I first remember watching Tony Currie play when I saw him on Match of the Day. I was probably about seven or eight at the time. It was the days of long, shaggy hair – if not that, then perhaps a perm – and he had this mass of rock-star blond barnet down to his shoulders. It was a time when shirts could be worn outside shorts and players would have their socks around their ankles if they felt like it. But he didn’t just look the part, he could play as well. He also wore the number ten shirt and in my eyes that has always meant you had to be someone special.
Tony was born in 1950 in Edgware, North London, and was one of those players who you could see was the business at a very early age. As a lad he was with Queens Park Rangers and Chelsea, but he moved to Watford as an apprentice and made his debut for them when he was just 17. One of my big mates Micky Packer was at Watford with Tony and tells me it was obvious he was going places. He scored nine goals in just 18 first-team games, not bad for a teenager playing midfield, and signed for Sheffield United when he was a month past his 18th birthday. The fee was £26,500, just about enough to cover the annual insurance premium on a Baby Bentley for one of today’s superstars, but a lot for a club like the Blades to splash out back in the 1960s, especially on such a young player. It was also unusual at that time for southern lads, especially as young as he was, to head north to make their name; usually it was the other way around.
None of that held him back, though, and he went on to become a legend at Sheffield, perhaps the greatest player they ever had. But the thing that stands out in my memory all these years on is that he was the first player I ever saw who could do a step-over. For the uninitiated, that is when you roll the outside of your foot over the inside of the ball and then over the top of it, making the defender think you are going to take the ball one way so he moves his bodyweight to block you. Then, with your other foot, you take it in the opposite direction. It was a revelation to me to see this happening – and in the First Division against good defenders too.
The thing was, it’s difficult enough to do slowly, but Currie was doing it at pace. Ronaldo of Manchester United does the same thing now. In fact, he can do four or five on the spin – and trust me, that’s knackering – but Currie was the first I ever saw. Some people might think that it would be easy for a defender to read what was happening, but if it’s done at speed it only needs the defender to shift his weight the wrong way for a second and the attacking player is away. Currie was so well balanced that he was like a ballerina – a pretty big one, sure – and he would just skip away while nine times out of ten the defender was falling on his arse. It also looked as if there was a grin on his face as he was doing it.
So there I’d be the next morning, after watching him on Match of the Day on Saturday night, a little kid out on the green practising by myself, trying to be just like Tony Currie. I would try to execute the trick but end up block-tackling myself, although eventually I did master it – after a fashion.
Tony Currie was the kind of player I wanted to be, an inside forward, the playmakers of their day, the entertainer. In fact, apart from him being slim, lithe and good-looking, having flowing blond hair and being able to kick with both feet, and me being a short, squat, freckled ginger who was predominantly right-footed, it would be hard to tell us apart.
Years later when I went to Arsenal, I saw that David Rocastle could do a step-over like Tony. Rocky had fantastic skill, and he could do it all the time. I could manage it in training, but I never tried it in a game at Arsenal. Our manager George Graham said to me that if he ever saw me trying a show-pony trick like that it would be the shepherd’s crook for me straight away. He’d say, ‘Grovesy, just stick to basics. Knock it out of your feet and go. You don’t need any subtlety.’ And let’s be honest, it would have been more Edwina Currie than Tony Currie anyway.
Tony was playing at the same time as a great group of English flair players – Rodney Marsh, Stan Bowles, Frank Worthington – all wonderful to watch and their fans idolised them. Even all these years later, the supporters at the clubs they played for remember the type of football they played. Every side seemed to have a player like that. We didn’t know it then but in its own way it was a golden age. It was all in the wake of George Best’s arrival on the scene in the 1960s, when footballers started to be treated like pop stars with the photo shoots, the clothes and the birds.
Currie’s time at Sheffield United coincided with their having one of the best sides they ever had. ‘Coincided’ is probably the wrong word, mind, as he was the main reason it was such a good side. They came up from the old Second Division and did really well for a few years. Their captain was a full-back called Len Badger and on the right wing they had a guy called Alan Woodward, who played for them for years and scored a hatful of goals. For a brief spell, they were right up with the top clubs, but it didn’t last and when they were relegated Currie went to Leeds United.
Don Revie had left Leeds a couple of years earlier and they were coming out of what you might call their ‘war of attrition’ phase by then. Tony turned it on for Leeds just as he had at Sheffield, although he was only there a couple of seasons.
