The Nowhere Men (26 page)

Yet this was a question of faith, a challenge to the belief that something as ultimately insubstantial as a football club has significance beyond the binary certainties of the win–loss column. Watford was the club which nurtured me, personally and professionally. It was where I discovered the illicit thrill of bunking in via the allotments, to stand on a shale bank on the bend beside the Rookery End at Vicarage Road.

My heroes were not household names, and were quickly assimilated into the communities which once worshipped them. A season spent as a ballboy at Watford was a formative experience, an insight into the game’s splendour and cruelty. I began my career on the local newspaper, where I played darts with Watford’s owner, who wore a pink satin suit and shape-shifted personalities between Reginald Dwight and Elton Hercules John. Forgive the indulgence, but these are two teams which matter to him, to me, and a few fellow travellers:

Walker, Welbourne, Williams, Lugg, Lees, Walley, Scullion, Garbett, Endean, Packer, Owen. Sub Garvey

Sherwood, Bardsley, Price, Taylor, Terry, Sinnott, Callaghan, Johnston, Reilly, Jackett, Barnes. Sub Atkinson

The former lost 5–1 to Chelsea in the FA Cup semi-final in 1970, on a moonscape of a pitch at White Hart Lane. They had beaten Liverpool 1–0 in the previous round with a bellyflop of a diving header by Barry Endean, a centre forward who was bought for £50 and became a builder in his home town of Chester-le-Street. It was 14 years, two months, and five days before the latter team represented Watford in their first FA Cup final. I still cannot bring myself to watch a recording of the 2–0 defeat to Everton.

My alienation with the club, which once espoused family values and rallied around a ringmaster named Graham Taylor, was complete. A minority of Watford fans were concerned about a loss of identity under the new regime, but the majority were as spellbound as natives blinded by the sheen of a silver penny. They didn’t care about Greenhalgh, and the brutality with which he had been despatched.

I remembered him as a underwhelming forward in an underwhelming Watford team. He played 18 times, scored a solitary goal, and promptly ended a journeyman’s career, which had encompassed spells at Preston North End, Aston Villa, Leicester City, Huddersfield Town, Cambridge United, Bournemouth and Torquay United. ‘I wasn’t enjoying it,’ he recalled. ‘I was thirty, my legs were going, and I thought “what’s the point?” It was time to get a proper job.’

Greenhalgh worked as a sales rep, sourcing orders for biscuits, cheese and butter in North London, while he dabbled as a part-time coach. He was introduced to scouting at Everton, initially for petrol money, and eventually spent nine years as chief scout to Howard Kendall, with whom he had been an apprentice at Preston. He returned to Watford, to work under Graham Taylor, before his instinctive fears were realised.

‘I’d been at the club that long, I saw it coming. When the previous owner was looking to sell I thought: hang on, there could be trouble here. When it became clear the Pozzos were taking over I said to myself: that is it. Game over. They are bringing in an entirely different system. They’ll do the job their way, and let’s see how they come to terms with the mentality of the English game.

‘What worries me is that Watford has been seen as a very good example of how to run a football club for football reasons. Now there is a completely different business model. That ignores, totally, the club’s stature in the community, and its history. You walk into these scenarios with the best of intentions, but they treat you as a piece of paper. It is a tick box mentality. I have come through the old school. I have a certain feeling for the game. These people want a different club.’

If Greenhalgh was reconciled to his fate, others were prepared to take up the cudgels on his behalf. Simmonds was unequivocal: ‘I have had a fantastic relationship with the Pozzos in the past. In fact we nearly took Yohan Mollo, a French winger, from Granada last year. But I had an agent, highly connected to them, ring me yesterday. I told him I was not the only one unhappy with the way Watford have conducted themselves. People are talking about not helping them.’

Solidarity, in the shadow of the sack, had an obvious relevance and resonance. Simmonds was acutely aware of his longevity at Fulham; only three other chief scouts in the Premier League – Robbie Cooke at Everton, Steve Rowley at Arsenal and Jim Lawlor at Manchester United – had longer service records. It was no coincidence that each worked for dynastic managers. Simmonds accepted his relative vulnerability, and harboured no illusions:

‘It’ll be a black bin liner job. It might be next week, next month or next year, but these things usually end one day. The only inevitabilities of life as a scout are birth, death, taxes and the occasional bin liner to clear your desk. As long as you accept that you will be allright. What do they say about the drowning man? The third time he goes down is the most peaceful.

