‘Frequently the more trifling the subject, the more animated and protracted the discussion’
– nineteenth-century US President Franklin Pierce
The Upton Park at which Malcolm Allison arrived in February 1951 was not exactly thriving. Relegated from the First Division in 1932, West Ham United Football Club’s biggest annual achievement was simply keeping its head above the deep financial waters that constantly threatened to pull it down.
It was a struggle, however, that was borne with a smile. Maybe it was something to do with London, the spirit of the Blitz and all that chirpy Cockney nonsense, but – just like Charlton – the Hammers were a happy-go-lucky club who placed more emphasis on fun than professionalism. Irishman Frank O’Farrell, who had arrived from Cork in 1948, explains, ‘It was a laid-back family club. They hadn’t been anywhere in football terms for years but it was a nice club to play for, full of nice people. There was not the ruthlessness that there is in modern football.’
Since the summer of 1950, the burden of improving the team’s fortunes on meagre resources had rested on the shoulders of Ted Fenton. Born in the Forest Gate area of east London, Fenton had become an effective wing-half for his local team, playing 176 games for the Hammers before the war and appearing in their 1940 War Cup final victory over Blackburn Rovers at Wembley. Having served as a physical training sergeant major during the Second World War, Fenton had gone into management at Southern League Colchester United, where he captured national attention with some notable FA Cup results. Rejoining West Ham as assistant manager in 1948, he had to wait only two years before ascending to the position of manager in place of Charlie Paynter, a Hammers servant for 50 years as player, trainer and, since 1932, manager. Fenton had been seen all along as Paynter’s successor and the serious prospect of demotion to the Third Division had made it clear that the time had arrived to effect the handover.
Fenton quickly fell in love with the cut and thrust of transfer market negotiation, but it was his very first signing, Allison, who was to remain his most significant piece of business. Even the official club history acknowledges that the capture of Allison ‘represented a watershed in the history of the Hammers’. Full-back John Bond, who was to become one of Malcolm’s best friends at the club, says, ‘He made a big impression on most people as soon as he arrived from Charlton. He was a big, brash good-looking fellow who had plenty to say for himself and was mad keen on football.’
For Fenton, it was an important symbolic signing as the physically imposing 6ft 1in. Allison, named as team captain, was bought to take over the shirt of Dick Walker, the strongest link to the Paynter era. ‘It was difficult for Malcolm,’ says O’Farrell. ‘He was replacing a very good and very popular player who was reaching the end of his career. Dick had a great rapport with the fans, had a proud record as a paratrooper in the war and was very personable. He was one of those characters who can say anything and get away with it. Malcolm was obviously brought in to replace him so it took him a while to sell himself to the crowd.’
Allison happily accepted the challenge, relieved to have escaped the retarded footballing environment of The Valley, and for a short while he was far happier with his lot at West Ham. At least he was in the team. But it did not take long – approximately six months – for him to be afflicted by the same old frustrations with English football. The pastoral air that surrounded the East End club was, according to O’Farrell, ‘the sort of thing Malcolm saw as a hindrance to progress’.
Allison discovered that West Ham was even more backward than Charlton – ‘a feat which I would have believed impossible’, he said. Training had no more purpose than at The Valley and being even shorter, necessitated less commitment from the players. The sessions took place on a scrub of land at the back of the stadium, where clusters of trees offered the players the chance to break off from their runs for a crafty cigarette.
For Allison, the important difference between Charlton and West Ham was that, as an older player and a more confident personality, he felt able to effect some kind of change – and he had the single-minded determination to do so. He admitted, ‘I’m amazed how one-dimensional I was in those days. My dedication was absolute. I didn’t smoke, I didn’t drink and I never had sex within three days of a match. Incredible!’
O’Farrell adds, ‘Malcolm arrived at the club just when more people in English football were beginning to say that we should be looking at ourselves and the way we approached the game. He brought that sort of attitude with him.’
Allison began to draw up his own practice schedules for the team, finding allies for his methods among the other players. Eddie Lewis, a forward who would join West Ham after spells at Manchester United and Preston, had been used to training that consisted of little more than laps of the pitch followed by 15-a-side free-for-alls. ‘Under Malcolm everything was so organised. One small group would be playing six versus six, another playing head tennis, another doing weights, another running. The whistle would blow and the groups would change. You didn’t see any clubs doing that at that time.’
