4
STAN ANDERSON was the manager at Middlesbrough when I said goodbye to my parents and headed for the club’s hostel, situated not much more than a goal-kick’s distance from Ayresome Park. But for the next three years the most influential person in my life, away from the training ground, was Nina Postgate, a formidable but kindly woman who made our ‘digs’ her personal domain and became a second mother to a bunch of teenagers all living away from home for the first time.
My intake included Brian Taylor, Malcolm Smith, Alan Parker, Peter Bickerdyke, Tony McAndrew and Bobby Hosker, all of us proverbially starry-eyed, all of us believing we were destined for stardom. Yet the odds were firmly against us because the failure rate among apprentices was, and remains, alarmingly high. The huge majority of apprentices never get as far as being offered their first professional contract and while there are famous examples of those who manage to bounce back after being discarded at 18, the truth of the matter is that most disappear without trace in football terms from the moment they are told they are not going to be good enough to play professionally.
The financial rewards for those who succeed at making the leap from humble, terrace-cleaning apprentice to regular first team player in the top divisions these days can be enough to set them up for life, but for those who fail there is nothing except the necessity to find a job outside the game and perhaps hope to play part-time for a few pounds extra. Managers say one of their worst jobs as the end of each season approaches is to tell apprentices on reaching the cut-off point of 18 that they are not going to be taken on. The dream is over and there are often tears as the manager attempts to soften the blow to tender young egos. It can be horribly hard. Fans don’t always realise that for every player fortunate enough to put on an England shirt, the casualty rate among those who aspired to be professionals has been colossal. So it was with us that July in 1970. Statistically most of us were going to fail. But like soldiers going into battle, none of us believed we would be the ones to be struck by the bullet. Certainly I didn’t. I had absolutely no doubts I would make the grade and I guess the others felt the same sublime sense of football immortality.
Mrs Postgate ran a strict boarding house. We had to be in the hostel by 10pm and no one was allowed out in the evenings at all after Wednesday as the weekend youth games approached. There must have been ten or 12 of us there at any one time, lads almost exclusively drawn from all over the North-East and now denied the home comforts we had taken for granted over the first 15 years of our lives. Some suffered from homesickness, some did not. I was in the latter category. While I loved my home in Durham, I was instantly happy in Mrs Postgate’s care. Not that she made life easy for us.
We had to help with the cleaning, in particular in the kitchen which she insisted must always be gleaming when we left it. There was no alcohol and definitely no girls although it has to be said that at that stage of my life I was not interested in either. All I wanted to do was play football and the rest of life was unimportant and just got in the way. For all of this we were paid five pounds a week in our first year, six pounds in our second and seven pounds in our third. This was just about enough to buy a few essentials but no luxuries and yet I don’t remember anyone complaining. To be paid even a meagre five pounds was just incredible because to be paid anything at all to play football was a bonus. We would probably have done it all for nothing just for the privilege of saying we were trainee professional footballers. It was a wonderful feeling.
Being away from home at such a young age helped my development as a person, of that there is also no question. Even in a controlled environment such as that at the hostel we had to grow up quickly and make decisions about our own lives. As I say, some adjusted to this and others did not but through it all I could see that there was not one among us who did not harbour a strong desire to succeed in our chosen profession.
Our citadel was the Ayresome Park stadium, now long forgotten of course and replaced by the Riverside, but to my generation it was a glorious palace of football. Only four years previously it had been a World Cup venue and the playing surface was every bit as pristine as Wembley’s, a joy to play on. As one of English football’s great amphitheatres, it was uplifting for Middlesbrough’s players and intimidating for opponents and I was deeply sorry, like generations of our fans, when it disappeared. The pitch and the stadium was the pride and constant concern of Wilf Atkinson, our head groundsman, who treated it with the same love and care he would have lavished on his own home and garden. Wilf guarded the pitch as if it was his private property, almost resenting anyone actually having the temerity to play on it.
As apprentices, when we weren’t training we were helping him tend his beloved turf, forking and re-seeding, repairing and mending, so that the playing surface resembled a lawn, particularly early in the season. Wilf taught us to have the same evident pride in our home pitch and we did. We came to share his enthusiasm and obsession and pitch preparation was never to me a grind or a duty. Of course, the North-East is not blessed with the best of weather and Wilf’s job was made no easier by the rain, winter snow and heavy workload of a season’s programme, which included reserve matches. When the weather was poor, the rain beating down and the players churning up the playing surface, fretting Wilf was on the pitch, pitchfork in hand, from the moment the referee blew the final whistle. During the week he wouldn’t allow anyone to train on his sacred turf but the result of his diligence and devotion was a superb playing area and, as I came to realise later, it was as good as any in the country.
