‘I don’t care what a man is as long as he treats me right. He can be a gambler, a hustler, someone everybody else thinks is obnoxious. I don’t care so long as he’s straight and his dealings with me are fair’
– New York Jets quarterback
‘Broadway Joe’ Namath
For almost two years, Malcolm Allison turned away from football, stumbling around in a wilderness in which his travelling companions could have stepped out of a Damon Runyan story. Footballers were replaced in his life by gamblers, bookies, showbiz stars and criminals; the invigorating air and healthy banter of the training ground supplanted by the choking tension of the race track and the smoke-filled ambience of London’s nightclubs.
Allison admitted to feeling ‘numb’ for 12 months after his retirement, battling unsuccessfully against the gnawing feeling that ‘life has cheated you out of the one thing that seemed to make it worth living’. Tuberculosis had done more than take away one of his lungs. It had robbed him of purpose. ‘One day life was touching perfection, a rhythm of physical action and great fitness,’ he said. ‘The next I was broken, washed up into a situation which resembled a strange and hostile shore.’ One of the hardest aspects of his new existence was dealing with the changed attitude of people around him. Used to being surrounded by those who were willing to be led by the force of his personality and the promise of what his creative thought could do for them in a football environment, he was shocked to find a new world of people who were ‘hardened’ towards him.
Allison turned down opportunities to jump straight into a new football career. Tottenham manager Bill Nicholson approached him about a position on his coaching staff, while Ajax – on the recommendation of Chelsea manager Ted Drake, another of Allison’s Lilleshall acquaintances – offered him £34 a week to join them in Amsterdam. After a four-day visit to the Dutch capital, he declined, explaining that money was not enough to persuade him to leave his family. He agreed to help out with a few coaching sessions at Isthmian League team Sutton United, but his depth of disillusionment over the end of his playing career made it hard to view any job in the game with enthusiasm. He’d simply had enough. It was football that had led to his current miserable state of mind and the desire now was to break free of its clutches.
Gambling had always been one of Allison’s favourite pastimes and he and his Hammers teammates had become familiar figures at the tracks of Hackney Wick and West Ham. Andy Nelson remembers, ‘We all loved going to the dogs and it wasn’t unusual for about a dozen of us to go along to West Ham greyhound track on a Friday night. Malcolm was well connected in the racing game and there were some big money bets going on at times. The lads used to be well in with a Brighton bookie called George Gunn but we didn’t always win. In fact, there were times when bookies would come to the ground looking for their money on losing bets, and one or two of the players would sneak out of the back door to avoid paying them after the game!’
One former teammate said that Malcolm and his pals would ‘bet on two flies going up the wall’, and Allison would on occasions stake more than he had in his pocket, at which point the football field became his escape from the debt collectors. There was even a time when Ted Fenton, the Hammers manager, had gone knocking on Allison’s door looking for the year’s rent he owed on his club house in Barkingside. The problem was solved when Malcolm won £360 that night at West Ham dogs.
After his retirement, Allison continued taking his old pals racing, happily treating them if the dogs had run well. George Fenn, whose career never advanced much beyond teenage stardom, admitted later that he was one who fell under the Allison spell. ‘Some of us were a little bit weak and saw Malcolm as a god. I thought he was. I idolised him. But little did I know that by staying out drinking, I was destroying myself. Of course I regret it now.’
In Brian Belton’s book, Days of Iron, former Hammer Mick Newman says of Allison, ‘He had the bearing and looks and he lived a life that impressed most of us. He was having breakfast at the Ritz while most of us were turning over in bed. I don’t know where he got the money but he managed it somehow.’
Frank O’Farrell, who had seen Allison let cash slip through his fingers like sand, says, ‘The way he looked at it was, “Money is only money.” He would go to the dogs and come back skint. His lifestyle wasn’t mine because I was one of those people who thought money should be spent on things that were more important, like family. But he was very generous and didn’t look on money as a god.’
As much as he loved the feel of cash on his hip, Allison’s attitude to it had long been established as ‘easy come, easy go’. He even recalled being kicked in the chest in a game at Sheffield Wednesday and going into a panic as he fought to catch his breath. His biggest fear of dying was having left £200 unspent in his jacket pocket. As ex-West Ham striker Vic Keeble said, ‘He was a bit of a playboy but he would give you his last ha’penny.’
