Pitch Black (17 page)

While the introduction of overt expressions of black culture had occurred in part because of increased numbers of black players into dressing rooms, wider changes in society and within youth culture were also having an impact. Dance music culture was having a huge impact on the way in which groups of young people were interacting with each other. The tribalism of youth sub-cultures was beginning to blur. Where there had previously been varied groups such as mods, punks, goths, casuals and other tribes, who would socialise separately, many young people within these groups now began to embrace dance culture. Within towns and cities, young people began to attend raves and clubs to dance. Whereas previously black kids and white kids, middle-class kids and working-class kids may have developed their own unique sub-cultures and may have expected to have limited opportunities for social interaction, dance culture broke down these barriers. Adding to this new
openness was the impact of the dance drug ecstasy, whose effects dovetailed perfectly with the new open culture of the movement. Amongst this generation, racism simply became unfashionable, something that belonged to a bygone age. Furthermore, groups of men who had regularly participated in hooligan and racist behaviour at football matches began to cease hostilities, albeit temporarily, as dance culture took hold, and many left their fighting and racist days behind them for ever. The government introduced the Criminal Justice Bill, which had wide-reaching implications for the rights of UK citizens. The Bill made changes to the right of silence, gave greater rights to police to take and maintain body samples, and broadened powers of ‘stop and search’. It also sought to specifically criminalise young people who wanted to do nothing more than have a good time and dance. The impact was that young people who were otherwise hard-working, well-meaning and harmless could be subject to arrest and imprisonment for dancing in a club, field or empty warehouse, and they immediately made the parallels with the experiences of those black young people who were at risk of being criminalised by discriminatory policing and application of the law.

While of course all young people weren’t necessarily involved in dance culture, the idea that racism was something from a bygone age affected much broader groups of young people, including footballers, so that young white people, particularly in large towns and cities, were far more familiar and comfortable with black culture due to wide social interaction. These wider societal changes were reflected in the relationships and culture of the dressing room. This new, more open, environment provided the conditions that would enable football to embrace change.

Michael Johnson was born in Nottingham to Jamaican parents, who raised him in a strict religious environment. His family were friends with the Anderson family and Johnson had met Viv on a few occasions when he was he was a child. Johnson had been spotted playing for Nottingham boys’ team and was invited to sign schoolboy forms for Notts County. His mother took some convincing and he was only allowed to train with County on the condition that he maintained a commitment to education and school work. Upon leaving school in 1989, he signed YTS forms and, while still a trainee, made his first-team debut in 1989 at the age of seventeen. At County, at the time, a trainee was selected to travel with the first team on away trips. They would run errands and get anything that was needed for first-team players. This might include obtaining liniment, tape, studs and laces and also taking orders and collecting the fish and chips after the game. He’d been asked take his boots with him, which he found strange, but had been told he would run out on the pitch during the warm-up in order to experience the atmosphere. During the trip he was summoned to the front of the coach. Feeling apprehensive and racking his brains to think of what he might have done wrong, he was asked by manager Neil Warnock if he was ready to play.

His debut could hardly have been more auspicious. County were away at Arsenal and the young Johnson was tasked with marking none other than Ian Wright. Wright was one of Johnson’s heroes. Two years previously, Johnson had been collecting Panini stickers of Ian Wright and here he was up against him, trying to prevent one of the hottest
properties in English football from continuing his rich vein of form.

During the game, Johnson’s centre-back partner suffered a serious injury, which necessitated a team re-shuffle. With a centre-back pairing of a seventeen-year-old debutant and a forward acting as a makeshift centre-half on the County side, Arsenal ran out comfortable 2–0 winners. Johnson had done well against Wright, however, and had kept him reasonably quiet, though, in a moment of class, Wright had twisted him inside and out to score Arsenal’s second.

After the game, Wright had sought out the still star-struck Johnson to give him some sage advice. He told him he was going to be a good young player and suggested he be more patient in his defending. Specifically, he should refrain from trying to nick the ball in front of his marker and stop getting into wrestling situations with his opponents. It was good advice that Johnson was to heed for the rest of his career.