Fenton – who Allison felt had been ‘promoted out of his depth’ – might not have been much of a tactician, but his wheeler-dealing meant there was a steady influx of new players throughout Allison’s time at West Ham. It was Malcolm’s good fortune that so many of them responded to his football philosophies and the force with which he indoctrinated them. The list of Hammers colleagues who went on to managerial and coaching careers at the highest level – men such as Bond, O’Farrell, Noel Cantwell, Ken Brown, Dave Sexton, Malcolm Musgrove, Jimmy Andrews and Andy Nelson – is the most obvious testament to Allison’s influence and the open-minded atmosphere that pervaded the Upton Park dressing-room during the 1950s.
A tight-knit group, they loved nothing more than to gather after training in Cassettari’s, a Barking Road café just round the corner from the stadium, where they would talk about the game. And talk and talk. Even after evenings of greyhound racing, usually at Hackney or West Ham, several of them would regroup in the café’s upstairs room to continue their debates, pushing salt cellars, cups and ketchup bottles around the tables like chess pieces as they discussed tactics. Bond recalls, ‘We used to come out of that café smelling of egg and chips. Loads of the other lads would go to the pictures or snooker but Malcolm, Noel, me and a few others would go back to the ground. Malcolm was a big influence on people who wanted to know and listen.’
Sexton says, ‘I don’t know if it was Malcolm’s idea originally, but he was in charge. Those meal times were very important because we used to explore different subjects and that was when people would come out with any ideas they had. As well as a working team, we were a talking team.’
O’Farrell remembers most players being ‘in tune’ with the mood of self-improvement. ‘We would talk mostly about how English football could change. But we put into practice the things we spoke about. We trained with a ball more, varied the times at which we trained. We were trying to improve the game and we were maturing as people as well as players. I remember that Dave Sexton was a bit of an intellectual and could discuss lots of topics. Some players, all they knew about were horses – they didn’t even know who the Prime Minister was. During pre-season training we would have a quiz during our lunchtime break. Dave would buy The Times coming up from Brighton and he would set the questions. It made people think and kept the brain active.’
Allison described his band of followers as a ‘revolutionary group’ and explained, ‘We used to fill the room with our theories and disputes. We had opened our minds and declared ourselves willing to try new things and be prepared to make mistakes on the way.’
Cantwell, who joined West Ham as a 19 year old from Cork United in September 1952, quickly became an Allison disciple, even though he was aware that not all at the club were happy with the influence being exerted by the skipper. Before his death in 2005, he explained to Hammers News how Cassettari’s had become the home for Allison’s think tank. ‘West Ham decided to give us two shillings and sixpence so you could go and have lunch there. We all had vouchers and that was abused because some guys did without lunch and copped the money instead to go to the dogs. But the café used to be packed upstairs with a stream of players – who weren’t always well behaved, I promise you.
‘We were a nightmare for George, the groundsman. He would prepare his pitch for Saturday on Wednesday afternoon, but we’d go out there training on a Thursday or Friday for hours, cutting the whole thing up. George would go and see Ted, but there was nothing he could do because Malcolm would have gone mad.’
When, in 1995, the BBC made its Kicking and Screaming series, charting the progression of professional football, Cassettari’s was considered important enough to merit an interview with Philip Cassettari, whose father Phil was in charge of the café in the Allison era. He told the TV crew, ‘At the time I didn’t realise how important it was. They were just footballers that came in to the shop and in those days footballers didn’t earn fantastic livings and they were quite glad to come and eat in the café and have somewhere to stay. A lot of them were living in digs.’
Allison’s group established a pattern of morning training, lunchtime tactical seminars and frequent additional afternoon practice sessions, in which Allison was often assisted by Bond and Cantwell. ‘They used to talk about the ABC of West Ham – Allison, Bond and Cantwell,’ says Lewis. ‘I wasn’t mad about moving to London but I joined West Ham because they were a forward-thinking club. When I got there, it was clear that Malcolm, along with the others, was in charge.’
