Pitch Black (9 page)

The price Williams’s father had to pay in order to watch his son play the game he loved for the team he loved was to
adopt the ‘just got to put up with it’ approach to attacks on his pride and dignity. The natural desire to defend his child had to be suppressed by Williams senior, who was forced to keep quiet and bite his tongue in order to help his son’s career and allow him to play for his beloved City … and love the club he did. As a child he had gone to watch both City and United, but gradually developed an affinity with City, which was cemented by their 1969 FA Cup final win. For Williams, playing for City – his boyhood club, who were at the heart of his local community – was a source of immense pride. Like many parents of that generation, his mother and father had no real understanding of football and therefore didn’t put any pressure on him, in stark contrast to the experiences of many young players in today’s academies.

As a young black man growing up in 1970s and ’80s Britain, Williams considered racism to be a normal part of his existence, yet on occasions like his experience in front of 10,000 baying, vitriolic south Londoners at Millwall, even he could be taken aback by its sheer intensity. He could never be described as a militant or as having a chip on his shoulder, but his analysis of racism’s subtle intricacies and motivations is crystal clear: ‘There’s a lot of jealousy, as well, you know, a black kid from Moss Side, doing well, earning a lot of money and having nice cars and living well. There’s still a lot of people resent that.’

Alex Williams was never anything other than a model professional in his approach to playing and training, his community work, and the way he dealt with the end of his career. Suffering from a disc problem that affected his right leg, he slowly realised that he was doing himself and his fellow professionals no favours by carrying on. The end came inauspiciously in front of a crowd of 2,500 while out on loan at Port
Vale. He’d gone there after an operation to cure the problem, because Port Vale had a reputation for its expertise in offering the kind of rehabilitation he was going to require if he was to get back to full fitness. Operating at around 20 per cent of his usual fitness level, he’d decided during the game that it was to be the end. The next day, he went to see Port Vale’s manager, John Rudge, and informed him that he was retiring. He was twenty-four. Had his career not been cruelly cut short by injury at such a young age, he may well have gone on to be the England no. 1 for a generation.

Williams returned to the club shortly after his retirement to take up community, coaching, charitable and ambassadorial roles at the club, and, after the club secretary, he is the second longest-serving employee at City, with his association with the club enduring for over thirty-five years. He and that first group of Moss Siders paved the way for an astonishing array of black footballing talent.

While Ron Atkinson’s West Bromwich Albion were lauded as pioneers for their inclusion of the Three Degrees, City’s record then and now is quietly impressive. In addition to Williams and his contemporaries at the club, the list of young black players who began their professional careers by way of City’s youth system is certainly impressive. Micah Richards, Daniel Sturridge, Shaun Wright-Phillips, Bradley Wright-Phillips, Dickson Etuhu, Nedum Onuoha, Jeff Whitley and Tyrone Mears all graduated through City’s academy and went on to win full or under-21 international caps for their country. In addition, Kelvin Etuhu, Adie Mike, Leon Mike, Jason Beckford, Darren Beckford and Shay Logan all went on to have careers in the game.

Dave Bennett knew he would need to toughen up not long into his Manchester City debut at Maine Road against Everton on 23 September 1979. Bennett had picked up the ball and tricked his way past an Everton midfielder. Comprehensively beaten, his opponent scythed Bennett down and, as he helped him up, he warned, ‘Don’t do that again, you black bastard.’

His antagonist had inadvertently done Bennett a favour by providing that crude welcome to First Division football, because he knew that if he was to survive, he would have to find a way of dealing with this kind of abuse. Bennett was the first of a crop of talented black players, plucked from the local area and groomed within the club’s youth, set up to be given a chance of wearing the famous Sky Blue. He wasn’t about to let any of them down.

Bennett’s dad had worked on the railways and after work one day was confronted by a pub regular, who’d heard Bennett senior’s son had just signed for City. He’d insulted and ridiculed Bennett’s father, incredulous that a black player could be good enough to play for the club. ‘Your son’s the sweeper,’ he suggested. The exchange was nasty and, later, when his father related the story, it made Bennett angry. If any further motivation was needed to become a first-team player, this was it.

