Catch A Falling Star (19 page)

My first impressions of
Preston
were positive. Bobby Charlton had just retired as a player and this was his first stint as a manager. In one of my first meetings with him he encouraged me. He said: “With your left foot I want you to shoot more for us. Sometimes it might go high, wide and handsome but we want to shoot more anyway.”

In a way the onus was more on me to start attacks. They used to give it to me earlier and try to get me to create things for them. The alertness of my brain, the quickness of my feet was the advantage I had over these players. It gave me a few more seconds on the ball than the others because I knew how to find space.

Having recovered from injury, my first game for
Preston
saw me score a hat-trick in a victory over West Bromwich Albion at
Deepdale
. Initially I did very well at
Preston
– although there wasn’t much difference in skill level between North End and some of the top teams, the general approach play wasn’t as clever and I knew how to find space that extra yard of space.

Meanwhile, back at City, Malcolm Allison left

Meantime we were going very well indeed at
Deepdale
 but always at the back of my mind was the unfinished business from

I wrote a letter to Peter Swales at City. He just replied: “I can’t do anything about it. I wasn’t at the club when the decision had been made.” So then I asked our manager if he would help me out. Bobby Charlton’s response shook me to the core: “You shouldn’t be in the game for the money,” which I thought was a bit rich coming from him.
Especially after he had just enjoyed a lucrative testimonial season at Old Trafford.

Don’t get me wrong, the money would have been nice but in the years afterwards it became a mental block – a nightmare which contributed to me losing my self-esteem. He couldn’t see that the testimonial game was important to me because it was about recognition rather than cash.

When I heard that from Charlton, of all people, well, I was a broken man. I’d been stabbed in the back by my employers old and new. There was nobody left who was willing to help me.

That meeting with Charlton killed me and I never kicked a ball for him again. So for the last ten weeks of that season I trained with the fifteen and sixteen-year-olds in the park near the ground along with big Matt Woods who used to play for
Blackburn
and now coaches the young players at
Deepdale
. So now, having been a leading
goalscorer
that season I wasn’t even playing in the reserves. I just left the ground on a Friday and reported back on the Monday to train with the juniors.
That was soul destroying for me and I couldn’t wait to leave at the end of the season.

Alan Ball senior was manager of
Preston
for a while as well. There were a few of us commuting to
Lancashire
from south
Manchester
: David Sadler,
Nobby
Stiles and myself. I didn’t find Ball a particularly inspirational manager. Sometimes we’d meet at the Swan near the M56 where the team coach would pick us up for an away match. Bally Senior would be there looking like he’d been in the pub till
6am
. Sometimes he’d have odd socks on! A typical comment would be: “I was in a great fight last night.” The man was simply bizarre.

Nevertheless there was the odd light-hearted moment.
Nobby
Stiles signed for
Preston
while I was there. He was a great lad – you could have a good laugh with him. Off the pitch
Nobby
wore his familiar big glasses but played in contact lenses. Sometimes I’d hide his lenses just before a game and he’d go mad – he was as blind as a bat without them. I used to let him stew until about ten minutes before kick off. When we went on to the pitch I’d say to him: “Here they are
Nobby
!”

Another time we played
Millwall
at the Den in front of their notorious fans. We’d been playing for fifteen minutes or so when we won a corner. So I put the ball on the corner spot, turned round to walk back and a meat pie hit me right in the chest. I picked it off my shirt, took a bite out of it and threw it back at them. The
Millwall
fans really appreciated that.

When City played
Preston
 in the first division a few seasons ago I was invited by the home club to be the ‘guest of honour’ because I had played for both teams. The day turned out to be an extremely pleasant afternoon. We enjoyed a sumptuous meal, I met some old friends and former team-mates and at half time I was asked to go on the pitch. That is where the fun started. First of all I was introduced to the
Preston
fans and I gave them a nice wave. They gave me a good ovation in return.

Next I was introduced to the City supporters and they went absolutely ballistic. Then I clenched my fist and thrust my arms in the air. The roof nearly came off the City end. That was the day Jon
Macken
was playing for
Preston
and scored from the halfway line. When City scored I leapt up in the directors’ box and went absolutely berserk, which is strange when you think about it, because I was celebrating a goal for the opposition while the home team were providing the hospitality… It’s even more surprising because I get treated with much more respect by
Preston
’s board than I ever have at City.

As an example of their hospitality, I get a letter from their Players’ Association every year. George Ross, whom I played with during my time at
Deepdale
, is the main organiser there and he always keeps me informed of what’s going on and it seems like I was only there five minutes. If only City paid some of their ex-players the same amount of attention…

*

Humiliated and ostracised at
Deepdale
I dropped down to fourth division football at
Spotland
.
Rochdale
gave me an opportunity to play first team football, yet on the whole it was a miserable experience. By now I was just drifting along and to be honest I didn’t want to be there – my mind wasn’t on the job, my heart wasn’t in it.

