Pitch Black (21 page)

Arsenal had paid a club record fee of £2.5 million in September 1991 for Wright and he quickly set about becoming an Arsenal legend by ending his first season as top scorer in the English First Division. He was Arsenal's top scorer for six seasons in a row, breaking Arsenal's post-war goal-scoring record with a hat-trick against Bolton in September 1997, and helped Arsenal to achieve the double later that season. Wright also won thirty-three England caps.

On 31 March 2001, David Rocastle, one of the crop of players who had helped to catch the imagination of London's black communities, passed away. Rocastle, who had won two league championships and a League Cup with the Gunners, died of cancer. He had played fourteen times for England and later played for Leeds United, Manchester City, Chelsea, Norwich City and Hull City, with a stint in Malaysian football. His illness had forced his retirement in
1999 and he was just thirty-three years of age at the time of his death.

On 9 November 2001, an unsung black football hero retired from playing league football at the age of forty-two. Grimsby-born Tony Ford made 931 league appearances, not only the highest number of appearances of any black footballer in the English league, but also the appearance record for any outfield player. He was also the first outfield player to play over 1,000 first-team games. Ford had made his debut for Grimsby Town as a sixteen-year-old in 1975 and had gone on to win two caps for the England B team. He received an MBE in 2000.

Like Ford, a number of his generation of black footballers had retired and were considering alternative careers, and for the first time the issues around the lack of opportunities for coaching and management were being voiced. Ford himself had played for far longer than could reasonably have been envisaged, but since the mid-1990s, there had been a steady stream of black players retiring from the game to become the first generation of coaches and managers. The 2001/02 season proved to be something of a seminal year for black managers. The tiny trickle of black managers in the game became a relative flood with the appointment of three in the space of six months. In November 2001, Carlton Palmer took over at Stockport County after replacing the sacked Andy Kilner; in December, former Coventry, West Brom, Aston Villa and Sheffield Wednesday striker Garry Thompson became manager of Bristol Rovers for the second time; and in May 2002, Keith Alexander was appointed as caretaker manager at Lincoln City.

One of the most surprising managerial appointments in Scottish football history took place in June 1999 when John
Barnes was appointed as manager of Celtic. Barnes was brought to the club by the newly appointed Director of Football, his former Liverpool manager Kenny Dalglish. Preferring someone with previous affiliation to the club, the Celtic board were sceptical of an outsider, but Dalglish got his way.

Celtic had appointed non-Scottish managers before, but Barnes was the first Englishman, and he had no managerial experience. Grave doubts were expressed by press, players and other managers in interviews and commentaries. Rangers had assembled a fine squad on good salaries. Celtic's players, on far less money than their Ibrox counterparts, were demanding new and improved terms at the time of Barnes's arrival.

At the beginning of the 1999/2000 season, Celtic started well, winning eleven of their first twelve matches. The problem was, however, that Rangers had a perfect record. Going into the first Old Firm derby at Ibrox, Celtic were four points behind their rivals. Preparation for the Sunday game had not gone well. Talismanic striker Henrik Larsson had suffered a horrendous fracture to his leg in a freak accident during a European tie in Lyon. In spite of conceding an early goal, Celtic were 2–1 up as half-time approached, but in stoppage time, captain Paul Lambert committed a reckless challenge, conceded a penalty, broke his jaw and lost three teeth into the bargain.

From the resulting penalty, Rangers equalised and eventually ran out 4–2 winners to go seven points clear. Celtic managed to stay in touch with the leaders throughout winter and into the New Year. Ideally needing a win against a rampant Rangers, they achieved a 1–1 draw against their arch-rivals in January, which saw Barnes awarded the Manager of the Month award.

