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- Herausgeber: Biteback Publishing
- Kategorie: Lebensstil
- Sprache: Englisch
- Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2018
Lee Howey was inspired to write this book after reading the autobiographies of other footballers. These were household names with glory-laden careers whose exploits on the pitch will never be forgotten. Yet, despite access to such fabulous raw material, they have mostly produced bloody awful books – predictable, plodding, repetitive, self-important and just plain boring. They may have been better footballers than Howey, but he has written the most entertaining football memoir you are ever likely to read. Not that Lee Howey's football career is in any way undistinguished. He won the First Division Championship with his beloved Sunderland in 1995 and played in the Premier League against some of the most celebrated names in English football, including Jürgen Klinsmann, Ryan Giggs, Eric Cantona, Gianfranco Zola, Peter Schmeichel, Ian Wright, Alan Shearer and Fabrizio Ravanelli – and not always unsuccessfully. It wasn't all assaults upon the kneecaps on wet Tuesday nights in Hartlepool (though there is plenty of that too). This honest, thoughtful and hilarious book may not end with an unforgettable game at Wembley, or a 100th England cap. However, it will amuse and delight fans of all teams in its portrait of the game of football before it disappeared up its own backside.
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To Maz
Thank you so much for all you do for me and for your support and encouragement to write this book. I would have never had the belief to even start this project without your confidence in me. You and our boys Joseph and Christopher give me strength and purpose every day.
Also in memory of my father-in-law, Denis ‘Denny’ Spillane, 1937–2017. Dearly missed – ‘Up the Kingdom.’
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
My thanks go to all the people who helped me to become a footballer, especially Norman Howey.
Information for this book provided by Paul Watson and Laurent Degueldre (AS Hemptinne), Pat Godbold (Ipswich Town), Rob Mason (Sunderland), Bobby (surname unknown, of Buckingham Town), Brian Porter (Daventry Town) and Phil Curtis at the Sunderland Antiquarian Society was invaluable.
Thanks too to Kevin Ball, Gary Bennett and Niall Quinn for the cover quotes. Also to proofreaders Keith Nixon, Alan Smith and Dave Turner. A mention too for Liz Gillan, for generally putting up with things.
Finally to Tony Gillan, who has been a great support to me in putting this book together. My memory for details was a little vague, but you were able to fill in the gaps with research and humour.
CONTENTS
INTRODUCTION
So many memories from the pinnacle of football. The Champions League, the FA Cup final, the World Cup, England versus Brazil – I’ve watched them all.
International fame, an MBE, streets named in my honour, documentaries about my career and the acquisition of a few million quid to keep me amused in my autumn years; these are just some of the things that never happened to me.
Medically speaking, I really ought not to have played football beyond the age of nineteen, but I continued until well into my thirties. As a consequence my paso doble is not as acclaimed as it once was; I creak more than a little and not all of me is original, with various parts now composed of metal and plastic. A bolt through the neck might be my next procedure. It may as well be; a triple bypass and a hysterectomy are about the only other operations I have yet to undergo.
Something else I had to contend with was deep, deep anxiety. Fear of a failure to perform and a feeling of massive responsibility to succeed, especially at my home town club.
It all ended on a dark, freezing March evening in 2006 in an Eagle Bitter United Counties League Premier Division game for Buckingham Town at Ford Sports Daventry in miserable, driving rain. But this momentous occasion is not widely remembered outside my house.
All of this brought me to where I am today – the payments industry with Judopay.
But the chances are that you envy me.
You may now be thinking how arrogant the previous sentence makes me sound. You may be asking yourself: ‘Who does he think he is? And why is he writing his story anyway? He was hardly Bobby Moore.’
Allow me to explain. The fact that you have read even this far means that you are probably a football fan. If Paul Scholes or Tony Adams or even Kevin Ball happens to be reading this then OK, they aren’t likely to be too seriously stricken by the green-eye. But if, like most of my friends, you were never given the opportunity to play professional football, then it is only natural to feel a tinge of envy (which incidentally is not the same as jealousy).
I don’t mean envious to an unhealthy level that disrupts your sleep, puts you off your food or makes you wish for another person to fall down a well. Just a small and natural dose of envy, such as you might feel for someone who can mend motor vehicles, or perform card tricks. As a football fan, you will inevitably feel more envy for Mario Götze than you do for me. He scored an extra-time winner, the only goal in the 2014 World Cup final for Germany against Argentina in the Maracanã Stadium. But I once scored an extra-time winner too, the only goal in an FA Cup third round replay for Sunderland against Carlisle United at Brunton Park.
There were almost 75,000 spectators to witness Mr Götze’s goal first hand, including world leaders and Hollywood stars, with billions more watching on television to see his effort land the biggest prize in football. He must have felt sensational.
But my little goal at Carlisle, a six-yard side-footer from a corner immediately in front of our own supporters, felt pretty damn good too. Although it has been largely forgotten and the ultimate prize for it was a 2–1 fourth round defeat at Wimbledon, I still say that it is, for most readers of this book, a small source of envy. It’s on YouTube, should you care to relive the moment (it has at least a dozen hits).
There were more glamorous days in my career than that cup tie in Cumbria. I did win a First Division Championship medal. I got to play Premier League football in some of the country’s most famous grounds, against some of the most celebrated names in English football in the 1990s – including Jürgen Klinsmann, Ryan Giggs, Eric Cantona, Gianfranco Zola, Peter Schmeichel, Ian Wright, Alan Shearer and Fabrizio Ravanelli – and not always unsuccessfully. It wasn’t all assaults upon the kneecaps on wet Tuesday nights in Hartlepool.