One of the highlights of our otherwise menial tasks was to tend to the dressing rooms on match day. The apprentices were divided and allocated to either the home or the away team and it was our job to cater for their every need. In January 1971 still fresh on the staff, I was delegated to the Manchester United dressing room when they visited Ayresome Park for an FA Cup third round replay and to that point it was just about the biggest day of my life. Those were the days when the United side contained such iconic figures as George Best, Bobby Charlton, Denis Law, Willie Morgan and Pat Crerand and it was wonderful just to be in the same room, listening to the banter and watching their preparations like a goggle-eyed schoolboy, which of course I had been a few months before. Best scored the only goal. By the time I got to play against Manchester United a few years later most of those had gone and World Cup-winner Stiles even became a Middlesbrough team-mate and an important figure in my early career.
For a few weeks I attempted to maintain my academic career at the behest of Mr Bagley but I knew from the outset it was never going to work and my three years at the hostel passed most happily. At the end of the week we would play our game–all home matches were at our Hutton Road training ground– against the juniors of other league sides in the Northern Intermediate League and then I would depart for Durham and home for a few precious hours. If dad was not able to take me down to Middlesbrough before starting his own work on Monday mornings, he and mam saw me off on the Express bus back to Middlesbrough for another week learning to be a footballer.
However, not everything was straightforward. At 15 and small, slim and far from being the finished physical product, I was not always picked to play in the Middlesbrough youth team. George Wardle knew that exposure to bigger lads could ruin my confidence, not to say my health. We played our contemporaries from teams like Doncaster and Scunthorpe and, with due respect, they took no prisoners when they played the bigger clubs, as if they had something to prove. George could see the danger of exposing such a frail boy to the mercies of 18-year-olds and frequently in my first year left me out. My reaction was to cry, several times as it turned out, but I always made sure that if I was blubbing in my disappointment, it would never be in his presence. I didn’t want George thinking I was a big baby, unable to cope with decisions which had ultimately been made in my own long-term interests. I was not fully grown until I was nearer 18 and by that age I had been promoted to the first team, well capable of looking after myself.
As a youth the big games were naturally against Newcastle and Sunderland and in the FA Youth Cup I achieved my ambition of playing at Roker Park, albeit in front of about 200 people, and at the dreaded St James’ Park in the league. We also got to play on Wilf’s Ayresome Park, remembering to replace the divots as we went. I think it is fair to say I acquitted myself well enough at youth level once I had grown a little stronger and crowds of any kind and size never got in the way of my performance.
In fact the only time I ever heard crowds was when I was playing for a team losing heavily – luckily only once or twice in my entire career – which is when you can hear every comment almost as if the perpetrator was standing alongside. All that ever mattered to me as a player of equable temperament was the state of the pitch, never the hostility of the crowd or the reputation of the opposition. I can’t ever remember freezing on a pitch or being intimidated. Go out and entertain was a motto I embraced early on in my career. Having said that about myself, there were players who looked world-beaters on the training ground but who rarely did themselves justice in the heat of matches. Others rose to the occasion, whatever that might be, and among those was McAndrew, not the most skilful of youngsters but a fantastic worker and competitor and an example to any professional at whatever stage of their career.
Middlesbrough may have been a Second Division team but the presence of Shepherdson as assistant to Anderson and Dr Phillips, England’s doctor in 1966, had brought a sort of international quality to the club and there was no doubt that we were underachieving in terms of first team results, something not put right until Jack Charlton came along a few years later. We should have been in the First Division because Middlesbrough was a big club with a big following but for some reason we were not and at 15 or 16 I didn’t know why.
I looked at our first team squad and saw the likes of top scorer John Hickton, Hughie McIlmoyle, a striker exceptional in the air, goalscoring winger Derrick Downing, brave goalkeeper Willie Whigham, solid full-backs like Gordon Jones and Alex Smith and wondered why we were not better placed. Then there was the Irish winger Eric McMordie, a close friend of George Best and on his day almost as tricky and as whimsical. Add to them Joe Laidlaw and, later, Stiles and there was the basis of a team performing below the sum of its individual parts. They were all characters and as an impressionable junior you could only learn from them, good and bad. I fear the older pros took liberties with Stan and that was one of the reasons why we languished too long in mid-table when we should have been pushing more for promotion. We had the ability but not the organisation or collective desire.