Drawn at home in the Scottish Cup against lowly Inverness Caledonian Thistle, a club that had only been formed in 1994, Celtic found themselves a goal down at half-time after a turgid, dispirited performance. In dispute with the club over a new contract, striker Mark Viduka was singled out by Barnes's assistant Eric Black during the half-time interval for an insipid performance. A row ensued and Viduka refused to go out for the second half – as serious a breach of discipline as is possible. Ian Wright was instructed to warm up to replace Viduka, and the team emerged from the dressing room clearly affected by the events at half-time. They managed to fashion themselves an equaliser before Caley Thistle took control of the game and deservedly ran out 3–1 winners, providing one of Scottish football's biggest shocks and the biggest achievement in the Highland club's short history.

The next day, Barnes was sacked. Unable to bridge the financial gap between his club and Rangers, and a victim of the factional politics at the head of the club, black Britain's most decorated footballer was ultimately defeated by an environment where being second in a two-horse race wasn't enough. Given the size of the club and the difficulty of the task, his sacking wasn't particularly surprising. There had been intense speculation about this from the moment he was appointed to the job. Surprisingly, however, it would be nine years before he was offered another job in club football.

Barnes is philosophical about his experience in management. He believes that of course any manager who loses will be sacked, irrespective of race or nationality, but that black managers are given less time to fail. He cites Stan Collymore's assertion when discussing likely contenders for the managerial job at Wolves in 2013 that tough, combative Glaswegian Alex Rae would make the right impression in
the dressing room as an example of British football's perception of what or who would make an ideal manager. As black managers don't fit the ideal, when they lose games and their capability as a manager is questioned, they are given less time.

At the end of the 2001/02 season, England participated in the 2002 World Cup and went into the tournament with a degree of optimism about the youthful squad that Sven-Göran Eriksson, England's first foreign manager, had assembled. The squad included David James and Trevor Sinclair of West Ham, Rio Ferdinand of Leeds, Arsenal's Sol Campbell, and Ashley Cole and Emile Heskey of Liverpool. Campbell scored the first goal of England's campaign in a 1–1 draw with Sweden, which was followed by an excellent 1–0 victory against Argentina. With Campbell and Ferdinand at the heart of England's defence and Cole at left-back, England progressed to the next round as group runners-up. They beat Denmark 3–0 in the last-sixteen game, in which Ferdinand and Heskey scored, and therefore progressed to the next round, where they were to meet Brazil. England started well and Heskey provided the pass from which England took the lead, but in first-half stoppage time Brazil equalised. Ronaldinho put Brazil ahead with an outrageous free kick from 40 yards out and then got himself sent off for a studs-up challenge. With Brazil down to ten men, the anticipated England onslaught never materialised. Unable to capitalise on their numerical advantage, England never really looked like getting an equaliser and went tamely out of the competition. Brazil went on to win the tournament and Campbell made the tournament's All-Star team, the only England player to do so.

Campbell's defensive partner in the England side Rio
Ferdinand had also had an excellent tournament and on the strength of that, in July 2002, Manchester United broke the British transfer record when they paid bitter rivals Leeds United £29 million for the centre-back. Ferdinand became the world's most expensive defender for a second time.

The following season, the underperforming West Ham United were surprisingly relegated, sparking an exodus of their best talent. Chelsea paid £6 million for nineteen-year-old defender Glen Johnson in July 2003, and later in the season, in February 2004, Spurs paid £7 million to take striker Jermain Defoe to White Hart Lane.

At Leeds United, Aaron Lennon, a local boy from Chapeltown and one of the brightest stars from the youth system that Ces Podd had helped to develop, made his Premier League debut, aged just sixteen, in a 2–1 loss to Spurs in August 2003. At the time, he was the youngest footballer ever to play in the Premier League.

Later that season, Ron Atkinson, describing a less than stellar performance from Chelsea player and former France international Marcel Desailly in a Champions League game between Monaco and Chelsea in April 2004, referred to Desailly as ‘a fucking lazy, thick nigger'. His description had carried with it an element of real venom and he had uttered the statement during the half-time break, when he'd assumed he was off air. However, the comments were broadcast across television networks in the Middle East and resulted in the sacking of Atkinson as an ITV pundit and as a columnist for the
Guardian
newspaper.

