I wouldn’t want anyone thinking that I had no mates as a kid and that I just sat in front of the television with my Pot Noodles waiting for the football to come on. That said, the first time I remember watching Kevin Beattie was on television. Not on Match of the Day, which I watched religiously every Saturday night, but on Match of the Week.
I was living near Colchester at the time and that was the name of ITV’s Sunday-afternoon football magazine programme in our area. Unlike the BBC programme, it was regionalised, so that in London – where it was called The Big Match – you would have Arsenal, Spurs, QPR etc, while in the Midlands it would be Aston Villa, West Brom, Wolves, Coventry and so on. The three big teams in our area – Anglia TV – were Ipswich, Norwich and Luton, who were all in the top flight around that time, although once a season you’d have Colchester, Peterborough, Northampton and Southend highlights as well.
The commentator on the games in our area would always be the legendary Gerry Harrison. He’d say, ‘The full-back has passed it to number six, number six passes it to the centre-forward, the centre-forward passes it to the left-winger who crosses and the number nine scores!’ Perhaps I’m being a little harsh on Gerry, but you get the drift. It was the days of kipper ties and sheepskin jackets for commentators and managers off the pitch, and home-perms and shoulder-length barnets on it. The fashions might look a nightmare now, but it was great to settle down in front of the box on a Sunday after I’d played for my team Cornard Dynamos in the morning and come home for my bath and then Sunday dinner.
At that time, Ipswich were managed by Bobby Robson. He was a great manager and, of course, ended up as Sir Bobby after being in charge of England and a host of big clubs at home and abroad. He used to annoy local coaches around Suffolk and Norfolk, though, because he’d bring down coach-loads of kids from his native North East for trials and the local teams thought it meant their youngsters would end up being overlooked.
Ipswich striker Eric Gates, who won a couple of England caps, was from Sir Bobby’s neck of the woods but the best of them all was Kevin Beattie. You can’t blame Robson for trawling the North if you unearth a ‘diamond’ – which is what Sir Bobby often called him – like Kevin. Robson would even go on to say that he was the best English-born player he had ever seen and this was from a man who’d played with or managed the likes of Duncan Edwards, Bobby Charlton and Gazza. At one stage Kevin was called ‘the new Bobby Moore’, but he was most frequently likened to Edwards – the powerful young Manchester United star who died in the Munich air crash.
Kevin was actually from Carlisle and there is a wonderful story about how he came to sign for Ipswich. He’d been watched by Liverpool and had gone there for a trial. He got off the train at Lime Street Station alone, a nervous teenager carrying his boots wrapped in paper. There was no one from Anfield to meet him so he sat around for an hour and then assumed they’d lost interest. So he got back on a train and went home. In fact, the Liverpool official failed to meet the train by mistake and so they’d let a 15-year-old gem slip through their fingers.
Liverpool’s legendary manager Bill Shankly said, ‘If he hasn’t got the brains to find his way from Lime Street to Anfield we don’t want to sign him.’ Big mistake, Shanks. But, in fairness to him, in later years he did take Kevin aside and say, ‘I haven’t made many mistakes, but you were one of the biggest.’
A week later, Kevin made it to Ipswich. He was wearing his father’s shoes as he didn’t have a proper pair of his own, and the football boots were still in a paper bag. This time, however, he was met by someone from the club. Sir Bobby had taken no chances. The youngster was escorted from Euston Station by Ipswich chief scout Ron Gray, who’d been bluntly told by the boss, ‘If you miss him, you’ve lost your job.’ The manager said that when Kevin did eventually arrive it was with ‘a hole in his trousers and sixpence in his pocket’. A slight exaggeration perhaps, but not by much. He was given some shirts and ties by the club and the very next day played for the reserves against Fulham.
The highly respected Gray, who brought a host of players to Ipswich, immediately phoned Robson to say, ‘This lad’ll be in the first team at 19.’ He got that wrong – Kevin made his debut at 18.