Lewis even remembers seeing Allison preparing his great friend, Cantwell, to play for the Republic of Ireland against England. ‘He took Noel out one afternoon and kept pushing the ball past him and running because Noel, at left-back, was going to be up against the great Tom Finney.’
Allison would be back at the club a couple of evenings every week to coach the schoolboys and junior players. The opportunity to imprint his vision of the game upon impressionable young minds was more important to him than the additional one pound and ten shillings he earned for his extra duties.
John Cartwright, a future England youth-team coach, was one of those who were quickly hooked on the passion that Allison radiated. ‘We were his protégés, if you like,’ he explains. ‘We used to train with him on Tuesday and Thursday nights. We had all learned the game in the streets – there was no coaching for young kids in those days. But then we started working with Malcolm. In the summer holidays, several of us used to go to his house and he would take us over to the local sports area to train with him. When we left school all of us could have gone anywhere, to be honest. I could have gone to Arsenal or Chelsea, but we picked West Ham, even though they were in the Second Division, because of Malcolm Allison. Me and guys like Bobby Moore all went there because of him. He was just mad about the game and was very inspirational in everything he said. Even as young players on the ground staff, we used to go upstairs in Cassettari’s and he would talk to us about the game.’
Terry McDonald, a winger who joined the Upton Park ground staff in 1954, admits, ‘Malcolm was massive to us, awesome. We looked up to him as an icon.’
If there was one event that coloured in the sketches of modern football that Allison had drawn for himself during his time in Austria, it was the game played at Wembley Stadium on 25 November 1953. That was the day the Hungarians tore down the smug superiority of English football with a 6–3 victory, becoming the first team from outside the British Isles to win an international on English soil and providing Allison with his ‘eureka’ moment. Already Allison had been disturbed that nobody in the sport had acknowledged a need to examine its structure following the debacle of England’s 1–0 defeat to the USA during the 1950 World Cup finals in Brazil. Now he was captivated by a team that ‘arrived from another planet’.
Allison, who travelled to the game with teammate Jimmy Andrews, was initially unimpressed when he saw the Hungarians practising outside the stadium, pointing to the obviously overweight man in the number 10 shirt. But once Ferenc Puskas began exchanging 25-yard volleyed passes with colleagues during the pre-game warm-ups, Allison turned to his colleague and said, ‘Tell you what, Jim. These aren’t bad.’
From their lightweight boots and shorts cut high on the thigh to the skilful expertise and tactical fluidity of their play, the Hungarians were, in Allison’s words, ‘so bright, so brilliant’ that ‘even the walls of complacency in English football began to crumble’.
Only days after witnessing Hungary’s brilliance, Allison’s despondency deepened further with West Ham’s 6–0 Upton Park thrashing by a technically overwhelming AC Milan team, led by Swedish centre-forward Gunnar Nordahl. Years later he was still discussing that match. ‘Nordahl gave Malcolm such a hard time,’ recalls Eddie Lewis. ‘He was always talking about it. Those kinds of games, and the Continental style – which was so far ahead of England – were a big influence on him.’
Confirmation of Allison’s growing feeling, that coaching could hold the key to his long-term football future, arrived at the FA’s training centre at Lilleshall, in the Shropshire countryside. Having seen details of off-season coaching courses pinned on the Upton Park notice board, Allison had eagerly signed up in the hope that such activity would improve him as a player. ‘I had abandoned hope of getting any meaningful help from the club,’ he admitted.
Once there, he devoured every piece of information offered by the likes of England manager Walter Winterbottom, future Burnley, Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday boss Alan Brown and Tottenham manager Arthur Rowe. It had been Rowe’s 1950–51 League Championship winners, with their groundbreaking ‘push-and-run’ style, who had been the first English side to stress the importance of the movement of players without the ball. Allison believed that Winterbottom, hamstrung by the archaic hierarchy of the Football Association, was a far more enlightened thinker than his record with the England team suggested, referring to him as ‘the messiah’. Derek Ufton, whose one cap for England was earned a month before the Hungary game, recalls, ‘Walter wanted things to happen and he started people thinking about the game. He had a lot of disciples all around the country.’