Allison’s only ambition as far as money was concerned was to put it to use as soon as possible, sometimes not even waiting until he had left Upton Park after picking up his wages. Terry McDonald explains, ‘On Friday morning we would all get paid and four or five of them, including Malcolm, would be straight off down the boiler house playing cards. Then he would be off to Hackney Wick dogs.’
The greyhound racing would often be followed by a trip into the West End and there was always a spare seat at the bar for anyone who wanted to tag along. ‘Malcolm helped me bed down in London,’ says Eddie Lewis. ‘I had come from Preston and was a bit of a yokel. I’d not had a lot of experience outside the game.’
McDonald continues, ‘He took a lot of us younger players with him when he went out. He would take us to clubs and then go off on his own. He liked to show you life. It was all about living it to the full, and he did it.’
Allison admitted as much, eventually writing, ‘I do not recall the wildness, the great extravagances with pride. It may be that some people would regard my private life as a disaster area. All I can say is that I have tried to live it to the full.’
Such an attitude was to underpin, some would say undermine, everything he was to go on to achieve in his working life. His triumphs would be followed, with an air of grim inevitability, by what others – although not Allison himself – would perceive as a fall. Never did he enjoy the financial stability that his achievements should have afforded him, even in the days before the cash-rich world of the Premier League. Instead of capitalising upon his greatest period of professional achievement, at Manchester City in the second half of the 1960s, he was more often than not broke. His response to discovering that the money had run out, however, would be to order another bottle of champagne.
For several months while coaching a City team that was the most exciting and successful in the country, Allison would be taking the bus to work, a finance company having repossessed his car. His money at that time was being drained by a restaurant called Napoleon’s, which he owned with scrap metal merchant Freddie Pye and businessman Jimmy Walsh. ‘A lavish enterprise’ that was ‘doomed’ was how Allison would describe that venture, reckoning that it lost about £20,000 in two years before being sold to a character called Frank ‘Foo Foo’ Lamar.
Allison would bounce cheques with alarming regularity and on one occasion City manager Joe Mercer handed him £134 in cash out of his own pocket after Malcolm had admitted, ‘Joe, I’m in a bit of trouble.’ He would at least have the honesty to own up to his failings without looking for excuses. When he made comments like, ‘It becomes a bit of a problem when you send people cheques and then they send you them right back again,’ there would rarely be a ‘but’ to follow. No stories of distant relatives needing money for life-saving operations.
Eventually, however, the pattern of spending more than he was earning – established early in his working career – became something he couldn’t just dismiss with a wisecrack and he would find himself in court in the early ’90s for failing to meet his maintenance payments.
His football career snatched away from him, Allison set his mind to replacing the money he had been earning at West Ham. Not that such deliberations would have kept him awake for long. He had always found ways of supplementing his football wages – so much so that teammates used to joke that he was working as a gigolo on the side. The truth for a while had been a good deal less exotic as Allison filled the summer months by working as a car salesman in Warren Street. His powers of persuasion saw him taking home more than was to be found in his West Ham pay packet, even though his lack of enthusiasm led him to admit, ‘I came to consider it an achievement to report in.’ And one former colleague remembers his anger when Allison failed to deliver the car he had promised him shortly after his arrival at Upton Park.
Such mundane activity, however, was never going to be considered by Allison as a viable replacement for life as a professional footballer. Allison, the competitor, the gambler, was drawn inexorably to the track.
Initial success on the horses had come Allison’s way courtesy of the jockey Geoff Lewis, who had provided a few profitable tips. At Epsom racecourse, Allison ran into the former Arsenal player Arthur Shaw, an old friend who had established himself as a professional gambler. Shaw suggested that his own contacts and information on the horses, combined with Allison’s network at the dog track, could make for a lucrative partnership. A new career had been launched.
Allison would prowl the trackside bookies, placing bets and picking up tittle-tattle that could be worked into profit. On their first night together at West Ham dogs, Allison earned £150 and the next day Shaw’s knowledge of the horses raised the winnings to £800. ‘It was the opening flurry to a year in which I never knew what it was not to have a huge roll of notes in my pocket,’ said Allison, who reckoned he won £80,000 in his first year at the tracks. Of course, he spent just as much, splashing out on new cars and expensive suits.
