in 1969. He made 58 appearances for the Blues before moving on to Crystal Palace in 1972. He was a regular in the Ireland national team, winning 50 caps; in his day he was a buccaneering type of right back, but he could also be inconsistent. He was comparatively short, with long, luxuriant dark wavy hair that had the look of a perm about it.
After hanging up his boots, he was on the short-list for the Ireland manager’s job in 1980. The list was eventually whittled down to two candidates: Limerick City boss, Eoin Hand, and Mulligan. Hand won by a solitary vote, and later one Irish FA committee member explained why he had voted against Paddy. It seems this official thought he was the player who once tossed a bun at him on an away trip!
So off we went, this trio of disparate human beings in a taxi, to this nightspot. I must admit I was very sceptical about the whole thing. In a country in which long hair and moustaches and Dylan were banned, I didn’t honestly think that the nightlife would be anything to write home about. How Ossie knew exactly where to go remained an unfathomable mystery to me; maybe he just asked the driver or someone in the hotel for a nearby bar with bit of oomph – who knows!
Arriving at this neon-lit, seedy establishment, I was struck by how empty the streets were. No one was abroad it seemed. Mind you, the junta’s ban on late night assemblies by the populace undoubtedly had more than a tad to do with it.
The bar itself was virtually customer-less – I later described it as ‘gruesome’. There was a shabby counter with a small, dark woman, looking unerringly like the Italian actress Anna Magnani, obviously in charge. She greeted us with a smile that would have gone down well with the director of the latest Hammer production. Opposite the counter, which was in desperate need of some good spit and polish, was a small, poorly-lit stage, on which pranced a squat young woman, fondling her ample though pendulous breasts. Her movements were gauche: the same ridiculously simple steps over and over again. In the far corner there was a little fat man, lit up by too much ouzo, showing his appreciation by making lascivious noises. I must admit it was about as erotic as painting a wall with white emulsion.
I ordered a brandy – Metaxa – and Ossie stuck to lager. As for Paddy, he tried to order a particular beer – I think it was Guinness – and in attempting to describe his poison to the Anna Magnani clone, he managed to utterly confuse her. We three thought this was the funniest thing ever, but we were by this time in that limbo world between being tipsy and just plain drunk.
Ossie was always good company, whatever it was; wherever it was; and even if it was all just bloody awful, he somehow managed to see the positive side and enjoy himself.
By the time we had advanced to our third libation, another lady was on stage. She was slightly better than the previous one, but thinking about my meeting with the King of Soho, Paul Raymond, I don’t think he would have gone on his hands and knees to put her under contract.
Despite the time – it was now well past one in the morning – we were still game for more, so having hailed a taxi, which was some kind of miracle in itself, we arrived back at the hotel, with one aim in mind – the next drink.
Once in the hotel I dashed to my room and threw some cold water over my face. Relaxing once more in the hotel bar, attempting unsuccessfully to look languid, I encountered Charlie Cooke, who had obviously ‘had a few’. Ossie had gone off somewhere, so I sat down with Charlie, and we both ordered our favourite tipple – large brandies. At about 3.30 a.m., I started to feel ravenously hungry, as did Cooke, so we managed to find a waiter, and gave him our order: eggs and bacon!
How he managed to understand our English, uttered as it was with the thickness of Devonshire clotted cream, but he did, and within what seemed only a matter of a few minutes, our early bird breakfast arrived. I tell you what, it tasted absolutely superb – you couldn’t have found better at The Ritz!
And so to bed, and not to ‘perchance to dream’, well not for long anyway, because the following day we had to catch the plane back to Blighty, but not before a couple more chance encounters with some of the locals.
Little shuteye, tongue like sandpaper; but who cared, we were young and invincible – in fact we were immortal. Plenty of coffee, a pill or two to get the body and brain at full throttle again, then off into town with Ossie. We found a café, and with the sun still beating down relentlessly, we ordered a couple of refreshers. The café itself was pleasant, but there was one major drawback: it was literally opposite a sort of open-air butcher’s shop, which had a whole collection of un-plucked chickens hanging from hooks in long lines and completely open to the elements.