Allison wrote of his visits to Lilleshall, ‘In that atmosphere I sensed that I could make an impact.’ And it was there where he encountered another coach who was to have a massive impact on his career, Argentinian-born Helenio Herrera, who would enjoy success with numerous teams in Spain and Italy, most notably Inter Milan. Described by Allison as ‘a Svengali with a whistle’, Herrera borrowed some of his coaching methods from army manuals, and his spectacularly choreographed routines would go over the head of uninitiated observers. Allison observed that ‘there was precision, but also a rich dash of imagination’ and noted Herrera’s ability to make his sessions intense and thorough without becoming monotonous.
Allison, whose enthusiasm had initially been checked by Winterbottom’s warning not to bite off more than he could chew, passed a considerable personal test when he took a group of players under the watchful and intimidating eye of Herrera. The master visited him in the dressing-room to deliver the verdict, ‘You can be a great coach.’
Back at West Ham, the atmosphere of learning and debate perfectly complemented the ideas Allison had picked up at Lilleshall and gave him the opportunity to put his theories into practice. Finally, he was enjoying and achieving fulfilment from life as a professional footballer. The dark, tedious days of Charlton were far behind him, prompting him to say, ‘I used to get up in the morning and feel like singing.’
An interest in discussing and dissecting the game was unusual enough in the 1950s; it seems even more so in these days when players disappear to their country mansions as soon as training finishes. They certainly wouldn’t be congregating in the local greasy spoon café. But Bond, who went on to win medals under Ron Greenwood and credits Allison with taking him from ‘a naïve little kid to some sort of manhood’, says, ‘We were conscientious and knew what we wanted. I would come home at five o’clock completely knackered but I learned so much. I always had tea and toast on a Saturday morning until Malcolm told me I shouldn’t drink tea on the day of a game.’
Colleagues recall that it was Allison’s own opinions that were voiced loudest during the players’ discussions and Malcolm himself said, ‘I just told them what to do. It was my determination and aggression that made other players fall into line and realise there was more to the game than they thought.’
Dave Sexton’s memory is, ‘Malcolm listened to others and it was good to be there with them. But he was the one who prompted us more than others and his personality was such that we followed. He felt that we should be a modern team. We wanted to play football at all times and we did.’
However, O’Farrell believes that Allison often overdid the dogma. ‘His problem was that he wanted to impose his view of football. He didn’t try to sell it; he just told us that this was what we should do. He could be a bit autocratic in that respect. You can’t always have a consensus, but he wasn’t prepared to listen to other people. His ambitions were noble in lots of ways – he wanted to take football forward – but he didn’t carry everyone with him, which could make people feel disenfranchised.’
Wing-half Tommy Moroney was a popular foil for Allison and the Irish international would often be heard yelling, ‘Fucking hell, Malcolm, what are you talking about? You’re talking a lot of bollocks, aren’t you?’ O’Farrell continues, ‘You had to say, “Malcolm, I don’t agree with you.” You had to stand up to him or else he would ride all over you. There were two or three players he could influence but I was a bit older, was independent and could hold my own in a discussion and argue that there was another way of doing it.’
The press latched on to what was happening and christened the ‘West Ham Academy’, but not every member of the Hammers squad bought into Allison’s ideology or sought a place in his clique. John ‘Jackie’ Dick, the joint third-highest scorer in West Ham’s history with 166 goals, mostly kept himself away from Cassettari’s and liked to play without referral to tactics. He would be the only Hammers player in the early ’60s to absent himself from a Ron Greenwood-led coaching course at Lilleshall. Sexton recalls, ‘Not everybody was involved because, at any football club, there are degrees of enthusiasm among the players. What we were doing was enjoyed by those who were keen on becoming better players and there were more who wanted to do it than those who didn’t.’
Lewis looks back on his experiences with Allison with ‘mixed feelings’, his emotions reflecting the extremes of Malcolm’s personality. ‘If you add up the pluses when talking about him, they outnumber the minuses. His passion was football, but sometimes when he was having a go at people he went over the edge and got too personal. I remember a number of times when you saw him spitting out insults. If he’d had a little more compassion he could have had more success. But he had this aura and I wanted to impress him. I remember being in the gym in a group that had to bench-press a certain weight 15 times. I had nearly finished but when Malcolm came over I went back to counting “two, three, four” because I didn’t want him to think I was cheating and was making out I had done more than I had. Unfortunately there were two camps at West Ham. I can’t say for sure, but if you were in Malcolm’s band then it appeared that he would look out for you and influence Ted Fenton to get you in the team. I wasn’t a big fan of his socially and some of his off-field behaviour nullified my feelings for him, but I felt I was one of those who were on his good side and he liked me as a player.’