‘The more I live this life the more I see the parallel with the foot soldiers, the poor bloody infantry. They are acceptable casualties. It is the sort of job which chooses you. You tell yourself it’ll only be a month or so, until that coaching job comes up, but you blink and you’ve spent years in the game. I’ll always remember that line, by Paul Newman, in the film
The Road to Perdition
: “This is the life we have chosen.” That’s us.’

It was a great line, but the quote was slightly inaccurate. Newman’s character, Irish mob boss John Rooney, actually said: ‘This is the life we chose, the life we lead. And there is only one guarantee: none of us will see Heaven.’

You will be able to spot the football scouts, if you reach the celestial gates. To merge Hollywood images, they will be the angels with dirty faces.

THERE IS A
profound poignancy about a footballer dying before his time. The cause may be medically mundane, but premature loss is the stuff of legend. It confers an intimate form of immortality; the stricken player leaves a legacy of images in a multi-media age, but continues to exist, most powerfully, in the imagination of those who watched, and wished they could be him. At Arsenal, one word is sufficient to stir the soul.

Rocky.

David Rocastle was just 33 when he passed away on 31 March 2001, a month after being diagnosed with non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma, an aggressive form of cancer which attacks the immune system. He died on the morning of a North London derby against Tottenham at Highbury. Most fans heard the news just before kick-off. Despite the tribal tensions of the fixture, the minute’s silence was broken only by the unmistakable sound of weeping.

Rocastle had Everyman qualities. His audacity allowed him to chip Peter Schmeichel from 25 yards at Old Trafford. He was born a generation too early: his pace and technique, strength and nimbleness, were suited to the modern game. He won two League titles and a League Cup for Arsenal, but is loved for who he was, rather than what he achieved. He was precious because he shared so readily the deep joy he derived from his game. His name is still chanted at the Emirates, where he is one of 40 club legends depicted, arm in arm, in groups of four on huge murals which circle the stadium’s exterior. His image is reproduced on countless tee-shirts, printed on basement presses.

He played 14 times for England. The shirt he wore on his debut, a 1–0 win against Denmark on 14 September 1988, is framed, and dominates the neat, narrow dining room of an unprepossessing pre-war house in North London. An angular grass stain, faded to a faint lime-coloured smear but unmistakable across the bottom left-hand corner, proves it has not been washed. The inscription above the Three Lions badge, in capital letters, appears to have been written in black felt tip pen. ‘To Terry,’ it reads. ‘Top Scout’.

Terry Murphy lingers. Silence stimulates the senses. I’m aware of a faint aroma of furniture polish, evidently applied to a small oval table, and a glass-fronted cabinet containing other items of football memorabilia. Murphy, a courtly, gracious man in his 73rd year, is lost in momentary contemplation. ‘I told David to keep it, or give it to his family,’ he says, quietly, ‘but he wanted me to have it.’ He leads me into the kitchen, where two cups are ready on coasters beside a modern, tubular kettle, without breaking the spell.

We progress through to the lounge, where a symmetrical arrangement of biscuits, Digestives, Ginger Nuts, Garibaldis and Rich Tea, await on a plate on the coffee table, alongside a bowl of mint imperials. Memories well up, like a child’s tears. Murphy remembers the first time he saw Rocastle play, on an astroturf pitch on Market Road, where Holloway, the school at which he was a PE teacher, were hosting Roger Manwood Secondary from Brockley Rise in South London. The visiting boy was 13, and the scout sensed, immediately, that he was exceptional:

‘David was the difference between the sides. He was so comfortable on the ball. He had tricks; even as a youngster he would do his step-overs and drag-backs. He was a talent, but it wasn’t just me who knew how good he would be. There were other clubs around. I quickly spoke to his mother and brother. This is when it comes down to selling your club to the family. It wasn’t hard in those days to sell Arsenal as a club, because you could talk about good training facilities, good coaches, good players to play with. You could talk about opportunity, and point to the first team. At times we had eight players in the first team who had come through the youth squad.