The proprietor, a tall, wide-hipped middle-aged man, wearing spectacles, came over to us and within a few minutes started chatting in competent, though somewhat eccentric English. He immediately made it clear he was a football man, and he recognised Osgood straightaway – his mugshots were all over the sports pages of the Greek dailies. He then went on to say that the people of Greece were extremely fond of the British. His compliments were mainly in reference to the Second World War, but believe it or not he managed to bring Lord Byron – who many Greeks regard as the saviour of their country – into the conversation. I didn’t have the heart to mention Byron’s liberal credentials.
I think he was trying as hard as he knew to convince us that everything in Greece was hunky-dory, and that the Government was doing its best for the people. The fact that I obviously didn’t believe him, and that all right-minded people would never believe him, and that apart from about fifty Fascist politicians in Italy, nobody in the West would ever accept what he was imparting to us as gospel, made me smile, and I tried to change the subject.
As a boiling hot wind began to swirl and the humidity increased to around 100 per cent, so did the smell of the dead birds. The aroma was positively pungent and, as my stomach was still on the fragile side, I glanced at my watch and said to Ossie that it was about time we got back to the hotel. He laughed, and at the same time he rose, and we left. So my date with Fascism was all but at an end.
The flight back was a real anticlimax, for by this time all I wanted to do was to go to bed. My conversation had dwindled to the odd pleasantry and my smile could only be described as an apology. I also knew that Basil Jawett, accountant for Peter Osgood Limited, had a major project he wished to discuss with us at his office in Fleet Street, and that it all revolved around fish. However, a combination of Hammersmith Council and the Arab-Israeli Conflict combined to scupper our plans.
A few days after our Greek odyssey, I was wandering down Fleet Street in the company of Peter Osgood. We had just enjoyed a good lunch, steaks as usual, salad and chips. As we entered No. 54 Fleet Street, Peter asked me about his taxes. ‘Don’t worry,’ I said. ‘Basil Jawett will sort it all out: he’s a dab hand at these sort of things.’
Fleet Street forty-three years ago was a wondrous place. The newspaper offices of the Daily Telegraph, the Daily Express and the other nationals dominated a street that in so many ways was like a tatty Toff – elegant, yet at the same time needing a clean and a press and a spruce-up. El Vino’s, that bastion of pre-war sexism, where even during the early 1970s a lady could not order a drink at the bar, was always, even by noon, packed with a mixture of journalists, barristers and solicitors, imbibing glasses of vintage reds and whites. The Wig and Pen was another watering-hole for journalists and lawyers – its beamed façade conjuring up images of Charles Dickens, sitting with glass in hand, holding court as he regales his companions with outlines of new stories. Opposite were the Royal Courts of Justice, built in 1882; then, further down, going towards Ludgate Circus, a small alleyway called Gough Square and the famous ‘Cheshire Cheese’ eating house, once the home of Doctor Johnson, who used to feed his cat Hodge oysters. Indeed a romantic place.
Behind No. 54 Fleet Street, it is but a short walk to the Inns of Court, unchanged since Georgian times. It was a London that had somehow miraculously survived the Blitz, not quite intact, but it still retained every aspect of the old London that, thanks or should I say no thanks to the madcap architects of recent years, is slowly disappearing.
We walked up the stairs into the offices of Berman, Abrahams and Jawett, Chartered Accountants. We went into the reception area, and there were Basil’s trio of typists banging away on their keys. ‘We’re here to see Mr Jawett,’ I informed one of the secretaries. ‘If you’ll wait here, I’ll tell him,’ she said, smiling insincerely.
After a matter of seconds, Basil called us in. He smiled in his standard ingratiating way, for he loved meeting Ossie; it was all about reflected glory, I guess. I think he was a Spurs supporter, and he loved his golf, going off each and every spring to Augusta, Georgia for the Masters. But Peter Osgood was the ‘in thing’ at the time, and Jawett was the sort of person that thrived on name-dropping – it made a good topic at the Golf Club and all those Rotary Dinners that such a man would be obliged to attend.
