Drinking
Whiteside was an enthusiastic participant in the drinking culture at
Manchester United during Ron Atkinson’s management, but they were not the
only top-flight club hitting the bottle . . .
When I was 17 and 18, I would have Saturday nights out, doing a minor crawl
around town, and we would always end up in a famous Chinatown establishment
in the early hours drinking lager out of a teapot to get round the licensing
laws.
As I got older, I would go out a bit more regularly, but if you look at the
schedule of a typical week, it is clear that we had a lot of time on our
hands and the way we filled it reflected the difference between what was
deemed acceptable in the culture of professional football then and now.
Later, we would go out with the wives and partners on a Saturday night to
somewhere like the Four Seasons hotel out by the airport and then have a
boys’ drinking session on the Sunday. The usual suspects - Bryan Robson,
Paul McGrath, Gordon McQueen and me - would be joined by others such as Mark
Hughes, Alan Brazil and Kevin Moran, depending on their commitments, and we
would stay in The Park all day, gassing about the game, steadily knocking
back pints and joining in a singsong with the Irish musicians in the evening.
On Monday, we would have a good, hard couple of hours of physical work to blow
the cobwebs away, from 10.30am to 12.30pm. On Tuesday, having got the
Saturday night and Sunday sessions out of our system the previous day, we
would do an hour and a quarter, maybe an hour and a half maximum, from
10.30am again.
If there was no midweek game, we would have Wednesdays off and do an hour and
a half on Thursday; if we played on Wednesday night we would have Thursday
off. On Fridays we would do an hour at most of five-a-sides, with perhaps
some finishing to end with. Then we would play on Saturday and have Sundays
off. It was either 4½ hours of training plus three hours of matches or six
hours of training and a 90-minute game - a 7½hour working week.
Usually, if we did not have a game on a Wednesday - and from 1985 there were
fewer than before because of the European ban after Heysel - Robbo would
convene a team meeting on Tuesday afternoons that would often go on for 12
hours or more.
I am not pointing the finger at Bryan - if he hadn’t given us the nod (and
done it with the manager’s approval, I must add), some of us would have gone
out anyway. Why? Because we loved it and felt it had no detrimental effect
on our form and fitness.
We were not the only ones who had a carefree attitude to nights out. Liverpool
did it, Everton certainly did it and you only have to read Tony Adams’s
accounts to know that Arsenal were up to it, too. I am not saying it was
right, but on the other hand I cannot see that it was all that wrong either.
Rubbery Ron
Whiteside enjoyed life under Ron Atkinson, the showbiz manager of United
who would often conduct contract talks with players while lying beneath his
office sunbed dressed only in briefs and red goggles
Ron was an old-school motivator, full of enthusiasm and encouragement, but not
one who would endlessly drill us on set-plays or put on a coaching
masterclass to outline his defensive theory. His team-talks reflected this -
there was no essential difference in their content and tone, whether our
opponents were Barcelona, Juventus, Arsenal, Liverpool or Bury.
His whole philosophy was: “We are Manchester United. Let’s not worry about
what they’re going to do. Let them worry about us.”
When Alex Ferguson came in [in 1986] he would have the opposition watched
three or four times and would come out with all sorts of intricate
instructions, for example: “In three successive games between the 65th and
70th minutes, their left back began to tire because he had made too many
runs. I want you to start hitting that channel in the 70th minute.” His
level of preparation was such that anyone would look bad when measured up
against him. Ron never gave a hoot about anything like that.
Ron’s other misfortune when appraised alongside his successor is that he was
not what you would call a manager of the whole club, in the same vein that
Fergie is. All that mattered to Ron was his first-team squad.
If you look at it objectively, you could say that his job depended on those
players alone, so it was understandable that he focused on us. We were what
he called his “magic circle” and if you were one of his chosen 16 you were
made - he backed us to the hilt, lavished us with praise, played
five-a-sides with us, made us all eligible for win bonuses and even,
occasionally, socialised with us. If you were in, you were part of Ron’s
gang, but if you were outside this charmed set for whatever reason -
dropped, injured, too young or not good enough - he would not give you the
time of day.
Behind the face he adopted for the public, jovial, wise-cracking TV Ron was a
football manager as serious and ruthless as any other. He certainly poured a
lot of pink champagne for the guests he regularly entertained in his office
after home matches, but he took ages to drain his glass and hid the fact
that he was secretly drinking gallons of tea while his visitors were necking
the sauce.
