Another part of my childhood gone . . .

Well, that's an absolutely gut punch on a Christmas morning.

For a few years in the late 1970s, John Robertson was one of the best footballers in the world. An absolute legend.

In the words of the late Brian Clough: "What is the point of giving you the ball when there is a genius on the other wing?" (Question to Martin O'Neill about John Robertson, 1979.)

Against Malmo, 1979 European Cup Final.

And it should also be stated for the record that he was front and centre on the greatest football song of all time. ('World in Motion' and 'Three Lions' can get fucked.)

On Days Like These: My Life in Football by Martin O'Neill (Macmillan 2022)

 

Within a few days I’m in residence above McKay’s Café, in a room – essentially a converted attic – with Seamus and another ten guys, much older than us, who rise much earlier than we do and arrive back at their digs much later than we do. They spend the night chatting about their respective jobs and at the weekend, if they don’t go back home, spend the early hours of the morning detailing their conquests of some hours before. Nottingham, I’m told early on, is a city with five girls to every fellow, so the chances of them getting hitched with someone, at least for the evening, are, I surmise, reasonably decent. Even so, I’m not convinced that their bawdy stories – told to each other at four o’clock on a Sunday morning – ring completely true. Some of these men have, in all honesty, not been introduced to a bar of soap in a week. So if these stories have a semblance of truth then Seamus and I feel that we must have a chance ourselves of finding a girlfriend, because we have not only washed, but also have a little aftershave to hand.

I have been at the club less than twenty-four hours. Bill Anderson, as he tends to do when under some stress, reaches for his breast pocket and produces an outsize handkerchief to wipe some beads of sweat from his brow. If my affair at the Henry Road landlord’s house is causing him to perspire, heaven knows what Saturday at White Hart Lane might do to him.

Regardless, he brings me into the reserve team dressing room and introduces me to the players. Most of these lads are my age, perhaps a year or eighteen months older, one or two are a little younger. In fact, John Robertson, almost a complete year younger than me, came on as a substitute last Saturday against Liverpool and may well start the game this coming weekend against Tottenham Hotspur.

Robertson is an interesting character. A young Scotsman from the outskirts of Glasgow, he has been at the club since he was fifteen years old. He is a very talented centre midfield player, with two really good feet, and can spray passes all over the pitch. Robertson is extremely well thought of at the club and a player of much promise. He is also extremely popular in this dressing room, despite the fact that he seems to have plenty to say for himself. All this I glean from my first fifteen minutes in the changing room on 21 October 1971. The introductions finished, Bill departs and I put on my Nottingham Forest training gear, with the number 10 sewn into the shirt and tracksuit. This will be my training number for the next decade. I am acutely self-conscious of the large birthmark over my right shoulder, and keep my back to the wall when disrobing. But they will spot it eventually after training when we jump into the communal bath adjacent to the dressing room. I suppose I will have to endure the almost endless ribbing I received from the Distillery players, who seemed to find continuous mirth at my expense.

One Step Ahead by Duncan McKenzie (Souvenir Press 1978)

 

A Misspent Youth

Sonic players need coaxing along, some need a kick up the backside to get the best out of them. I needed both kinds of treatment in my callow days and I got what I needed. Born a Methodist, I graduated from schoolboy football playing for a team run by a Roman Catholic priest and another team which operated in a local Sunday pub league, and I don’t suppose you can have greater contrasts than that.

My Soccer travels have taken me a long way since the days when I was kicking a ball around for my junior-school team at Old Clee, Grimsby, but I like to think that f still get as much of a kick out of the game now as I did then, although my views have changed somewhat over the years, and especially in the past 18 months or so. Some people might say that I’ve grown up, at last; others would argue that I have found my right niche in the professional game since I joined Everton and came under the influence of manager Gordon Lee. Me? - I feel that I have learned as I have gone along, that everyone I have encountered in Soccer has taught me something, and that my own native intelligence has taken me to a point where I have matured.

In my early days in the professional game, I saw some youngsters who needed coaxing being given the kicking treatment - verbally, if not physically and the result was that they failed to respond. I’m still convinced that they probably had as much ability as myself, had they been handled in the right way, psychologically, but what happened was that they became afraid. They were afraid of doing things wrong.