Stan Anderson was something of a North-Eastern legend in that he had played for Sunderland, Newcastle and Middlesbrough and became the first to captain all three. The son of a miner from Horden, the record books say he made in excess of 400 appearances for Sunderland, 81 for Newcastle and a further 21 at Middlesbrough before replacing Raich Carter as manager at Ayresome Park, only the club’s fifth since the Second World War, as his playing career wound down at the age of 32. He was described as a cultured wing-half in his heyday and was good enough to earn a couple of England caps when at Sunderland, going with the national side to but not appearing in the 1962 World Cup in Chile. Stan stayed with Middlesbrough until January 1973 before a surprise move to AEK Athens and subsequent spells at Queens Park Rangers, Doncaster and Bolton before retiring from football to care for his sick wife when only 48 in 1981.
Stan was an easy-going man who liked his players to enjoy themselves in training in the belief that a relaxed atmosphere would translate into a strong team spirit but it was not until Jack Charlton, the disciplinarian, came along that I realised how soft his regime had been. Stan was too familiar, too much of a friend to the senior professionals and in management that doesn’t work. The great managers of my career, Jack Charlton and Lawrie McMenemy, knew there had to be a distance between themselves and the players without being aloof and unapproachable.
Stan had Shepherdson, coaches Ian MacFarlane, Jimmy Greenhalgh and Jimmy Headridge, the physio/trainer, in support and Wardle was an influence so that the backroom set-up was right but the results were far too inconsistent. To his credit, Stan loved the technical side of the game and it was clear how good a player he had been when the apprentices were commandeered to play head tennis. He would lead a team drawn from the coaching staff and the apprentices were made to play against them. The coaches didn’t want to lose to a bunch of cheeky lads and it could become quite competitive, especially if it looked like we might win. Stan would shout at us, deliberately trying to put us off, not just to win but to teach us to concentrate and to avoid outside influences.
On the field of play, with a crowd apparently making all the noise, it is sometimes not appreciated by fans that the players are also shouting at each other, at the referee, the referee’s assistant, the fourth official, anyone in hearing distance. It is easy therefore to lose concentration when there is so much information being flung at you. Stan made sure we learned that particular lesson and in my subsequent career it proved to be a valuable one. Let nothing put you off.
I still had some growing to do by the time I reached the reserves in the second year of my apprenticeship. Without anyone saying as much, I think the coaching staff began to see something a bit different in me at a time when they were beginning to work out who among my contemporaries was going to make the step up to professionalism and who wouldn’t.
By now I was playing among grown men and those on the opposition were not inclined to take it easy against whippersnappers like me. Reserve team football these days has been watered down by the academy systems but when I was playing, the North Midlands League in the north and the Football Combination in the south had full programmes of 40 or more games and they were all regarded as important.
At Middlesbrough we had a core of players in the reserves made up of those on the fringe of the first team, those making their way as first-or second-year professionals and an apprentice or two like me. In my era there were players such as Malcolm Smith, Stan Webb, Alan Murray, Jimmy Platt, Pat Cuff, Brian Taylor, Basil Stonehouse, Mike Allen, Don Burluraux, Peter Martin and Steve Fenton. Among mature adults there was nowhere to hide and I had to adapt quickly to survive. Some of the tackles aimed at me would not have escaped red cards in these less tolerant times but defenders then could get away with some hideous challenges unpunished. It helped that I didn’t react. Some players don’t like the physical side to the game and it is their undoing eventually but if I got kicked – and I did – I was lucky enough never to let it bother me to the extent that I sought revenge and retribution. I also never moaned to referees, a fact for which I have the discipline of my schooling and George Wardle to thank.
At Middlesbrough the combative Graeme Souness would take care of any opposition transgressors and of course at Southampton there was no better an enforcer than hard man Jimmy Case. Jimmy wasn’t a thug and never went in search of trouble but if it came, he looked after himself and those others around him less forceful or experienced.