Johnson made a few more appearances that season, in which County were relegated. He became a first-team regular the following season, in which County struggled but avoided a second successive relegation. However, the following season, they succumbed to relegation. At the start of season 1995/96, he received a call from Birmingham City manager Barry Fry, who told him they needed a centre-half and had been watching him. Ever the wheeler-dealer, Fry said he was certain he could get the twenty-year-old Johnson cheap in a tribunal. The Blues had a massive fan base and had just been promoted to the Championship. The club were also on the up and the atmosphere at County was subdued. Johnson jumped at the chance and was to play for Birmingham for the next nine years. During his time at City, they achieved promotion under Steve Bruce and got to a League Cup final
under Trevor Francis, which they lost to Liverpool. He still maintains close links with Birmingham.

Johnson’s reaction to the racist abuse he received differed to that of previous generations of black footballers. At a game at Millwall, he’d gone to retrieve the ball after it had gone out of play and had heard someone from the crowd shout the ‘N’ word at him. Looking round to see who had made the remark, he realised it had come from a young boy, who was with his father or grandfather. Both were laughing. Like previous generations of black footballers, he was advised that scoring or winning was the best answer to the racists, but for Johnson this wasn’t a solution as the thought process of the racist wouldn’t be challenged and the attention would be turned to the next black player.

When, in 1990, former Cabinet minister Norman Tebbit suggested that the ‘cricket test’ would be a good barometer of ethnic minorities’ Britishness, within black communities, the discussion confirmed for a second – and, by this time, increasingly third – generation of black people that they were in a no-win situation. Mainstream politicians and media continually questioned the patriotism of black people while simultaneously informing them that to be black and British was incompatible. Because Tebbit’s test sought to deny black people the opportunity to celebrate their heritage and also respect that of their parents, black people rejected Tebbit’s narrow, myopic vision of identity and actively set out to fail his test.

Former England striker and TV pundit Jimmy Greaves had picked up Tebbit’s central theme when he wrote an article in which he questioned John Barnes’s commitment to England, due to his Jamaican birth. At Liverpool, the team were set up to get the most out of their brightest star. Barnes would
receive the ball on twenty or thirty occasions per game and was given licence to roam across the front line. For England, Barnes’s talents were horribly wasted as he would receive the ball only six or seven times per game and was required to stick rigidly to England’s left side. He rarely produced a performance for England to rival those of his club. As a pundit and ex-England international, Greaves could have provided a degree of insight and analysis into the differences in performance between the John Barnes of Liverpool and that of England. Instead he seemed to play to the gallery and ingratiate the decidedly right-wing element of the England fan base by invoking Tebbit’s sentiments. In this atmosphere and in an insipid England performance against a weak San Marino side, Barnes was specifically singled out for booing and was racially abused by a section of England fans in a World Cup qualifier in February 1993.

The incident demonstrated that more needed to be done. Buoyed by the success of grassroots campaigns at Leeds and elsewhere, the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) and the Professional Footballers’ Association launched the ‘Let’s Kick Racism Out of Football’ campaign at the beginning of season 1993/94. The players’ organisation had taken a leading role in the initiative, and Garth Crooks and Brendon Batson as leading members had played an important role in highlighting issues of racism and putting the organisation at the forefront of the campaign for equality.

By 1997, the FA, the Premier League and the Football Foundation were funding the campaign and had ninety-one of the ninety-two professional clubs sign the Kick It Out charter. The exception was York City: its chairman, Douglas Craig, a former Conservative councillor, had decided that there was no need for such an initiative at Bootham
Crescent and was a vociferous opponent of the ‘Kick Racism Out of Football’ initiative. Craig’s objections reflected the anti-equality backlash that was a feature of all progressive campaigns to promote equality. It was not until April 2001 that the club agreed to sign up.