‘David was easy to talk to. Some youngsters won’t come close to you at all, they’re distant. But David was very friendly, talkative. We just got on well. Sometimes, if your characters are compatible, it helps with a relationship. I don’t try to butter anybody up. I always believe in speaking the truth and whatever I would say to David I would say to other people because that’s the way I am. Players react differently to conversations, some players listen, some players don’t.’

Rocastle listened, learned, and never forgot. His bond with Murphy sustained him throughout a career hampered by injury, and was renewed on his death bed.

‘When David was in hospital, no one was allowed to see him. I didn’t realise that when I went up there, but he said, “No, I want to see him.” This was two days before he passed away. It’s very difficult to say how special the relationship was and why it was special. It was just the personality that he was. We seemed to click together.

‘You like to feel that Arsenal is a family. Once the boys are there you don’t just say “right, we’ve got the player, that’s it, forget him” and go on to someone else. I would always maintain contact with the parents and the players themselves. I can go back twenty or thirty years and I’m still in contact with them. But David was special. Yes, very special.’

He paused, and refocused. A celebratory DVD, a compilation of Rocastle’s greatest moments, was stacked neatly beside the television, to the left of the deep, high-backed peach-coloured armchair which enveloped him. The house contained fragments of a football life. Two brass cannons, symbols of Arsenal’s heritage, faced one another in the grate. The walls were studded with small photographs, taken in moments of private exultation.

A dressing-room scene at Anfield, where the League title was won with incomparable drama in 1989, captured Rocastle and Paul Merson wide-eyed, as if in awe at what they had just done. Another photograph shows the stern features of Martin Keown softened by satisfaction. The glint of sun, off the Premier League trophy, illuminates his angular face. Rocastle and Keown were his boys, his men.

Murphy joined Arsenal in 1973, along with Terry Burton, who had also supervised PE at Holloway, the school which produced Charlie George. Holloway flourished under an unconsidered visionary named Alan Wright, who brought in contemporary players, such as Arsenal goalkeeper Bob Wilson and Wales captain Mike England, to conduct coaching sessions.

Wright’s staff, which also included Peter Shreeves, who would go on to manage Tottenham, taught football, cricket and badminton. The communal goal was to follow another Holloway alumnus, Tommy Coleman, on to the coaching staff at Highbury. They took the school motto – ‘Aspire. Achieve. Succeed’ – seriously.

‘We were coming up to the summer holidays and Terry Burton suggested writing to the Arsenal, to ask if we could go and watch one of their training sessions. He got a reply from Bertie Mee, because he had been there as a youngster. We were watching a match involving some thirteen-year-olds with the then chief scout, Gordon Clarke. Suddenly he blows the whistle, stops the game, and out of the blue he says, “Right, you talk to that team, you talk to that team.” We’d only gone in to watch, so we were in at the deep end. We said a few words, blah, blah blah. This went on about half a dozen times, with Gordon stopping the match, and telling us to go in and have a chat.

‘There’s luck in everything in life, isn’t there? We were in the right place at the right time. The first team training had finished and Bertie Mee came over with Bobby Campbell, his coach. We must have been doing something right. About a week later Terry got a phone call, asking if we’d like to do a bit of evening training at Arsenal. We took sessions twice a week. That was really the start of it all. Terry and I went on a full badge course together, he passed and I didn’t.

‘Terry went from strength to strength as a coach. Arsenal had a fella called Ernie Collett, who was chief scout at the time. He’d been at the club man and boy. He got me going out to watch games, and I eventually took over some of the schoolboy duties from him. Unfortunately, he got run over and killed by a fire engine in Finsbury Park. He was a lovely bloke, but always rushing around. That’s how I came into scouting. Strange, but true.’

Murphy and Burton, who became first team coach under Don Howe and eventually returned to Arsenal in August 2012 to oversee the development group and reserve team, embody social history. Each came from a culture of street football, in which they played games like three-and-in and Wembley. It was a time of grazed-knee innocence, when footballs were plastic, gossamer-thin, and required rescue from railway lines, or back gardens guarded by mongrels who raged with Pavlovian excitement whenever an intruder appeared. They played other street games, such as Tin Tan Tommy, a form of hide and seek which involved throwing a can, and hopscotch.