With Clough, By Taylor by Peter Taylor (Biteback Publishing 1980)

 

Harry’s message about being the boss, finding the best players and standing no nonsense was so simple  that it went unheeded, but not by me. I was Storer’s pupil. He taught me what to look for in a player and I disagreed only with his emphasis on defence and overemphasis on physical courage and bodily contact. Joe Mercer, when manager of Sheffield United, phoned Harry to protest after a bruising visit by Derby.

‘I don’t know why you bothered to bring a ball,’ said Joe. ‘Two of your players didn’t need one. They kicked us, instead.’

‘Which two?’ snapped Harry, who had missed the match to go scouting. ‘Give me their names.’

Joe, always the nice guy, demurred. ‘Oh, no. I don’t wish to get them into trouble.’

‘Give me their names!’

Joe considered it. ‘Only if you promise not to punish them.’

‘I’ll do nothing to them,’ cried Harry. ‘I’m going to crucify the other nine!’

Harry admired skilful footballers provided they also shaped like prospective VCs. I can still hear him musing, ‘Yes, I agree that lad can play – but can he play when some big, angry bloke is trying to stop him?’ He scouted for Everton as an old man when he was out of management and they still remember receiving from him the shortest possible report on a player. It was one word in capitals  across the reporting form: COWARD.

I was fascinated by Storer and would go out of my way after leaving Coventry to consult the oracle, often in just a few minutes of conversation on railway platforms as our teams waited for Saturday night trains – but I disliked his prejudice against cowards and told him so. I prefer to sign brave footballers but have always seen plenty of scope for those who are less foolhardy; indeed, the word coward is one that I never apply to players. Harry remained adamant, though, that a footballer was useless if he shrank from challenges and the risk of injury. He said, ‘There’s never been a player who enjoyed being kicked but some endure it better than others. They are my kind of player.'

I Believe In Miracles: The Remarkable Story of Brian Clough’s European Cup-winning Team by Daniel Taylor (Headline 2015)

The only player Clough doted on was the podgy little Scot he once described as ‘the Picasso of our game’. When Clough walked into Forest’s dressing room for the first time, John Robertson had a chip-fat grin, a slapdash attitude and a packet of Polos strategically hidden in his back pocket to help cover up his fag-breath. Robertson’s career was drifting and it took a “while for the chemistry between him and Clough to work. Yet he has never forgotten Clough’s first day and the instinctive feeling that something better might be on the way. It wasn’t anything Clough said that resonated. It was the aura. It was the moment the dressing-room door almost flew off its hinges. It was the way, before uttering a single word, that in one swift movement Clough was already taking off his jacket and flinging it at a wall peg, as if he had been there years. Clough being Clough, it landed plum on the hook. ‘It was like a whirlwind coming in,’ Robertson says, with the awe still apparent in his voice. ‘I’d never seen anyone in my life with so much charisma. All I could think was: “Jesus, this guy means business.” Right from the very first minute.

Steak Diana Ross II: Further Diaries of a Football Nobody by David McVay (Reid Publishing 2017)

 

During my first two years as a sports journalist for the Nottingham Evening Post I managed to do something for Notts County that not even six years of blood, sweat and toil as a player could achieve. I guided them to two successive relegations.

It was not entirely my own fault. The players and management did their bit to transform Notts from a tabletopping First Division side (two games into the 1983-84 season) into a team humbled 4-0 by Brentford in front of 3,857 fans at Meadow Lane in the Football League's third tier (March 4, 1986).

In that respect, I have always been indebted to Larry Lloyd during his brief but unsuccessful tenure at Meadow Lane. It was a time when many of my former team-mates were still active in the pro game, for Notts or elsewhere, so it was not uncommon for people to inquire about my current status as a journalist and why any semblance of a playing career was now at an end so relatively soon.

If Larry was in earshot, and strangely enough he seemed almost ubiquitous when that question was posed, before I could even muster a mumble of a lamentable excuse the answer would be provided by the current Notts manager: "Lack of ability. That's right isn't it David?"