The launch of the campaign had come weeks after an important milestone had been achieved. On a June evening in Boston on a tour of the USA, Paul Ince became the first black player to captain the England side when he led his team to play against the host nation. Some eighteen months later, Ince was to be a bit-part player in an event that was to change the landscape of anti-racism in the English game forever. It involved a mercurial Frenchman and was to be played out not at Manchester United’s self-styled ‘Theatre of Dreams’ but at Selhurst Park, the south London home of Crystal Palace.

WE WILL NEVER
know how many footballers were lost to the game in the days before the authorities moved to impose sanctions for racist behaviour in the game, when issues of racism were scrutinised in far less detail than they are today. Amongst those who were lost, there may have been someone who was able to earn a decent living or someone else who could have developed into a superstar or perhaps become a British Mourinho or Guardiola. The case of Richie Moran is a case in point. It is unlikely Moran would have developed into a superstar but he could have been a club legend and might have earned a decent living from the game had it treated him with more dignity. Moran is an intelligent thinker, speaks several languages and is a passionate analyst of the game. He might have made an excellent manager but left the game because he was no longer prepared to put up with the racist attitudes of coaches and managers he worked with, and walked away before his professional career really got into its stride.

Moran was born in London in 1963 to Nigerian parents and adopted by Irish parents who named him Richard and whose surname he adopted. He never knew his biological father and was in contact with his biological mother until the age of fifteen. Inspired, like so many others of his generation, by the 1970 Brazil side and by West Ham’s Clyde Best, he wrote a letter to his school PE teacher asking to be part of the school football team. As a child, he’d gone to watch his local side, Millwall, and was excited at the prospect of going to see his team play for the first time. Listening to the racist abuse received by an opposition black player, he decided that Millwall was no longer his side.

Moving from multiracial south-east London to predominantly white Gosport in Hampshire to live with his adoptive parents, he was only one of two black kids in his school. He moved back to London at age ten to live with his biological mother and had trials for a representative London schoolboys’ side. When, two years later, his biological mother became too ill to care for him, he moved back to Hampshire to live with the Morans and played school and local Sunday league football in and around Gosport. Playing him as a winger or up front, his PE teacher had warned him to be careful as he wouldn’t like the cold. Upon leaving school, he found a job as a care worker, then discovered women and alcohol and so stopped playing altogether for four years until, at the age of twenty, he was invited to play for his work football team. From there he caught the attention of local non-league and semi-professional outfit Gosport Borough. His pace and goal-scoring prowess translated well at Borough, where he began to get attention from league clubs. He was offered a trial at Leeds United, but the weekend before he was due to go on trial, he received a kick in the kidneys
during a game, was coughing up blood and so couldn’t attend the trial. His chance at the big time appeared to have been dashed with one kick.

However, a pre-season game against Aston Villa earned him enough attention to get him an opportunity to play professional football. Borough were playing Villa in a preseason game and for non-league teams, these matches are like cup finals. It’s an opportunity for the semi-pros to put one over on their more illustrious counterparts and, perhaps, to play well enough to gain the attention of someone who’ll be able to offer them an opportunity to play higher up the league ladder. For top-flight outfits like Villa, the games are designed to provide them with an opportunity to gain some match fitness against a side who aren’t expected to provide stiff competition. The players are keen to get through the game without injury and generally want an easy ride before the serious business of the start of the league campaign begins. Therefore, the result and performance is of little importance for the big-name team. For the non-league club, the result and performance is everything.

Moran ran the Villa centre-back pairing ragged. Up against Derek Mountfield, an experienced defender who’d won a league title and Cup Winners’ Cup with Everton in 1985, and Martin Keown, an England international, he earned the award for Man of the Match. Keown, perhaps annoyed that he was forced to work harder than he’d intended, or just wanting to put Moran in his place, taunted him by telling him that he probably earned more in a week than Moran earned in a year and asking him how many England caps he had.