Dave Bennett had been brought up in Longsight, an ethnically diverse area near Moss Side and part of Manchester City’s catchment area, and had grown up as a City fan. In Manchester at the time, there existed a great deal of racial tension, and Bennett and his friends had to take particular care to avoid the skinheads who roamed around parts of Manchester looking for likely targets. Being tough, like being polite or crossing the road, was something that, as a black kid, he had to learn in order to survive.

He was academically bright and managed to gain a place at Burnage Grammar School, and of course he played for the school team and became its stand-out performer. Playing as a striker, he was selected to play for Manchester boys’ team and, upon leaving school, enrolled at college to improve his grades. While at college, Bennett played for open-age teams on Saturdays and Sundays, and as a fifteen-year-old did well enough to attract the attention of scouts. He first had a trial for Oldham Athletic but then got a chance to have a trial at City. Pitched in against City’s youth side, he helped himself to a hat-trick in front of the watching City manager, Tony Book, and was offered apprentice forms the next day. However, it was discovered that Bennett was too young and had to wait a few months before he was able to sign as an apprentice.

He found that the coaches at City were brilliant, being encouraging and patient with both him and Roger Palmer, with whom he formed a striking duo. Bennett and Palmer attracted a great deal of attention, not only because the two black kids on the team played as central strikers – a novelty that no doubt in itself would have stunned some opposition defences and coaches – but also because between them they scored a lot of goals. Bennett was quick and wiry, Palmer also had pace and was brave, and they performed brilliantly as the main goal getters for a very talented City youth side.

Bennett and Palmer had an acute understanding of the fact that how they performed would have an impact on other black kids coming through the City youth system. Bennett’s younger brother Gary was also on City’s books, as well as Clive Wilson and Alex Williams, so they knew the challenges of carrying other black kids with them and breaking down a few barriers along the way.

Acutely aware of what black players supposedly could and couldn’t do, Bennett played in the wind, the rain and the snow, scored a lot of goals, led City to the Central League title and gradually did well enough to break into the first team.

At the time Bennett broke into City’s first team, there were very few black players in the First Division. Viv Anderson was still in the Second Division with Forest and Bennett was one of the few black players to play regularly in the top flight. As he became an established striker, Bennett had suggested that he and his dad go down to the pub, find the punter who had said Bennett was good enough only to sweep up, and have a word with him. Wisely, Bennett senior told him to forget it, but a few weeks later, the pub sceptic admitted to Bennett’s father that his son could play.

However, in spite of his elevated status as a footballer, every so often the racist attitudes that existed in Manchester at the time reminded him that he was another local black kid. In the 1970s and 1980s, the nightlife in a town or city could be deeply segregated. On one hand, most clubs didn’t play black music, or, where they did, they gravitated towards the more commercial end. Secondly, each town or city had clubs that didn’t admit black people. The excuse would usually be some kind of violation of the dress code or the age policy, which, depending on the answer you gave or the ID you had, could be eighteen, twenty-one or twenty-five. You might also be told there was a private party, or that the club was full and you couldn’t wait till enough people left, or that you wouldn’t like it, or that you just couldn’t come in. This would often happen even when black people were working on the door or in the DJ booth.

After a Manchester derby, Bennett and his teammate
Nicky Reid went to the new Britannia nightclub in Manchester. As they stood outside, Sammy McIlroy and Jimmy Nicholl, two of their opponents from the earlier derby game, were just leaving. They asked how the club was and when McIlroy and Nicholl said it was OK, they proceeded to go in. Both Reid and Bennett were well turned out, with suits and ties, but Bennett was denied entry and Reid was permitted to go inside.

A local journalist witnessed the event and asked Bennett for a comment, which he declined to give. Nevertheless, a story about the incident appeared in the local paper on the eve of an important cup semi-final. He really didn’t need the publicity. A few months later, Alex Williams chose the reception room attached to the club as the venue for his wedding, and later on in the evening they decided to go into the club. The same doormen who’d refused entry to Bennett now not only had to admit him due to the adverse publicity but also had to admit Williams, Wilson and others.