Jawett was always dressed in the manner of the typical City gent. He had style, and the cut of his cloth reeked of quality, but he was never flashy. He wore stylish glasses, which gave him the look of an American corporation vice president. His facial expression was always on the grim side, and my mother, who never liked him, once told me that he had the ‘look of a shark about him’.
Without further ado, Basil came to the point – an unusual occurrence for accountants and solicitors. ‘How do you both feel about a fish and chip restaurant not far from Stamford Bridge utilising Peter’s name?’ he announced.
‘Sounds great,’ was my very obvious response. And even Ossie, who I don’t think ever quite trusted the accountant completely, also displayed in obvious terms his unbridled enthusiasm for the idea.
‘Yes,’ continued Jawett, ‘we could give it a name like “Ossie’s Plaice”. I think I have just the man to back the idea, so the next thing is for me to arrange a meeting.’
He then went on to explain in more detail his overall business plan, and after a few more questions to Ossie about football matters, we rose and left, but not before Ossie had signed a few autographs for some of Basil’s female employees.
The idea was a sound one, and after what seemed like interminable meeting after interminable meeting, a property in the Hammersmith area was found. The backer, an Arab, was a pleasant individual, but unfortunately his relationship with Jawett was an edgy one. This was all down to the various conflicts and wars that had taken place, were taking place and were going to take place between Arabs and Israelis. You see, Basil was a Jew first, and an Englishman second. If he felt Israel was under threat, his patriotism would always be geared to that country, and not the country of his birth.
It has to be remembered that the famous – or should I say infamous – Six-Day War was still fresh in the memory. The war, which involved Israel and much of the Arab World, but primarily Egypt (known at the time as the United Arab Republic), Jordan and Syria, proved to be a military success for Israel. As a result, they captured the Gaza Strip and the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) from Jordan and the Golan Heights from Syria.
Despite being so short in duration, it was extremely bloody, and for the Arab countries as a whole it proved a disaster. The war made a star of Israel General Moshe Dayan, he of the black eyepatch, but it was, in essence, a human tragedy. As such, relations between Jews and Arabs were at an all-time low.
Basil Jawett was forever telling us that this ‘Jew/Arab situation didn’t matter’, but it obviously did; why did he keep telling us day-after-day?
There were more meetings with the council, who out of the blue decided that our fish and chip emporium would be ‘too noisy’ for the particular part of Hammersmith we had selected. No one, neither Basil nor the backer, fought our corner with any conviction, so the whole deal was given the big heave-ho. What a waste of time!
Chelsea’s league form during the early months of the 1970–’71 season was patchy to say the least. They remained unbeaten for six games, but this included three draws, and it was their old adversaries, Leeds United, who ended this far from convincing run on 6 September with a 1–0 victory at Elland Road, witnessed by over 47,000 fans.
From a personal point of view, it was Ossie’s goal tally – or more accurately the lack of it – that was causing me concern. Thankfully, on 26 September, his drought was ended with a goal in the 2–1 home success over Ipswich Town.
The second leg with Aris Salonika came four days after the Ipswich win, and Chelsea made light of the opposition on this occasion, John Hollins and Ian Hutchinson netting a couple each in a 5–1 score line as the Greeks completely caved in. As Hudson quipped to me many years later: ‘Aris were like Greek yoghurt – runny everywhere!’
Next up was a trip behind the Iron Curtain, and CSKA Sofia on 21 October. A 2–1 win at Derby County on the Saturday before the Bulgaria trip was just the confidence booster that Sexton’s men needed.
Tommy Baldwin put away the only goal of the game in Bulgaria, 2 minutes before the break, so the second leg looked a formality.
