5
AT THE first available opportunity I signed as a professional. I was just 17 at the start of January 1972 and would have signed on my birthday had it not been on Boxing Day, a few days before. Stan Anderson called me in to his office and I put pen to paper on a two-year contract which saw my wages shoot up from £6 a week to a basic 20. There was £25 for every first team appearance and bonuses which could, on a good week, take me up to £60. For every point gained I got £5 (in those days it was two points for a win) and there was another incentive which guaranteed a pound for every thousand fans over 21,000. In those days we were getting only about 13,000 to 14,000 at Ayresome Park so it was not exactly a generous gesture. Even so it was good money for a teenager from a humble background who was living the dream. I was actually getting paid for doing something I loved and never wanted or was qualified to do anything else.
The average wage now for a Championship player – the equivalent of the old Second Division – is somewhere between £5,000 and £10,000 a week, and can be more if a player has a good agent. Later with Middlesbrough and Southampton I played 13 years in the First Division and on today’s colossal, unfeasible money that should have been enough to set me up for life. I need never have worked again. But at the height of my career I never earned enough to save any for retirement. Am I envious? Of course, who wouldn’t be? But it was a different time, a different place and there is no point in feeling jealous. I am aware of the money now swilling around in football and what it might have done for me but I don’t think I would have changed the path of my career for any greater financial reward.
That path lay before me in January 1972 as a lad just starting to break into the first team. With up to £60 a week in my pocket I didn’t know what to do with it all. Almost immediately I passed my driving test and bought my first car, a Volkswagen Beetle from team-mate Malcolm Smith, and the freedom that gave me enabled me to say goodbye to Mrs Postgate’s hostel and move back home to my mam and dad’s in Durham.
Leaving the hostel was a sort of rite of passage, a measure of graduating to adulthood and based in Durham I was home from training in time to pick up mam from the school where she worked and build a social life among the mates I had left behind almost three years before. I played badminton with George Wardle, watched by Jackie Milburn, Len Shackleton and, believe it or not, Neil Warnock and could have gone mad with the money now at my disposal.
Later I bought my father a car to thank him for all his support over my formative years and settled a few non-financial debts, rewarding those who had previously gone out of their way to help me. The car enabled my parents to get to our home matches in comfort and to contemplate stretching their horizons to watch me in a few away fixtures. Mam and dad were always supportive like that. When I was a boy they would watch me play for school, district and county in the morning and then go off to see John or Joseph play for their respective teams in the afternoon. We all appreciated their sacrifice.
Around that time, crowd violence at football matches was endemic and widespread and affected all strata of the British professional game for several disruptive years until greater measures of control were put in place like all-seater stadia and segregation. I used to worry about the safety of my family as they travelled to unfamiliar cities and was always much relieved when the tickets I had set aside for them had been collected. That way I knew they had arrived and were in place.
In 1972/73 Middlesbrough finished a creditable fourth, or so it would appear on paper, but actually we didn’t do ourselves justice again. For a big club, we underperformed and lost our manager along the way. Yet Stan Anderson’s sudden resignation in mid-season to manage AEK Athens led to Jack Charlton’s arrival and some of the most interesting years of my life. Before he left Anderson brought in Alan Foggon, a former Newcastle player, from Cardiff for £10,000 and in the following month signed an ambitious but hard-to-handle Graeme Souness from Tottenham for another £32,000. It was Stan’s last signing for the club, having beaten Spurs down from the original asking price of £35,000. Souness’s debut against Fulham was also Stan’s last game as boss.
Hickton was our top scorer with 15 and in the league we only used 21 players. Those who played most often were Platt, Craggs, Spraggon, Stiles, Boam, Maddren, McMordie, Gates, Mills, Hickton, Armstrong, Souness and Foggon. Stiles was captain, taking over from long-serving Gordon Jones who moved to Darlington in February after losing his place.
We made a poor start to the season, recovered to reach fifth by the end of November and then slumped again. The FA Cup defeat by Plymouth probably convinced Stan it was time to take the AEK Athens vacancy he had been first alerted about by the Liverpool secretary Peter Robinson who had asked him if he knew anyone who might be interested in it. We picked up when Shepherdson took over as a caretaker for a third time, losing only three times in 16 matches and winning all our last four. Even so, we were 14 points behind runners-up QPR at the end and in early May Charlton, who had been secretly watching us and weighing up our potential, was appointed.