He actually arrived as a striker but Sir Bobby turned him into a defender and that changed his life completely. Kevin has gone on record as saying that, once he moved to the back of the team, the game was in front of him and it made it even easier. He didn’t have to turn and look both ways like forwards do, and it became clear that’s where his best position was, either in central defence or as left-back.
‘What a player the boy was,’ Robson said of him later. ‘He could climb higher than the crossbar and still head the ball down. He had the sweetest left foot I’ve ever seen and could hit 60-yard passes, without looking, that eliminated six opposition players from the game. He had the strength of a tank, was lightning quick and he could tackle.’ Again not the complete player, he had no big throw. ‘I was so grateful he was on my side, because as a player I would have hated to play against him.’
Now, why didn’t anyone ever describe me like that?
Kevin’s first-team debut for Ipswich came in the opening game of the 1972/73 season and Ipswich won 2–1. That would be a good enough start, but the team they beat was a Manchester United side with Denis Law, Bobby Charlton and George Best in it. And the game was at Old Trafford. Afterwards, a teenage Kevin asked Bobby Charlton for his autograph. Signing it, Charlton said Kevin reminded him of Duncan Edwards and that Kevin would be the one signing autographs for many years to come.
This was a golden era for Ipswich. As well as ‘The Beat’ – which was what everyone in football called him – and Gates, they had Colin Viljoen, John Wark, Mick Mills and Trevor Whymark, and they were one of the best teams in the country.
It was only a few months after his first-team debut that he was capped for England Under-23s. Kevin went on to win nine England caps – Sir Bobby said it should have been 99 or more – but injuries were to play a big part in his life. His international career even survived the embarrassment of getting off a train heading for Scotland and a Hampden Park clash with their Under-23s when the train pulled into Carlisle. He saw the station nameplate, felt homesick and simply got off.
Kevin was a colossus on the pitch. He dominated in the air, he had a fantastic left foot and was pinging balls everywhere. That transformation into a defender was a masterstroke. Playing at centre-half or left-back, he looked like one of those players who had a horseshoe in his boot. He could hit the ball miles and his range of passing was fantastic. He had a ferocious shot on him too and he didn’t mind shooting from 30 yards or more. And he was quick.
So that was the player I used to watch on Match of the Week. He was described at the time as a boy trapped in a man’s body, but what did I know? There was always a guy in the Under-12s at any club who had a beard and hairy legs and turned up on a moped, and in his way this was The Beat. He seemed like a man-mountain. It’s amazing how certain players have a presence and an aura about them. I was lucky enough to train and play with him at Colchester United at the end of his career and he was only 5ft 10in. He was no bigger than me and in my eyes that made him even more of a fantastic player. When he was playing, it seemed as though he was one of the biggest men on the pitch. He was a legend to me even then, although I wasn’t going to tell him that, but it made him even more impressive in my eyes to know that he could somehow ‘grow’ into a giant once he stepped on a football field. You can’t buy presence.
The Beat was the first great player I had been lucky enough to train with and I just wanted to see how good he was. They say you should never meet your heroes because you’ll be disappointed, but he blew that one out of the water. When I met him and trained with him, he turned out to be the nicest man you could wish to meet – a top geezer.
When he came to Colchester – for a very brief period in the early 1980s – his knees were all shot due to the injuries and cortisone injections he’d had. Yet, even injured and into his thirties, he was still the quickest player at the club over ten yards by a long way. One of my great assets was pace and he was the only one who nearly beat me in a race. So I’m glad I never came up against him in his prime.
The years that had passed since his debut against Manchester United and those Sunday afternoons I’d seen him on the box hadn’t been too kind to him. His career had started off superbly but injuries had stopped him from achieving the greatness everyone reckoned was his for the taking.
In his first season at Portman Road (1972/73), Ipswich won the Texaco Cup by beating Norwich City and finished fourth in the league, which meant they qualified for Europe. The following season they came fourth again and in the UEFA Cup beat Lazio, Twente Enschede of Holland and a little side called Real Madrid before going out in the quarter-finals. Ipswich also beat Manchester United at Old Trafford again, this time in the FA Cup, The Beat scoring the only goal of the match with a header. The year ended with him winning the inaugural Young Player of the Year award and all those hopes of everyone who rated him seemed about to be fulfilled.
