Always Managing: My Autobiography (13 page)

Sandra’s dad, Bill Harris, was a foreman down Albert Dock. He was a huge bloke with arms bigger than my legs. You didn’t want to mess with Bill. Sandra and Pat were hairdressers, and the whole family lived in Barking, in a house with a proper little garden, which I thought was very upmarket, coming from a block of flats on the Burdett Estate. I used to take Sandra back to her house after going out, and if I was there longer than ten minutes
the old man used to bang on the floor from the bedroom upstairs. He was fantastic, Bill, an absolutely lovely man, but not the sort you wanted to cross. Frank was scared stiff of him as well – and Sandra and Pat’s brother, Brian, was every bit as big. They were a wonderful family, though, and it wasn’t long before we were making plans to be married.

I had to save up first – I told you times were different for footballers then – and to help us buy our first house I got a job in Mr Wilson’s supermarket in Green Street. Turn right out of Upton Park, the station is on the left, and opposite was Mr Wilson’s. He was a nice man, he came from Newcastle, and loved his football. We used to eat in Porkies Café, which was next door, and when I told him I needed extra money he offered me a job stacking shelves. I started on Monday and on the Friday of the first week walked down Green Street to pick up my wages from West Ham. Nobody got their pay sent directly into a bank account then. We all had to collect our little envelopes, and mine had twenty quid in it, plus a bit of silver and the wage slip. Ron Greenwood must have seen me arrive in my white coat because he came straight out to meet me. ‘Hello, Harry,’ he said. ‘What are you up to? A bit of decorating?’

‘No,’ I told him, ‘I’m working in a supermarket. I’m saving up to get married, but I want to buy a house and I can’t afford it on what West Ham pay me.’

‘You’re working in a supermarket?’ he replied. ‘Not any more you’re not. You’re under contract to us.’ He managed to get me another two quid a week, but I wasn’t the only one doing two jobs. A lot of the lads took a shift on, certainly in the summer. Bobby Moore worked in a factory in Barking for a year at least.

The most I ever earned at West Ham was £50, and none of the young players had cars. It would be a few years before I bought my first one, a little green Austin 100 which cost £640. Players went to the match by bus, some of them even walked. John Bond lived no more than fifty yards from the ground: right, then first left, in a little terrace. The only person who had a big house and moved out was Bobby, to Manor Lane, Chigwell. Then Geoff Hurst and Martin Peters moved to Wingletye Lane in Hornchurch, but they didn’t have mansions. Sandra and I were going to move to Barking, near Frank and Pat. I remember my dad thinking I was off my head, buying a house for £6,200. He didn’t know anyone who owned a house. He and my mum still lived in their old council flat. He didn’t understand what I was doing.

We got married in 1967 in a church in the centre of Barking. Frank was going to be my best man, but he broke his leg badly. Willie Carlin went over the top on him at Sheffield United, one of the worst tackles I’ve ever seen. Frank was only a kid, 18 at the time. His leg was in pieces. It took all his willpower – and more running up and down the terraces at Upton Park – for him to make a complete recovery.

We had the wedding reception at a club in Loxford Lane, Ilford, where Sandra’s dad was a member, and went off on honeymoon – to Torquay. These modern players have got nothing on the glamorous life we lived then. What I remember most about the trip is the new car I had bought, so we could travel in style: a bright red Jaguar, formerly owned by John Bond.

After training, John used to hang out with his mate, who ran a garage opposite the Central Café called Birkett Motors. One day, Frank and I came out of the café and starting chatting to them.
It was Frank’s idea that I buy the car. I’ll admit it was a beauty: wooden steering wheel, lovely red paintwork, immaculate. We took it for a spin along East Ham High Street, and that was enough. John wanted £250. Deal done. I’d only had it a few months when I took it on honeymoon and on the way back the head gasket went. It took us nine hours to get home. Very romantic. Not only that but when I inspected the log book properly, the car was from 1960 and John had told me 1962. We ended up having a huge row.