Returning to the question of why I have written this book, I have been inspired by several autobiographies of other footballers, past and present; household names with glory-laden careers whose exploits on the pitch will simply never be forgotten. I won’t name names and I am not referring to all football memoirs. But some of them have, despite access to such fabulous raw material, produced bloody awful books; predictable, plodding, repetitive, vain, self-important, expletive-strewn and just plain boring. So I was encouraged by these people negatively. They were far better footballers than I, but this is a more enjoyable book.
Trust me when I say that is not a massive boast.
This book does not end with an unforgettable game at Wembley, or a 100th England cap, or even scoring the goal that averted a relegation. But I sincerely hope that it ends with the reader having had an insight into our beloved game when it was still imbued with some semblance of reality. I hope, more importantly, that it ends with the reader having had a good time. Despite the numerous setbacks, the abuse and the dodgy knees, I had a great time.
Even if I could, I wouldn’t change a thing.
I’m glad to say that football supporters who are old enough still remember me. In August 2015 I was invited to take part in an event at the Roker Hotel in Sunderland, to commemorate the famous football documentary Premier Passions. I joined Peter Reid, Richard Ord, Kevin Ball, Martin Smith, Bobby Saxton and Niall Quinn. Each one of us was introduced with a big build-up by the compère, Peter Daykin.
Peter Reid got: ‘The man who transformed a failing football club as a manager; as a player he represented his country, won two league titles…’
Niall Quinn was described as: ‘Sunderland’s messiah. A legendary goal scorer and a man who graced two World Cups…’
Richard Ord was: ‘A classy defender, respected throughout football with over 250 appearances in the famous red and white shirt…’
And so on, until it was my turn. Last and evidently least.
‘Never forget that this man had the distinction of serving his club at centre-back as well as striker. In both roles he is widely regarded as not just massively violent, but also as decidedly average.’
Oh well – if the cap fits. Not that I won any caps.
Still, far better ‘decidedly average’ than not there at all.
Lee Howey, 2018
CHAPTER 1
IN THE BEGINNING…
Don’t worry. This is a memoir, not an autobiography.
The main difference between the two is that memoirs give you only the goods, the juicy stuff, rather than being weighed down by unnecessary detail about how the author likes his eggs, the destination of his first holiday or his favourite films. This book will have none of that. Nor will it contain emetic passages about the gladness of my fluffy heart when my children were born, or purple prose descriptions of the languid sun setting behind Booze Buster on Fulwell Road, or how the twinkling stars in the dark skies above Roker Park inspired such stirring poetry in me during a goalless draw with Grimsby while some bastard was stamping on my ankle.
No, none of that old guff. However, a bit of background may be in order. I can’t relate first-hand any events for this book from any earlier than 1 April 1969. That was when this particular Howey first saw planet Earth, from Sunderland General Hospital.
I arrived without fanfare. This was by request as my mother hated trumpets, especially at a time like that. But both of my parents were apparently quite chuffed with the advent of their first-born and it is widely reported to have gladdened their fluffy hearts. My parents, Norman and Yvonne Howey, née Drummond, are still together and living in Sunderland. It hasn’t been a marriage abundantly laden with chocolates, flowers and candlelit dinners. This is despite my father being a former shipyard labourer from Pennywell. The tales you may have heard about the incurably romantic nature of Wearside’s maritime workers are largely apocryphal. But after a few decades of, well, each other, they’re still together. In most people’s experience, this is about as successful as marriage gets.
Historians among you will of course immediately recall that Marvin Gaye was at number one with ‘I Heard It Through the Grapevine’ when I first appeared. Sunderland’s most recent game was a 1–1 draw at Newcastle United (doubtless you will also know that Colin Suggett scored for Sunderland, Jackie Sinclair for Newcastle), President Eisenhower had died three days earlier, John had just married Yoko, men were about to walk on the moon, fashion was getting worse and voters were about to get younger; from twenty-one to eighteen.
That’s enough scene setting I think. It’s not as though I remember any of it. What I do recollect vividly is the omnipresence of football. My father Norman played semi-professionally in the Northern and Wearside Leagues. This was football of a pretty decent standard, as well as bringing in a useful few quid. My mother Yvonne’s hairdressing career was scuppered by babies.
In London it has always been possible to choose which club to support, which means a selection of about a dozen clubs in the capital, plus (let’s be honest) Liverpool and Manchester United. There can be very few Sunderland supporters, ever, who made a conscious decision that SAFC was the club for them. The ‘decision’ is made by genetics at the point of conception. So it was with my dad, and then me.
Sunderland’s rivalry with Newcastle United back then was not as we know it today. It has always been the case that when one of the two clubs is at home, the other is automatically away. When I was born it was common practice among many in the North East to watch the home games of both. Norman did this. He was Sunderland daft but just loved football and, with so little of it on television, he would stand with his friends in St James’ Park every other week and happily watch Newcastle – albeit occasionally enlivening a dull game by verbally winding up those around him in the Gallowgate End in black and white livery. But it never went beyond banter. For those only familiar with the current relationship between the respective followers of the clubs, this may seem a mite difficult to believe, akin to the Orange Order arranging a bus trip to the Vatican. But I can assure you that it happened.
We lived in a high-rise block in Gilley Law in the south of Sunderland. As far back as I remember I was kicking a ball around in the streets. At every school playtime and lunchtime, I played football. Then, at the end of a trying day of education, I would go home and unwind by playing a relaxing game of football. The weather was never a cause for postponements in the streets of Gilley Law, although there was the occasional breather from relentless football when we would trail our mucky feet back indoors to watch a bit of television – especially if there was football on.
Lest you should think I was an obsessive child and not a properly rounded individual, I should point out that I was also an avid reader, and not just of Shoot! I was also an occasional subscriber to Match weekly, Roy of the Rovers and everything in between.
