Pitch Black (13 page)

His performances led to a call-up to the England U-21 side and, later, the full England squad. On a tour of South America, he scored the famous wonder goal against Brazil, officially recognised as the sixth-greatest England goal of all time. As he picked up the ball on the left-hand side he had no particular idea as to what he wanted to do. He beat one man, looked to pass, with nothing on, he beat another and got to the box looking for a shot on goal. Tony Woodcock got in his path, so he dragged the ball away and then carried on going and eventually rounded the keeper to leave himself with a tap-in. The NF claimed it didn’t count.

NF members had travelled on the tour with the official
England party, along with FA officials and journalists. They aimed racist taunts at Barnes and Mark Chamberlain, the father of future England international Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. Fellow players, FA officials and journalists did nothing to challenge the racists, too embarrassed to do anything. As Barnes said of the journalists, ‘Some of those people who are the first to write about and condemn racism were on that plane at the time and did nothing.’

After his first season at Liverpool, Barnes had won the league and the team were runners-up in the FA Cup to Wimbledon, where John Fashanu and the Crazy Gang, supplemented by a cameo from Laurie Cunningham, who came on as sub, outwitted the Liverpool side. Barnes won the PFA Player of the Year and the Football Writers’ Player of the Year, Thierry Henry being the only other black player to win the two awards in the same season.

Therefore, for the black community in Liverpool, what Barnes possessed that Marshall and Gayle didn’t was genuine superstardom. Like Regis and Batson before him, he was prepared to build a relationship between himself and the community. Whether it was attendance at community events, award ceremonies for football tournaments or end-of-season prizes, he was generous with his time, not only within Toxteth and black community events but also in other areas of the city. In a community with few positive male role models and years of terrace racism that had caused a fracture between the club and the community, Barnes had not only gone a long way to healing that relationship but had also re-invigorated grassroots football within the community.

As for his England career, it rarely hit the heights of that brilliant night at the Maracana, the spiritual home of Brazilian football. Barnes could have won over 100 caps, but was
a victim of the ‘control-freak’ attitude of English football. At Liverpool, he was given licence to drift from the left-hand side and take up more central areas as the play and the game dictated. For England, under a succession of managers, he was forced to stay out wide, hug the touchline and track back. Barnes cites Glenn Hoddle and Chris Waddle as two other England players who were similarly stifled on England duty and, while this is true, it was Barnes whose England performances came under the most intense criticism, the implication being that his Jamaican birth impacted upon his commitment to the national cause. Barnes was racially abused by England fans on more than one occasion when playing for the national side.

Barnes broke down barriers for both club and country and was a trailblazer for his side. His impact on the black community in Liverpool and beyond was palpable, as Liverpool attracted black supporters from well beyond Merseyside’s borders. After playing for Liverpool, he would go on to play for Newcastle and Charlton and he became the first black manager in Scottish football when he managed Celtic.

THE LATE
1980
S
and early 1990s began to see a radical change in the experiences of black footballers. In England, only a minority of clubs had no black professionals regularly turning out for the team. This gave the racists something of a dilemma. How could they racially abuse a black player on the opposing team when they had black players in their own side? The signing and integration into the team of a black player was often the catalyst for the end of terrace racism at most clubs.

The situation in Scotland was somewhat different. While football south of the border began slowly to come round to the idea that black footballers were here to stay, questions of racism had never really been as big an issue in the Scottish game. Scotland had had its share of both home-grown and foreign black footballers, but had been more concerned with issues of religious sectarianism. Historically, Dundee United, Hibs and, of course, Celtic had been formed by Irish Catholic communities, and while sectarianism had somewhat diminished over the course of the twentieth century in both Dundee and Edinburgh, in Glasgow it remained strong and virulent.

Graeme Souness had been appointed as player manager of Rangers in April 1986 and set about trying to reclaim
the club’s ascendancy over its great rivals. Capitalising on the banning of English clubs in Europe after the Heysel Stadium disaster, Souness had bought a number of England international footballers and sold them the lure of European football. The mighty Rangers hadn’t won the league since 1978, while, during that period, Celtic had won it four times and the upstarts of Aberdeen and Dundee United had won it three times between them, but by the end of his first season in charge, Souness had brought the championship back to Ibrox. The signing of English players certainly caused debate in Scottish football. Scotland’s best players had a tradition of moving south to England, as Souness himself had done, and here he was reversing the trend. Rangers were back on top, with a new manager, new (English) players and once again ready to take their place at the head of Scottish football. As for Celtic, they had been taken by surprise by the new money that had come into Rangers and found themselves unable to compete financially. They had been wrong-footed by the boldness of Souness’s signings and his exploitation of the ban on English clubs playing in European competition. They had not only lost the league but had also been defeated by Rangers in the League Cup. Rangers had all the bragging rights; Celtic carried renewed resentment. A history of sectarianism, arch rivalry, new money and a changing of the guard. Their fierce antagonism had intensified and, if it was possible, had become even more embittered. Into this combustible environment stepped Mark Everton Walters, a 23-year-old black kid from Birmingham.