It was then that, during a conversation with Terry O’Neill, the idea of a footballer actually being featured in an upmarket magazine came to me. At the time to most people, such a thought would have made them laugh hysterically; ‘football was not classy enough’, they would say. But I knew they were wrong, as indeed did Terry, who, like me, fully realised that football, George Best-style anyway, was throwing off its 1950s dress and shackles and replacing it with a swanky new suit from a top-of-the-range tailor. And whereas at Manchester United it was all about Best, at Chelsea it was about the team as a whole. ‘It’s just like another branch of the rock business,’ I said to Terry, and, believe it or not, he didn’t laugh – not a titter.
The plan revolved around Charlie Cooke, and to get him to pen a feature on what it was like in the Stamford Bridge dressing room before a big match: what was required were real insights, and not just ‘the usual ghosted rubbish’, as Cooke so aptly described most of the footballers’ literary output in those days.
It was Terry who suggested Vogue as the outlet for Cooke’s undoubted writing talents. My brief was to help him write the thing, but before any thoughts of pen being put to paper, I had to make contact, via Terry, with a senior member of the Vogue magazine editorial team.
Terry’s prowess, plus his international reputation as one of the leading photographers on the planet, was going to be used as an extra carrot to entice the people at the magazine into agreeing to this idea.
Terry’s enthusiasm knew no bounds, and he offered to take some shots of Charlie in action, so I arranged for a photographers’ pass for him for the European Cup Winners’ Cup second round second leg tie at Stamford Bridge on 4 November. This would, I thought, be the clincher.
Another added bonus for us was that Vogue had begun a ‘Men In Vogue’ section, and Charlie’s efforts would, therefore, be a perfect fit. The next edition of this supplement for men was due out during the middle of March, and following a few subsequent meetings at the Conde Nast headquarters in Hanover Square, this off-the-wall idea was finally given the green light. Charlie Cooke, Chelsea FC professional footballer in Vogue; ‘had the world gone stark staring mad?’ would surely be a question emanating from the mouths of many.
When I lived in Maida Vale, DJ Alan ‘Fluff’ Freeman lived in the penthouse flat above me, and I remember telling him about the Vogue article (we were in a taxi at the time). He actually said to me that I had broken new ground – ‘football will never be looked at in the same way again’, he said. Needless to say I was flattered.
Terry O’Neill’s Charlie Cooke pictures were just extraordinary. They not only captured the grace and movement of this special player, but somehow he had managed to bring into focus Charlie’s facial expressions when on the ball – the contractions, the grimaces: the lot.
The match itself was a cagey affair, with Chelsea doing just enough – Dave Webb scoring the only goal five minutes before half-time.
Having broken the ice with the Vogue ensemble, and armed with Terry O’Neill’s pictorial treasures, now was the time for me to sit down in the secretary’s office at Stamford Bridge with Charlie and attempt to write something that was not just the standard football stuff, so enjoyed by the readers of Shoot and Striker and the other soccer comics of the day, but a new take on a footballer’s pre-match mental state and all the rituals that he goes through prior to any big contest.
There we were sitting cosily in this shabby office, throwing ideas at one another in the manner of Hollywood scriptwriters. Looking round at the décor of this Stamford Bridge inner sanctum, I thought what a contrast it made to the plush, sleek home of Vogue, and its perfectly-dressed, well-bred upper echelon ladies of high fashion.
I don’t know why, but I always felt somewhat intimidated by Charlie’s undoubted intellect; it was said that he had the IQ of a genius – good enough for MENSA and all that. How true this was I never did find out, but what was true was that he had a way with words, albeit often very American in construction and usage. For example, he often came out with that de rigueur ‘yoof’ word of 2013, ‘awesome’. No one else I knew then – apart from some American cousins – used this American/English word with such impunity as Charlie. As I have already stated, he was Hemingway-obsessed in those days, but having said that, his turn of phrase was better than any football journalist of the period – at times his phrases were possessed of an almost poetic quality.
Well, we differed a bit about how the article was to be formulated. I wanted something relatively simple, but Charlie thought we should go out of the norm somewhat and try to add drama to each and every line.