Aged around five, I was the youngest player in the neighbourhood, so a specific natural law was upheld. The sacred codes of jumpers-for-goalposts football and universally cognisable human reason are inextricably entwined: i.e. they made me go in goal.
I was desperate to join in and accepted my lot until such time as an even younger and smaller partaker would slither his way into the game. More of him in a while. It was a sort of apprenticeship. The venue was usually a ‘pitch’ that is still there today. It was a nearby field with a 1:3 gradient, which thereby presented an obvious advantage to whichever team was defending the summit. Keeping goal at base camp was rather less appealing, but I persevered. Only the dark could end the game, at which point I was thrown into the bath to be pristine and presentable for Yvonne when I arrived at school the following day.
The People’s Republic of Gilley Law and its surrounding dependencies would later prove to be something of a stellar neighbourhood. Many of the regular participants in our games were then of approximately school leaving age. They all had about ten years on me and projected carefree confidence and, so it seemed at the time, a dash of sophistication. Several of them would achieve much in the game. They included Kevin Dillon, who became part of the renowned team of hard-nuts at Birmingham City in the 1980s and the last player to be given a debut by Sir Alf Ramsey.
Then there was Mick Harford, later capped by England and a League Cup winner with Luton Town. He also played for Newcastle, Derby County and Chelsea, and was ever so briefly a colleague of mine at Sunderland. His Premier League career (the league didn’t start until 1992) lasted for a total of fifteen minutes, during which time he scored the winner for Coventry City against Newcastle at Highfield Road in 1993. He was also another of the renowned team of hard-nuts at Birmingham City in the 1980s.
Mick Smith was not one of the renowned team of hard-nuts at Birmingham City in the 1980s. He joined Wimbledon in 1979 when they were in the Third Division, and played for them over 200 times as part of the incipient ‘Crazy Gang.’ By the time he left them in 1986 they had been promoted to the old First Division.
Occasionally we were joined by Mick Hazard, who would sometimes wander over from Thorney Close. He would go on to play for Tottenham in two winning cup finals: the FA Cup of 1982 and the UEFA Cup of 1984. He also spent years at Chelsea, then Swindon, where he played in their only Premier League season. If he harbours disappointment at never having been part of the renowned team of hard-nuts at Birmingham City in the 1980s, he has never made it public.
As far as kids’ kick-abouts go, this must be about as lofty as it gets. I wasn’t going to be allowed out of goal in a hurry. It made me dream of possibilities for myself. Four older lads from my neck of the woods would forge successful careers, and one of them wasn’t even called Mick.
If only to temporarily stem my compulsion to constantly play football, football and then more football, my dad began to take me to Sunderland home games in his battered old van. Like the first record you bought, most fans have an eidetic memory of their first game. I’m afraid that mine is a little sketchier. I do remember that it was in the dark during the freezing pit of winter when I was about five. Looking at the record books, the favourite would appear to be a floodlit Division Two game against Manchester United at Roker on 18 January 1975, in front of 46,000 people, but I can’t be certain. Whatever the fixture was, there and then I became even more hooked on the game and a very easy child to buy birthday and Christmas presents for: Sunderland shirt, Sunderland tracksuit, Sunderland pennant, a ball, Shoot! annual, etc. (I would eventually do one of those cheesy Q&A sessions for Shoot!: favourite meal, best friend in football, pet hates and so on – a load of old moon juice of course, but still a strangely proud moment.)
• • •
I exaggerate how much football I played. Slightly. My mates and I did have a wide range of academic interests, such as climbing trees, jumping off walls, riding our bikes, rummaging round building sites and being a general nuisance. We were just let out like semi-feral cats and away we went, as did millions of other kids the same age. It was simply the norm. I tell this to my children now and it truly seems like a different world. In many ways, it was. I’m fairly sure that perverts had been invented long before the 1970s, but they didn’t have today’s high profile.
My best friend was John Sproates. We were virtually inseparable and our friendship even survived the time that I killed his dog. Geoff Thomas may now be reading this with knowing cynicism, so I must stress that it really was a complete accident. I was calling the dog to come to the other side of the road where I was standing. My voice was the last thing that poor Smokey heard. The last thing he saw was the radiator of a Ford Cortina. May God have mercy upon his soul.
John is over it now. As he is today a highly trained British serviceman and recently to be found bobbing around the Indian Ocean looking for Somali pirates, I certainly hope he’s over it. Animal lovers and advocates of karma may be heartened to learn that I was run over myself six weeks later. John also mentioned that it served me right. Happily, it was for a relatively short period of time that I was known as the Wearside Dog Murderer.
My formative years were for the most part quite normal. But as the poem says, into each life some rain must fall. When I was two-and-a-half, there was a sustained deluge when my precious little brother Steven was born; as far as I know, my only sibling.
Aged seven or so, I would scamper out of the flat to join my cohorts, usually to play football or possibly to attend to one of our other projects, such as smashing things. My brother would indulge in some high-pitched wailing because he had been left out. So our mother would open the window and shriek after me: ‘Take your little brother! Take your little brother!’
Steven’s inveterate career as a monumental pain in the arse began early. He was a spectacular whinger in those days and his related talent for twisting his face almost round to the back of his small, petulant head was unsurpassed. I say ‘in those days’: the child is indeed the father of the man and this is a gift he retains. It is reassuring to note that there are still a few constants in this ever-changing world of ours. He was, in fact, known unaffectionately as the ‘Ginger Whinger’ as he then had this peculiar excrescence of strawberry blond hair, which did at least distract some attention from his permanently wobbling bottom lip.
The whinging was constant. It didn’t matter what was on the agenda; it would be met with a whinge. The accepted rite of passage alluded to earlier, that the youngest and snottiest should play in goal, was not respected by Steven, who would whinge about this duty and demand to be outfield, even though a casual glance could confirm his youth and his snot (indeed, he tended to be festooned in mucus; these candlesticks, along with his alarming hair colour, made him resemble something from the Book of Revelation).