After this, Moran’s reputation began to grow and after another pre-season game against Leyton Orient, he was approached by an agent and offered a chance to play
professional football. Giving up a chance to study for a qualification as a social worker, and at the age of twenty-six, Moran signed for Fujita Kogyo in Japan.

Fujita were managed by Alan Gillett, who had been assistant to Dave Bassett when Bassett had been manager of Wimbledon and Sheffield United. Japanese football teams are traditionally sponsored by large corporations and, upon moving to Japan, Moran lived in a team dormitory. Some players were full-time professionals and others worked parttime for the company. He found the change in culture fascinating and managed to learn Japanese in only three months. He did, however, find racism widespread, endemic and crude, often being asked by teammates how it was he was able to speak their language given that he was black and therefore must be stupid. A statement by the then Prime Minister of Japan, explaining the reason for Japan’s economic dominance over the USA as being the intellectual and moral inferiority of blacks and Hispanics, further illustrated the kind of endemic racism that was prevalent within parts of Japanese society.

He found the standard of Japanese football better than he expected; in fact, very high. Due to his experience in non-league football, he was frustrated to pick up a lot of yellow cards for challenges that in Britain would have been regarded as innocuous, but in Japan were considered overly robust. In addition to the Japanese players, the team included midfielder Ian Griffiths, a Liverpudlian whom he got on well with, a Frenchman and some Argentinians. As Moran spoke Spanish, he could speak with the Argentinians, and he also spoke a little French so could converse with his French teammate.

His relationship with some of his Japanese teammates got steadily worse, however, and he would often come in to find his kit had been thrown in the bin. He clashed with Gillett,
who, as a disciple of Bassett, favoured a direct, long-ball approach, rather than Moran’s preference, a more considered, possession-based passing style. Besides this, the side were struggling in the league and were eventually relegated. After a season in the Japanese top flight, the club didn’t want to keep him and Moran didn’t want to stay, so he packed his bags and returned to England.

Upon his return home, he wrote a letter to all the clubs in the league, detailing his experience in non-league and Japanese professional football, and received an invitation to spend a few weeks at Leeds United on trial. At the time, Leeds had just won promotion to the First Division and he trained with a Leeds side that included Gary Speed, Vinnie Jones and Gordon Strachan. Gary McAllister had just been signed and Moran stayed at David Batty’s house during his time there. He considered them the nicest bunch of players he’d ever met.

At the end of his trial, Leeds weren’t prepared to offer him a contract, explaining they had players who could do a better job, so, undeterred, he then went for a trial at Norwich City, after which he moved on to Birmingham City, then of the Third Division. At his trial, Birmingham were impressed with his all-round game and particularly with his pace. Moran could run 100 metres in around ten seconds, which was very quick even for a decent club sprinter, and after a week or so of his trial he was offered a full-time contract.

So, at the age of twenty-seven, Moran made his football league debut in the Blues’ first home game of the season against Leyton Orient, coming on as substitute in the seventy-seventh minute and scoring in the eighty-eighth to seal a 3–1 victory for Birmingham. He’d made an auspicious start to his football league career.

During his time on trial at various clubs, Moran had
spoken to a number of black players and had conducted his own unofficial research into the grounds where he was likely to suffer the most racist abuse, in preparation for his career as a professional footballer. From his discussions, and in keeping with the experiences of earlier generations of black players, the same few clubs were consistently cited. These were Leeds, Newcastle, Chelsea, Millwall, West Ham and Portsmouth, and all had a fearsome reputation as the most unwelcoming places for a black player to play football.

Moran had anticipated that he would suffer racist abuse from opposing supporters, but the first time he was forced to confront racism as a professional footballer in England came from an unlikely source. A few weeks after making his debut for Birmingham, he was sent off for dissent after swearing at the referee in a heated reserve team game against Halifax Town. As he made his way to the dressing room he was followed by two members of the opposition coaching staff, who were abusing him, calling him a ‘black bastard’ and a ‘black cunt’. Cornered by the pair in the dressing room, he punched one of them on the chin, decking him in the process.