My own contribution was that which might be expected from a teenager who had a lot to learn. The enthusiasm was there but not the stealth and the knowledge which comes with experience. I made 19 starts and scored my first – and that season my only – goal. It came at Villa Park on 28 October in a 1-1 draw and I have to be honest about this and say I don’t remember anything about it. It was the first of 120 in the league spread over my career and of course it should be embedded in the memory, re-told to friends at every opportunity, but it’s not. I don’t know why. I could bluff my way through this omission by looking up the details but all I can say is that it must have been a fluke.
Souness proved to be an outstanding signing for Middlesbrough although there was always a provincial sus-picion about someone arriving from a London club. At 19 he was bristling with determination to make up for what he perceived as lost time at Spurs where he had been unable to break into the first team. Alan Keen, later to become an MP, had scouted him for us. There was an on-field arrogance about Souness, which did not always endear him to opponents, but it was possible to see straight away that there was great potential and moving north nearer his native Edinburgh did him the world of good. Such was his ferocious desire to succeed that he had a habit when he first arrived of holding on to the ball too long and trying to win the game on his own. It took him time to realise he had to change and become part of a team. In fairness, he did. But when he first came to us we used to say sarcastically, ‘Give Graeme the ball and we’ll play with another.’
Joe Laidlaw left us before the 1972/73 season started for a stint at Carlisle and our paths didn’t cross again until many years later when we found ourselves on either side of a great divide. I was playing for Southampton and he had been playing in midfield for our deadly rivals, Portsmouth, although he was no longer on their books. We were not in touch. One day our beloved old English sheepdog, Jevvy, went missing. We were heartbroken and had no idea how he could have disappeared. After all, a dog of his size and breed is not easy to lose, but he was well and truly gone. In desperation I got in touch with the local paper, the Southern Daily Echo, to make an appeal for his safe return, offering a reward. Surely someone must have seen him.
Soon afterwards on a Saturday morning as I prepared to play against Tottenham at The Dell, a big match by any standards, I got a call from Southampton Football Club to say a Mr Laidlaw has your dog and wants to meet you at Ports-mouth’s Fratton Park. So a few hours before a match at South-ampton, I was standing outside the home of Portsmouth to talk to a man about a dog. Sure enough it was the same Joe Laidlaw and the dog was definitely Jevvy. Joe explained how he had been in a pub when a man offered the dog to him. Joe said he wanted £120 for Jevvy and after some brief bartering I gave him £60 and escaped from Fratton Park as quickly as I could. I don’t suppose I’ll ever know what really happened.
Jack Charlton was, like his famous brother Bobby and his uncle Jackie Milburn, very much a man of the North-East even if, again like Bobby, his playing career was spent outside the area. While Bobby will always be identified with Manchester United, in playing terms Jack was a crucial part of Leeds’ rise to prominence under Don Revie and a ten-year, not-always-popular dominance of the First Division in the 1960s and 1970s. Jack spent 21 years with Leeds and joined us on his 38th birthday, an extensive playing career ended after 629 league appearances and 35 England caps. We had it on good authority that Jack was being lined up to come in as the long-term replacement for Anderson way before it was announced. Shepherdson was just keeping the seat warm until Jack finished his Leeds contract.
In many ways Middlesbrough suited Jack. We were not far from Leeds, enjoyed a big and vocal support when doing well and, perhaps most importantly, had the nucleus of a solid squad and team spirit which was reminiscent of Leeds in the early days when they went years without appearing to tamper with the basic line-up. Jack scouted us without a doubt and I think he saw in me a home-produced teenager who could hold down the left-side positions for years to come. I like to think also that Shepherdson would have marked his card as to my potential.
Just before Jack came to the club I had embarked on my run of 305 consecutive league appearances and 358 in all competitions. On 24 March 1973 against Aston Villa at Ayresome Park, a 1-1 draw, I began a sequence which did not end until August 1980. In many ways this durability, this capacity to play every game for years on end was what I became best known for. I thought nothing of it at the time and it never once occurred to me to step down all the while I wasn’t injured. Squad rotation would have been regarded as laughable in the 1970s when managers simply picked their best teams and would never have rested their top men. It was all in place for Jack, the perfect job for him. Meanwhile we, as a capable set of players, needed his discipline and his knowledge of what it took to win matches.