Had to go in goal? Whinge. Lost the game? Whinge. No one would pass to him? Whinge. Punk rock hits the charts? Whinge. United Nations announce that smallpox has been eradicated? Whinge, whinge, whinge. I recall very few events that Steven greeted with warmth and an appreciative smile. It’s enshrined in Magna Carta or something that the youngest goes in goal. This made Steven’s whinging on the matter particularly irksome, as I had served my time uncomplainingly.
He did like his football, but was not the automatic, unquestioning Sunderland supporter that I was. He was a fickle fan. For example, he had a flirtation with Tottenham Hotspur during their Ossie Ardiles and Glenn Hoddle era, before moving on to some other club, then another and another that he had no connection with. I think he did eventually want to support Sunderland, but he never had a deep affinity with any team. He possibly attended the occasional match, but I don’t remember it.
His disagreeability was non-stop and he would often make my life hell. Our first school was St Leonard’s Primary in Silksworth where, aged seven, I was told I could have a trial for one of the football teams and was therefore quite giddy with excitement. However, during the lunchtime before the trial I was summoned to see the headmaster, Mr Conroy.
A prefect had informed Mr Conroy that I had been nabbed in the course of acting the goat on the school bus. Goat acting was one of the less socially acceptable crimes of the era and would have been specifically prohibited by an Act of Parliament if Mr Conroy had had his way. The sentence in this instance was to sit outside his office all afternoon, missing the trial in its entirety. I was distraught; more so because while I was not averse to reprehensible behaviour myself, I had no idea what I was supposed to have done on that bus. I rummaged through my mind for some memory of any goats I may have recently acted, but could think of none.
Eventually Mr Conroy called for the prefect, who looked at me and immediately confirmed: ‘That’s not ’im.’ The goat had in fact been acted by my delightful brother, who upon apprehension had told the prefect that his name was Lee in an attempt to evade justice. While this was at least evidence of a sort of low cunning from a boy in his first year at school, we were to later reflect that a more gifted child would have also given the authorities a false surname. You may be familiar with the passage in the Old Testament, when the skulduggery of Cain prevented Abel from getting on the footy team. Well now I knew how Abel felt.
When I was eight we moved to Thorney Close, where I would take Steven for a kick-about with certain unwritten laws evolving because he was so much smaller than me and susceptible to a tantrum if he should lose. We would play across the street with the openings to two narrow, cross-sectioning back lanes (ginnels, snickets, pathways, cuts, depending on where you’re from) on either side of the street which served as goals. I had to chip the ball softly into the air rather than belt it: ‘nee blammers’ being the most important rule. If I miskicked a chip and the ball went low into the corner of the goal, he would cry like a mistreated Scarlett O’Hara. Then, oblivious to my pleading, he would run into the house and inform the relevant powers-that-be, usually resulting in a good roaring in my direction.
He became aware that tale-telling of this sort was likely to mean a severe lambasting for his elder brother and he began to maximise this vicarious power. On one occasion, because he had created so much parental gyp for me and I knew he had done so deliberately, I mentally snapped and chased him all over the estate with the express purpose of administering him a rigorous wedging. However, as he accelerated along Tay Road, I decided instead to upgrade the retribution and that I would simply kick his fucking head in. If I was going to cop it for supposedly picking on him, I decided that I may as well have my money’s worth. The pursuit lasted for quite a distance until his eventual capture. I had my knees on his arms and was happily and repeatedly whacking him.
Unless he was about to bite me on the bollocks, his escape was impossible.
So he bit me on the bollocks. In later years I would play against some horribly dirty footballers, but would never scream like that again. Having effected his escape, Steven then (understandably in the circumstances) managed to beat me back to the house where his version of events meant that I was given a proper clip myself. Oh, the injustice.
Incidentally, my brother’s name is Steven and not ‘Stephen’ as it says in just about every book that mentions him. They even gave the wrong spelling on Pointless a couple of years ago – and we expect better from them.
Anyway, while Steven was hardly a Sunderland fanatic, as I’ve said, I would attend matches as often as time and money would allow. I still do. The disappointment of watching Sunderland lose limply to Norwich City in the 1985 League Cup final is undiminished; ditto with the awful 1990 Wembley play-off final against Swindon, just three years before I became a Sunderland player myself.
Still, then as now there was the occasional glory day (sadly no trophies since the FA Cup win when I was four). My absolute idol as a kid was Gary Rowell. I just loved him. He was a lethal finisher, scoring over 100 goals for Sunderland including a hat-trick against Arsenal in 1982. But his most famous hat-trick was at St James’ Park in 1979 and I was at the game, five weeks before my tenth birthday. I travelled on the football train with my dad, followed by a police escort up to the ground. I could describe a walk through the town with the natives lining the streets to sportingly applaud their Wearside cousins as they gave a rousing chorus of ‘May the Best Team Win’, but that would be a clunking great lie. It remains my most terrifying experience.
Rowell was particularly adept at penalties. If he was about to take one you could nip out to the toilet. You didn’t need to watch because it was going to be a goal and the keeper was about to dive the wrong way. Unfortunately, a bad injury when he was twenty-two seemed to deprive him of some speed. He was still a fine striker when he came back, but he could have been better still with that extra touch of pace. Other inspirations included Shaun Elliott, Stan Cummins, the late Rob Hindmarch and the incomparable Joe Bolton; a talented left-back often described as ‘uncompromising’. We all know what that means, but there was more to his game than that and he gave everything on the pitch – or 110 per cent as they say in dull society.