Meanwhile, Musgrove called Allison, ‘a very strong character – too strong for some I suppose’. In Brian Betton’s Days of Iron, he said, ‘I didn’t like [Malcolm] for what he could do to people he didn’t like.’ But he added, ‘If he liked you as a person and footballer he’d go through a brick wall for you. But he would crucify those he didn’t get on with.’
Cantwell saw the resentment some players held towards Allison, who he felt ‘didn’t like people who didn’t like football’. He noted, ‘Some people got fed up talking about the game and there were those who weren’t keen on learning.’ Of those people, Allison would sneer, ‘We can do without them.’ Cantwell admitted, ‘Malcolm wasn’t popular with everybody. A lot of people don’t like change and he did lots of things that weren’t popular with the manager.’
Which prompts the most obvious question about this period in West Ham history: who the hell was running the place – Malcolm Allison or Ted Fenton?
‘Eventually I began to run the team, with his tacit agreement,’ is Allison’s description of the arrangement with his boss. ‘I was able to bring some variety to our training. And Fenton allowed me to get on with it.’ Allison described the relationship with his manager as ‘scarcely satisfactory’. Even though it didn’t sink as low as the frosty non-communication of his experience with Charlton boss Jimmy Seed, manager and captain could hardly be called bosom buddies.
Allison felt that the club directors’ loyalty in appointing an old Hammers stalwart proved that they ‘had no sense of how to achieve anything or to be successful’. He believed they would rather appoint someone unsuitable than bring in a thrusting, forward-thinking outsider who might show up their own lack of football knowledge. The might of Allison’s personality inevitably caused friction with Fenton, but the manager at least appeared to appreciate that those issues were born of a desire to see the club progress. And as long as Allison’s influence was dragging the club in the right direction it seems that Fenton was happy to indulge such a brazen show of player power.
Sexton explains, ‘Ted didn’t interfere. He was very in love with football and so were we. If it was going to make us better, then Ted let us do it. Coaching was a new scene for most people, but we were lucky to have Ted because he could have put the boot in, as some managers would have. He was as keen as us.’
Bond states, ‘Ted used to let Malcolm have his head. Malcolm decided what way we would play, what formation we would use, and would talk to Ted about selection. Ted would have the final say but Malcolm would have a big influence. I got injured and missed the start of one season. George Wright took my place but when I was fit and ready Malcolm said to me, “Don’t worry,” and he went to see Ted. I was back in the team in a week. Malcolm’s views were the ones that mattered.’
John Cartwright contends, ‘Ted was really nothing in comparison to Malcolm. Ted used to turn up for training and then go off. It was Malcolm and the senior players who were inspired by him – like John Bond and Noel Cantwell – who had the influence and were looked up to by the youngsters.’
Any disagreements Allison had with Fenton took place in private. ‘They wouldn’t clash in front of the players,’ says Bond. But there was little doubt in the squad’s mind who held the power. Terry McDonald recalls complaining to Allison about being selected for the A team for a game at Didcot after he had been led to believe he would be involved with the first team. ‘When Mal found out he went in to Ted, came back and tore down the sheets. When he re-pinned them, I was the twelfth man for the first team. We always felt Malcolm ran the club and totally transformed it.’
Jimmy Andrews, however, acknowledges Fenton’s contribution, especially the feeling of friendship and camaraderie at Upton Park. ‘Ted had a lot to do with that,’ he explained. ‘Ted would occasionally go on about tactics and you’d see Mal looking at him, as if to say, “Oh, shut up, Ted. For Christ’s sake, just get on with it!” But in his own way, Ted was a good influence – just in a totally different way from Malcolm. And between the two of them they did a great job. Ted was clever. He was no fool and he thought, “Fair enough, if it’s good for the club and the players, let Malcolm get on with it.” But Ted was never far away and he was a very decent man.’
