So Long Ralphie

  I’m proud to say I loved the man. I wrote about him in No Nay Never Volume One several years ago. In connection with this we spoke on the phone several times and these weren’t just 2 minute calls they were at least an hour every time. He loved to talk about football, his past, and loved to help anyone writing.

     I met him in person at book launch dinners, two of them. I remember how delighted he was to come up north for the Harry Potts dinner and how Margaret Potts was thrilled to meet him again. Harry Potts took him under his wing when his mother died after he had only been at the club a little while.  Ralphie never forgot the Potts family kindness.

 
     Of course he was a wonderful player, and the team for a couple of seasons revolved round him. He was devastated to leave and Potts and Adamson were devasted that he had to go. The story of how the club tried to keep the sale to Spurs secret until it was done and dusted, was real cloak and dagger stuff, involving hush hush phone calls, back door exits, car parks and  car switch-overs and all  funny enough to have been part of a Carry On film – Carry on Ralphie maybe.

 
     It took him a while to adjust to the new demands at Tottenham, there the classic small fish in a big pond, in contrast to Burnley where he had been so central and it was essential that he played so that he was patched up more than once when really he should have been in bed.

    Who will ever forget the way he was kicked black and blue when Ron Harris and Chelsea came for a Cup replay. That’s how much they feared him. Ron Harris allegedly said he was the player he least liked to play against. In truth he was bruised and battered in so many games, but then it was part of the game and the Ralphies of this world never complained.

     It was Ralphie who sat on the ball during one game whilst legend says the other players had a big set-to.  You never saw him involved in any punch-up despite the treatment he received. Some say it was this game, or that, or t’other, in fact you’d think he sat on the ball in half a dozen games the tale is told so often. The other story is that he sat on the ball to give the opposing full-back a rest he had driven him dizzy so often, and he felt so sorry for him. It was away at Blackburn Rovers – or was it Leeds and Paul Reaney – according to legend it could have been at any one of 20 grounds.

     He was part of that wonderful team of 65/66 that included Lochhead, Irvine, O Neil, Harris, Elder, Angus and Morgan. It was a team that came so close to winning the title and then the following year played in Europe. One by one Bob Lord sold most of them to pay the bills. In one game at Sunderland that season Coates was so mesmeric, so tantalising, so brilliant that there was a row in the Sunderland Boardroom afterwards about how this player had slipped through the Sunderland net and ended up at Burnley. But Burnley had ace scout Jack Nixon and Sunderland didn’t. 

 
    We’ll remember his Geordie roots, the huge wide grin, his trademark figure, his trademark hair, in fact there was a record brought out to commemorate the latter. In spite of his unlikely physique his acceleration was electric and his skill with the ball just inimitable. His low centre of gravity in fact was one of the reasons why he was so good, it was almost impossible to knock him off the ball.

     Hunter Davies wrote a wonderful chapter about him in his seminal book “The Glory Game.” The Spurs players made merciless fun of his ‘country boy’ appearance. They told Ralph that at Spurs he was not allowed to wear the same shirt twice.  On a first training run they ran through a council estate. “You wanna get your name down for one of those,” they ribbed him. Little did they know how much he wanted to get on the first bus back to Burnley.

     After Spurs he finally ended up at Leyton Orient and enjoyed an Indian Summer. He came to Turf Moor with them in 1979 when Turf Moor was a desperate place and Bob Lord was overseeing a terrible decline. The eleventh commandment of football is that an ex will always score against his old club. John Chiedozie was the lad who tore Burnley apart, but to rub salt in Burnley wounds, sod’s law being what it is, Ralphie scored against his old club.

     There’s an old saying isn’t there “grown men don’t cry” but it’s rubbish isn’t it? I shed a tear when I saw the news and the picture of Ralphie onscreen. I was stunned. Then I dug out the ones I took at the Harry Potts dinner. It doesn’t seem two minutes ago that he was all smiles, walking into the room with a spring in his step, holding the microphone and talking about Harry. It was someone’s birthday and he was only too pleased to present her with the cake.

 
     He belonged to a generation of players who had no airs and graces, no pretentions, no gated mansions, no conceit and didn’t live their lives in hotels and bars and night-clubs. He was just a lovely man and a wonderful player. Those of us who saw him at Burnley were truly priveleged.

Dave Thomas December 17th 2010