Basil Stonehouse is not a footballer known to anyone except the anoraks of Boro devotees but he played an important part in my career for all the wrong reasons. Basil was a sound defender from North Yorkshire and a couple of years older than me. He was one of those who had come through the ranks, good enough to sign as a professional but in the end not quite good enough to get into our first team. I understand he later had a game or two for Halifax and then tried his luck in Australia. We were both living in the hostel at the time and Basil had decided for no obvious reason that he wanted to impose on someone the nickname Spike. I have no idea why. I was unlucky enough to be his chosen victim and the name Spike followed me around the country even as far as Southampton by the time I got there. People often wondered why I was known as Spike, coming up with all kinds of theories, but ultimately it was just the mischievous whim of a team-mate. Everyone knew me as Spike, except Bobby Robson.
There was a certain rivalry between those lads who had recently signed as professionals but were struggling to bridge the gap between youth, reserves and first team and the apprentices. Not unnaturally the 18-and 19-year-olds, as Basil Stonehouse would have been, saw us 16-and 17-year-olds as potential threats and we had to be put in our place. That is possibly why I became Spike. At the time I was being fast-tracked towards the first team and indeed made my debut at 17, in the process by-passing older players like Basil. I can only imagine what they must have been feeling. These lads may have been team-mates but they were also, in their way, your competitors even if Basil, for instance, and I didn’t play in the same position.
There used to be a much-anticipated fixture every week between the apprentices and the young professionals at Shaw’s Bowling Club and it often turned into a nasty little kicking match with all kinds of injuries inflicted and scores settled. To our shame these encounters took place on the manicured bowling greens and at the end we surveyed the damage we had done and retreated hastily, only to return to the same venue the following week.
There comes a time when decisions have to be made about the futures of young players. I was in the first team when my fate was decided and there was never any doubt that I was going to be offered a professional contract but for others the last year of the apprenticeship is a deeply worrying time. Some are clearly going to be good enough but for others, still growing physically and mentally, the outcome is less obvious. There was, I now realise but didn’t see at the time, a sense of selfishness about us all. We were concerned only about ourselves. Yes, we were mates, living together in Mrs Postgate’s tidy hostel five days a week but in the end all that mattered was getting a chance in the first team, possibly at another’s expense.
Come the day and Parker, Bickerdyke and Hosker were among those called in by Shepherdson and probably the boss, who was by then Jack Charlton, and told the bad news. Shepherdson was acutely aware of the damage done to teenage psyches and, being a kindly soul, would make big efforts to find clubs for our rejects further down the scale. Others, who saw no future in football, were pointed towards other career opportunities.
Some borderline decisions have to be made, not everyone at 18 is an obvious success or failure. At Middlesbrough there was a big doubt about one Craig Johnston who was four or five years behind me in the system. Craig was a busy little tousle-haired midfield player who came to England from Australia, where he lived, as a 15-year-old after writing for a trial. His parents sold their home in New South Wales to fund his trip and Middlesbrough must have seemed a million miles away to a boy of that age. But he stuck it out, fighting his way into the Middlesbrough team before going on to join Liverpool where he enjoyed great success. At 18 his capacity for stardom was debatable. I know Jack Charlton didn’t rate him but he was saved by George Wardle who saw in him personal qualities above and beyond those of an ordinary footballer. Jack took Wardle’s advice and gave Johnston his first professional contract and he soon blossomed. But it was a close call. What might have happened had Johnston been fired we will never know but I suspect he would have returned to Australia, his gamble having failed. As it was, Johnston famously quit at 28 to go back and help his ailing sister, his last match being the 1988 FA Cup Final defeat by Wimbledon.
Later when I was playing for Southampton, a hard little midfield player called Paul Wiltshire was released at the completion of his apprenticeship, a decision which greatly surprised me. Southampton had an exceptional youth scheme at the time, they still do as the likes of Gareth Bale, Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain and Theo Walcott testify, and maybe Paul was just unlucky. But I felt there was something about him and I got in touch with John Neal, previously my manager at Middlesbrough and then in charge at Chelsea, and told him that he could be the next Souness. Paul went up to Chelsea, who were not the club they are now in terms of players and money, but sadly didn’t get taken on. His career instead was spent in local non-league circles but he did take the trouble two or three years ago to thank me for trying on his behalf and I was pleased he had remembered.
I must only have played about 20 reserve team matches by the time I was chosen by Anderson for my first team debut. It all happened so quickly and I had no indication that it was about to take place. The date was 3 April 1972, the venue was Blackpool’s Bloomfield Road and I was 17 years and 98 days old. Once more, Wardle was involved. The Easter programme was always hectic, much more so then, with three games taking place over four days prompting injuries, suspensions and loss of form. On Easter Saturday I played for the juniors and immediately afterwards Wardle told me to meet up with the first team the next day for the Easter Monday trip to Blackpool. I hadn’t seen this coming at all so it was a bit of a shock.