The following year, Ipswich finished third in the league and were unlucky to lose to West Ham in a replayed FA Cup semi-final. It wasn’t a question of if Kevin would play for the full England side but when, and in April 1975 he got his first cap. The game was a European Championship qualifier against Cyprus and is best remembered for Malcolm Macdonald scoring all five goals in the 5–0 victory. That was a good start for Kevin – he played in the centre of defence and had a goal disallowed for a foul on the goalkeeper.
He was also one of the stars of another memorable England performance soon after that, a 5–1 thrashing of Scotland at Wembley. It’s one of those games that the Scots hate to be reminded of, so here goes. England’s skipper was Alan Ball and alongside him were Colin Bell and Gerry Francis. Mick Channon tore the Scots apart with his direct running up front and they had no idea how to handle Kevin Keegan, frizzy barnet and all. But The Beat was as good as any of them. He played at left-back, although that didn’t seem to mean all that much on that afternoon as he was everywhere.
England were already ahead through a goal after five minutes from Francis when Ball and Keegan combined down the right a couple of minutes later. When Keegan’s cross came over, Channon was racing to get into the box to meet it, but somehow or other The Beat had got there first – and, remember, he was left-back. There was the little matter of two Scottish defenders to be sorted out but he outmuscled and outjumped them both and looped a great header into the top right-hand corner of the net. It was recently voted one of the top 50 goals ever scored for England. The Wild Man of Borneo had arrived.
Kevin would undoubtedly have been in the national side throughout the 1970s and beyond if accidents and those injuries hadn’t taken their toll. In 1977, Ipswich were chasing the title and were well placed at Easter, only for Kevin to get badly burned in a bonfire at his home. He’d decided that the fire needed stoking up so he threw some petrol on it. Our Kev was never going to be a rocket scientist, was he? He was forced to miss six games – Ipswich lost four of them and finished five points behind the eventual winners Liverpool. Bobby Robson reckoned that with The Beat in their side they’d have won the championship.
During these glory days, Kevin was a key member of the Ipswich side that beat Barcelona, Johan Cruyff and all, 3–0 in the UEFA Cup and in 1978 he was a member of the Ipswich team that beat Arsenal 1–0 in the Cup Final. On the way up the steps to collect his medal, he was offered a lit cigarette by an Ipswich fan. He smoked it, hid it as he shook the VIPs’ hands and then took some more drags as he came down the steps. Throughout his career The Beat – whose eyesight was so bad he later said he couldn’t see clearly what was going on but played a lot ‘by intuition’ – smoked 20 cigarettes a day.
There were lots of great days but the injuries were plaguing him. If anyone thinks it’s all wonderful in the Glory Game, just look at what he said recently about that period: ‘My knees were knackered. According to modern medical science, three cortisone injections in a lifetime is about enough, whereas I was having three every game, two before the kick-off and one at half-time. I certainly don’t blame anyone, the injections were given in all good faith. Sadly, I think it has now been proved that, like thalidomide, at the time cortisone was unsafe and could have devastating side-effects.’
There’s not one ounce of bitterness in his statement, but it shows that players are just a piece of meat – if you can’t play, then you’re no use to the manager or anyone.
He might have won a UEFA Cup winner’s medal in 1981 but broke his arm in the FA Cup semi-final defeat against Manchester City, so he missed the two-leg European triumph over Dutch side AZ ’67 Alkmaar. Twenty-seven years later, he was belatedly given a winner’s medal by UEFA President Michel Platini who had been one of the fine St-Etienne side that Ipswich beat 7–2 – yes, 7–2 – on aggregate on their way to the final.
The game against Manchester City turned out to be his last game for Ipswich. After his glory days had ended he came to us at Colchester where his old centre-half from Portman Road, Allan Hunter, was then managing the side. I have a couple of abiding memories of him from that period.