Walters’s parents had arrived in Birmingham in the late 1950s and had settled in Handsworth, where he was born. His heroes were Pelé and Cyrille Regis, whom he regularly saw round the streets and restaurants in and around
Handsworth along with the two other Three Degrees. Fellow Handsworth resident Bob Hazell was another of Walters’s heroes. At his school, Handsworth Primary, he played his first organised football. He went on to play for his secondary school, Holte High School, and later played Sunday league for Dunlop Terriers, a team considered as a nursery team for Aston Villa and whose manager was a scout for the club. Bob Hazell himself had played for the Terriers in previous years, as had other players like Brendan Ormsby, who would later go on to play for Villa.

It was through this connection that Walters came to the attention of the club and began to train regularly with them. As a twelve-year-old, he had attended a game at Villa where Regis had been racially abused by Villa fans and by the Holte End in particular, which had singled him out for especially vicious treatment.

Walters was an outstanding schoolboy footballer, playing for Aston boys, Birmingham boys, West Midlands boys and an England schoolboys side that included future Rangers teammate Trevor Steven. His talent was such that, while still at school, he played in an FA Youth Cup tie for Villa at Millwall against players aged eighteen. He was to suffer racist abuse for the first time as a player when he was spat at by Millwall fans as he emerged from the tunnel at the start of the game. He was fifteen years old.

Playing in and around Birmingham with a group of other talented young black footballers, he would regularly discuss with his friends the frequency with which they would suffer racism and how they might respond to it. Seeking to debunk stereotypes about the inability of black players to play in the cold, Walters made a conscious decision to always wear short-sleeved shirts when he played, a policy he practised throughout
his long career. However, he and the other black boys with whom he played football considered racism an integral part of the game, both at grassroots level and in the professional set-up, as through televised coverage of football they regularly saw and heard the abuse of black players. They had several conversations as to whether they had the capacity to put up with the abuse that came with being a black footballer and a few of his contemporaries who had the talent to make a successful career in the game decided they were not prepared to play in those circumstances. For Walters, he had decided that the dream of playing professional football was too irresistible to allow racism to impede his progression into the professional ranks and upon leaving school he signed Youth Training Scheme (YTS) forms.

He made his debut as a seventeen-year-old in April 1982 against Leeds United, weeks before the greatest night in the history of the club. A three-month injury lay-off had delayed his progress into the first team for his debut and he therefore hadn’t played enough time to feature in the squad that was to contest the final of the European Cup in Rotterdam.

League title-winning Villa manager Ron Saunders had resigned over a contractual dispute with the side in the quarter-finals of the European Cup. Saunders’s assistant Tony Barton was appointed as manager, but the senior players ruled over the dressing room and effectively picked the side. Older players on the periphery of the squad got to go to Rotterdam while younger guys like Walters stayed at home as Villa won the trophy with a scrappy goal against the mighty Bayern Munich. The greatest moment in Villa’s history was the first big disappointment of Walters’s career, as he missed out on European glory.

During the following season, the older pros demanded
improved terms on their contracts, but chairman Doug Ellis wasn’t prepared to pay them any more money, so the team began to break up. Too many young players came into the side and, just six years after winning the European Cup, Villa were relegated.

During this period, Walters had emerged as the side’s brightest talent and was regularly watched by his brother, who attended his games, but Walters was never keen on allowing his mother to attend, as he sought to protect her from the racism directed at him and other black players.

Villa weren’t buying quality players and the club lacked ambition, so when they were relegated he decided to leave his boyhood club. Everton had just won the league title and had agreed a fee and personal terms with Walters and he was set to sign. Rangers made a last-minute offer, however, and invited him up to Glasgow for talks. Walters hadn’t realised just how big Rangers were. Seeing the size of the stadium, impressed with the club’s ambition and seduced by the prospect of once again playing in Europe, he signed for Rangers and became the first black player of the modern era to play in the Scottish top flight since Gil Heron, the father of poet and musician Gil Scott Heron, had played for Celtic.