We reached Blackpool on Sunday evening when it was revealed Hickton and Stiles were injured. I was to play as a conventional left-winger in a much-rearranged team. I roomed with David Mills, another North-Eastern lad who had come up through the youth team, but there was nothing he could do or say to reduce the nerves which made sleep impossible.
Blackpool were a good side in those days with Tony Green, Tom Hutchison and Micky Burns in their line-up, all high-calibre players, and of course Alan Suddick, the prize-giver of my childhood, was one of their more expensive signings. The pitch was bone-hard, the day far too hot for Easter and we lost 3-1. The late John Vincent scored our goal and the nerves never quite left me although I made a competent if inauspicious start. Burns later joined us at Middlesbrough and was kind enough to say I was the best player he had ever played with.
I remember sitting silently in the dressing room surrounded by all our top players, wondering if they would accept me, but I think they saw my potential and nursed me through my first tentative steps. Even so, for a youngster such a situation is always daunting and I feared making a crucial mistake. Fortunately I did not. The team that day was Platt, Craggs, Jones, Spraggon, Boam, Maddren, Laidlaw, McMordie, Mills, Armstrong and Vincent. Gordon Jones was our captain.
Stiles, an influential figure even while nearing the end of his distinguished career, returned to the side later and I kept my place for the following matches against Leyton Orient, Norwich and Preston. I was still a boy among men, earning six pounds a week as a second-year apprentice while my team-mates were earning anything up to £100 as seasoned professionals, not bad for 1972 when the average wage was not much more than half that figure.
While the others knocked back pints of beer after the games, I was still sipping orange and lemonade, trying not to look hopelessly out of place and juvenile. Some of the lads, perhaps as many as a quarter, liked a smoke, among them notably that fine Scottish goalkeeper Whigham, and it was not unusual for them to light up at half-time. Such an action would be unthinkable now but I guess management tended to believe that if a crafty fag aided concentration and made players happy then so be it.
There was also, on the Middlesbrough dressing room table, a bottle of brandy. I am told we were not alone in cultivating alcohol as a pre-match booster and that other clubs resorted to the same trick. Players indulged in a tot or two before going on to the pitch, but it settled nerves and got the adrenaline flowing and never did anyone any harm that I ever noticed. As a youngster, new to the adult world of pre-match drink and half-time cigarettes, it was all a bit of a surprise but I’m pleased to report I indulged in neither.
There isn’t a club in the land now that doesn’t have a long list of sports therapists, performance advisers and improvers, dietary specialists and you name it hovering around players with their stopwatches, clipboards and laptops. There seems to be as many of them at times as players and I wonder what they would have made of players smoking and knocking back brandy with the full consent of the management. It is a different game, or is it? Are we not complicating a simple sport? Certainly the England team is not any better than it was in 1966.
Nobby Stiles became something of a mentor in that first season and then the next. He may have been some way short of his Manchester United and England best but everyone liked him and warmed to him, based on the respect he deserved for his achievements. What stood out was a deep and basic will to win and I think we performed better as a team when he was in it, driving us on with his constant shouting and leading by committed example. I saw opponents who were frightened of him and his reputation and fled from confrontation. I liken him to Alan Ball, the same charisma, the same huge enthusiasm.
The following season I roomed with Nobby and it wasn’t always a pleasant experience. Nobby bawled and hollered in his sleep, once causing me to wake believing we were being raided or something equally calamitous. Nobby wore contact lenses, most of his hair had long gone and he took his teeth out at night. Sat bolt upright in his bed, trying to come round from his nightmare, he was not a pretty sight.
There was always a sense of fun when Nobby was around, once cajoling Eric McMordie into throwing the cherished hat of experienced Middlesbrough Gazette reporter Cliff Mitchell out of a train window. I’m not sure Cliff, who covered the club’s highs and lows over many years, saw the funny side.
In fairness, during my difficult and brief first campaign, Cliff gave me some good reports, some of which I have kept, and at the end of the season I could look back with some satisfaction at what I had managed to do. The record books say I was still looking for my first league goal having made five starts and a substitute appearance. We won ten of our first 15 matches but fell away after a mid-season slump and finished ninth, ten points adrift of a promotion place. I at least was on my way even if the team had still not got it right.