• • •
It was just as I was about to enter year three (first-year juniors in old money) that the Howeys tunnelled out of Gilley Law and defected to Thorney Close, a council estate a short distance away on the other side of Durham Road. This put Steven and me in a different primary school catchment area. We switched to St Cuthbert’s on Grindon Lane as it was the nearest Catholic school (for we were a family of Rome). This is tough for any child, but I adapted quite well, helped by being friends with Vincent Marriner, who was already at the school (and a good goalie). As expected, football was a terrific icebreaker. I don’t remember much about the early days, so it must have been OK.
St Cuthbert’s has always had a big reputation for football. Apart from a couple of Howeys plus Messrs Dillon, Hazard and Harford, alumni also include Kevin Young, a midfielder for Burnley, Port Vale and Bury. The school continues to lift trophies, and these days that includes the girls.
It did not occur to me yet that I was all that good at football. My first break into the St Cuthbert’s team only came about because, in a recurring theme of my life up to that point, someone had to go in goal. I just wanted to play and was willing to take any position on the field. My instinct in goal was to flick the ball with my foot up into my hands, rather than just catch it. The young teacher, Ray Stewart, asked me what the hell I thought I was doing, but soon realised that I was not really a goalie and allowed me to play outfield. Within a year I was playing for the first, second and third teams. I would play a game for one team, change strip and then play a game for another.
And I still played footy when I got home.
Mr Stewart was the main football teacher, although he was also obsessed with trains (or should that be locomotives? Or railways? That lot are easily offended, so I apologise if I have used the wrong terminology). He was gradually replacing the fourth-year juniors (year six, these days) teacher, Jimmie McAuliffe, as the main football bod. The teachers were quite strict but Mr McAuliffe was fine with me – when I wasn’t in his class. Approaching his sixties by then, he once took me aside for some or other misdemeanour and informed me, with nothing like uncertainty: ‘You had better stick in at your lessons because I’ll tell you now: I’ve seen some players come through this school – and you will never make a footballer.’
This was a serious, humiliating, proverbial kick in the nuts, exacerbated by the ensuing laughter in the classroom. I was not a model pupil and he wanted to make a point. But what a way to do it. Aside from the fact that he turned out to be wrong, this was a hell of a thing to say to a child. Neither did it have any connection to whichever piece of arsing about he had caught me doing.
Perhaps he did me an inadvertent favour. The school had a game a couple of days later and I scored in it, so I thought ‘bollocks to him’ and continued with the rest of my life. Years later when I did make it in football I was tempted to contact him and stick the ancient incident right up his nose. But he was an old bloke by then and I thought: ‘What would that achieve?’ I’m glad I resisted the temptation as it would have been utterly childish and besides, he must have known. He died aged eighty-four in 2006.
I played on the right wing at St Cuthbert’s because (and this may surprise a few who only remember me as a professional) I was extremely quick. Whether by nature or nurture, this was a primary school team that was almost freakishly skilful. Other players included Jonathan Common (known to this day as Archie for reasons that remain obscure), Paul Redman, Jonathan Whelan, Lee McNally, David Simpson and the aforementioned Vincent Marriner.
Between them they would be given trials and apprenticeships at a number of Football League clubs. There is a variety of explanations as to why none of them made it professionally, although absent among these reasons was a lack of talent. Paul Redman, for example, was academically gifted and always had more possibilities than just football. He is now head of media at FIFA Films in Zurich (their media arm; he had nothing to do with that bloody awful United Passions film with Tim Roth perplexingly cast as Sepp Blatter).
Until this time there was no more to my football than the sheer joy of playing it. However, if you are a member of a side that wins virtually every game and one of the best players in it, a certain realisation will come. I was rattling in many, many goals and was not even a main striker. It got to the point where Mr Stewart would ban us from shooting inside the penalty area, just to make a game of it against some of the weaker opposition. Goals from within the box were simply disallowed in those games. I was pretty confident too. The only issue at that stage was whether or not I was the best player at St Cuthbert’s. Archie Common and I had a scuffle or two over the issue because it’s a highly important matter at that age. Archie was a completely different type of player to me and one of the most naturally gifted teammates I ever had. As I would eventually play alongside Chris Waddle, this is not something I say lightly.
• • •
A year or so after it had dawned on me that I was a pretty good player, my dad had an epiphany in this regard too.
Anyone who loves football will tell you that a game will draw you in. Any game. You can be driving past a playing field that is staging a match between two flabby pub teams; the outcome of the match is not going to affect your future happiness and yet, if one team is awarded a corner or free kick, you are compelled to keep watching to see if it leads to a goal. It’s that addictive.
So it was when Norman was strolling along Grindon Lane one summer’s day, running a substantial risk of treading in dog shit because he was using his peripheral vision to watch a kids’ game on an adjacent pitch. One lad controlled the ball beautifully from a high pass, beat several defenders and then stroked it into the bottom corner with the much coveted ‘good touch for a big man’. Norman thought: ‘Bloody hell. He can play.’
It was only after some additional squinting that he realised he was watching his eldest son. This was when football became significantly more serious in the Howey household. From that moment on, my father would do what he considered to be the best he possibly could to help me to become a footballer. He would later do the same for Steven. However, such were my dad’s methods that the amount of help he ultimately provided is a matter of some conjecture.
A theory called the 10,000 Hour Rule has emerged in recent years stating that in any sphere of human activity, but especially sport, 10,000 hours of practice will produce expertise. You may feel that the premise is sheer flapdoodle, as there is usually at least one person in your class at school who is so uncoordinated that they would require something closer to a million hours just to have an outside chance of touching their own nose, let alone playing professional sport. Nevertheless, there is no doubting the value of work ethic, practice and dedication, and Norman’s ideas were very much along those lines; constant hard work and football, football, football.
