Pitch Black (27 page)

When West Ham played away, Barnes went to see his other local side, Leyton Orient, who themselves have been pioneers in providing black players with opportunities to play football. At Orient, Barnes could watch Laurie Cunningham, Bobby Fisher, John Chiedozie and Tunji Banjo, at a time when black players were a rarity. Inspired by heroes in Brazil, the Boleyn Ground and Brisbane Road, Bobby Barnes had no shortage of role models to call upon.

He also had other heroes from the world of sport. Barnes’s father used to drag him and his siblings out of their beds to watch Muhammad Ali’s fights and, like many of his generation, Barnes senior was a big cricket fan, imparting his love of cricket to his son. The West Indies touring team of 1976 inflicted a humiliating defeat on England after the latter’s captain, Tony Grieg, arrogantly declared that England would make the West Indies grovel. His comments were widely interpreted as haughty and colonial. Barnes and his father attended Test matches during the long hot summer of 1976, in which the West Indies won the series 3–0 and England never really got close. A full fourteen years before Norman Tebbit introduced his cricket test, Barnes proudly failed it.

However, Barnes’s first love was always football and, as a kid from Leytonstone, football meant West Ham. After being spotted playing schoolboy football, he was signed by West Ham and invited to train during school holidays. His deep affinity with West Ham had already started by the time he began to train with them at the age of eleven or twelve and hardened as the club made a point of looking after all the young players. The chief scout of the club, Eddie Baily, used to pick him up and drop him off at his home in Leytonstone, and manager John Lyall made a point of taking an interest in the youth players, trying to identify potential recruits for the first team. Barnes was one of the star performers in the West Ham side that won the FA Youth Cup in 1981 and included Keith Macpherson, Chris Ampofo, Dale Banton and the brilliantly monikered Everald La Ronde as captain, all of whom were black kids from east London.

After doing well in the reserves, Barnes made his debut aged seventeen in the Cup Winners’ Cup against Castilla, the
nursery club of Real Madrid at the Bernabéu. The game itself was marred by crowd trouble, forcing West Ham to play the return leg behind closed doors. However, on his home debut he scored a stunning goal against Watford to raise the roof at Upton Park. He’d fulfilled the dream he’d had for as long as he’d been able to kick a football.

Barnes was nicknamed ‘Superwog’ by the West Ham fans, a term so offensive it’s difficult to believe it was a term of acceptance by a group of fans well known for their racist following. Whereas black players who played for opposition teams were mere wogs, Barnes was the claret and blue version. It’s a reminder of what his generation had to face.

Barnes is uniquely placed to assess the progress of black footballers and the journey they still have to make to gain acceptance. He had bananas thrown at him at St James’ Park in the 1980s, when he went there for an away game with West Ham. He received hundreds of letters of support from Newcastle fans, and West End theatre tickets from the Newcastle Supporters’ Club. He suggests now that ‘if Chris Hughton had been appointed to the Newcastle job in the 1980s they’d have been out on the streets, protesting against his appointment’. As it happened, they were out protesting when he got sacked. There has been a world of change over the past thirty years, but most of the re-education that has taken place has
occurred amongst fans. Many fans who chanted racist abuse, made monkey noises and even threw bananas are now the same fans who would happily report incidents of racist abuse to a steward or the police or condemn it on social media. A process of re-education has occurred and its impact has been profound. While the numbers of black and Asian supporters are still chronically low, football grounds are now much more welcoming places for black and Asian fans to attend. When Barnes played, his parents refused to attend the majority of his games as the level of racism meted out to their son and other black players was too difficult to bear. Barnes’s wife also refused to attend and struggled to come to terms with sitting through matches and watching her husband be abused.

Like most of his generation, Barnes didn’t allow himself to dwell on it for too long: to do so would make you question why you put up with it and if you ask yourself why, you might not be able to find the answer. That earlier generation are owed a debt of gratitude for not asking themselves those soul-searching questions, sticking with the game to pave the way for future generations of footballers. It is noticeable today that when black players are occasionally subjected to abuse, for example in Champions League games or while on England duty, it seriously affects their composure. Ashley Cole, Nedum Onuoha and Danny Rose have all suffered racist abuse and have all been visibly shaken by it, struggling to regain their composure during games. For the earlier generation, visibly reacting simply wasn’t an option.

There have also been changes in the way that white players are more than happy to support and protect their teammates when they receive abuse. Pat Nevin and the Crazy Gang’s actions were remarkable because despite the fact that
team spirit and camaraderie were highly prized in the game, there were very few examples of the kind of solidarity that Nevin showed towards Paul Canoville. Usually teammates said or did nothing and allowed black players to deal with it in their own way, though occasionally they would find a way of making light of the issue.

West Ham had travelled to Elland Road and, as expected, Barnes, who was nineteen or twenty at the time, was, in his own words, ‘getting dog’s abuse’. However, he happened to be playing extremely well and at half-time his teammate Tony Gale made a dressing room plea. Gale explained that in spite of the abuse Barnes was getting, he was having a great game. Imploring the team to ‘show these bastards’, he urged Barnes to lead the team out for the second half with his head held high and his chest out. Feeling on top of the world, the young Barnes led the team out, got to the centre circle, noticed that the abuse was even louder, and turned round only to find he was completely on his own and his teammates were laughing at him in the tunnel.

Amongst black players, however, there was a camaraderie born out of a shared experience. Both Bobby Barnes and Brendon Batson bear testimony to the practice of giving a nod of acknowledgement to another black man, whether you’re in an airport lounge or hotel reception, whether you’re in New York or Northampton. Mo Johnston, a former teammate of John Barnes at Watford, was amazed at the practice. On an away trip to play Arsenal at Highbury, the coach travelled along the Holloway Road and Barnes nodded to a succession of black people going about their day. For Glasgow-born Johnston, the penny dropped when he realised that Barnes couldn’t possibly know that many people.