A few coffees were downed, and we got to work – it was a very basic pen and ink job. Once we had decided upon the direction we were going to take, the first paragraph just happened, and Cooke’s pen wrote these words: ‘It’s different below in the dressing room before a match. There’s no cool beer or King’s Road dollies, none of the euphoria of up-top.’
It all flowed after that; some words here from Charlie, then more words from me. ‘How are we going to end it?’ I thought. ‘What’s going to be the denouement?’
I said to Charlie that we should utilise the first few lines, and after a few false dawns with lines that frankly were pretentious to the point of being stuff ready-made for Private Eye’s ‘Pseuds Corner’, we eventually decided upon: ‘And you? Right now you wouldn’t mind being up there, with the cool beer and the King’s Road dollies, immersed in the collective euphoria. Yet you know that when the concrete yields to turf, when your studs cease their chatter, and you start to swing the ball about in those long looping practice passes, it will start to be all right again and the game will take over.’
It all sounds simple when told in retrospect, but the amount of crossings-out on our sheets of paper, as we attempted to get Charlie’s ideas across to a readership totally unused to the doings of a footballer as he prepares for a game, were testament to how difficult the task was. ‘We’re writing for Vogue, for God’s sake,’ I said, half under my breath. ‘This puts the whole bloody thing on another level. Some of their readers won’t know a cross from a corner-kick!’
Mission accomplished, all I had to do was to type the thing out on my new Olivetti, show it to Terry O’Neill, and hope for the best. I thought it was good, and thankfully so did the ladies with the cut-glass accents at Vogue.
The Blues’ league form continued to be no more than satisfactory, and at no stage did they display the kind of devil-may-care football that had marked their FA Cup-winning campaign. Following the European tie in Bulgaria, there was a 4–3 success by the seaside at Blackpool; a 2–2 home draw with Southampton, and 1–0 victory at Huddersfield Town three days after the CSKA second leg. A 1–0 reverse, in front of over 61,000 at Spurs seven days later was a setback, but faith was restored on the 21 November with a 2–1 victory against Stoke, Ossie at last finding the net again. And so it went on: more victories than defeats, but the successes more often than not by the odd goal.
In the domestic cup competitions, Manchester United put paid to their hopes at the end of October in the fourth round of the League Cup, and they also exited the FA Cup in round four, the other half of Manchester banging in three goals without reply. So, it was Europe or bust for the Blues.
As for Os, it was proving to be a season that never really saw him replicate the deeds of twelve months before. Apart from a dearth of goals, his cause wasn’t helped by a draconian ban he received of eight weeks, plus a fine of £160, on 20 January 1971. He had been booked six times in a year, and had already been handed a suspended sentence, so when he had his name taken at Goodison Park against Everton on 16 January in a 3–0 defeat, he knew that he was for the high jump (his misery was further compounded by a penalty miss).
At the time the Football Association, ruled by ‘a generation of ghosts’, and apparently dismayed by the dramatic increase in bad behaviour on the pitch, set about waving the big stick. In their minds there were several players – shall we call them the characters and entertainers – who never seemed to toe the line, and as far as officialdom was concerned were just a big pain in the fundament, to quote Horace Rumpole.
George Best was certainly one, and Os was another ‘naughty boy’. Apart from his ban – which, by the way, was given top-three billing during that evening’s BBC TV News – their dossier on Osgood was forwarded to the England Selection Committee for them to study. This undoubtedly seemed to put the kibosh on his chances of winning more England caps.
As you can imagine, my Trim phone chirped incessantly, following Peter’s ban: ‘What is he going to do during his lay-off? How will he keep fit?’ Never-ending questions, which frankly I found difficult on occasions to give the right – or should I say – diplomatic answer. It was definitely a touch of ‘them and us’ in those final years of Swinging London. The Bests, The Marshes, The Osgoods – these were young men at odds with the shiny blazer brigade at FA headquarters. They were part of a new breed, and the FA establishment just didn’t get it; a bit like Dave Sexton, really.