O’Farrell also speaks up for Fenton, arguing that Allison was wrong to undermine him to such an extent. ‘He did usurp Ted’s authority, which I thought was wrong. He thought Ted knew eff all. I felt Fenton bridged the gap between the old-fashioned manager who ruled with an iron hand and the newer generation of manager-coaches who thought hard about the game. Ted wasn’t going to come in and say, “This is where you will play.” He had team meetings and players would discuss the things they would try to implement. Malcolm thought he did that so he could learn from us! Not everything was perfect, but Ted shouldn’t be rubbished.
‘Malcolm might claim it was all him and, of course, he did make a great contribution to football and I liked him a lot. But he needed a manager to be that way orientated. Mal railroaded people and it may have looked sometimes like he was the manager. He did argue once or twice with Ted at meetings, but I don’t think it is a player’s place to question the authority of the manager. He shouldn’t try to prove he knows more than the manager – and sometimes Mal would want to do that. His role was to play as a player to the best of his ability.’
O’Farrell confesses, however, that Allison’s criticism of Fenton made the players ‘more self-sufficient and turned us into managers’, adding, ‘If we’d have had a strong manager we wouldn’t have blossomed the way we did. That’s why so many of us succeeded.’
Fenton and Allison could hardly have been more different. Allison’s quiff and brooding good looks created an air of James Dean, while the slicked-back hair, tweed jacket, pipe and pointed features of Fenton hinted at Basil Rathbone playing Sherlock Holmes. Fenton was without the charisma and strong disciplinary principles of his predecessor Charlie Paynter. And he lacked natural leadership qualities, which was why Allison was so easily able to commandeer the loyalty of so many players.
While Allison claimed to have ‘blanked out the board, the manager – everybody who might get in the way’ and said that he ‘wasn’t sure what Fenton was doing’, the manager took his refuge in the club’s infrastructure, initiating a youth scouting system, looking after the needs of the staff and manoeuvring in the transfer market.
The dynamic between Allison and Fenton was at the centre of – and is perhaps the most fascinating aspect of – life at West Ham in the ’50s. In some ways it was an unintentional prototype of the modern phenomenon of director of football working alongside a coach, or in this case an unofficial player-coach. Yet, tellingly, Fenton made no reference to it in his 1960 book, At Home with the Hammers. Even though his publication purported to give an inside look at the club during the decade, the only mention of Allison in the entire 160 pages is a somewhat dismissive six paragraphs, half of which concentrated on the circumstances that led to his early retirement as a player. There is no acknowledgement or discussion of his tactical input; not a word about the group of players who shaped the club from their table at Cassettari’s; no reference to Allison in the chapter entitled ‘Styling The Hammers’.
In their Essential History of West Ham, authors Kirk Blows and Tony Hogg describe Allison as a ‘visionary who in six short years would revolutionise the club’s archaic regime and transform training, coaching techniques and tactics to secure promotion’. Yet the only nod Fenton is willing to give towards any influence Allison might have had is in the following comment. ‘Apart from being a good player, Malcolm was fantastically keen and enthusiastic. He was a fitness fanatic and inspired the others. Because of that I made him club skipper.’
There are conflicting tales about how much influence Allison had over cosmetic matters like West Ham’s playing kit. The Hammers were among the first English teams to swap heavy, buttoned shirts for streamlined, tight-fitting, short-sleeved V-necks and to adopt Continental-style short shorts. Noel Cantwell’s landlady was given the task of cutting down West Ham’s baggy breeches, although, when necessity dictated, Allison would grab a pair of scissors and do it himself before training, administering the same treatment to shirt sleeves. Bond remembers, ‘The shorts were so short that we looked like a load of women running around the place.’
Allison quickly abandoned one idea that O’Farrell believes shows how ‘sometimes he could be lacking in prudence and judgement and be guilty of not looking ahead’. He explains, ‘One day Mal decided that shin pads were a waste of time and just put extra weight on your legs. He told us that we should get rid of them and chose to prove his point by not wearing them. Unfortunately he was up against a Birmingham centre-forward called Cyril Trigg who didn’t shirk any tackles. He ended up getting a bloody gash right down his shin. That showed the reckless side of his nature.’