The first came when we played at Watford in a friendly. Elton John had owned Watford for a few seasons and Graham Taylor was in the process of bringing them up from the Fourth Division into the old First Division. He was building the best team they ever had there with players such as John Barnes, Luther Blissett and Nigel Callaghan. They also had Ross Jenkins, a big centre-forward who played for them through all the divisions. He was 6ft 3in tall, which was remarkable at the time, and compared with the size of the defenders he played against he made Peter Crouch look like Wee Jimmie Krankie.
Even though it was only a pre-season match it was a big game for us. Watford played Graham Taylor’s ‘sophisticated’ style of flowing football, their main tactic being to make sure the ball would ‘flow’ from the right-or left-back 40 or 50 yards on to Ross Jenkins’s head. In the pre-match talk, our coach Cyril Lea was going through who was going to pick up who in open play and who would mark people at set plays. Obviously the question of who was going to mark Jenkins came up, but The Beat just said, ‘Don’t worry, leave him to me.’
When they stood side by side as the match started, you couldn’t even see The Beat behind Jenkins – he was almost five inches shorter than him. But the first time the ball went up in the air for Jenkins to flick on, The Beat suddenly appeared above him as though he was bouncing on an invisible trampoline. The same thing happened on every occasion they tried to find Jenkins’s head throughout the game. The Beat got there first and higher and did not lose a header in 90 minutes. It was all about his timing, his power, his athleticism. As a young player I just watched in awe: it was fantastic to see a player like that. He was thirty-whatever, with knees that were in big trouble and he was still jumping higher than any player I’d played with or against.
I was also thinking to myself, Cor, if we can keep him fit throughout the season, we’ve got half a chance. But the next pre-season game, at Leyton Orient, was in stark contrast. Everyone was getting ready to go out for a warm-up and a lot of players were going through the ritual of getting the match programme and going for a dump. It’s either through nerves or because you think it makes you lighter for the game, and you’d always take the programme with you to read. The Beat disappeared into trap two and was in there for ten minutes. We were all ready to go out when he reappeared and called Cyril Lea over. ‘Cige,’ he said, ‘you’d better write me off for this one.’ Cyril asked what was wrong and Kevin replied, ‘I’m injured.’
Cyril said, ‘What do you mean, you’re injured?’
The Beat, a legend in his own lifetime, replied, ‘I was taking a dump and I strained too much and I’ve pulled a stomach muscle.’
We thought he was mucking about but he said, ‘No, my stomach is killing me.’
He couldn’t make it on to the pitch so someone had to take his place. Perhaps they should have given him Ex-Lax before the game. You could truly say that his Colchester career went down the pan.
Unfortunately, what happened after that wasn’t so funny. Shortly afterwards, The Beat was to be seen signing autographs outside the DHSS in Ipswich – before going in to get his regular dole money. The building was so close to Portman Road he could see the new generation of players arriving at the ground in their flash motors.
The Beat has spoken about it publicly and also written his life story. He drank too much, was given the last rites in hospital once when his pancreas packed up and even contemplated suicide. He also became a carer for his seriously ill wife. Thankfully, he got his life back on the right track. I’ve met him since doing television work. He is a top man – not flash or bitter, but a man’s man, no frills.
Quite a few of the players I discuss in this book can be glimpsed in action on the internet, including The Beat. But there is another place you can watch him in his prime if you go down to your local DVD rental store. Kevin was one of a clutch of English professionals who were used during the making of Escape to Victory, the film about how a group of Second World War prisoners planned to escape using a football match as their cover. It starred Michael Caine, Sylvester Stallone and, er, Pele. Bobby Moore and Osvaldo Ardiles were also in it, as were some Ipswich players. During one break in filming, muscle-bound ‘Sly’ Stallone challenged The Beat to an arm-wrestling bout. Stallone lost and didn’t speak to Kevin for the rest of the shoot.
Unlike some of the footballers used, The Beat didn’t have an acting role, but he was used in a lot of filming. If you think Michael Caine looks pretty useful in some of the movie’s football action sequences, there’s a pretty good reason for that. Kevin Beattie was his stand-in for those scenes. Not a lot of people know that.