Pitch Black (8 page)

At the Kaizer Chiefs’ stadium in Soweto, a massive crowd gave him, as the only black player in the squad, a special welcome. He observed that the crowd was all black except for those in the segregated, expensive seats in the main stand, who were exclusively white. He’d also visited Table Mountain near Cape Town, which overlooked Robben Island, where Nelson Mandela was being incarcerated even as the tour made its way around South Africa. It was only when he
travelled around the country that the bitter truth began to dawn on him.

Back home, a storm was brewing and, unbeknown to him, FIFA and the FA had condemned the tour and pressure was mounting on them from anti-apartheid campaigners to take action. Plummer received a phone call from a Forest official, Paul White, saying that he wasn’t allowed to play in any of the games. The FA had announced that anyone who played on the tour would have their league registration cancelled. This left Plummer in a strange situation of travelling with the tour but unable to play in matches. He phoned home, where his parents informed him there had been plenty of unrest. They expressed fear about the impact of the tour on his career and advised him that he should be careful. In South Africa, the controversy was having an impact as the tour was beginning to unravel due to the international pressure. A heated meeting was held between the sponsors and the players, whose sole concern was whether they would still be paid if the tour was called off. Plummer was receiving what he described as ‘a princely sum’. As he was the youngest and least high-profile member of the touring party, the other players must have received a king’s ransom. Jimmy Hill assured the players that they would still be paid if the tour was called off and that this provision had been included in the contract in the event that the tour was cancelled. The pressure back home grew
and, after two weeks of a tour in which he hadn’t kicked a ball, one of the tour officials told Plummer that Forest had requested that he return to England.

After a fourteen-hour flight from Jan Smuts to Heathrow, he arrived to a media scrum. Microphones were thrust in his face, cameras flashed in his eyes. ‘What was South Africa like?’ ‘How much money did you get?’ He’d been told to say nothing and was ushered through the press pack. Accompanied by a Forest official, he flew to East Midlands Airport and went straight to the City Ground, where he was met by Clough. Clough gave him a hug, told him he was pleased to see him and asked him if he’d been paid. Plummer told him that he had, to which Clough replied that he also had received a payment.

After a day or two’s rest, Plummer returned to training, where his teammates gave him the nickname of ‘Springbok’. As he sprinted during a training exercise, Clough joked that he could run like one. As for the tour, it had limped on but Plummer’s departure was the beginning of the end. It was a public relations disaster and after three games the tour was abandoned. Upon the return of Hill and the rest of the party, media interest in the event fell away and the world moved on.

Meanwhile, within Nottingham’s black community, Plummer’s actions had caused upset. He was invited onto a local radio station to explain his side of the story, which he did, after which his explanation appeared to be accepted and any opposition to him personally melted away.

Clough had placed Plummer in a terrible situation and could have jeopardised his career as well as his standing within the black community and amongst his fellow black professionals. The threat to his league registration could
have ruined Plummer’s career before it had fully started. It was cynical of Hill and Clough to involve a young black footballer when apartheid money was at stake. That Clough had informed Plummer he wasn’t to play and had brought him home from the tour early probably saved Plummer’s career, but it was a close call. Plummer had been hung out to dry by his manager and forced to face the disquiet of his local black community on his own. It was common knowledge within the game that Clough was fond of finding ways to supplement his income and earn a few extra pounds here and there. Alan Sugar, former Spurs chairman and star of
The Apprentice
, stated that Clough liked a bung. He had assisted in organising the tour by getting players and providing the team with the Forest coach. Clough had been one of the original signatories to the formation of the Anti-Nazi League in 1977. The league had played a prominent role in opposing the activities of the far right throughout the late 1970s and early ’80s. He was also close friends with Lindy Delapenha, his Jamaican teammate from his time at Middlesbrough. Clough had compromised his anti-racist credentials and had shamefully exploited a young black man whom he had a duty of care to protect and support, simply to please an unacceptable racist regime.

Plummer was a small but quick and skilful winger who had two spells for Forest and also played for Derby and Chesterfield. He grew up on a council estate in Hyson Green in Nottingham, a very ethnically diverse area, and played for his primary and secondary schools. Playing for Nottingham Schoolboys and for local teams, he was spotted by a Forest scout and eventually signed for them after leaving school in 1979. Plummer recalled many black players being signed for Forest and other local sides, but they found things very
difficult because of the attitude of coaches at the time. The lazy stereotypes that circulated around the game meant that many black players didn’t get the opportunities that their talent merited. When he joined Forest, he and Viv Anderson were the only black players at the club. They were to be joined the following year by others, including future Leeds United legend Chris Fairclough. As an established first-team player and local lad, Plummer looked up to Anderson, who was a great influence not only on Plummer but on all the young players at Forest. On making his first-team debut, away to Brighton, Plummer had shared a room with Anderson, who set about putting the nervous youngster at ease and provided sound advice as to how he should approach the game.