Bennett was also approached to play in Jimmy Hill’s ill-fated tour of South Africa. He was offered a great deal of money to participate, but was urged not to go by his father, who proceeded to give him a lesson about apartheid and, in the process, save Bennett’s legacy and standing as a pioneer amongst Manchester’s black community.

THE SUMMER OF
1984 had seen the domineering West Indies humiliate England 5–0 in the famous ‘Blackwash’ tour. The West Indies had set the tone early in the first Test. England debutant and opener Andy Lloyd had just made ten when his bat got nowhere near a short-pitched delivery from Malcolm Marshall. It crashed into the helmet of the hapless Lloyd, who was forced to retire from the innings and would suffer from blurred vision for a week, never to return to the England Test side. The pace and aggression of the West Indies’ bowling attack complemented the fearsome batting of the West Indies opening and middle order. The tail proved to be dogged and determined and the team as a whole were ruthless in the field. England were beaten into submission, from the opening session of the first Test to pretty much the final session of the last. Football was Britain’s national game, but cricket was the game of the English establishment, which the overwhelming majority of people of Caribbean heritage felt alienated from and by. Dominating, rather than just
beating, England represented a way of asserting some pride in the face of hostility. The British Nationality Act had been introduced in 1981 and under its wide-ranging provisions, the automatic right of people born in the UK to acquire British citizenship was removed, as was the automatic right of women married to British citizens. Its introduction left nearly 21,000 people of Indian ancestry effectively stateless as British Overseas citizens, while white South Africans continued as citizens because of direct ancestry. No amount of official denials from government ministers could repudiate the singularly discriminatory nature of the Act.

With discrimination now enshrined in law, the new decade had not improved the fortunes of black communities. A 1982 survey found that 53 per cent of British Caribbeans and 51 per cent of British Asians said things had got worse for them over the previous five years. While the economic recession was the main reason for this, 41 per cent of Caribbeans and 49 per cent of Asians cited racism as a factor.

Disturbances of the kind that blighted British inner cities in the early and mid-1980s followed a pattern so familiar as to be almost predictable. A spate of over-zealous and heavy-handed policing would occur, which for the police and community alike would be considered as almost routine. For police, this would involve the deployment of additional officers and resources into a specific area, perhaps coupled with a specific initiative to target street crime or motoring offences. For communities and for individuals, whether black or white, young or old, anger and resentment brewed as mainly (though not exclusively) young black people would be stopped and searched on the way to work, school or while going about their daily business. So when a routine arrest, stop and search or motoring offence check occurred,
it would provoke a response that took the police by surprise. This routine activity might include the gathering of a small group to protest, or resistance to an arrest. The police would respond with a display of force, which would add fuel to an already simmering fire. What couldn’t be predicted in these circumstances was the date, location or time, but inevitably and inexorably, all hell was guaranteed to break loose. Such was the pattern that saw Handsworth and nearby Lozells explode in September 1985. A routine check for a motoring offence, followed by a routine attempted arrest, followed by the deployment of more officers, resulted in a pitched battle at a Lozells café between local youth and police. Eleven people had been injured in the café disturbances and, like a dam that had been unplugged, there was no turning back. When, inevitably, the looters moved in, sensing a quick pay day, all bets were off. The horrific violence that ensued left shops burned and led to the death of two brothers who, seeking to protect their livelihood, stayed in the post office they owned and died of smoke inhalation in their burning building.

When the dust settled, ex-West Midlands Police Chief Constable Geoffrey Dear identified five factors – massive social deprivation, inadequate housing, unsuccessful education, mass unemployment and racial discrimination – as the root causes, all of which were hugely significant factors, but he conveniently omitted the elephant-in-the-room issue of policing. James Hazell, brother of Bob, then signed to Reading, was one of those arrested and later found guilty of offences associated with the disturbances.