One of his first, typically unpredictable, actions was to send me and Bobby Hosker, not yet released, to Jack’s parents’ farm at Leyburn for a week to fatten us up like pigs being made ready for market. Hard to believe now, but I was slim and slight, and little Bobby was much the same. Jack told his parents to make sure we got big breakfasts and evening meals and to be certain we worked on the farm doing all the heavy manual jobs to build us up. ‘David,’ he said. ‘You’ve got to start putting on weight.’ The problem is that he hasn’t told me to stop.
The Middlesbrough players, mindful of Charlton’s arrival, didn’t waste the two-month summer break. Most had a quick holiday and were back in for light training, a few runs and five-a-sides, before the official date when we were required to start again but in the long run it paid off because we were certainly as fit as the new manager wanted us to be.
Jack was everything we expected him to be. He was an imposing sort of man, taller and more aggressive than his brother, and he brought with him much of the ultra-professional approach that Revie had inspired at Leeds. Revie had engineered something of a Leeds versus the rest of the world attitude at Elland Road and Jack was keen for some of that to find its way into the dressing room at Ayresome Park.
From the moment we met him for a pre-season tour of Scotland we knew his regime was going to be very different and a lot less fun than easy-going Stan’s. Training was tougher, more structured, much less amiable and the match preparation was detailed and specific in a way that would have been foreign to us. But none of us minded. We wanted to be good, we wanted to play in the First Division and Jack’s way was going to be the best. He was, after all, a World Cup-winner.
Away from the training ground he developed a reputation for not being the quickest to put his hand in his pocket. He cadged cigarettes, was the last to buy a round of drinks and was both tight with his money and cagey, but in some ways it endeared him to us. Jack had a funny way with words, occasionally inventing one or two of his own. We were playing Derby and Jack was warning an assembly of players about the dangers of their striker Roger Davies who had scored five the previous weekend and was an obvious threat. ‘We have to be real astic,’ he kept saying. One or two players started sniggering behind their hands, among them Maddren and Souness. Eventually, like a teacher interrupted by pesky kids, Charlton asked what was so amusing. Maddren responded, ‘We just think you’re stretching things too far.’ We all laughed, Jack didn’t.
Jack was no fan of directors and kept out of the boardroom as much as he could. Maybe it was because he didn’t like authority, more likely it was because he didn’t feel directors had any real knowledge of the game. Dr Phillips was the go-between, but it mattered little because Jack was an instant success, winning the Second Division title in 1973/74, his first incredible year in management. He was wise enough not to tinker with the squad he inherited, using the close season to make one vastly important signing. Nobby Stiles returned to Lancashire, sold for £20,000 to Jack’s brother Bobby at Preston but his replacement proved to be an inspired piece of business by Jack. Bobby Murdoch came from Celtic on a free transfer.
Nudging 29, to the outside world it must have looked like he was winding down his career, but that was far from the case as it turned out. Bobby’s reputation was huge in Scotland as one of Celtic’s Lisbon Lions who famously won the European Cup in 1967 by beating the favourites Inter Milan. Boro fans must have thought he was coming south for one last pay day but they very quickly realised what a good player he remained.
Bobby was a little overweight and not the most mobile but he more than made up for it with his experience, his expertise and his fantastic passing ability, short and long. Jack and Bobby would have come across each other in the 1960s in some of the Celtic-Leeds battles, which captured the imagination of supporters on both sides of the border, and there was evidently a mutual respect. Jack endorsed the view of Celtic’s Jock Stein when he described him as ‘the best passer I ever saw’. Jack also described me as ‘my little gem’.
Bobby’s presence in the team made a huge difference to me and to the whole team who were lifted by the extra dimension he brought to us. Bobby worked the right side of midfield and I worked the left with the young and improving Souness in between. At Second Division level it was a formidable unit and it was little wonder that we ran away with the title in spectacular fashion.
Every bit as important to us was Foggon, a striker with pace enough to trouble any defence if he got behind them and whose 20 goals was another important factor in helping us return to the First Division for the first time in 20 years. He had won the Fairs Cup with Newcastle so he knew about pressure. John Hickton may have been coming to the end of his career but as a traditional English centre-forward he was always a danger and thrived on the service we in midfield provided.
Jack was fortunate in that although there was a useful, young group of players making up the squad on the fringes like Peter Brine, Brian Taylor, Malcolm Smith and Pat Cuff, the main core rarely changed. I played every game, so too did Boam and Maddren. The remainder only missed a handful of matches between them through minor injuries as we swept through the division, losing only four of our 42 fixtures. A couple of those came after we had clinched promotion with weeks to spare.