So what I said to these newspaper guys was often controversial. I knew Os wouldn’t mind a jot because it was all part of our plan. After all, if he hadn’t ruffled a few feathers, would Ray Connolly have been interested? Os was no Bowie or Hendrix or Jagger, but to Connolly he was as much a part of the whole scene as any rebellious rocker.
But Ossie was always the supreme sporting actor and entertainer. When I say actor, I don’t mean that he ever indulged in what is referred to these days incongruously as ‘simulation’, I mean that he knew how and when to take centre stage. And what better stage than the quarter-finals of the European Cup Winners’ Cup.
Chelsea had been drawn to face the obdurate Belgians of Bruges, with the first leg to take place on 10 March 1971 away in that delightful city – ‘the Venice of the North’.
The Bruges players were no mugs and proved it, prevailing 2–0, thanks to goals from Raoul Lambert and Gilbert Marmenaut. It didn’t look good for the Boys in Blue for the second leg in a fortnight, but cometh the hour cometh the man, and in this case it was the irrepressible Osgood.
Stamford Bridge, Wednesday 24 March, and Os was back in town, with 45,558 spectators cheering the Chelsea players on to the pitch. This was going to be a tall order, and the team’s talisman, Peter Osgood, was not match fit. It represented Sexton’s last grab at a trophy, so was it going to be one of those special nights?
From the off, Chelsea attacked. The fans were raucous; it was a frenzied atmosphere cracking like thunder with emotion: tempers became frayed as the Bruges back line adopted both fair and foul methods to thwart the Blue hordes.
Then, there he is, the understated and underrated ‘Nobby’ Houseman advancing on goal – it’s a goal! – 1–2. The curtain rises and on to the stage comes the star of the show to grab all the headlines – Peter Osgood – it’s in the net! – 2–2. Extra-time, and there he is again, Osgood, making it 3–2 to the Londoners. Baldwin added number four, as the Belgian bubble burst, and the Bridge erupted as referee Kostovski from Yugoslavia blew the final whistle – Chelsea had made it through to the semi-finals on a night to remember.
Alan Hudson has fond memories of this titanic tussle: ‘Osgood was eight weeks short of his best because of long-term injury, and I was still looking for my best form. We took an early lead, and they (Bruges) seemed to become more leg weary. Cooke was showing his intricate skills, and with Os struggling with his fitness and me with my ankle, we needed to dig deeper than ever before.
‘In extra-time Cooke was magnificent, and Sponge (Tommy Baldwin) was living up to his nickname as he soaked up so much work, and thoroughly deserved his goal. Overall, it was quite a performance, although a lot of people tend to forget the one man who kept our faint hopes alive, John Phillips (again deputising in goal for Bonetti). He had been in such incredible form in the first leg in Belgium, and but for him the second game would have proved to be the kind of mountain that had never been found, let alone climbed!’
Believe it or not after such drama and nail-biting tension – and having grabbed a quick drink with Ossie and co. – I left the ground and made for the Paris Pullman cinema in Chelsea to see one of the most acclaimed post-war French films, Le Grande Meaulnes, based on the cult novel of the same name, written by Alain-Fournier in 1913. Talk about from the sublime to the ridiculous!
Away from Ossie’s European exploits, I found myself busy with another player, one of a totally different hue to the King of Stamford Bridge; midfield dynamo John Hollins, whose contribution to the success of that team was in many respects as telling as the more gung-ho guys. Clean-cut, articulate and polite, here was a King’s Road hero without flower power, but possessed of a football brain and work ethic that were second-to-none.
Hollins signed for Chelsea as a teenager and made his first-team debut in September 1963 in a League Cup-tie at Swindon. I actually witnessed his debut, but it was an evening to forget in Wiltshire for any Chelsea fan, as Docherty’s youngsters went down 3–0.
He left Stamford Bridge in 1975 for QPR, signed by previous boss Sexton for £80,000. Four successful years at Loftus Road, and he was on his way, this time to Arsenal, where he remained for four years.