Two weeks later, armed police officers searching for one Michael Groce in connection with a firearms offence raided his mother’s home in Brixton and shot and paralysed her.
Groce wasn’t there. An angry crowd gathered at her home, marched to the local police station and demanded disciplinary action be taken against the officers involved. At this point, an opportunity to diffuse a fraught situation might have averted the inevitable, but a few skirmishes followed and then fifty officers in riot gear attempted to disperse the crowd. As sure as night follows day, pitched battles ensued, which were to continue over the next two days. The apology for the shooting of Cherry Groce came twenty-nine years later and three years after she had died.

A week later, on 5 October, a few miles north of Brixton on the Broadwater Farm Estate in Tottenham, in close proximity to White Hart Lane, four officers raided the home of Floyd Jarrett, who had been arrested over a car tax disc misdemeanour and then, seemingly randomly, charged and later acquitted on theft and assault charges. During the raid, Jarret’s mother Cynthia collapsed and died from heart failure. At the subsequent inquest, Jarret’s daughter claimed her mother had been pushed by a police officer.

A demonstration at the local police station took place the following day, with small skirmishes between police and local youths. Riot police attempted to clear the streets with baton charges, which was followed by pitched battles, scores of arrests and injuries, and extensive damage to property. Subsequently, an officer, Keith Blakelock, was murdered and three local residents were arrested, ‘fitted-up’, imprisoned and later acquitted on appeal for his murder.

From a policing perspective, the riots on ‘the Farm’ had been a disaster. The police had failed to act on intelligence, had conducted the shoddiest of investigations, had neglected to deploy officers appropriately, hadn’t provided adequate protection for their officers or adequately secured a crime
scene. A widow and mother’s family had been left without loved ones or justice. A community was left stigmatised, many criminalised and families traumatised. It could all so easily have been avoided.

In the four years since the 1981 disturbances, little had changed. The factors that had been identified in Lord Scarman’s inquiry into the causes of the 1981 disturbances were a mirror image of those that prevailed in 1985. There had been a temporary lull as a result of the 1981 events, as police, keen not to reignite tension and under scrutiny from local police committees and communities, ceased out-and-out hostilities. But, slowly and surely, familiar policing patterns had been re-established. Traditional police views of black communities as filled with aggressive, criminally inclined, drug-selling, volatile inhabitants, worthy only of heavy-handed methods of policing and control, had created a self-fulfilling prophecy. For black communities, however, policing was one of only a number of issues that impacted negatively. Unemployment, poor education and a general lack of confidence that the future could be better than that enjoyed by their struggling parents all added to the sense of frustration and alienation. The experience of family and friends who were well qualified but who were stuck in employment opportunities that were significantly below what should be expected, further eroded confidence.

Sport in general and football in particular had become one of the few areas where young black males could achieve success, but there was a problem. Many parents within black communities bemoaned how their children had been encouraged and supported to succeed at sport, often at the expense of their academic studies. The stereotypes that abounded about black athletic prowess proved hard to shake off
– and remain so to this day. The all-black 1984 Olympic 100 metre final reaffirmed these stereotypes, based as they are on ‘common-sense’ understanding and observations, but feeding into widely held notions that are part of everyday discourse and ideas about race.

The prevailing notion of black players as fast, skilful, athletic and strong, but lacking the cerebral qualities necessary to play in central midfield, where dictating the play and taking creative responsibility is crucial, made it inevitable that these positions would be dominated by white players. These ideas had stunted the progress of a succession of black players. Players like Paul Davis, who refused to fit the mould, were forced to challenge these assumptions more times than they cared to remember. Davis wasn’t quick or brawny, but he had a brain par excellence. In a career for the Gunners that spanned the late 1970s to the mid-1990s he was very often the silk in an Arsenal side that was chock-full of steel.