The nod of acknowledgement formed part of the shared
experience on the pitch, and maybe it would turn into a few words exchanged while warming up, or just before kick-off, or in the players’ lounge after the game. The bonds were also forged at social events, such as PFA dinners or charity events, while, particularly in London, Birmingham and other big cities, the players from different teams frequented the same bars, pubs and nightclubs. Often they would be the only black people in the club, their status as footballers allowing them entry to the most exclusive of places, whereas friends and brothers would be denied entry.

Occasionally they bonded at testimonials, like those held for Len Cantello and Ces Podd, or when a British-based Jamaican side played the Jamaican national side during a close season in the summer of 1987. In the British Jamaican team were Alex Williams, Bob Hazell, Clive Wilson, Luther Blissett, John Barnes and Franz Carr, as well as Bobby Barnes. As he was forbidden to play, being Grenadian, Brendon Batson managed the team. They were able to spend some time in Jamaica and received a brilliant reception everywhere they went on the island. The British Jamaicans ran out 3–2 winners over the home side, in a game played at the national stadium. Bobby Barnes was struck at how popular John Barnes was. After a few days, the accents and speech had slipped into patois, so much so it was impossible to work out who were the Jamaican Jamaicans and who were the British Jamaicans.

Barnes is perhaps the highest-profile and most powerful black administrator in football – perhaps even in British and European sport. Having studied business while still a player, he later qualified as a financial advisor for Friends Provident, doing well enough to be one of their top earners. Brendon Batson was managing the PFA financial services company
and invited Barnes to run the business in the Birmingham office. After joining the PFA he held a number of positions and a few years ago was responsible for establishing their London office.

The PFA has been the avenue through which many of the issues of racism have been channelled throughout the last thirty or so years. Garth Crooks, Chris Powell and Clarke Carlisle have all been chairmen of the PFA and Brendon Batson was once deputy to Gordon Taylor, the role that Barnes now holds. As such, when tensions have arisen over how issues of racism, under-representation and discrimination have been addressed, the PFA has often been at the forefront of events.

Bobby Barnes first started looking at the issue of underrepresentation of black managers in 2003, at a time when, including caretaker managers, there were seven black managers in post. The most difficult task then was to persuade black players to gain qualifications, in order to ensure that charges of lack of qualifications couldn’t be levelled at them. Now those same players are frustrated at being persuaded to study coaching qualifications for which they cannot find a job.

Barnes has been instrumental in liaising with the architects of the Rooney Rule in the USA in order to win support for the scheme and develop an English equivalent. The PFA’s credentials as an ethnically diverse organisation and its commitment to open and transparent recruitment practices are not coincidental. If clubs adopted the same principles, they would increase their diversity and bring benefits for all. All
coaches, both black and white, face the same problems in trying to find a coaching or managerial job within a culture that employs people based on who they know rather than their skills and aptitude for the job. In these circumstances, those under the radar of a club chairman or chief executive cannot get on the ladder and this militates particularly against black coaches and managers. The benefit for the clubs of introducing a Rooney Rule is that they might increase their diversity and therefore widen their potential pool of talent – and, more importantly, employ someone they might otherwise have missed. The impact will be that those who are interviewed, whether they are black or white, may be unsuitable for that post but may be suitable for another, or may be invited back in six, nine or twelve months’ time, when the previous manager finds himself out of a job.

Barnes concedes that as a global recruiter of coaches and managers, the Premier League is a special case, and until there exists a groundswell of experienced black coaches, plans for the scheme to promote more black managers should apply only to managerial appointments outside the Premier League. Other than head coaches and managerial positions, there are a number of Premier League roles that might provide experience of operating at a Premier League level, but in managerial terms, the Championship and Football League are where black managers will be able to prove their worth.

Barnes sees the key barriers to the initiative as a lack of understanding combined with deliberate misrepresentation, not least because of the amount of time it takes to make the same arguments to the same people over and over again. He states that, ‘Football is very conservative and doesn’t want to embrace change … If you don’t understand it, the easiest thing to do is misrepresent the idea.’

Both Barnes and Upton Park have come a long way since the days when he had to leave the ground early to avoid the prospect of a racist attack. He attends matches at Upton Park with his wife and children and always receives a rapturous welcome from the fans whenever he is presented to the West Ham faithful. Undoubtedly, the older supporters will include some of those who chanted ‘Superwog’ at him during his playing days, but today the club is finally beginning to attract black and Asian supporters from the local area, which is one of the most ethnically diverse in the country. The working-class black kid from Leytonstone who pulled on the famous claret and blue has risen to become deputy head of the world’s richest trade union and European president of FIFPRO, the worldwide umbrella organisation of footballers unions and associations, and he participates in a number of UEFA committees.

However, as Barnes says, ‘You could have a meeting of black administrators in a phone box.’ And that is one of the fundamental issues facing the game as far as black footballers are concerned: gaining access to how decisions are made.

When a senior official of a large business knows little about a subject, before going to the press he or she is extensively briefed on the specifications of the new product or impact of the new development so that they are able to convey the company’s new product or activities from a position of authority.

Wigan chairman Dave Whelan’s announcements that ‘chink’ wasn’t offensive and Jews did indeed chase money were remarkable only in so far as he had been allowed yet another opportunity to stand in front of a media scrum and give his opinions on an issue about which he was so insensitive and offensive. Whelan had previously stated in October
2011 that players who complained about racism were ‘a little bit out of order’.