Plummer was taking the place of Forest striker Justin Fashanu. Fashanu had arrived at Forest from Norwich City as the first £1 million black footballer. Plummer had been scoring goals for fun in the reserves; Fashanu was struggling, badly.

Fashanu was very personable and widely considered around the club as a genuinely nice person. He wasn’t flash, but was always well turned out. His time at Forest proved to be a difficult one. He had a big price tag and had been playing poorly. At Norwich, his rawness had been harnessed well. He was required to, in football parlance, ‘put himself about’ and was well served as the focal point of the Norwich attack. A combination of his strength, a decent turn of pace and a more than adequate touch had seen him score twenty-nine goals for a Norwich side that was relegated at the end of the 1980/81 season. He was twenty years old and an England under-21 international and he had his best years ahead of him. The logic of signing him was in no doubt when Clough beat off interest from other clubs to gain his
signature in 1981. Fashanu’s problem was in how Clough chose to manage him. In training he was a hard worker. He could run all day and was strong and powerful in the gym, but when it came to technique, he struggled. Clough was merciless in his criticism of Fashanu’s technique, and instead of galvanising him to improve, as no doubt Clough intended, it shattered the player’s confidence. His poor technique in training spilled over into games. For a player, especially for a forward, whose reliance on technique affects a sizeable proportion of their game, when their confidence becomes fragile their touch and technique are often the first aspects of their play to suffer. As a big man, Fashanu’s touch would never be described as silken, but as he regularly demonstrated at Norwich and for the England under-21 side, he had two good feet, could dribble and, with his pace, could beat a man when he got up a head of steam. With Clough placing his touch under such high scrutiny, he became over-conscious of the need to control the ball properly. He began to overthink his game, which then went to pieces. On match days, his teammates became frustrated at his poor first touch, his inability to hold the ball up and his clumsiness, and, attempting to compensate, he would try to make challenges and generally put himself about, with the result that he gave away too many free kicks.

Fashanu wouldn’t be the first player in the history of football to be badly handled by Clough, or any other manager for that matter. Clough liked to keep football simple and, by extension, training sessions were also simple. There was certainly no room for the kind of individually tailored programme that could have benefited Fashanu.

The lack of confidence in his football was compounded by the issue of his sexuality and his recent conversion to
Christianity, the two of which were seemingly incompatible. His sexuality wasn’t widely known to his teammates, his relationship with his fiancée putting his teammates off the scent. His sexuality was known by Clough, whose homophobia, compounded as it was by Fashanu’s poor form, had rendered their relationship very difficult to say the least.

So it was that the young Calvin Plummer came to make his debut in the Forest side. He followed up his debut by playing the next game at home against Ipswich and scored his first goal for Forest. At his next game, at home to Middlesbrough, with his parents and his brother proudly watching him, the away fans proceeded to welcome him with monkey chants. His mother, watching her son for the first time, was deeply upset.

The worst grounds he visited were at Millwall, Newcastle, Sunderland and Leeds. Being a winger, and therefore being stuck out on the flanks, he received a lot of abuse but developed some kind of acclimatisation to it. Early in his career, he was named as substitute in a game at Upton Park, the close, hostile and deeply racist home of West Ham United. Clough told him he was going on, so he got off the bench to stretch and warm up. The crowd, relishing their role as tormentors in chief, rained down their racist abuse at him. Going through his routine, but sensing the hostility of the crowd, something hit him on the ear. Looking down, he saw a banana; he picked it up, pretended to eat it, then threw it back on the floor. Cutting short his warm-up routine, he returned to the safety of the dug-out. As he sat on the bench, Clough told him, ‘Right then, young Plummer, you get back up there and show ’em that you’re not intimidated. And by the way, young Plummer, bring me back a banana.’