Meanwhile, football was going through major changes. The step up to the first team had not been a problem for me initially, but between 1965, when I made my debut, and 1967, when I married Sandra, England won the World Cup, and wingers were no longer fashionable. My early form was good and, as a local boy, the fans were right behind me, but once three of my teammates had helped England lift the World Cup, in a team without wide players, the euphoria gave way to a more pragmatic approach. The wingless wonders altered how people looked at my position. It’s true that I failed to fulfil my early potential but the revolution in the game certainly did not help. For years, full-backs had been the slowest players in the team. Now coaches had caught up and many were as fast as the wingers. They were told to get tight, not to give that yard of space to get the ball under control. A winger in a good team would still get enough chances to beat his man, but it wasn’t like that at West Ham. I’d be out by the touchline, never allowed to come inside, and when we finally did get the ball to me – bang – the full-back came in hard. There wasn’t the protection that exists for players these days. My form dipped, and so did my popularity. Upton Park is a terrible place to play if the fans are against you, and
they came to be always on my case. The Chicken Run, the lower tier of the East Stand, was the worst. You could almost feel them breathing down your neck. The moment you got the ball they expected you to turn your man inside out like George Best. That’s hard when your confidence is on the floor.

‘Were the tackles as bad as people say back then?’ I am often asked. I think they were worse. It was an open secret in football that at Leeds players were as good as coached to go over the top. Any fifty-fifty tackle and there was a good chance you would be done. Giles and Bremner are two of the finest players I have seen, but to say they could put it about is an understatement. They were horrible to play against. I think it was the dirtiest era there has ever been in football. Yes, there were some rough challenges in Sir Stanley Matthews’s time, too, but the players were not as athletic. Have a look at the famous FA Cup final between Blackpool and Bolton Wanderers in 1953, and when Stan gets the ball, it takes about ten seconds before the full-back comes into the picture. He’s had to run over from forty yards away. By the time I played for West Ham, players like Tommy Smith were on you as you got the ball – there was no space wide any more, and the only player I ever saw operate there consistently was George Best. Eventually, even he started coming inside to avoid a kicking, though. George at his peak was unstoppable, but for the rest of us mortals it was hard. I don’t think football has ever changed as much in such a short space of time as it did in the mid-sixties.

I was seven years a West Ham player but, looking back, I was on my way out after 3 October 1970, when my relationship with Ron Greenwood hit a low. We had made a dismal start to the season
and had only won one game – against Hull City in the League Cup – when Newcastle United came to Upton Park. Our bad form continued that day. I was about the only player who was performing for us, but when we went 1–0 down, Ron took me off for Trevor Brooking. I was furious and couldn’t help showing it. I walked as slowly as I could from the far side of the pitch to the tunnel, with all the fans booing Ron’s decision. It made a change from them hating me. We lost 2–0 and I was sitting in the medical room after the game when Ron burst in. ‘Don’t you ever do that to me again,’ he snapped. ‘When I take you off, you run, you don’t walk.’

I wasn’t having that. ‘And don’t you fucking do that to me again, either,’ I shot back. ‘You could have taken any one of us off – but it’s always me, isn’t it?’

Ron stormed out, but as he was leaving I picked up a bottle of beer from a crate that Jimmy Greaves and Bobby had been working on, and threw it against the closing door. ‘That’s nice,’ said Jim. ‘You could have thrown an empty one.’

I played about half of that season, and half of the next, but my time at West Ham was done. In 1972, I went to Bournemouth, where John Bond was now manager. I played 175 games for West Ham, but only scored eight goals. He wasn’t a bad judge, Bill Nicholson.

I joined Bournemouth on 1 August 1972, for what was then a club record fee of £31,000. John Bond, my old West Ham teammate and used car salesman, was the manager, and he was throwing a lot of money at a big rebuilding project. He’d bought Ted MacDougall, a Scotland international, who had scored nine goals in an FA Cup tie with Margate the previous season, and would go on to play for Manchester United. Ted’s partner was Phil Boyer, and they had played together at four different clubs, scoring 195 goals. On the day I signed, John also bought Jimmy Gabriel. He had won the title and the FA Cup at Everton, but had lost his place in the team to Howard Kendall and had moved to Southampton. He was a Scottish international too, and rock hard in midfield. Bobby Howe, who played with me in the FA Youth Cup final, was another that had been brought to Bournemouth from West Ham.

