Book of Eli (part three)

       They are not fondly remembered.    Even the official site refers to them as “infamous.” So you want to find out and people are so helpful. Take the people at Wolves for example. The internet can tell you so much but sometimes you need a historian, maybe the secretary or chairman of one of the supporters’ club sites or a media guy at a club to help you out. Darren Bentley, media man at BFC, put me in touch with his Wolves counterpart Paul Berry.

     Every club has a historian but I couldn’t do that job. They deal in records, facts, figures; who scored that and when or who was sold for how much to which club, who was manager in 1954 and all that sort of stuff. It’s a special job and I take my hat off to them. But I’d rather write about people and their stories. And historians need a good memory but mine’s dreadful. I wrote a book about Willie Irvine not that long ago, but if you asked me 20 questions now about Willie Irvine I’d probably get 5 out of 20.
 
      Finding things out and collecting resources is half the fun of book writing; digging up background stuff, tracking books down, old reports, pictures and the snippets of information that can bring things to life. Sometimes you find them by accident. Sometimes things are sent to you. Suzanne Geldard from the Lancashire Telegraph when she found out what we were doing sent a copy of a recent interview with Roger.
 
     From things like this you get an insight into people that you can then follow up. Just like I get a thrill in finding something in a book, or actually finding a book I need, Roger gets a thrill from selling and is now a successful businessman.  “I love the kill,” he told her. I know what he meant. There’s a buzz and it’s the same buzz that I get if I find something in an old mag or on an internet site that I can add to the chapter or that will lead to something else. Finding the old programme on ebay of one of the two games that Roger played for Leeds gave me a real kick. Funnily enough just as I was writing this, the ebay email arrived that I had won the item. Roger will get a ‘fix’ maybe if he lands a new client. I get the same ‘fix’ if I find a programme I need. And all it cost me was £1.98 including postage. Being a tightfisted Yorkshireman I’m not sure what gave me the bigger pleasure, the programme or the giveaway price.

     The Bhatti brothers intrigued me but information about them is scant, or so it seemed until a ‘search’ came up with the mention of their name inside the pages of a Derek Dougan book listed on ‘Amazon’. I bought the book, goodbye £13. Dougan and the Bhattis were connected at Wolves. How? Why? What might Roger know about it all? Were their names still bandied about when he was there? And in fact would everyone today know who Dougan was? People of my age certainly would but maybe not others.
 
     Roger calls himself an entrepreneur not a wheeler dealer. Sorry Roger but it occurred to me to call one of the later chapters “Del Boy” or in fact “Don’t call me Del Boy.” Even as a player he sold sports goods and those dodgy looking shell-suits that were all the rage in the 90s. Mike Summerbee when he was a player used to drive round with a car boot full of shirts for sale. Did Roger do the same? Turns out he did, the players loved the shell-suits. Today he runs Ventura Office Supplies with his co-directors. Was it Napoleon who called the English a nation of shopkeepers? Actually the phrase first appeared in 1776 in Adam Smith’s book The Wealth of Nations.

     But hey this is getting too intellectual and it’s all a hundred miles away from Roger Eli’s brief sojourn at Wolverhampton Wanderers; but you see the fun there is to be had just finding things out where one thing leads to another. Whilst the story goes that Leeds’ Elland Road was built on the site of old rhubarb farms and gypsy camps (Don Revie thought it was cursed); the name Molineux in Wolverhampton comes from the Molineux family who arrived there from France in 1306 and built their home. 500 years passed by quickly and it developed in 1871 into the Molineux Pleasure Grounds where occasionally football was played. The football club made their home there in 1889 with help from the Northampton Brewery Company.
 