It had lightened the mood on the bench and had quashed
his fears. Clough had used a similar strategy with Viv Anderson when he first broke into the side, with similarly positive results. In addition to abuse from opposition fans, Plummer also suffered abuse from opposition players. He found a Birmingham City defender to be a particularly nasty individual. As Plummer said of racist abuse:

While the kind of remarks made were widespread, even within the context of football and wider society in early 1980s Britain, their commonality of usage did not render them socially acceptable. As Mark Walters remarked, ‘They would say these things on the pitch, but they would never go up to you and say them in the street.’ This tacit understanding of what was known to be appropriate behaviour towards black people rendered football one of the few areas where racists were not only able to indulge in racist behaviour, but could even be afforded protection to do so. Their behaviour was distinctly cowardly. Given the aggressive stereotypes, to racially abuse a black man in the street would be to invite confrontation, in which there was a good chance it could end badly. The unwritten code of street relations would also brook little sympathy if the racist received a good beating, but the experience of many black footballers mirrored that of black people outside the rarefied atmosphere of a football ground. Most racists would rarely indulge in racist behaviour without the protection that being part of a crowd
offered. In football, the protection for this racist behaviour was provided by teammates, referees, coaches, the FA, the media, football authorities and in fact the whole culture of the game itself. For racist fans, the culture of the game afforded them similar protection. Very few areas, other than the nastiest of workplaces, offered such protection for racist behaviour.

And, while it was true that racism was used as a motivational tool by many footballers, the picture was far more complex: as Calvin Plummer acknowledged, it could eat at a person’s pride and self-respect. When he was playing well and his team were winning, the racism would wash over him, but when he wasn’t, it was hard to take.

WILBRAHAM HIGH SCHOOL
in Chorlton had great football teams in the mid-to late 1970s. With a strong sporting tradition, its football teams were amongst the most dominant in Manchester and the surrounding area. From this school came a crop of boys from in and around Moss Side who would go on to form an integral part of the Manchester City youth side that got to two FA Youth Cup finals. Gary Bennett, who went on to play 440 times for Sunderland and become club captain, and future Oldham Athletic all-time leading scorer and out-and-out legend Roger Palmer both attended the school. Such was the dominance of their football team that Alex Williams’s school team never lost a single home game in each of the years from age twelve to sixteen that he kept goal for the team, drawing only once. In the same school team as Williams and playing on the left side of midfield was Clive Wilson, who played over 500 times for City, Chelsea, Tottenham, QPR and Chester City. As well as sharing a place on the school football team, Williams and Wilson shared a classroom, back-to-back places
on the school register and a birthday (13 November). Both played for Manchester Schoolboys and both were offered apprenticeships in City’s youth set-up.

City was the team of choice for Manchester’s African-Caribbean community. Migrants from the West Indies began to settle in Manchester in the 1950s and ’60s and Moss Side was its hub of the community. As well as West Indians, the diverse community included Indians, Pakistanis, Chinese and Irish residents. City had moved there in 1923 and were to remain there for the next eighty years. Alex Williams’s parents arrived in Moss Side in the 1950s, along with many others from the Caribbean. Williams was born in Moss Side, but the family moved to nearby Levenshulme when he was two years old, although his ties with Moss Side remained close. Wanting to join the school football team, he wasn’t good enough to play outfield but got a chance to keep goal when Wilbraham’s keeper got injured. The twelve-year-old Williams volunteered to go in goal, found he was good, got better, kept his place in the team and eventually found his way to City in 1978.

As a strong footballing school, there were often scouts at games. One of the school teachers, Bert Jackson, had strong links with City. Williams played for Manchester boys and the north-west area boys’ teams, but for reasons unknown he didn’t attract the attention of scouts until two weeks before he was due to leave school, when he was approached by a City scout to go for training. After impressing, he continued to train at City twice per week and to his delight was offered an apprenticeship when he turned sixteen. In the six months between leaving school and signing for City as an apprentice, Williams had worked collecting glasses in the evenings at a club in Manchester’s Piccadilly and had worked on a milk round in the mornings.

In City’s youth set-up he was joined by Gary Bennett, Roger Palmer and Clive Wilson, whom he knew from school, and by Bennett’s older brother Dave. As Williams said,

This was a unique experience for black footballers in Williams’s era. There was none of the isolation, the sense of otherness, the feeling of being an outsider that had so characterised the experiences of many of Williams’s contemporaries. As he says,

Williams was a very good keeper, probably the outstanding young keeper of his generation. Not only did he have all the right physical attributes – tall, broad, agile, huge hands – but he was also brave and possessed an astonishing temperament for a young goalkeeper. He showed remarkable poise and incredible self-assurance, and sped through the ranks at City to cement his place in the first team, while also seamlessly
working his way through England youth sides. Such was his progress, his debut for City was only a matter of time.

His chance came when regular keeper Joe Corrigan was injured: he made his debut in 1981 against West Brom. Williams made an important save with the game still goalless, City eventually taking a two-goal lead before conceding a late goal but hanging on to win.

So it was that Alex Williams became the first black British goalkeeper to play in the top division of English football and he had made a winning start. It was 1981 and although the number of black players was increasing, the sight of a black goalkeeper caused considerable consternation.