Davis was born in Dulwich in south London to Jamaican parents who arrived in the area in the mid-1950s. His parents left two older brothers and an older sister with relatives in Jamaica, a not uncommon occurrence amongst those migrating from the Caribbean and elsewhere. Eventually, Davis grew up in a household with his mother and younger sister. Eschewing local sides Crystal Palace, Fulham and Chelsea, he had been seduced by Arsenal’s double winning side of 1971 and grew up with the team firmly fixed in his affections. In school, he excelled at sport and even at the age of nine was singled out for his drive and commitment. He captained the school at football, cricket and the little-known skittleball. His mother wanted Davis to go into commerce or banking, but as far as he was concerned his future lay in football; he
did his school work, but never really applied himself to it fully. He represented south London boys, and was invited to train with Fulham, which he did. When an Arsenal scout invited him to train with them, he dropped Fulham like a hot potato and, ignoring his mother’s concerns about how he was going to travel to north London, he began training with Arsenal twice a week.

As captain of his school team, Davis had also excelled at cricket. A left-handed opener or no. 3 batsman and a fast medium bowler, he’d had London-wide representative trials for football and cricket on the same day. He wisely chose football, further opening the generation gap between the cricket-loving first generation and the football-mad second generation of Caribbeans.

The process of selecting young players for professional contracts is far from an exact science. Every year, thousands of boys have their dreams shattered on the whim of a tiny number of individuals. Technical proficiency, combined with likeability, attitude, potential, physicality and a range of other intangible factors, not to mention a hunch, a feeling, are tallied up each year to select boys for a professional contract. In this case, five individuals held the fate of Paul Davis, the Arsenal midfielder for the next decade, in their hands. They were concerned about Davis’s size. He was small and slight and they wondered if he had the strength to forge a career in the game. By a margin of three to two, Davis was offered an apprenticeship. By small margins are football careers made and lost.

Davis made his debut aged just seventeen and a half against bitter rivals Spurs. He played well, giving an assured performance in a 2–1 victory, but opportunities after that were few and far between. Part way through the following
season, and frustrated at the lack of first-team opportunities, he went to see manager Terry Neill to tell him he wanted more games and playing time. First-team chances remained scarce, however, given that he had the experienced England internationals Brian Talbot and Graham Rix, and Arsenal’s creative fulcrum Liam Brady ahead of him in the pecking order. Brady’s transfer to Italian giants Juventus gave Davis his chance and he was to remain a regular member of the side.

He took time to win over the fans – after all, filling Brady’s boots was always likely to be a thankless task, but slowly he won them over and they began to value his qualities. Although strength wasn’t his forte, he wasn’t afraid to ‘put his foot in’, as it’s known in football parlance, and as an elegant, creative midfielder, his calming presence became quietly appreciated by fans and management alike. The Arsenal side of the 1980s was respected rather than admired. The foundation of the side, particularly under George Graham, was defensive solidity, hard work and strong running rather than attacking prowess. During this period, they became famous for their ability to win 1–0. They would get an early goal and grind out a result, or somehow conjure a late goal after a solid but unspectacular, somewhat vapid performance. In that side, Davis stood out. Whereas his teammates often appeared to treat the ball with contempt, Davis treated it with respect, if not outright love. Where his teammates were happy to be rid of it, Davis would demand it. He wanted to dictate the play and was a composed, reassuring presence in a team full of abrasive characters who would aggressively contest every refereeing decision and take any opportunity to make the game tough, physical and attritional.

In that side, Davis appeared to be something of an outsider. He was quiet, except when demanding the ball, and both his short and long passing were exceptional, all carried out by that sweet left foot. In a team that scurried, hurried and harried, he always seemed to be playing in slow motion. It’s unlikely the side could have been so successful without his presence. He was radically different from the stereotypical image of black players, given his lack of pace, which was more than compensated for by his speed of thought. He was one of the few black players to be given the responsibility of being the creative focus for their side. Of his generation, only Luton’s Ricky Hill played a similar role in a top-flight side. Others like Vince Hilaire, who had all the qualities to play there, were frustrated by managers who couldn’t see beyond their blackness, pigeon-holing them into narrow, suffocating roles.