He returned to Chelsea in 1983 for a twelve-month period, but by then he was thirty-seven-years-old, and despite his most potent days being behind him, he still proved invaluable to the team cause as the club gained promotion back to the top flight. He was immediately appointed team coach, and following John Neal’s departure, he became manager, but in 1988, following a series of poor performances, he was sacked.
He won just the solitary England cap against Spain in May 1967, and there is no doubt that in another era, he would have donned the England shirt on many more occasions.
I enjoyed the task of pushing the name of John Hollins. I was by this time writing regular interviews and such-like for several football magazines, and interviews and first-person features for John were starting to appear on a fairly regular basis. But I wasn’t satisfied – I wanted something different.
Cooke’s Vogue opus was above-and-beyond, but there was still the matter of cracking the chat-show radio circuit.
Probably the most popular show on radio in the early 1970s was Open House, presented by Pete Murray. At its height it attracted over 5.5 million listeners on BBC Radio 2. It was a two-hour magazine-style show broadcast five days a week, and it ran for some ten years. During this period, Murray was voted Radio Personality of the Year on two occasions.
Now, Murray was an authentic celebrity; he was also a football fan – an ardent follower of Arsenal. When I use the word celebrity, I mean it in its truest sense. An actor by profession – he studied at RADA – he joined Radio Luxembourg in 1950 as one of its resident presenters. It was television in the shape of Six-Five-Special that elevated him to the national consciousness.
To people of a certain age, the Six-Five-Special, which went out live at five past six on Saturday evening, was their first introduction to rock ’n’ roll on TV. Jack Good, later to go on to greater things with ITV’s weekly rock show, Oh Boy!, and even having hit records of his own with Lord Rockingham’s XI and their novelty rock number, ‘Hoots Mon’, was the producer. Josephine Douglas and Murray co-hosted the show, with Murray’s catchphrase ‘Time to Jive on the Old Six Five’, soon becoming one of the ‘in-phrases’ of the 1950s.
After Six-Five, Murray’s career blossomed. He was one of the regular panellists on the hit TV show Juke Box Jury, and when Top of The Pops was launched on New Year’s Day 1964, Murray was selected as one of regular frontmen. Three years later he was one of the original DJs on BBC radio’s new youth-orientated station, Radio 1. He moved to Radio 2 in 1969, and by 1970 his stock was sky-high.
In many ways life as a PR person back then was a doddle. Okay, so there were limited outlets for publicity and promotion, certainly in respect of footballers, but making that initial contact was so much simpler. For one thing, people were far less suspicious. So, speaking on the blower to Murray was no problem, and suggesting that a Chelsea player be a guest was met with a warm affirmative.
Broadcasting House, Langham Place: so much history, so much that was part of the fabric of British culture. Arriving there with John and his attractive, bubbly wife Linda, I was immediately impressed by Murray’s easy-going manner, and the almost boyish pleasure that he was obviously getting from meeting and chatting to a top footballer, even one from such bitter rivals of Arsenal as Chelsea.
John had sideburns to die for, but unlike several of his colleagues, he was never remotely associated with a rock ’n’ roll lifestyle. But as a radio guest, he made the ideal interviewee, and this one show with Pete Murray did so much to dispel the standard image of professional players – inarticulate and thick.
I’ll always remember many years later, listening to a Somerset County Cricket Club committee lady, who mocked footballers with these words: ‘Thick as two short planks compared to cricketers.’ Blanchflower, Cooke, Pat Nevin, to name but three – more cranium activity there, I would have thought, than the likes of the celebrity cricketers of today. This lady was living in the past – in the era of Mike Brearley and David Gower, when cricketers could converse on TV with the late John Arlott on subjects ranging from Apartheid to the latest wine vintage. Those days are long gone – gone forever.
As we bade Pete Murray adieu, he smiled broadly and said something like: ‘We must do this again sometime.’ Well, we didn’t, but we should have.