In football folklore, goalkeepers are often characterised as loners or eccentrics, as if this state of mind is a prerequisite for being a goalkeeper, and of football’s long list of eccentrics, outsiders and the downright bizarre, a fair number have indeed been goalkeepers. This impression is perhaps due to their particular role in the side, but it has often been at odds with the reality of what many teams have required from their goalkeeper. The majority of the successful sides in the game’s history have featured a good goalkeeper. As well as athleticism, bravery and agility, keepers need to be solid and dependable; in fact, the antithesis of the wildly eccentric, madcap image that often prevails. Williams was of the solid, dependable, non-eccentric type; at his best, a calm and
reassuring presence in City’s goal and an excellent shot-stopper when called upon.

Of all the stereotypes that have been ascribed to black footballers, their supposed inability to keep goal is perhaps the most enduring. The first black professional in English football was a goalkeeper, Arthur Wharton, but apart from Williams, Derek Richardson, who had played in Len Cantello’s testimonial in 1979, was the only other black goalkeeper of that generation. Richardson had been at Chelsea as a youth player and then at QPR, where he was famously mistrusted as a goalkeeper on account of him having only one good eye. The novelty status that black goalkeepers like Williams were held to began to disappear with the prominence of David James and others like Matt Murray, who would go on to represent England at under-21 level, his Wolves teammate Carl Ikeme, and Jason Brown, who was capped by Wales. What is true, however, is that there have been few black goalkeepers in comparison to players in other positions, and although a number of reasons have been put forward as to why, the germ of the answer is likely to boil down to role models.

The great Brazilian sides of the 1960s and 1970s never had a black goalkeeper, and in fact Brazil never had one at a World Cup until Dida played in goal for the team in the 2006 World Cup, the first black goalkeeper to be a regular for the Seleção since the 1950s. The notion that blacks don’t make good goalkeepers remains a feature of Brazilian footballing culture to this day. The stereotypes that many British coaches had, which meant that for many years, black players couldn’t be trusted with more central playing responsibilities, along with a lack of outstanding goalkeeping role models, leaving very few black goalkeepers for young black
kids to emulate, means that, with the exception of a handful like Williams, James and Brown, very few black goalkeepers have had an impact on the game in this country.

When Williams replaced Corrigan, he expected City to buy another keeper. There was talk of City signing Pat Jennings, the experienced Northern Ireland international keeper, but so good were Williams’s performances, they showed tremendous faith in their young keeper, who went on to play over 100 successive games and keep twenty-one clean sheets in one season, still a Manchester City record.

Williams’s hero status as a Moss Side black kid made good was further cemented by his regular participation in the Junior Blues scheme, which was a club initiative to connect the club with its younger fans. The genial local boy was forging a good reputation for himself, enhanced by his support for the Junior Blues initiative and by other community work and coupled with his meteoric rise through the youth ranks for both club and country.

However, he was forced to face a series of uncomfortable truths. Although his status as a footballer protected him from many of the worst experiences of other young black Moss Side men in their late teens and early twenties, he was forced to deal with his own uniquely footballing brand of racial discrimination. While home games were largely free from some of the more horrific examples of abuse, it was often a different story away from Maine Road.

Like all black players of that generation, Williams had to be mentally tough. As a keeper, there was nowhere for him to hide. The abuse never really bothered him, but he had been surprised by the vitriol meted out at certain grounds, and made a distinction between the types of racism he suffered.

Williams distinguishes between a more benign form of racism and more hostile, hateful forms of abuse. As one of the first generation of black footballers, he was forced to rationalise as to which forms of racism were more acceptable than others and to find a way to dismiss them, or literally grin and bear them, as the situation required. Winning over crowds, concentrating on performances, trying to encourage people to see
the player, rather than the colour – this was the experience of Williams and his contemporaries as they navigated their way through the minefield of hatred, casual prejudice, stereotyping and hostility that characterised English football in the 1970s and ’80s. Dealing with both subtle and overt forms of racism and determining the most appropriate response was a daily challenge. Could he take a joke, could he stand up for himself, could he ignore it, could he show it wouldn’t affect his game, did he have a chip on his shoulder, how should he maintain his dignity? The right response at the wrong time could lead to allegations of not possessing enough mental fortitude to forge a career in the game, so players were forced back to the familiar default responses. These challenges were in evidence even when racism occurred in the dressing room, as Williams recalls:

One advantage that Williams had was that, at least in his case, there were other black players at the club. It provided an opportunity to talk, to share experiences and knowledge, to discuss strategies and to check in about whether their feelings were mutual.

While the burden of dealing with racial abuse was shared with other black professionals at City, Williams was careful to protect his family from its worst excesses. Williams was forced to ask his father to stop attending games, fearing it would aggravate his father’s asthma attacks.