Atkinson had played an important role in the history of black footballers in Britain. He had been the first manager to regularly field three black players in a top-flight side and had coined the name the Three Degrees to describe Batson,
Cunningham and Regis. When he was appointed manager of West Brom, he had brought Batson with him from Cambridge United, where he had made the classy right-back his captain. As manager of Manchester United, he had also signed Remi Moses, making Moses the first black player to play for United. At Aston Villa, Atkinson had fielded a side with nine black players in the starting XI.

As a successful manager, Atkinson signed and selected whoever he thought could do the job he wanted, and several of those players were black. His willingness to provide opportunities for black players not only to play, but to play with confidence and responsibility, was, at the time, almost unique amongst managers of his generation.

He had also encouraged several black players to take coaching qualifications and consider careers in coaching and football management; his record in nurturing black talent made his remarks about Desailly all the more shocking. Amongst black players, there exists a wide range of perspectives about the motives behind his comments. Inevitably, those who played under him were more likely to provide a sympathetic assessment of him. Some former black players, notably Carlton Palmer, were keen to defend him, but most found his remarks and subsequent behaviour unacceptable and demeaning, including both Regis and Batson. They acknowledged that Atkinson was distinctly ‘old-school' in his attitudes and outlook and often indulged in banter and behaviour that was clearly the wrong side of offensive, aimed at a wide range of targets, not necessarily black footballers. Under his stewardship, Cunningham and Regis earned England caps, and many other black players he managed earned international recognition. His Aston Villa side of the early 1990s regularly included five or six black players.

However, by the time Atkinson had issued his remark, changing social attitudes had rendered the term as just about the most offensive in the English vocabulary. His often clumsy attempts to explain his remarks after the Desailly incident demonstrated what little understanding he had as to why his utterances were so offensive. A TV documentary with veteran black activist and broadcaster Darcus Howe further exposed Atkinson's attitudes on issues of race. When Howe confronted Atkinson on his remarks, he expressed contrition, seemingly believing that the incident should be viewed as little more than a minor blot on an otherwise highly successful career in the game. However, he appeared to possess little understanding as to why his description of Desailly was so unacceptable and preferred instead to blame a culture of political correctness and to present himself as the victim, rather than Desailly.

Atkinson was a product not only of his generation but also of the insular nature of English football. He had made his supposedly off-air remarks amongst those he assumed shared his perception of the game and, in doing so, forced a reassessment of his legacy in providing opportunities for black footballers; his comments have since come to redefine his career. Atkinson was never an anti-racist crusader; he was a football manager and selected black players because, ultimately, he thought they would add something to his teams that could make them successful. His support for black footballers extended as far as they were able to perform well, and when a player dropped below a level that was of use to the team, they were reduced to ‘a fucking lazy, thick nigger'.

If the English FA paid barely concealed lip service to issues of racism, their Scottish counterparts seemed equally incapable of doing any more. The treatment of firstly Mark Walters
and then later Paul Elliott should have been the catalyst for the Scottish FA to take action on the issue. While the English FA had agreed to fund the Kick It Out campaign in 1997, the Scottish FA had the opportunity either to fund the campaign to enable its activities to extend north of the border or to develop a similar campaign of their own. They did neither. In keeping with the increasingly global game, Scottish sides continued to sign black players, not only from England but from around the globe. For the few home-grown black players, like Kevin Harper, the experience at grassroots level and when starting out in the professional game illustrated how this lack of action on racist abuse left players feeling isolated and frustrated.

Harper was born in Oldham to a Scottish mother and Jamaican father. His father died before Harper was born and, after a year, his mother returned to her native Glasgow. He spent his first few months in Scotland in children's homes and eventually settled with his mother in Possilpark, a tough housing scheme in north Glasgow, amongst the poorest areas in the UK. Although the scheme was notorious for its social problems, every available space was usually taken up by a football game and Harper found himself in demand from other kids eager for him to join their makeshift sides. He would get home from school, have a quick piece and jam and be out playing football. This would eventually be interrupted by his tea, after which he would be out again until it was time for bed.