Sometimes, he didn’t even get the cash away from the racecourse – like the time after a big win at Royal Ascot when he was to be found buying champagne all round. Such extravagance was not, according to Allison, born of a desire to be the ‘big man’. It was, he said, a simple desire to share his happiness – ‘an expression of the mood that came to me when my luck was running smoothly’. Perhaps it was more than that. He had been evicted by illness from the life he knew, one in which his place was secure. It is likely, then, that there was a need for acceptance – a search for a new role and a new sphere of influence. He had established that at West Ham with his personality, knowledge and dedication. On the racetrack, it appeared that all it required was a winning ticket and a crate of bubbly.
Describing his new life as ‘pure escapism’, Allison watched very few games of football and his only contact with the sport was the evenings he spent entertaining his West Ham buddies. Yet Allison quickly became dissatisfied with winning money on what boiled down to chance. Having been such a strategist, tactician and planner in his former life, having taken such firm control of his own destiny – and of those around him – no amount of money could make up for the empty feeling of having your fate out of your own hands. The rush of seeing a horse charge up on the rails proved shallow and transient compared with the deep-rooted satisfaction of a goal worked out in advance on the training ground.
The long treks to remote courses to place a single bet on a horse began to lose their appeal and there were times when Allison wondered what the hell he was doing. Those days began to overshadow the glamour of Epsom on Derby day or weekends in Deauville, France, where he dined with a female member of the Rothschild family and helped an American millionaire lose £10,000 in 20 minutes in a casino. Allison described that weekend as the highlight of his gambling career – ‘a time when, briefly, it did seem to me that there was no other way to live’.
Once the inevitable bad run descended upon him, Allison sensed the hopelessness of his profession. He had come to see it as ‘a terrible, desperate business’. It no longer seemed like a job for life and a day of losses in the rain at Kempton Park offered one torn-up betting ticket too many. Before he turned away completely Allison had one last fling, losing £1,500 that he didn’t have. He was warned off the tracks for failing to pay his debts to the bookmakers. It was some years before the ban was lifted.
Leaving behind the life of a professional gambler, Allison needed something else to fill his time and provide him with an income. Football had still not re-established itself sufficiently in his bloodstream for him to consider it as a career option. But it was an old contact within the game, Queens Park Rangers chairman Jim Gregory, whom he had got to know through his connections to the motor trade, who loaned Allison £2,000 to launch his next venture. Allison bought himself a club in Soho, the Artists and Repertoire, on Charing Cross Road.
His clientele was an eclectic group – including show-business people such as Harry Secombe and the singer Dorothy Squires, and professional footballers. Players from many of the London teams, including his old colleagues at West Ham, would find their way to the A & R on their return to the capital after away games. Allison also widened his contacts within the criminal world, having mixed regularly in such circles during his time at the track.
One such acquaintance, with a gambler called Joe Lowery, had led to him spending four hours being questioned by police at Doncaster. Lowery got to know Allison and his West Ham teammates after watching them losing their weekly wages at Hackney dogs. He approached them to place bets for him instead, a task for which they were well rewarded. Allison confessed to his suspicions about the legitimacy of Lowery’s operations and was not altogether surprised when his new pal was warned off greyhound racing for suspected doping. Lowery turned his attention to the horses and after the favourite came a cropper in the St Leger, police became suspicious about Allison’s long trackside conversation with Lowery. It took several hours, and the intervention of Joe Shaw, for Allison to persuade the constabulary that they had been discussing nothing more sinister than old times at the dogs.
Allison’s non-judgemental loyalty to his friend was such, however, that when Lowery began a subsequent five-year jail sentence, he sent him some equipment for the prison team. And when Lowery was released shortly before the 1969 FA Cup final, Allison loaned him £200 and secured him an invitation to Manchester City’s post-game banquet. ‘Joe came from a murky corner of my past, but I wasn’t about to disown him,’ he explained.
There were other memorable encounters. Allison recalled being challenged to a fight with axes by a character called Albert ‘Italian’ Dimes over the £300 Malcolm believed he was owed, and he got to know the Great Train Robber Buster Edwards. For a while he even thought he was going to be called to give evidence on his behalf at the Old Bailey.
Some years later, the Manchester City players would see the evidence of an acquaintance Allison had established with the notorious Kray twins, Ronnie and Reggie. Staying in London after a game, the team had gone to the club where Britain’s most infamous siblings happened to be drinking. One of the players established winking contact with a girl who was sitting at a table with another man and when the player visited the gents, the girl’s companion followed him in to warn him that he would lose his kneecaps if he persisted in his flirting. The shaken player reported the encounter to Allison, who went straight to the Krays’ table and conveyed the events to them. A word from Mal was enough to send the twins immediately over to the potential aggressor, who was seen moments later hurrying nervously out of the club.