The mainstays of the team were interesting characters among whom I was very much the junior. Jim Platt, the goalkeeper, was the quiet man of the dressing room but with a dry sense of humour. Jim had taken over from Willie Whigham, who had always looked after me when I was an apprentice, making sure I was keeping out of trouble but who did all the wrong things himself, smoking, drinking and once setting fire to his own house.
John Craggs was the right-back, big pals with David Mills, a defender who loved to get forward, being an exceptional crosser and striker of the ball. Frank Spraggon was left-back, Shepherdson’s son-in-law, a steady performer who was a completely reliable defender.
The backbone of that exceptional team was provided by the central defenders Boam and Maddren. They formed a terrific barrier, both strong in the air and dangerous going forward for corners and not much got past them. Maddren was the more mobile, a great mickey-taker but unable to train regularly because of knee problems. Mills was sharp, quick, a great athlete and willing to run all day. Only his touch let him down at times otherwise he might have become a truly outstanding player and he didn’t always make the best of his chances. Mills was mature enough to know his limitations and used to come back in the afternoons and practise his finishing. We at Middlesbrough knew what he could and could not do and a subsequent big-money move to West Bromwich didn’t work out, I think, because he tried to complicate his basically simple game based on pace.
Foggon was another quiet lad who didn’t like training but he had this incredible speed which made him such a lethal opponent. Then, of course, there was big John Hickton, as good a finisher as I have ever come across, a real powerhouse of a man and a great crowd idol. If you ever wanted anyone on the end of a cross into the penalty box it was John. Statistics show his worth to Middlesbrough. Only three players have scored more than his 192 league and cup goals spread over ten years and he was an example to us as apprentices for the way he also used to return in the afternoons to hone and perfect his skills. Whenever he goes back to the club for functions it’s clear he is still idolised by a whole generation of supporters who had grown up to his goalscoring exploits which, incidentally, included ferociously-taken penalties.
Jack watched this team develop rapidly, describing myself and Murdoch as the best midfield players in the Second Division, which was a welcome personal boost, as we went on to take the title by storm. Once again the stats make awesome reading when I revisit them. We went a club record 22 matches unbeaten, chalked up 25 clean sheets, six of them successive in March and April as our prize neared, and lost only once at home, 2-0 in the first match of the season to Fulham. My own contribution was five goals against Bristol City, Luton, Crystal Palace, Oxford and Notts County plus another in the FA Cup at Grantham.
Attendances soared once our success gathered momentum and it became clear to our supporters that there was a strength about us which suggested we could sustain our bright start over the whole winter. Jack said we were the worst at giving the ball away but the best at getting it back, a comment which hints at a lack of sophistication but we made up for that with great fitness and a tireless work ethic built around a rugged defence. We learned to hunt in packs of four or five so that if we lost the ball, as Jack indicated we often did, we got it back again promptly.
Our record shows we did it very well but there was no magic formula. Jack merely made sure we were rock solid, in the way Revie’s Leeds had been, and used the right players for the system we had evolved.
As I remember, the London press didn’t like us on the whole because they could see in us the possibility of Leeds Mark II developing, the way in which we were crushing opponents, just as Leeds had done, by not allowing them to play. There was no way we were going to apologise for being successful but for all the goodwill directed at Jack we were not exactly welcomed to the First Division by scribes when the time came.
Mention of Boam reminds me how we used to share a joke at the height of battle to ease the tension. We would be waiting for a corner when I would say to him, ‘Do you know the size of the crowd?’ Bearing in mind our crowd bonuses we loved a full house. He would respond by saying he had counted them and we would be going home with an extra £3 in our pocket. That sort of thing happened quite often so not everything was deadly serious, even when we were playing Newcastle and Sunderland.
We started our glorious season with a 1-0 win at Portsmouth then lost at home to Fulham, the only defeat in 26 matches. We went top on 29 September after winning 2-0 at Bristol City where Murdoch and I were the scorers and stayed there for the rest of the season. Our only other defeats were 5-1 at Nottingham Forest on 2 February, a strange aberration that one, 3-2 at Cardiff and 2-1 at Bolton. We finally clinched promotion on 23 March with a 1-0 win at home to Oxford when I got the only goal.
Benny Fenton, the manager of Millwall, was quoted as saying before our game with them in October, ‘Middlesbrough are a tough lot and if they dish it out we must not stand around and take it.’