I went to
Rochdale
and the pre-season there was totally alien to anything I’d ever experienced before. All we did was to go down to the local park and train, and have a five-a-side. By this time my attitude was not really right but I decided to just struggle on as best as I could. After all, I could still score goals.

In my first game we won 1-0 at
Shrewsbury
and I scored the winner. The second game was a cup-tie at Marine near
Liverpool
and I scored the winner again. It was a real battle on their ground, they desperately wanted to beat a professional club and with just ten minutes left and the score 0-0 we got a free kick just outside their box. I swerved it around the wall for a sweet winner.

This wasn’t the football I was used to though. It was simply kick and
rush
, boot it and hope for the best, I derived no satisfaction from playing in the fourth division. By this time I was sending more letters to Peter Swales pleading with him to get involved. I’d been promised a game and I was distraught that it wasn’t happening. Not only was my heart not in it at
Rochdale
, my spirit was so crushed that my heart wasn’t in football at all.

When Best and Marsh dropped down a league they ended up at Fulham where they had all the glamour of
London
and received plenty of media attention. Whereas I’d be playing in front of one man and his dog and when I went across to take a throw-in I could hear the bus rattling by on the street outside the ground. I left at the end of that season with one week’s wages, £60. I was out of football with nowhere to go and nothing to do. I was lost.

9. Rock Bottom

To lose one’s self-esteem, as I have done, is a very sad state of affairs. It’s a desperate time in anybody’s life because you tend to just give up and become a misery, which in turn makes everyone else miserable and only alienates your loved ones further. If you’re not careful this becomes a vicious circle with increasing misery turning your family against you… and sadly this is exactly what happened to me.

I finished my football career when I left
Rochdale
for the last time one Friday afternoon with a week’s wages, about £60. I drove home and sat in my lounge for about two hours, wondering what the hell I was going to do. I had a car on HP, a mortgage, a wife and three children to feed. I was the provider who could no longer provide. I had no savings whatsoever and my wife didn’t work. I didn’t see it coming. It was a calamity waiting to happen.

For the first time in my life I had to sign on the dole which was a new experience for me and I felt even more degraded. Most people have signed on at some point in their lives but I had only recently
  been
hitting the heights with City and now I had to rely on handouts.

I used to dread queuing up at the dole office every Thursday morning to sign on but I had to get used to it. From being a professional footballer for sixteen years I suddenly found myself on the scrapheap. My self-esteem took a pounding. I was Neil Young: I won medals, trophies, I went in exclusive nightclubs, I drank champagne and hung out with the rich and famous – I could count
Besty
and Franny as mates but now I could feel their eyes burning into me in that queue. Nobody could believe that I was in the same boat as them.

There was no one to advise players in those days. There were certainly no
agents,
they didn’t really come to the fore until the early 90s. I remember City signing Keith
Curle
because the manager at the time had never met him until the day he signed. I think later he went to Wolves and they put him on more money than he was on at City, so in
Curle’s
eyes that made Wolves a bigger club! Then there was Geoff Thomas who was going to “Walk up the M6 to play for City” until Wolves offered a certain amount and he went to
Molineux
. Those are two examples of agents getting involved and bumping up transfer fees. That sickens me because there’s no loyalty there. I came from a different era. We were loyal to the club. Nowadays they’re loyal to their wage packet.

Some of today’s players do very well out of the game. It’s just the way it is but if, like me, you were one of the unfortunate ones then you can find yourself struggling to cope with it all. 

You have friends when you’re playing football. However when you are not playing those friends tend to disappear. A lot of players in the 70s packed up the game and then wondered what on earth to do next.

At City, Colin Bell opened a restaurant and Francis Lee had a paper business he had inherited from his father and turned into an even larger concern but they were the exceptions to the rule. In those days footballers tended to pick up their wages on a Friday and that was that. Footballers were not business minded.

Nor was my predicament anything I could discuss with Margaret, my first wife. I had no training for a situation that was moving far too quickly for me. Nevertheless after six weeks moping about and doing very little, I snapped out of my apathy. Bills had to be paid. The mortgage was still there, the children needed feeding. So I hired a van and did removals for four years with Margaret’s father until my marriage got so bad that divorce was inevitable. This meant, of course, that my partnership with her father couldn’t continue either. There were a lot of overheads with that job: petrol for one and insurance for another and there was not much left at the end of the day.