Allison admitted getting to know a group of men who had been involved in a gold bullion robbery, although he stressed, ‘It was not a world I wanted to get too closely involved with. What I could do was appreciate their sense of humour and an intelligence that, if channelled into legitimate business, would have made many of them rich men.’
The circles in which he moved, coupled with the fact that most people knew that he was skint more often than not, made him an obvious candidate to be approached with the odd dodgy proposition. On one occasion, an American pornographer sought out Allison in his club to explain his network of wealthy clients around London, before asking him to collect money and letters for him from a post office box. Even with his unstable finances, Allison was not tempted to go down that road. Being friends with criminals was one thing; becoming one of them was an entirely different proposition.
Meanwhile, Allison’s chances of becoming rich through his own legitimate methods, his nightclub business, were doomed from the start. Even though trade was healthy, his head was never made for business. His attention was too easily diverted from the profit-and-loss column by the promise of another drink with one of his new, glamorous pals. Mal drank away the profits, becoming more miserable as he did so, slipping into a life of all-night boozing and all-day hangovers. He found that he was starting to mirror some of the customers, seeing himself reflected in the way they depended on drink to get them through their lives. ‘They could make “set them up, barman” the most miserable words in the language,’ he commented. And recalling the time he helped a wealthy, drunken, customer out of the club, he added, ‘He had no control over himself. He had become a clown. I have never forgotten the thought that came into my head: “So this is being a playboy?”’
While the Conservative government’s policies of reduced taxation and economic expansion in the late 1950s saw televisions, washing machines and refrigerators flying out of the High Street stores, Allison’s murky, twilight existence appeared more closely aligned to a Chicago speakeasy during the prohibition days than Britain’s new age of prosperity and consumerism. But now he was ready to step back into the sunshine and during long stints behind the bar his thoughts had gradually been turning back towards football.
He had turned out a few times in charity games for the TV All-Stars but, realising that he needed a greater escape from the increasingly claustrophobic walls of his club, he went to see Jack Chisholm, manager of Southern League team Romford. His health and fitness, he felt, were up to playing a few games for a semi-professional team. He was not doing it for the money, which was just as well as Romford, despite being in the top flight of the Southern League, were virtually broke. Allison told Chisholm, ‘Jack, I am spending my days and nights in a smoky nightclub in London. It’s not my scene. I want to get the feel of football again.’
Romford took over Allison’s playing registration – still held by West Ham – in August 1960 and he turned out in three pre-season trial games. Described by the Romford Recorder after the last of those matches as ‘a player to be reckoned with’, he made his debut for the club at centre-half in a 6–2 Eastern Counties League Cup victory against Sudbury. The local reporter stated, ‘At the end of the 90 minutes we were left with the comforting knowledge that Allison has forgotten very little of his skill. His coolly enthusiastic but intelligent performance completely booted out the Sudbury spearhead.’
The majority of the 22 League games Allison played for Romford in 1960–61 came in the second half of the season, meaning he missed out on the club’s run to the second round of the FA Cup, where they lost at home to Northampton. He was a valuable contributor, however, to the team’s fight to stave off relegation, something they eventually achieved when they won 2–0 at Folkestone. There, Allison was praised for his ‘incessant promptings’ and was the ‘mastermind of the victory and star of the defence’.
He missed the last couple of games of the campaign after a sending-off at King’s Lynn, but entered the summer months buoyed by the confidence he had regained in his physical well-being. He had proved that he could last a competitive 90-minute match and make a contribution to his team. He went as far as saying that he had ‘saved himself’ by stepping back into football. ‘It put into perspective the flashy, big-time Charlie days on the racecourse and in the nightclub,’ he said.
Further realisation of how much he had missed the sport was provided by Chelsea and England forward Jimmy Greaves, who sat in Allison’s bar in April 1961 waiting for news of an exciting, life-changing transfer to AC Milan. Greaves was set to become one of a group of British international strikers – along with Denis Law of Manchester City, Hibernian’s Joe Baker and Aston Villa’s Gerry Hitchens – who were escaping the feudal world of the £20-a-week maximum wage in favour of the riches on offer in Italian football. Within months, their departures would have given decisive momentum to the crusade of the Professional Footballers’ Association, led by chairman Jimmy Hill, to rid the game of such an outdated and punitive system. The exiles would return, mostly disillusioned by their Italian experience, to reap the benefits of the new order of English football. For now, however, Allison looked at Greaves and saw the excitement and the great possibilities that stretched out in front of a young man with the world at his feet. ‘His hope and optimism had taken me out of myself,’ he remarked.
