The match that pitted white players against black players
West Brom players Cyrille Regis (left) and Len Cantello (right) at kick-off
- In 1979 West Bromwich Albion were looking for an idea for a benefit match for one of their longest serving players, Len Cantello. Somebody, we don't know who, came up with the idea of a match pitting black players against white players. Yes, really: blacks v whites, writes Adrian Chiles.
Warning: this story includes very strong language which some readers may find offensive.
It sounds somewhere between somewhat odd and downright appalling now, doesn't it? At the time, as I recall, it felt a rather progressive thing to do. After all we - I'm a lifelong West Brom fan - led the way in fielding black players. It seemed rather logical to push the envelope a little further and get a whole team together.
Behind closed doors, in the decidedly peculiar world of the training ground, this kind of thing had been going on for a while. "In five-a-sides we used to have the Jocks and the blacks versus the English," remembers Cyrille Regis, one of the stars of the black team. "I think the idea may have sprung naturally from that."
Cyrille Regis, Brendon Batson and Laurie Cunningham were our magnificent trio of black players, dubbed - again not in the best possible taste - The Three Degrees. They remember the game with pride and great fondness. Batson recalls no controversy. "Nobody ever rang us up and said, 'Do you realise the implication?' Nothing at all. It was fun. In that dressing room it was just great fun."
And all the black players I've spoken to about that day talk with feeling about that dressing room. Don't forget, all their lives they'd been outnumbered. Now, for one match only, they had a room of their own.
Image caption Back row, left to right: Ian Benjamin, Vernon Hodgson, Brendon Batson, Derek Richardson, Stewart Phillips, George Berry, Bob Hazell, Garth Crooks. Front row: Winston White, Cyrille Regis, Laurie Cunningham, Remi Moses, Valmore Thomas
Having been an obsessed teenage fan in the 70s, I thought I knew all I needed to know about what my heroes went through in that era. How wrong I was. I've spoken to many of the players and I've been reminded of how simply awful it was, and bewilderingly complex too.
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Very few black fans braved it. One of them was Bernie Noel, a friend of mine. He runs gyms in prisons - a real tough guy. His arms are the girth of my legs. He describes the horror of the moment the fans around him used to start chanting racial abuse. "You'd feel part of a family enjoying all manner of songs, chants and boisterous activity together. They start making monkey chants and chanting 'You black bastard' to opposing players or fans. At those times you couldn't feel more alone."
Bernie wouldn't go back to those days but he does have an interesting take on how far we've come, which may not be as far as we like to think. "I sometimes wonder if I preferred it back in the 70s."
"Eh?"
"Because then," he explains carefully, "you knew who the racists were - they were shouting their heads off. Now I look around and think, well some of you are still thinking those things but I don't know who you are anymore."
Dion Dublin and Ian Wright at Crystal Palace
So many stories from the era, remarkably really, remain untold. Ian Wright and Dion Dublin are from the angrier generation of players that followed Regis, Cunningham and Batson. "We owe them so much," says Wright. "They had to turn the other cheek. They were Martin Luther King. I was more Malcolm X."
We meet at Crystal Palace, where Eric Cantona infamously lost his temper and karate-kicked someone in the crowd who was yelling abuse at him.
"I tell you," says Wright, as we walk past the spot where it happened, "any black player watching Cantona do that would have wondered how they stopped themselves doing the same thing.
"But imagine any of them back in the day, with all the abuse they got, jumping into the crowd. Do you think they would be playing football? They would have been locked up for that."
Good point. But on this occasion, Wright is wrong. When I relay what he said to George Berry, he looks half-sheepish, half-proud and says, "I did it." It turns out Berry did a Cantona a good 20 years before Eric got round to it.
I lost it. I jumped in the crowd, gave him a right hook, and got arrested
George Berry
George had made a mistake that led to Watford scoring in a cup tie against Wolves at Molineux. As he was coming off the pitch a Wolves fan started yelling at him. "One of our own fans was calling me a black bastard and a fucking disgrace to the club and saying '*** off back to your country' and 'You're a coon' and the whole lot.
"As I started to walk up the tunnel at Molineux, I thought: 'I ain't taking that.' So I walked back down the tunnel and back up the track and I confronted him. Some of his mates started laughing. That was it - I lost it. I jumped in the crowd, gave him a right hook, and got arrested."
I think we can safely say George Berry would have made a rotten Martin Luther King, but who can blame him? The really amazing thing is that it was all hushed up. George wasn't charged, the fan's complaints, if he made any, apparently fell on deaf ears, and the TV footage, Berry was told later, was quietly lost.
My hunch is that the whole incident was considered too incendiary for words and it would be much better to pretend it had never happened. I applaud the cover up. Just like our blacks v whites match, it feels quite wrong now, but might well have been the best thing to do in the worst of times.
The match itself, by the way, finished 3-2 to the black team. Lots of black fans turned up to watch. There was no trouble whatsoever. A good day was had by all.
Image caption The players of 1979 reunited. Back row, left to right: Stewart Phillips, Ian Benjamin, Alistair Robertson, Tony Brown. Front row: Vernon Hodgson, Cyrille Regis, Brendon Batson