Well, given Larry's glittering prizes gained primarily with Nottingham Forest, it was difficult to argue, and given his expanding girth and frame back then, it was also unwise.

It's probably one of the reasons for Steak Diana Ross II, some sort of purgative endeavour to remind myself that I could at least kick a football in a straight line. Now and again.

Oddly and sad to report, the more I re-read some of the notes I made during my last two seasons with the Magpies, the more I could see that Larry's pithy barb contained more than an element of truth.

I Believe In Miracles (2015)

Provided You Don't Kiss Me: 20 Years with Brian Clough by Duncan Hamilton (Harper Perennial 2007)

He wasn't satisfied with the eulogies written about Taylor. Not because each one did not describe him generously, but because in Clough's eyes none did Taylor sufficient justice or apportioned enough credit for the work he had done in the partnership. It was as if he'd become the guardian of Taylor's posthumous reputation.

'Your obit on my mate was crap, utter crap,' he yelled at me, his face flushed, the voice rising in protest. 'You're all the same, you journalists - crap. Every paper missed the point, the real story. No one showed him the way he was. No one managed to give him the send-off he deserved. He was funny - you know that. He was intelligent - you know that too. He had a football brain - everybody could see it. And he was my mate. And we had some great times. And now . . .'

Clough slumped into a chair. He seemed to be stringing together in his mind all the bright days he had shared with Taylor.

'What a waste,' he said after a long pause. 'All those years when we could have been sitting together having a beer. All those years when he could have come, as an honoured guest, to watch us play. All those years without the laughter he was capable of providing. No one - absolutely no one - has made me laugh like him. I always missed that, and now . . . he's gone. I can hear his voice . . . telling joke after joke. But all we did at the end was slag one another off. Oh, fuck.' He shook his head slowly, his eyes staring at the floor.

My Father and other Working-Class Football Heroes by Gary Imlach (Yellow Jersey Press 2005)

Later, I called around and discovered that two other members of Scotland’s 1958 World Cup Squad had been in the same situation as my father. Archie Roberston of Clyde was dead; Hibs’ Eddie Turnbull had never bothered pursuing the SFA for a cap. I was inclined to agree with Eddie’s stoic acceptance of the rules as the rules, and the players simply victims of the period in which they’d played. Then I spoke to Tommy Docherty, who had gone on to manage the national team in the early ’70s, and heard the story of how he’d intervened to help get a cap for Bob Wilson. Bob, he told me, had played for Scotland but never against the home countries.
What? The Scottish Football Association, with its fear of floodgates and its respect for tradition, had been dishing out retrospective caps on a selective basis? It was only Tommy Docherty’s famous assertion that the best football managers are liars that kept me from calling Hampden Park there and then. Instead, I contacted Bob Wilson. He cautiously declared himself unaware of any intervention by Tommy Docherty on his behalf; but otherwise confirmed the story, which apart from the outcome sounded exactly like my father's. He’d written periodically to the SFA over the course of two decades with no success. It was only after Craig Brown took over as national manager that he’d got his cap. jim Farry had also been helpful.
I mentioned this discovery to Eddie Turnbull. ‘The English keeper? He got a cap? You’re kidding’ He was scarcely less incredulous by the time I’d outlined the sequence of events to him. ‘That’s ridiculous. That takes some believing, that Wilson got a cap.’
To many people, Bob Wilson - born in Chesterfield and a key member of Arsenal’s double-winning side of 1970-71 - was an English keeper and a very good one. In fact, he was perfectly well qualified to play for Scotland through his parents and turned out twice for the national team: in a European Championship qualifier against Portugal and a friendly against Holland, both in late 1971. His cap, inscribed with the initials P and H, finally arrived in 1996. That made it two years after Jim Farry had first written to my father, all sympathy and tied-hands, to say that it simply wasn’t possible, and four years before the SFA - following ‘some research into the circumstances’ - had turned him down for a second time.
The implication was clear: a well-known, well connected television presenter who could call on the Scotland manager to lobby on his behalf was worth an international cap in the eyes of the SFA; an older name frm a less spotlit era, sitting at his dining-room table with a ballpoint pen and some Basildon Bond, could be safely fobbed off with the official line.