Walters’s shock signing from Aston Villa to Rangers on New Year’s Eve 1987 was met with unprecedented levels of racism within the Scottish game. He made his debut a few days later, on 2 January 1988, and could hardly have chosen a more hostile baptism. In the incendiary atmosphere of an Old Firm derby at Parkhead, Walters was subjected to staggering behaviour. Hundreds of bananas were showered on him, and Celtic fans dressed in monkey suits rained down verbal abuse. While he could have anticipated a hostile reception from Celtic supporters, the behaviour of Rangers fans was bad enough
for the club to take the unprecedented step of banning some season ticket holders for racially abusing their own player.

To their credit, Celtic immediately condemned the actions of their own supporters. Match reports in the Scottish press, meanwhile, barely acknowledged the incidents, and the Scottish FA’s silence on the matter was deafening.

Two weeks later, at Tynecastle, the home of Hearts, the racist abuse gained momentum and Walters was struck with a banana. Hearts chairman Wallace Mercer condemned the banana throwing. Rangers operations executive Alistair Hood demanded the Scottish Football Association act. SFA president David Will finally commented, stating that all possible action would be taken to stamp out racism and expressing the hope that ‘sensible supporters will let the minority know they shouldn’t be so stupid in the future’. The Scottish football authorities had never with any seriousness attempted to tackle the thorny subject of sectarianism. Prior to Souness, Rangers had stuck rigidly to its policy of never signing a Catholic. Sectarian chanting and clear discriminatory practices were accepted, seemingly as normal practice, within the Scottish game generally and amongst the Old Firm particularly. Even when sectarianism had manifested itself as violence on the terraces, which occasionally spilled onto the pitch, the usual fines and protestations from the authorities followed, but no real attempt was made to tackle the cancerous sectarianism that characterised the relationship between the country’s two biggest clubs.

The Scottish media, both press and television, with few exceptions, adopted the same attitude as the SFA. There was never a concerted attempt on their part to challenge these deep-rooted sectarian attitudes.

No wonder, therefore, that the authorities were so dilatory
in their response to racism. They could hardly take club and fans to task over racism when they’d repeatedly done so little about sectarianism. In Scotland’s biggest city, home to its two biggest clubs, there would be an expectation that its derby would be of a particularly intense nature. Adding the combustible material of sectarianism made the poisonous atmosphere generated at Old Firm games the most intense in European football.

BBC Scotland reporter Archie Macpherson subsequently said of Walters’s debut game:

Macpherson’s comments are illuminating on two points. Firstly, he acknowledges the behaviour as infinitely more sinister than the usual winding-up of an opposing player and, secondly, he understands the power of inaction of those with the means to do something about it. The fact that Walters’s treatment passed without action or comment created an environment in which fans felt they could act with impunity. After the game at Tynecastle, Macpherson stated in his report on BBC Scotland, while holding a banana to the camera, that he’d felt ‘ashamed to be Scottish’.

Walters’s introduction to the Scottish game brought into sharp focus the critical role of the authorities in responding to racism in the game. The lack of leadership and inertia on
the part of the SFA, as illustrated by the abuse suffered by Mark Walters, remains largely intact today.

Notwithstanding the attitudes of a section of the Rangers support, Walters was warmly welcomed within the club and settled well. Leaving home for the first time enabled him to grow up a little and the success of the club gave him a winning mentality. He was not particularly well regarded by the Scottish press, but generally he didn’t read the papers.

Eighteen months after Walters’s debut, Paul Elliott was signed by Celtic from Italian side Pisa. Walters and Elliott were close friends. Elliott had been signed by Villa and when Elliott had moved from London to Birmingham, Walters had taken him under his wing, shown him around Birmingham and developed a firm friendship with the Londoner. Elliott proved to be a success in Scotland, winning the Scottish Player of the Year Award as well as trophies and other hon-ours with Celtic.

Walters went on to triumph at Rangers, winning three Scottish titles and two League Cups, before moving with Souness to Liverpool in June 1991. He won his only England cap in a 1–0 England victory over New Zealand in Auckland after an outstanding season with Rangers.

The impact of Walters and Elliott forced Scottish football to confront the issue of racism, something they had hitherto had little experience of. Like their English counterparts, the response of the Scottish FA was to do virtually nothing. In the next few years they would get an opportunity to take a firm stand and demonstrate strong leadership in combatting racism in the Scottish game. It would be interesting to see how they would respond.