He had read biographies of the likes of Bobby Charlton and Brian Clough, which would outline their sheer devotion to the game when they were growing up in the ’40s and ’50s, spending hour upon hour kicking a ball against a wall with either foot. It clearly hadn’t done either of them any harm and so my dad saw that as the way forward. Therefore all my spare time was used at his behest to practise, practise, practise.
I maintain that a twelve-year-old can only kick a ball against a wall for so long before the benefits, as well as the brain, become nullified. My friends had other things in their lives that they invited me to become involved with, such as playing space invaders, chasing girls, watching The Young Ones and other invaluable enterprises. But I declined to join them as I had to plod on with practice to avert a strenuous shouting at and/or bedroom banishment when I returned home. This rendered me as something of an outsider among my peers; someone out of the clique. Similar reprisals would occur if Norman thought I had in any way shirked during a match, the theme being that I had let him down and what was I thinking of – that sort of approach. He was extremely vociferous on the touchline, and not just with me. He would also holler at the referee and other spectators. If another parent said anything untoward about me, he would limber up for a fight.
My mates thought he was great. They loved his enthusiasm. If I had performed well then he was pleasant to be with, but my mates weren’t in our house an hour after a game when I was being energetically berated if I had played indifferently. The pressure at times was intense. I didn’t necessarily have to score or be man of the match, but Norman demanded maximum effort, and my being a mere child with the attendant physical difficulties of growing was never going to be any reason to fail to try my hardest.
I did not therefore always have the greatest fun playing football as a schoolboy under this regime – and I use the word advisedly. But there was a pay-off that came years later. No matter how aggressive, scathing or downright unreasonable a coach was being towards me, at any level I played at, it was water off the wildfowl of your choice. At youth level, other lads would pack in and go home, but not me. Sticks and stones and the occasional two-footed lunge may break your bones; name-calling, however, had long ceased to have any effect. At least I eventually got to have insults screamed at me by professional coaches, and Norman’s role in this is not to be underestimated. He had correctly identified something that Jimmie McAuliffe hadn’t. It was difficult growing up in these circumstances, but it was not without its rewards.
He wasn’t so tough on my brother. He would play with Steven more himself, practising shots and crosses with another kid and his dad, which looked far more like fun to me, whereas I was expected to do my stuff alone. Perhaps his experiences with me had encouraged him to adopt a slightly different approach.
Norman was a big strong bloke and it would be some years before I showed anything like rebellion. When I was eleven, I watched him play in a Sunday league game. He’d had a tussle with an opponent, so he waited until everyone’s attention was diverted by another incident that the referee was dealing with, upon which he seized his opportunity to punch his unfortunate adversary clean out. The poor chap then rolled silently down an adjacent bank. Had the man ended the incident in a water trough it would have been very much along the lines of a fight featuring Clint Eastwood or John Wayne.
My dad then jogged nonchalantly back to position to carry on the game before anyone else had even noticed. Tough with me though he was, he was not in the habit of punching his offspring. But the incident reinforced that he was not a father whose will was to be lightly ignored. The downside of this for Norman’s own football was that he gathered a reputation, justly as it happens, as someone who could be easily aggravated into earning a red card. His fuse on the football field was not so much short as barely discernible.
That was how he wanted me to play, but I was never like him in that regard. They could kick me if they pleased. I was nowhere near soft, but I was by then a centre-forward and I extracted justice by inserting the ball into the net, whereas my dad wanted me to thump people. He would ask why I hadn’t smashed a defender who had been overly physical and I would reply: ‘I scored two goals.’ The physical side of my game would develop at professional clubs – as you will see.
I must reiterate. He did help, but not as much as he had intended. He did everything he thought was beneficial and had an enormous knowledge of football. It’s just that it all instilled in me a fear of failure in my performance, something I still feel today in a separate career in an entirely different industry. Before playing in Sunderland games I would feel physically sick and wouldn’t be able to feel my legs. My first time in the starting XI was at Derby County in 1993. I was wrung out and could barely walk onto the pitch at the old Baseball Ground for a match that we would lose 5–0. I’m considerably better read now and I firmly believe that these anxiety issues go back an awfully long way.
By the time I was at Sunderland, Norman had mellowed and was more of a mate than he had been previously. Then we could discuss football more rationally. We still can. There isn’t a problem – now. He always meant well and I won’t allow anyone to speak ill of my dad.
• • •
Divine intervention may have played a part in St Cuthbert’s success.
In the late 1970s my Uncle Tom was working as a joiner in Warsaw. He had done an initial six-week stint before two weeks’ leave back in Blighty. Prior to his return to Poland we had a discussion about football boots. He made me stand in the kitchen on a sheet of paper in my stockinged feet and drew around them with a felt tip. He then took the piece of paper back to Poland where he said he could have a first-rate pair of boots knocked up for me by a local shoemaker for a fraction of what they would cost in the UK. The modern reader may be shocked to learn that in those days, we Brits had no compunction about utilising cheap Polish labour, but it did happen.
In September 1978 Pope John Paul I died after just thirty-three days in the job (bear with me, it’s all connected). Following a three-day interview in the Sistine Chapel, he was replaced by Karol Wojtyła (himself a decent goalkeeper back in the day), who gave himself the papal name of John Paul II, thereby disappointing the waggish element of Thorney Close who had mooted the possibility of a John Paul being succeeded by a George Ringo. John Paul II was the first non-Italian pope since 1523. He was Polish and his second official visit as pope outside of Italy was to his native land. He arrived there in the summer of 1979 with the express intention of meeting up with Tom Howey for a few jars. It didn’t take long for the Pope to track him down and when he did, Uncle Tom asked his Holiness to sanctify my new boots. The story went something like that anyway; the boot blessing part is certainly true. I would like to say that following this blessing I went on to score my hundredth goal of the season before 70,000 fans at Wembley Stadium.