It is true about the sunbed in his office, though, and he often conducted
contract negotiations with players while lying beneath his lamp, dressed
only in his briefs and a pair of red goggles. It was probably quite a good
negotiating tactic because it had the effect of unsettling you.
His assistant, Mick Brown, took a lot of the training sessions and we were
always in hysterics on dark winter mornings when we would ask Mick where the
boss was and he would say “scouting” or “talking to a manager” because
behind him as he spoke was the telltale Close Encounters style fluorescent
blue light emanating from the window of Ron’s office. It is his tragedy as a
manager that if we had won the title everyone would have forgotten about all
the showbiz stuff they used as an excuse to attack him. To me, it was just
part of the showmanship of an extrovert man.
Ron was at his best working with good players, an art that should not be
underestimated. One of his tricks was to be very complimentary and it
endeared him to us because players love compliments. It was a massive ego
boost to be told after a match that your left foot reminded him of Ferenc
Puskás’s.
He was, though, not every player’s cup of tea and used to infuriate the Scots,
Welsh and Irish on a Friday morning when he set up the five-a-sides, naming
himself captain of the England team and pointing at everyone else saying:
“It’s England versus all you rubbish.”
But perhaps getting us wound up was his intention; it gave an edge to those
games and let him fulfil his fantasy that he was Bobby Charlton. If he could
have moved as quickly as he came out with a one-liner, he would have been
half-decent, but sadly he never recognised that his brashness only played
well with those of us who were already fond of him.
Making history
Whiteside beat Pelé’s 24-year record when he became the youngest player in
World Cup history after being selected to represent Northern Ireland in the
1982 finals, a record that still stands today
When Sven-Göran Eriksson picked Theo Walcott for England’s 2006 World Cup
squad, I was contacted by journalists for my opinion and I said, as was said
about me: “If he’s good enough, he’s old enough.”
The controversy that greeted his selection surprised me because my own, in
1982, caused few ripples until we got to Spain. Of course, that is a
reflection of the size of expectations - England always generate far more
coverage than Northern Ireland - and the hype that has grown around the game
over the past 25 years.
Many people noted the similarities between us - our age and experience - but
few pointed out one essential difference. Walcott had not played in the top
flight but had turned out 20-odd times for Southampton before his transfer
to Arsenal and had featured in one of England’s warm-up games. I had 102
minutes of action, a fragile knee and had never met the manager or the
majority of the squad. OK, I had the build of a man, but in truth never has
a greener player than me been selected for the tournament.
I should have felt nervous, daunted even, but all I could think was something
eminently practical. Because of the injury, I had missed so much football
that year and now here was Billy Bingham [the Northern Ireland manager at
the time] handing me the opportunity to carry on playing. It was the
prospect of games as much as the prestige of the World Cup that excited me.
Who the hell else in the world remembers what they did when they were 17 years
and 41 days old? My day, the one when I broke Pelé’s 24-year-old record as
the youngest player to play in the World Cup finals - a record I still hold
- began with a chartered flight to Zaragoza, where we were due to play
Yugoslavia.
When we got to the hotel, Billy was adamant that I would not be available to
talk to the media until after the match, but as I stood outside the door of
my room on the second floor I could see down the stairwell into the lobby,
which was mobbed with hundreds of journalists. For an hour I felt more like
a prisoner than a pop star.
It was then that I got my first taste of how the next couple of weeks would
unfold. There were so many photographers crowding around me as I walked
through the foyer that Billy summoned a security guard - a policeman who was
armed with a sub-machinegun, to protect us from Eta, the Basque separatists
- and he pushed my head down and bustled me through the throng and on to the
coach. Home-town fame was one thing, instant world celebrity was quite
another and I must have had a bemused look on my face as I sat in my aisle
seat on the coach, facing inwards to avoid the cameras pressed up against
the windows.
© Norman Whiteside 2007. Extracted from Determined: My Autobiography, to
be published by Headline on Thursday at £18.99
Tomorrow More exclusive extracts from Norman Whiteside’s autobiography.
To order a copy (£16.99 p&p free; RRP £18.99) phone 0870 160 80 80
or go to timesonline.co.uk/booksfirst