On his return to Birmingham, he was hauled up by the club; evidently, someone from Halifax had complained. Moran told the manager and his assistant exactly what had happened. Expecting support and a degree of sympathy, he was stunned at their reaction.

They were uninterested in the alleged abuse and informed him that he had to take it. They ordered him to write a letter of apology. Moran informed them that if the vilifier had followed him into the dressing room and told him he was a ‘crap player’ then he would be entitled
to his opinion; however, he wasn’t entitled to abuse him based on the colour of his skin, and he would not write the letter of apology. He also told the pair that if they were to abuse him in a similar way, he would mete out the same treatment to them. The club was outraged at Moran’s refusal and the PFA was contacted to check whether there were any grounds to have Moran sacked.

Within football, clubs often employ a siege mentality, which can be positive when it fosters support, bonding and a team ethos, but, negatively, it can mean that clubs will defend the indefensible. Moran had been followed into the dressing room and cornered by two opposition coaches. In the circumstances, Moran found himself in, he felt he was entitled to expect support from his manager. Instead, in the event, he was fined two weeks’ wages and ordered to train with the youth team. He truly felt that his manager had displayed no respect for him as a human being.

Meanwhile, Moran’s team, Birmingham City, had made a good start to the season and there was a degree of optimism that the team could win promotion, but results soon fell away and, before long, optimism around the club waned and the side was slipping down the table. In February 1991, the management team at the club were replaced.

Moran had been playing well and was scoring prolifically for the reserves. At the time, the first team were playing poorly and in particular were struggling in front of goal. Moran had expressed his frustration at his lack of first-team opportunities and this hadn’t been received warmly by the new manager, Lou Macari, who had a reputation as a disciplinarian. The Macari training methods were also a source of disquiet amongst some of the players. Macari had gained a degree of success in his managerial career by making his
sides extremely fit. However, his teams were functional rather than attractive and as his sides climbed up the leagues, opposition teams were able to match Macari’s sides for fitness and also outplay them. Macari had played for Celtic under the legendary Jock Stein and for Manchester United under managers like Tommy Docherty, who liked to play a passing game rather than the long-ball style that Macari favoured. Displaying deep mistrust in the ability and skills of footballers outside the top flight, he prioritised running in his training methods and the players rarely trained with a football. Amongst the squad he had some skilful players, like Dougie Bell, a Scottish midfielder, who was probably the most talented player at the club but was rarely given a chance in the first team.

One day, Moran was called into the manager’s office by Macari and his assistant Chic Bates and asked why he had dreadlocks. Surprised to find this was the reason for being summoned, he stated his hairstyle was ‘part of my African heritage’, at which Macari and Bates laughed at him. Moran informed Macari that he had insulted him and Macari responded by telling him he had to cut his hair as it wasn’t appropriate for a professional footballer. Moran’s adoptive father had been a keen fan of Macari’s former team, Celtic, and Moran had followed their fortunes closely since childhood. He reminded Macari of the terrible haircut the latter had sported during his playing days in the 1970s. He also told Macari that his suggestion that he cut his hair would be like asking Macari to take elocution lessons to rid himself of his Glaswegian accent. Macari threw him out of his office and he never played for the Blues again.

Moran had also clashed with both Mackay and Macari over playing styles. Macari’s direct approach was at odds
with Moran’s previous experience in non-league football. Moran was allowed to drift anywhere across the front line and generally express himself, and in his first game for Birmingham he had beaten a defender with a trick and had been admonished severely by Bobby Ferguson at half-time. In addition, Ferguson’s criticisms slowly chipped away at

Moran’s confidence, consistently being told he wasn’t any good and facing disbelief that he was a professional footballer. Marked out as a troublemaker, he was loaned out to Torquay United. He’d been there for a few days and was participating in a training session. At the end of the session, the players were told that there would be a five-a-side game, and, according to Moran, they were told that the ‘whites’ would play on one side and the ‘coons’ would play on the other side. This led to Moran turning his back on football.