And I did.
In 1980, St Cuthbert’s was one of four teams to reach the finals of a national six-a-side tournament run by Smith’s Crisps; sport and junk food have always had this symbiotic relationship. The games were played across the Wembley pitch on Saturday 7 June. Mr Stewart’s coaching skills had guided us there and he was justifiably very proud. Such were the financial constraints that we travelled to London by bus. Had we gone by steam train I suspect it would have been the pinnacle of his entire life.
We were a sort of support act to an England–Scotland schoolboy international (a great game, which featured Paul McStay, Alistair Dick and Paul Rideout, who scored a screamer to complete a hat-trick for England, although Scotland won 5–4). Our semi-final was a 2–0 win over a southern team, with goals from Archie and me. We lost the final 2–1 to a school from Manchester, but I scored in that game too and the goal was my hundredth of the season, from the right boot of the pair blessed by the Pope the previous year. I never wore them again, although I still have them, replete with decaying blades of decades-old Wembley grass.
One in the eye for Professor Richard Dawkins there then. Thirty-three years after we played at Wembley, Sunderland were bottom of the Premier League with one point from their first eight games, when Pope Francis was photographed in St Peter’s Square holding an SAFC home shirt. Two days later Sunderland beat Newcastle and went on to avoid relegation, as well as reach the League Cup final. If that, along with the tale of my old boots, doesn’t dispense with atheism, then I don’t know what will.
• • •
I left primary school on a high. In my last year at St Cuthbert’s we won everything, and I scored 109 times. I then trotted off to comprehensive school, the all-boys St Aidan’s RC Secondary. My first year of 1980–81 was spent at a place called Havelock, three miles from the rest of the school. For some reason, everyone had a much worse time at Havelock than at the main section. Mine was the last year to be educated there, which was excellent news for the lads in the year below. Should you find my description of the place to be somehow lacking, pop on a DVD of The Shawshank Redemption and you’ll get the broad idea. If you’re still not sure, then nip down to the library and borrow a copy of Lord of the Flies. If that doesn’t do the trick, just punch yourself.
Havelock was dirty and brutal. There was just something about that place, the building and the atmosphere, that was worse than the main part of the school in Ashbrooke. It was so manky that I thought it should have been napalmed, but as the years passed I decided that that would have been too agreeable a fate. Violence was institutional. St Aidan’s was then run by the Congregation of Christian Brothers and their accompanying loving tenderness.
They weren’t all bad, but one of them, whose name my memory has refused to store, was a total sadist. He had two main hobbies: scripture recital and corporal punishment. There are passages in two of the gospels that say ‘Suffer little children’. This bloke had clearly misinterpreted them. I recall Brother O’Twatt, or whatever his name was, dragging one David Leonard by the hair over several desks as a light-hearted prelude to kicking his head in. The same bloke would jump from a chair when administering a leather strap in order to gain more purchase, because obviously you just can’t hit an eleven-year-old child hard enough. He left soon after his assault on David Leonard, possibly transferred before he could be prosecuted. This was sad in a way, as he would never be able to take a class of kids with Steven in it. There was another teacher called Weston, a nasty piece of work who never quite grasped the distinction between discipline and recreational bullying. It isn’t simply a case of ‘They couldn’t do that now’ – they really weren’t supposed to do it then either.
As ever, a respite from life’s unpleasantries came from football. I had no difficulty in making the school team. St Aidan’s has always won a good portion of trophies and is proud of its achievements in sport. The fact that it was an all-boys school and therefore had double the number of players from which to choose is something they tend not to refer to. But our year did have a very good side. We had a choice between two great goalies in Vincent Marriner and Eddie Harrison (who might have made it had he been slightly taller, although he did go on to play in an England firemen’s XI). Outfielders included Archie, Gavin Ledwith, David Simpson, Damian Adamson, James Duncan and Mickey Robinson, who eventually played for Darlington.
The team coach was Damian’s dad, a gifted maths teacher called Tony Adamson who once sent Damian off for overuse of the mouth. In contradistinction to certain colleagues of his, the expression ‘laid-back’ does not provide a sufficiently accurate description of Mr Adamson, who would smoke fags in the classroom while he was teaching.
On colder days he would referee our matches from the interior of his car, parking his light blue hatchback at the side of the pitch. Assuming he could still see the game through a fug of cigarette smoke, he would toot his horn to signify a free kick and use the indicators to denote which team had received it. And he was still a better referee than Andre Marriner. Mr Adamson’s officiation of matches from behind the wheel of a stationary 1975 Austin Princess did not strike anyone at the time as peculiar or even worthy of comment. I have to say now that despite all the goals and the trophies we won, this is one of my greatest memories of school football.
Another great memory is of setting a record that I believe still stands. When I was fifteen, we played the nearby Southmoor School. We won 10–2 and I scored all ten of our goals, five in each half, and even made the back page of the Sunderland Echo on the strength of it. I was marked that day by Philip Coxall, who was centre-half for England schoolboys. He got so pissed off at 8–0 that he went up front and scored their two. Scoring ten is an unusual occurrence at any level of football, and in case you were wondering, I can tell you that the tenth felt as good as the first. I loved scoring goals.
My dad wasn’t there.
• • •
For our second year at St Aidan’s, 1981–82, we were moved from Stalag Havelock to the more salubrious setting of Ashbrooke, where we continued to play football at every given opportunity. As soon as our lunches had gone south, we would charge into the yard and immediately divide into pairs, with all five or six pairs attacking the same goalkeeper (usually Vincent Marriner), but with each twosome for themselves. Now in our teens, we began to take an interest in fashion and made such assiduous efforts to be individuals that we all looked exactly the same. Fans of Madness one and all, we wore Fred Perry T-shirts, Farah trousers, white socks and black brogues with steel segs. It soon became apparent that black brogues with steel segs were not conducive to playing football in a concrete yard.