Unknown to Allison, certain wheels were turning at that time that could have taken him back into football full-time – at Upton Park, of all places. After dispensing with the services of Ted Fenton, the West Ham directors had appointed Ron Greenwood, formerly coach of Arsenal, as their manager. Greenwood knew the history of the Cassettari clan and could still sense Allison’s influence at the club. To him, the idea of having Allison return as youth-team coach was as obvious as it had been to the young players who had expected their mentor to be given that role immediately after his retirement as a player. In his book, Sincerely Yours, Greenwood would explain:
I inherited fertile ground and Allison was one of the men responsible. He is a natural coach, a man with real insight into the game, and he proved his ability with youngsters right from his early days at West Ham.
I thought he would be ideal but when I put the proposal to the board their reaction surprised me. They listened attentively, but then said, firmly, that they did not think Allison should come back to the club. They told me one or two things had happened which would not make it a good idea and they were clearly not going to change their minds. I had to accept their decision. I had not mentioned anything to Malcolm so it was just a bright idea which never got off the ground.
It would have been his first full coaching post and it is of course impossible to say how things would have worked out. I still believe he would have been perfect for the job for a while. Sooner or later he would have been on his way. It is impossible to keep outstanding lieutenants.
Allison was at the stage in his life where he would probably have relished the chance to return to the game on a daily basis. In the meantime, he signed up for a second season at Romford, under new player-manager Ted Ditchburn, the former Tottenham and England goalkeeper. Named club captain, Allison’s commitment to the cause is evidenced by the fact he was booked four times in the early weeks of the season, some feat in the days when only the most extreme misconduct would prompt most referees into such action. ‘It’s time manager Ted Ditchburn had a long strong talk with skipper Malcolm Allison,’ wrote Romford Recorder reporter Johnny Morris after the third caution had resulted from an argument with the referee in the first qualifying round of the FA Cup. This time around, Allison was to be the key figure in Romford’s return to the second round proper, a run that began with a 6–2 home win against Wembley. The same Morris was obviously not a man who was easily pleased, describing the Romford performance as ‘a disgraceful exhibition’ and adding that it was ‘utterly amazing that so little effort should have brought such great reward’. ITV had filmed the game for future broadcast but it was Morris’s fervent hope that the recording would never see the light of day.
Further home wins followed against Leytonstone and Dagenham, in a replay. Yet some of the club’s fans were proving as hard to please as Morris in the press box, taking exception to Allison’s unrelenting high-decibel cajoling of those around him. Reporter Paul Paris noted, ‘I hope all those sniping supporters took note that when Allison eased up the shouting, Romford eased up their play.’
In the fourth qualifying round, drawn at home again, Romford trailed to Cambridge United when they were awarded an indirect free-kick in the 55th minute. Cambridge put 11 men in front of goal and Allison simply blasted the ball at the lot of them. It ended up in the back of the net, with Cambridge convinced it had found its way there without touching anyone. Photographers behind the goal tended to support their view but the referee ruled otherwise. ‘Well, er, I was watching the ball as I kicked it and when I looked up it was bulging the rigging,’ said Allison later with the air of a schoolboy having been caught scrumping apples. Seven minutes later, Romford were given a penalty for a harsh-looking handball and Allison, who had earlier been forced to leave the field to have his studs filed, slammed it past the keeper’s right hand. ‘The plaudits really belonged to the brilliant Allison, whose stentorian shouts sounded over the roars of the 5,323 Cup-happy soccer fans,’ raved the Recorder.
The first round did not reward Romford with Football League opposition. Instead, it was Walthamstow Avenue who arrived at Brooklands. It is the game that lives most in the memory of anyone who watched Romford during Allison’s two years at the club. The local paper’s match report began like this:
Magnificent match-winning Malcolm Allison, cool, calm and cultured hero of Romford’s incredibly exciting FA Cup run, shot Walthamstow Avenue out of the competition last Saturday in a last-minute incident that left Boro fans white with fear. Boro’s cocksure clown conjured up victory with as cute a piece of gamesmanship as you could wish to see.