I was only 25, but it didn’t feel like a huge step down going to Bournemouth. John was a bold thinker and the club had ambition. We were building a new stand, and John switched the first-team strip from plain red to red and black stripes, like AC Milan. He even
changed the name of the club. We were no longer Bournemouth and Boscombe Athletic as we had been since 1923. We were AFC Bournemouth. With the good players we were signing, even the standard didn’t feel low. Whenever a good player became available who was within our reach, John would open the chequebook and sign him. The running joke was that if you had a good game against Bournemouth, they bought you the next day.

The best of the lot was a left-winger called Alan Groves. We had taken him from Shrewsbury Town and he had ability like I have rarely seen, not even in the top division. He was six foot, 14 stone, muscles on muscles, and nobody could get near him. I had played against him once before with West Ham, and I knew he was good: there were about eight of us chasing him all over the park like a Benny Hill sketch. We couldn’t get near him. He was hard as nails: the more you kicked him, the more he liked it. ‘Don’t do that, son, you’ll only hurt yourself,’ he’d say to full-backs. It used to drive them mad. He was just one of the greatest characters I met in football. Smoked eighty fags a day, drove a Jag; if we were doing shuttle sprints in training he’d run ten yards, hop ten yards, then run the last ten pretending to be smoking a cigar. And still keep up! He was that athletic.

Alan was an orphan. He started off as a Dr Barnado’s boy, became a long-distance lorry driver, and got into football by an alternative route. Having worked hard for a living, he knew it was only a game. He was one of those guys that was always laughing. John was a flamboyant sort, too, and when Alan bought an E-Type convertible Jag, he loved it. It had one of those fancy horns that play a tune, and you could hear him roaring about all over town. John turned it into a speech. ‘I see one of you boys driving about
in an E-Type Jag,’ he said. ‘Fantastic. I want the day to come when you’ve all got E-Type Jags; all got Mercedes. I don’t want to see Minis and Morris Minors out there, just beautiful cars. Because that means we’ve all been successful together.’ He turned to look at Alan. ‘Grovesey – different class, son,’ he said. The following week, we got beat and Groves had a quiet one. John came in like a whirlwind. He blasted the lot of us, then turned to Alan. ‘And you,’ he said. ‘If you think you are going to drive around town, showing off in that fucking E-Type, you’ve got another thing coming. Get rid of that car. I don’t want to see that fucking car at this club ever again.’

For a time, Alan was killing every defender in the division. I told Bobby Moore about him one night. ‘He’s the best I’ve seen, Bob,’ I said. Bobby had just played for England against Yugoslavia. ‘Oh yeah,’ he replied. ‘Is he as good as Dragan Džajić?’ ‘He’s better,’ I told him, because by then I’d probably had a few and wasn’t going to back down. Bob brought a few of the West Ham lads down to watch one of our games just to check out Alan. He was brilliant that night. Scored two goals, beat four players for the first, five players for the second, won the game on his own. ‘You may be right,’ Bobby said afterwards. ‘What a player.’

One day we went to an away match at Chesterfield and, as we got off the coach, a girl was waiting for us. We heard this huge row taking place, at the end of which the girl was marching up the road with Alan running after her, holding a baby. It was his, apparently, from when he played at Shrewsbury. The time came to warm up, we were all in the dressing room, and Alan was still standing there with the little boy. In the end, he gave it to these two fans, a couple of old girls who used to follow us everywhere, and they looked after
it during the game. You never knew what was going to happen next with him. Trevor Hartley, the manager that succeeded John Bond, sold him to Oldham Athletic in the end. Alan didn’t want to go, but Trevor had been promoted from our youth-team set-up and didn’t know how to handle him. Alan was just too lively for him. The next time Bournemouth played Oldham, Alan got the ball on the far side of the pitch and began dribbling it along the halfway line. We were in pursuit, but nobody had a clue where he was going. He finally veered off slightly right until he got directly in front of the Bournemouth dug-out and then he hit the ball as hard as he could straight at Trevor Hartley. The ball was bouncing about inside the concrete shell like a pinball. At the end of the game, Hartley ran off and locked himself in our dressing room to stop Alan trying to get him a second time. The player had the last laugh, though. Bournemouth were in a promotion position when Alan was sold, but missed out, and who went up in our place? Oldham, mostly thanks to the impact that Alan made. You may wonder why you have never heard of this incredible, larger than life man, and I’m sad to say the story doesn’t have a happy ending. Alan died of a heart attack in his home, at the age of 29. He was about to start preparing for the new season, 1978–79, with Blackpool.