Meanwhile, Allison had been impressed with a pair of lightweight boots that a friend on the Arsenal team had brought back from a tour of Brazil, although he claimed that Fenton had said, ‘England’s footballers will never wear these slippers.’ According to Allison, Fenton had turned away overtures from manufacturers of such footwear. ‘It was this fixed stonewall attitude that made me very bitter,’ he said.
Eddie Lewis remembers, ‘Malcolm would take our old-fashioned boots and get a pair of scissors and cut off the top part.’ Fenton, meanwhile, recalls in his book that it was he who contacted the Hungarian football authorities to find out the origin of their boots, after which he acquired two dozen pairs from the manufacturer. He likened the arrival of the boots to discovering that his team had been ‘playing the piano in boxing gloves’. He also claimed to have introduced the Hungarian-style aerodynamic kit.
One thing is for certain. West Ham’s modernist approach impressed the hell out of other teams. O’Farrell recalls, ‘After I was transferred to Preston, one of their players, Bobby Foster, said they had come to see us in a Cup tie at Blackpool. They couldn’t believe it when all these Cockney boys ran out in biscuit-coloured tracksuits 20 minutes before kick-off. Nobody came out for warm-ups in those days – you warmed up in the dressing-room. Things like that impressed other professionals.’ Lewis also remembers going to see West Ham play before he signed for them. ‘I was knocked out. They came out early and had short shorts and looked fit and fantastic.’
Another area where there is variance in testimony about the extent of Allison’s influence is the weight training that became a standard part of West Ham’s working week. Fenton explains in his book how he introduced it, while Allison claimed, ‘I brought in weight-training, heavy weight-training. Ted Fenton didn’t want to do it. But I found that our jumping became better. We became stronger and quicker.’
O’Farrell offers this version of events. ‘We had a young lad called Alfie Noakes – a likeable cheeky Cockney – who came up with the idea in a team meeting that we should do weight training. Nobody else had come up with that idea. Malcolm said, “Weight training? What do you know? We are not weightlifters or wrestlers.” But Alfie fought his corner, which was quite something for a young player. Weight training became part of our routine and subsequently Malcolm became one of the greatest converts. He went a bundle on it.’
Cantwell recalled the importance of the Hammers’ aesthetic and athletic upgrades. ‘We would go in the gym at quarter past two and have a fairly good work-out and come back and then get prepared. The weight training gave you tremendous confidence. You felt stronger and you felt good. How one looks and how one appears is always very important. I think it helped when we got away from the old baggy shorts and had good gear.’
The playing style of the West Ham team owed much to Allison’s interpretation of the Hungarian methods. His main contention was that the ball should be played out from the back, rather than being hoofed downfield in the finest tradition of blood-and-thunder English football. His own instinct as a defender was to look to play an intelligent pass. ‘He used the ball quite well for a centre-half,’ says O’Farrell, although Bond adds, ‘He wanted to play sometimes when he shouldn’t. He used to try all sorts of silly things and let himself down at times.’
Eddie Lewis adds, ‘West Ham liked to knock the ball around, keep it to feet. And we worked a lot of set pieces. Johnny Bond was one of the best kickers of the ball I have ever seen and there would be a lot of practice on players making decoy runs, allowing Noel to come in at the back to score.’
According to goalkeeper Ernie Gregory, ‘In our day we’d play in threes and play the angles. I’d give the ball to Bondy and he’d give it to Andy Malcolm.’ But such a patient style of play was not immediately appreciated by the Hammers fans. West Ham historian Brian Belton wrote that it appeared as though West Ham were ‘trying to goad the opposition and annoy the supporters’. He added, ‘The East End had grown used to solid, hard-working footballers. This group of players looked to play with finesse.’
John Cartwright remembers, ‘Malcolm was very interested in people being individual and making up their own mind about things. He liked players who were comfortable with the ball and imaginative. He liked brave kids. I don’t mean just physically brave, but in the sense that they would try things.’
Meanwhile, Fenton allowed the Allison-influenced style of play to continue, although some suggested he simply had the good sense to stay out of it because he had no clue what was going on. Whatever the truth of Fenton’s feeling towards Allison and his standing in the eyes of his club captain, fate was to bring their complex relationship to an abrupt end.