Romford forward Barry Cappi, who scored one of the goals that had left the game tied at 2–2, was fouled in the box in the closing seconds and Allison stepped up to strike the penalty beyond the reach of goalkeeper Gary McGuire. Referee S.S. Mundy, however, ruled that a home player had encroached into the area and ordered Allison to take it again. This time Allison added to the dramatic effect by indicating to McGuire that he intended to beat him to his right-hand side once again. As McGuire stood motionless, trying to figure out whether this was bluff or double bluff, Allison placed it to the other side to win the game. Relating the incident recently on the club’s internet site, one Romford fan adds, ‘They say Malcolm was grinning as he placed the ball again, pointed to the same corner, and calmly knocked it past the keeper. Cue pandemonium and Romford were through to a home match against Watford.’
Things did not go so well for Allison in the second-round tie. With Romford having performed creditably and holding Watford after 64 minutes, he gave away a penalty with a late tackle. The kick was converted by Tommy Harmer and Watford were on their way to a 3–1 victory. The remainder of the season became another battle against relegation and once safety had been achieved around Easter, it became evident that Romford, under new manager Harry Clarke, and an increasingly injury-prone Allison would be going separate ways.
But far from marking an ending, Allison’s departure from Romford enabled him to take a further step back into the sport he once thought he had left behind – this time in the role for which he had evidently been born, coaching. The surroundings, though, were not those that a working-class south London boy like Malcolm would ever have envisaged for himself. Steeling himself for a journey into the unknown, Allison accepted an offer to coach the undergraduates of the Cambridge University Football Club, a move that, he said, ‘completed my recovery’.
Allison drove into Cambridge on the kind of sunny late summer’s day that showed the historic buildings of the city in their best light. Football was not exactly the most prominent of the extra-curricular activities at the university. Cambridge had established itself as the home of the satire movement that was transforming British comedy. Future Monty Python members John Cleese, Graham Chapman and Eric Idle were treading the boards of the Footlights Club, while in the week that the final trials for the football team took place, the university newspaper was pondering the likely success in America of the touring Beyond the Fringe squad of Peter Cook, Dudley Moore, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Miller.
Allison had been wary of accepting the job offer, wondering whether someone whose life’s classrooms had been the barracks, football field, racetrack and nightclub would be accepted into the world of academia. Yet he was put instantly at ease when met by team captain Howard Moxon, who greeted him with, ‘We’re all very thrilled that you’re coming to work with us. We’ve heard a lot about you and we’re ready to start when you are.’
Concerned about his ability to communicate with his players, Allison was relieved to discover that the students were keen to soak up the knowledge he was able to impart and were well used to processing such information. ‘Whatever training routines I laid down were followed slavishly. I would travel back to London knowing my instructions would be followed.’
On completion of the trials for the team, Varsity, the university newspaper, reported confidently, ‘Under the guidance of Malcolm Allison a powerful side will doubtless emerge.’ The overriding goal for any Cambridge team was, of course, to beat Oxford in the Varsity Match early in December. In preparation for their big game at Wembley, Allison supplemented the usual schedule of games against the likes of the Royal Navy and FA representative sides with matches against strong Tottenham, Arsenal and West Ham teams. It meant that the Light Blues suffered a run of defeats in the build-up to the Oxford game, but come the big day Cambridge were favoured to repeat their victory of the previous season.
Facing Allison in his first coaching appointment at Wembley was a former teammate, Malcolm Musgrove. The ex-West Ham winger was considered to have produced a team that was more deliberate in its approach to play than Cambridge, who had been well schooled in the art of turning defence swiftly into attack. Allison gave his team a final tune-up at White Hart Lane on the day before the game, and was rewarded by seeing them race into a two-goal lead inside six minutes. The coach’s Continental influence was obvious in the way he employed his number 9, Keith Sanderson, in a deep, scheming role and it was he who put two passes through for left-winger Clayton to fire in right-footed shots. Oxford pulled a goal back before the interval but a burst of three goals between the 70th and 80th minutes set up a final scoreline of 5–2.
Yet, greater than the joy of victory at Wembley, Allison’s most valuable gift from Cambridge was the calming atmosphere of the colleges, the respect for fellow human beings that he felt and witnessed and the eagerness of his students. All had combined to further rekindle his love for football. He now knew that coaching and management was the path he wanted his working life to take. His nightclub was being forgotten – ‘neglect born of boredom and something approaching distaste’ – and would soon have to do without him completely. Football was beckoning him more strongly than ever, and this time Allison was ready to give in completely to its call.