Like millions of dads, mine was on the dole for much of that decade, so my own brogues were the best that my mother’s Providence cheque could purchase from a particular shop where such currency was accepted. Not a first-division pair. However, they were still as perilous as any other brogues when playing football. Brogues must have been the biggest cause of football injuries in the 1980s (although I suppose we should be grateful that we were not five years older, because playing football in platform shoes must have been positively lethal). An informal ban was therefore agreed among ourselves; trainers only for football. The universal trainer of choice was Dunlop Green Flash – so we were still all dressed identically. From then on, yard football was played alongside an extensive line of gleaming brogues that had been dutifully removed in the interests of our general wellbeing. It was an eminently sensible piece of schoolboy self-governance. These days they would contact the Health & Safety Executive.
As well as representing the school, I played for a Sunday team called Blackthorn for a couple of years. In the first year, the team was run by a gentleman called Ray Lindstedt. In the second year, the team was run by a gentleman called Norman Howey.
Those of you who have been paying attention will have guessed that I was not wholeheartedly pleased with the appointment of the latter. He was his usual exacting self; more so because I was the best player on the team.
I was responsible for taking free kicks, throw-ins, corners, penalties and was the main goal scorer. Because he did not go so far as to expect me to head in goals from my own corners, Norman thought that his demands upon me were wholly reasonable, but he was shovelling on even more pressure than usual. I have a glaring memory of eliciting his fury by missing a penalty; over the bar during a 1–0 defeat. This was not, to put it mildly, a pleasant afternoon. We didn’t have a car then, but were given a lift home by one of the other dads. The silence in that car was an ominous prelude to the sonic bollocking I was about to receive in the house. It was tough love.
For obvious reasons, the following season I went off to play for another Sunday team called Moorside, where I was up front with Clive Mendonca, who would haunt his home town club with a hat-trick in the extraordinary 1998 play-off final between Charlton and Sunderland. Another teammate was Gary Coatsworth, who later joined Barnsley, Darlington and Leicester City.
In 1998 the BBC broadcast a famous fly-on-the-wall documentary about Sunderland AFC called Premier Passions, which I featured in. It is probably best remembered for the ranting of the manager, Peter Reid, when things were going badly as we fought in vain to keep the club in the Premier League. There were often similar scenes in our house in Tintagel Close.
Peter Reid was a professional doing a high-pressure job in a multi-million-pound industry. Blackthorn was a kids’ Sunday team. But Norman did not make that distinction because he took all football extremely seriously. However, like Mr Reid, he would also give effusive praise if he thought it was merited. I say yet again – he always did what he thought was best and, despite my misgivings, both of his sons would become professional footballers. So who was right?
CHAPTER 2
IPSWICH
Some very good schoolboy footballers of my age were based in and around Sunderland. Those who remember the town at that time (it became a city in 1992) may recall the names of – with apologies to anyone I may have missed out – Philip Coxall, Archie Common, David Pringle, Paul Redman, Gary Breeds (another England youth player), Neil Foster, Ian Dipper, Mickey Robinson, Grant Brown and Clive Mendonca, with Richard Ord a few miles down the A19 in Murton.
Although they were all tipped to become professionals, only Brown (Leicester and Lincoln City), Mendonca (Charlton Athletic, Rotherham and Grimsby), Ord (Sunderland) and I would properly make it. Some of the others became apprentices and Mickey Robinson did play once in the Football League for Darlington. Ian Dipper is now a respected kids’ coach. But the overall story of that bag of players is quite typical. The moral is that the chances of making a living from the game are minimal. Despite this, there will never be a shortage of lads who assume that they will rise to the top because they are a cut above on the football pitch as teenagers. Oh, life.
When I was fourteen, I trained with the younger players at Sunderland, who then included Gary Owers and Gordon Armstrong. The manager of the time was Alan Durban, but we were coached by George Herd, a former Sunderland inside-forward who also played for Scotland. He was a great man (still is, now in his eighties), a wonderful coach with infectious enthusiasm and a tremendous player. He was then nudging fifty years of age, but was doing stuff with a ball that we could only watch with slack-jawed admiration.
However – allow me to indulge in a cliché here – a dream come true was not to be. I was not physically prepossessing at that stage; on the lanky side and with the added disadvantage of still developing bodily. I was also, relative to other players, not quite as quick as I had been. George took me to one side and informed me that they had just signed a lad who lived in Newcastle. I don’t recall the name of the fellow in question, but he was ginormous, about 6ft 7in. He was in the Andy Carroll mould without being anywhere near as good (think of the Honey Monster, only slightly better at set-pieces), but he was deemed good enough for me to be offloaded. They could only offer terms to seven kids and it seemed that I was the eighth. The gist of it was: ‘We’ve got our centre-forward and it isn’t you. Off you pop then, there’s a good chap.’ Devastated is the mot juste.
Several weeks later I received a call from Newcastle United, asking if I wanted to try my luck there. At the behest of the youth coach Colin Suggett (the same bloke who scored for Sunderland against Newcastle ten days before I was born), I had deigned to train with them a few times during the summer.
Jack Charlton was the manager, but more memorable was the presence of a young Paul Gascoigne who was two years older than me.
Only six years later, the World Cup would make him globally famous and recognised as arguably the most naturally gifted footballer on the planet. At Benwell in 1984 he was far better known as a pain in the arse. He was a dumpy little right-back and the professionals at the club couldn’t stand him. He had a bit of skill but didn’t seem like anything out of the ordinary (other than being visibly off his onion), yet that wouldn’t prevent him from throwing buckets of ice into the communal bath. At least he thought it was funny.