Luton, also promoted, were the only team who could remotely put together a challenge and when on 30 March we won 1-0 at Kenilworth Road, David Mills’s goal was enough to make sure we went up as champions. Jack Charlton would have liked us to have clinched the championship in front of our own fans and was a bit grudging in letting us do yet another tour of a pitch. He looked at me celebrating at the end of the Oxford game, a promotion-winner at 19, and said, ‘Enjoy it because it does not happen every year. Enjoy it as much as you can, but be professional.’
Jack, incidentally, had a Bobby Robson-type inability to remember names or got them wrong. If he didn’t remember to call me Spike he probably referred to me as Neil, which I wouldn’t have been over the moon about.
So there we were, champions with a month to go and we visibly relaxed, losing a couple of games at Cardiff and Bolton we would probably have won had they mattered. We were no longer by then a tight, relentless unit but there was a mental tiredness which I suppose was inevitable and I think we tried to express ourselves a little more than we had been allowed to in the run-up to the title. Even so, we put four past Bobby Moore’s Fulham, scored another four against West Bromwich and we finished the home season in front of a full house by scoring eight against Sheffield Wednesday. Souness got a hat-trick.
The highlight for me of an incredible year was getting that goal against Oxford. All my nearest and dearest were there to witness it, including my new girlfriend. Murdoch picked me out with a trademark astute pass and I shot in from the edge of the box. There were fantastic celebrations on and off the pitch and it was probably one of the finest moments of my entire life. Not long later we were doing the first of many laps of honour and experienced team-mates said much the same as Jack. ‘Take it all in, it might not happen again.’ And of course it didn’t.
There were other great moments. Bobby Moore’s Fulham debut on 19 March ended in that big win of ours but it was just a privilege to be on the same pitch as a man of his stature. Only eight years previously, as an impressionable 11-year-old I had watched him on television lift the World Cup and while I always aspired to that sort of level, it all seemed a long way off sat on the sofa at my uncle’s farm at Okehampton on the edge of Dartmoor where he had a slaughterhouse.
The derby with Sunderland on 2 March, as fiercely-fought as ever, saw Bobby Kerr and Dennis Tueart sent off, failing to stop us winning 2-0. Bobby and I, as I mentioned, were firm friends. Bobby had been something of a hero even of mine, albeit as a Middlesbrough player, for what Sunderland had done in the FA Cup of 1973 but we were social mates from the time we used to meet at the Cock of the North club on the A1. My first wife Julie and his first wife Cath often used to get together as a foursome with Bobby and I, and we remained pals even after we both subsequently remarried.
Luton, too, was a glorious occasion. We partied on the bus home as champions with six matches left and if the Boro fans had had their way we would have done a lap around the pitch every match thereafter. Jack, of course, was having none of that nonsense.
The fall-out was simply bizarre in its way. Everywhere any of us went fans came up wanting to thank us for putting Middlesbrough back on the football map. The whole team was invited to the Fiesta nightclub and asked on to the stage to take the applause. All the little supporters’ clubs dotted around the area demanded we came along to receive various accolades. We were overnight celebrities and it wasn’t always easy to take it in. We were a bunch of lads mostly from the North-East, ordinary working-class boys for whom it was a bit overwhelming, almost embarrassing. In a funny sort of way I was glad when it died down.
The reward was a world tour later in the summer that took in Hong Kong, Bangkok, Tahiti, Australia, New Zealand, all places I knew nothing about and never expected to visit. It was my first time abroad and certainly made a huge change from the normal team breaks in Scarborough. Jack had the added pleasure of being Manager of the Season and £1,000 better off, beating his brother Bobby in the last game of a superb season, 4-2 at Deepdale. Preston were relegated.
As a verdict, Jack had taken over a group that contained some very good players, many of them way better than Second Division standard, and moulded on them the Leeds methodology of unity of purpose, strength in togetherness and a willingness to run all day allied to high calibre skill. Jack knew what to do and did it with great efficiency.
It is not easy to single out any one player because we all contributed. We had a great goalkeeper, a strong and well-balanced back four, a midfield of contrasts and three players up front who could always score goals. A simple formula, and it worked from day one at Portsmouth.
We all felt, once the adulation had died, that we were strong enough to do more than just survive in the First Division. The test now for Jack was in improving us without destroying the very qualities which had got us promoted in the first place. While we toured the world in luxury we knew there were some big tests ahead.