He was so good you had to put him in the England team – it was criminal to leave him out. The tragedy is that he never got a decent run in the side. He won just 17 caps and those were spread out over seven years. It was like all those other gifted players of the time: they got a reputation as being guys you can’t ‘trust’ if the going got tough. It was all rubbish, of course, but that’s the way it was, and it can’t have helped that around that time England could call on players like Colin Bell, Alan Hudson, Trevor Brooking, Ray Wilkins and Martin Peters for the midfield. But he should have been in the England team for four or five seasons.
After his spell at Leeds he moved back south and played for Queens Park Rangers before ending up at Torquay United for half a season in 1984, and that’s when our paths finally crossed. They were in the old Fourth Division and he was the old ‘seasoned pro’ there. I was an up-and-coming youngster at Colchester, and when I read that he’d been signed by Torquay manager Dave Webb I immediately looked at the fixture list to see when Colchester were playing them.
It was a Saturday fixture at our Layer Road ground and I just hoped that he would be in their side. We were out on the pitch early warming up and I kept looking over my shoulder to see if he would be coming out too, which would mean he was playing. After a while, the great man made an appearance. He obviously liked a buffet as when he came out of the dressing room it was more of a waddle than a run, but I didn’t care. I was still thrilled to be on the same pitch as him. But I also didn’t want him to look too embarrassing, as the old Fourth Division was a bit muck and nettles.
I was on the right, all energy and ambition, he was centre-midfield, all ‘been there, done that’. Needless to say, he completely ran the game without even breaking sweat. Our players tried to hustle him, close him down, boot him, everything they could think of, but it made no difference. It looked as though he was in slow motion: he just glided around them and they couldn’t get near to him. It was obvious to everyone that he was just different class.
One thing happened in that game that still sticks in my memory. We played a long ball over the top of their defence and for some reason he was their last man – perhaps he just hadn’t been arsed to get back up field after defending a corner. The ball came to him, and me and Tony Adcock went to close him down in the corner. We thought, We’ve got him – the old bastard ain’t going to get out of there. But he dropped his shoulder as if to give the ball back to the keeper, dummied Tony Adcock and that was Tony done for. I was the next one to engage him and I thought, I’ve got him now – he’s got no chance.
For all those years I’d seen him do the step-overs, I’d wondered how dopey could those defenders be, because it was obvious what would happen. Then it all went into slow motion. He put his left foot around the ball and did it. I moved to the right and the whole stand on that side of the pitch swayed to the right too. We all moved in synch and dropped our right shoulders. At exactly the same moment, he skipped away to his right. I just saw this gliding figure ghost past me, exactly as it had been on the television all those years before. All right, it was probably the 5,000th time he’d done it, but as he moved away I just started clapping. He was one of my heroes and now I had been officially ‘Curried’. How proud I was.
It was March or April so the grass was thin and there were bare patches down the middle and in the goalmouths. It didn’t make any difference to him. He could have played on corrugated iron and his touch would have been fantastic. I never even got a tackle in on him. I could have chased after him and caught him to try to get a tackle in, but I didn’t want to. I didn’t want to dispel the myth.
As well as his step-overs, Currie was also a ground-breaker in another area of football. He was one of the first football stars to become a gay pin-up. Before I go any further, I must point out that, as well as liking a sherbet, he had no ‘iron’ tendencies, yet he ended up on the cover of a gay magazine.
I only became aware of it later on, as at the time it happened I was only ten, for God’s sake, and had no idea what that kind of stuff was all about. It was at Bramall Lane in 1975 when Sheffield United played Leicester City. Leicester had a top side at that time too and one of their key players was Alan Birchenall, a good forward who’d been at Chelsea and Crystal Palace. Like Tony Currie, he had long blond hair and looked as though he spent a couple of hours before every game at the hairdressers.
Anyway, the two, who were mates, collided in the penalty area and ended up in a heap. Birchenall jokingly said to Currie, as you do, ‘Give us a kiss.’ So Currie gave him one. I mean, what else could a geezer do? But the exact moment their lips met a cameraman snapped the picture and the next day it was all over the papers. Soon it went around the world and was one of the most reproduced sports shots ever. It featured on main news bulletins and a question was even asked in the House of Commons along the lines of ‘What is sport coming to?’ Right-wing groups said that when they came to power they’d shoot them and a German gay magazine even wanted them to write a column for it. They were even asked to repeat the kiss for a photo-shoot – in bed together. They said no. Obviously not enough dough!
It was all, as they say, in the best possible taste, but I still think I prefer to remember Tony Currie for his step-overs and his other skills on the field, rather than his smooching with Alan Birchenall.