     You write a book and questions crop up all the time. Sometimes they come into your head for no logical reason and there’s no connection with the chapter you’re currently covering. For some reason it suddenly occurred that footballers spend half their life on a coach, especially when it’s a small club, money is tight, economy is the mantra. Bob Lord used to fly his players to a game sometimes, or get a crack steam express. But in the 80s at Burnley there was none of that. Imagine a trip from Burnley to Torquay. How did they cope, how much boredom was there, but on the other hand how many laughs. How do their families cope in their frequent absences? It’s the wives who hold the fort, pay the bills: get the kids to school. How do marriages hold up? What about mixed-race marriages. I hate the expression but what else is there – multi-cultural marriages maybe?  What are the strains? And when it’s a lower League footballer and the pay is poor how does the mortgage get paid, car bills and all those things that we all struggle with?  And if you are only 29 when you finish just what state of mind are you in?

     That injury niggled him from the age of 17 when he got up badly and in so doing twisted the knee. It never went away. What feelings does he have now about it? Willie Irvine still feels bitter after all these years about the Johnny Morrissey tackle that broke his leg at Everton. He was never the same player afterwards and it ruined his career.  Frank Casper the man who signed Roger for Burnley curses the name of Norman Hunter. As we wrote the book Burnley appointed a new manager, Eddie Howe, only 33 years old. A knee injury ended his playing career.

     We met in the same place as before; The Potting Shed café in the Woodside Garden centre near his office. This time the publisher came along as well from his office in Skipton. Over two hours we sat there mulling things over – the trip to Russia and how they had three KGB officers attached to them all the time. Footballers are footballers with healthy appetites (nudge nudge wink wink) and they had been told how Russian women would be happy to exchange favours in those austere times in exchange for stockings and lingerie. One player (who may be named if he still laughs about it) took a suitcase full of the stuff but then found that it remained unused. The KGB were always in attendance making finding women difficult if not impossible. And in any case how often did you find a beautiful woman in 90s Russia. Most of them drove tractors. The more practically minded Roger took a suitcase full of food. Food figures highly when Roger travels abroad. As a 15 year old on his first ever trip abroad from Manchester Airport to Rome with Cloughie and the Forest youth team, he carried a bag of sandwiches wrapped in a Sunblest sliced loaf wrapper that his mum had packed for him in one hand, and an apple in the other. Bless
 
     On the Bermuda trip two players spent much of their time with the locals smoking weed. Perhaps we can weed out a few more details later.
 
     At Leeds in his early days it was legend and hard man Kenny Burns who took him under his wing; but then Billy Bremner moved him on as part of the clear-out after Eddie Gray was sacked. He took part in a youth tournament in Italy twice, once with Nottingham Forest when he was an associate schoolboy and once with Leeds as an apprentice. It was Brian Clough took the Forest lads to Italy and made it a memorable week, providing possibly one of the best stories of the book – not telling you now – you’ll have to save up for the book.

    Or would the best story of the book be the behind the scenes tale of what happened to the manager and the assistant manager prior to the Torquay play-off game; something that left the players with a mixture of anger, disbelief and hardly had them in the best frame of mind for the game. Unsurprisingly they lost it 2 – 0. And again he told us about the knee problems and what really amounted to botched medical diagnosis and care, botched to the degree that he wondered whether to sue the surgeon who operated.

     There’s a tidy list of players he can call on today including Andy Ritchie, Kenny Burns, Dennis Irwin, Terry Phelan, David Platt… and it’s a small world. He was in digs in Crewe with Platt and a guy called Wayne Goodison. My ears pricked up. I remembered. “You’re joking,” I said. This was the brother of my deputy head in a previous life. When Wayne Goodison got married the story was splattered all over the back pages of the Sunday red-tops of the appalling risque stories told by his best man Platt (by then a big name England player) at the wedding. It really did cause a furore. No one knew where to put their faces, it was so cringworthy, and the deputy had come in on the Monday morning brandishing one of the Sundays, purple faced with embarrassment and disbelief. Personally I’d always thought it was hilarious and wondered should I tell the kids in assembly. 
     
    And: must tell you this one. I started out to write a book with Roger. But  I keep forgetting Roger gets a kick from selling. I must ask him how many of those ghastly shell suits he used to sell from the boot of his car in the Burnley FC Car Park to the other players. So far he’s sold me two printer/scanners. How the hell’s he managed to do that? He’s good. I only needed one.
    

Anyone need a shell suit?

Dave T February 2011