Being Mistaken For Rodney Marsh

There are at least two reviews out on the internet whose authors are under the impression that 'Rock n Roll Soccer' was written by Rodney Marsh. Marsh, of course, wrote the foreword, and his name appears on the cover beneath my own. I don't have a problem with this. If people read the book and enjoyed it and thought it was written by one of the most prominent and colourful English footballers of the 1970s, who am I to complain?

When I first received proof copies of 'RnRS' a year ago, my father-in-law happened to be visiting and was keen to read the book. As the foreword was not attributed to Marsh on the first page, at first he thought it was written by me. "It seemed a bit strange that you were making out you'd played in the NASL," he said, "and I was somewhat worried about your mental state." For the final print edition, we made it clear from the first page that the foreword consisted of Marsh's account of playing in the league, and not some flight of my imagination.

And God knows, I've spent enough time in my life imagining myself as a paid footballer. From around my fifth birthday onwards, to varying degrees, until my tender hamstrings forced me into retirement last year at the age of 49.

Me with some cheerleaders during the 1970s.

I once wrote a piece for the now defunct Major League Soccer magazine about players who'd only made a single appearance in MLS. While most of those players probably regarded themselves as failures, it's obvious from re-reading my introduction to the piece that all I felt towards them was a profound existential envy:

"If dreams, as Shakespeare wrote, are nothing but 'the children of an idle brain, begot of nothing but vain fantasy', then I plead guilty. In sleep, I've often scored great goals in front of huge crowds. In waking hours, I've longed to play in a professional game, even for five minutes. Just to see what it's like. Just to say I've been there."

Around a decade ago, when MLS started up its reserve league, I dreamt that I got called up to play for DC United's second string due to an injury crisis. I told my dream to Doug Hicks, who was the team's head of media relations at the time. "That's not gonna happen," he responded drily, as though just by telling him the dream, I'd been hinting that maybe it would, or at least that it could. Which of course was exactly why I'd told him. He was on to me.

Hicks and his colleagues are, however, very switched on to the needs of writers and journalists in this respect. They know we're only carping from the press box because we're either too fat, slow, useless or old (or all four) to be out there ourselves. So during MLS Cup and the MLS All-Star Game they indulge us by taking the trouble to organise media games or tournaments. I've still got my lovely trophy from being on the winning team at the 2011 All-Star Media Challenge in New York. I played against Greg Lalas, who once played half a dozen games in MLS (albeit over a decade earlier). He didn't seem to be noticeably better or worse than the rest of us. See, man, I coulda been a contender.

But that passage in Rock n Roll Soccer that goes: "In one game he [Pele] went ballistic at me for what he thought was showboating. In another game he scythed me down and provoked a 15-man brawl. Most painful of all, after I nutmegged him once he came up to me and ruffled my hair - a sporting gesture by the revered icon. Except that no one could see that he'd gouged my ear with his fingernail and opened up a bleeding wound..." - that was not written by me. I did not nutmeg Pele. That was Rodney Marsh. But if you want to confuse the two, be my guest.

"I didn't know who the hell FIFA was and I didn't care"

The North American Soccer League’s relationship with FIFA was fractious from the go, and it barely progressed to the point of cordiality in the next two decades. NASL Commissioner Phil Woosnam was forever lobbying to innovate at the behest of owners such as the Atlanta Chiefs chief executive Dick Cecil who initially, in his own words, “didn’t know who the hell FIFA was and I didn’t care”. The NASL meddled with the points system, the offside law, shirt numbers, and the number of permitted substitutions, and it became wholly opposed to the idea of ending any game in a draw. The NASL knew that to sell the sport to a new market, it had to understand what it was that the fans – unencumbered by 100 years of history and tradition – wanted from 90 minutes of sporting entertainment.

Sport imitating art: Subbuteo-style, the NASL
 experimented with a 35-yard line to spread
 play and decrease offside calls.

Not all of its ideas worked, or were necessarily beneficial to the game as a spectacle, but at least this was a league prepared to instigate a discussion and then take action at a time when FIFA took (and still takes) years to even contemplate the possibility of change. And it happened in a decade, the 1970s, when football was at its nadir of negativity in terms of tactics and goalscoring. In this excerpt from Chapter 7, The NASL vs FIFA and the world, we look at the changes that the NASL, with FIFA’s eventual (but reluctant) approval, made to the field of play. By adding a 35-yard offside line (think Subbuteo), the league attempted to stretch the play, minimize offside, and avoid the tight and frenzied midfield stalemates so prevalent in Europe at the time:

One of the rumours that did the rounds in the 70s was that ‘the Yanks want to abolish the offside law’. This was another supposed example of how the Americans wanted to mutilate and destroy our game, and although it was mooted by a couple of teams at the League’s inception, it was voted down by those who had a vague clue about soccer and its place in the world. However, anyone who recalls the offside trap of the 1970s and 1980s in European soccer might grant the idea of even discussing a change to the offside law a little sympathy. For the benefit of those who weren’t there, or who have shut out the memory, lines of defenders would step forward at the apposite moment with their arms simultaneously raised in appeal, usually catching an opponent clear through on goal, but yards offside. This could happen time and time again, and would prompt much agonizing among television pundits about what to do. The answer, as always from the European game, was nothing. On the other hand, it was of course a wonderful sight when one or more of the defenders got his timing wrong, the linesman kept his flag down, and all of a sudden the forward was through on goal with only the keeper to beat. If the forward scored, the defenders would jaw at the linesman as if he had personally advised them to step up like line dancers and ignore the ball in favour of a negative, under- handed tactic which had never been envisioned when a more Corinthian generation had devised the law as a way of avoiding goal-hangers.

For the unique case of the NASL, though, a modification was in order. In the middle of the 1972 season FIFA allowed the NASL to experiment with an offside line in line with the penalty area, but it was a fiasco – defenders played so deep that play became entrenched in the penalty area and goals per game actually decreased. It was brought upfield to become a 35-yard line for the 1973 season. Long-serving NASL coach Ron Newman explains that one of the reasons the offside line was introduced ‘was mainly down to the fact that we kept playing in high school arenas and they were so long and narrow. You were fitting a soccer field inside a running track, and it was hard in this country, because the running track was a different shape here – more narrow, and you’d get things like a long jump pit down the edge of the field and you had to cover it up.’ With the game already constricted by narrow pitches, having the offside line on halfway squeezed play still further. Despite its introduction being designed to fit the unique case of US soccer, Newman believes ‘without question’ that a 35-yard offside line would have worked for the rest of the world.

Phil Woosnam explained the rationale when FIFA, after a year of deliberation, finally gave the League the go-ahead to try the experiment. ‘By opening up the play with this change in the offside law, we feel that spectators will be treated to a more exciting and enjoyable brand of soccer,’ he said. ‘The entire world of soccer recognizes that changes in the laws that produce greater goal-scoring opportunities must be considered. It is our belief, shared by many European officials, that the ultimate answer is to make a change in the offside rule and the size of the goal.’ Some years later, he explained to Observer journalist Hugh McIlvanney another reason for the offside line: ‘An increasing influence of coaches and players from England in North America was resulting in an increase in the use of offside tactics, congestion of players in midfield and tight marking of skilful players by extremely physical defenders.’

"Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it"

Tampa Bay Rowdies coach Gordon Jago said of players like Rodney Marsh that “you have to accept them the way they are. Only a fool would try to submerge those assets.” Yet the 1970s were full of fancy-footed, flair players who were adored by fans but submerged by managers and clubs who couldn’t afford to let a single unruly player look bigger than the club, no matter how special his talents. Spurned by the tactically dull English game and the post-Victorian disciplinary norms of its custodians, many of the more individualistic British players found the North American Soccer League to be a far more receptive platform for their charisma-driven style, both as a footballer and a personality.

Chapter 4 of Rock n Roll Soccer examines at length the largely successful NASL careers of Marsh and George Best, looking to resurrect their reputations after having fallen out with Manchesters City and United respectively. While both had their issues with team bosses and coaches in the USA just as they had done in Britain, the two players were also uniquely suited to bringing the NASL the kind of panache and publicity that it was craving during its heady expansion years in the mid 1970s. Here are the opening paragraphs to ‘Marsh and Best: Entertaining the USA’:

Marsh and Best: hair and flair

Rodney Marsh stopped the game, although referee Peter Johnson hadn’t blown his whistle. The Tampa Bay Rowdies midfielder fell to his knees, stretched out his arms and gestured at the ball in his possession. Come and get it, he was saying to the New York Cosmos, a team that was losing 4–0, and whose pivotal player, Pelé, was not having his greatest day. Come on, come and get it – I know you can’t, but try anyway.

It was the 1976 season, and the first visit by the Cosmos to the upstart Tampa Bay Rowdies since Pelé’s signing the previous year. The New York team, fresh off the plane from an exhibition game in the Dominican Republic, looked distinctly out of sorts, playing in front of a national TV audience and a regular-season League record crowd of over 42,000. They finished exhausted, outplayed, and soundly beaten by five goals to one. The talking point of the game was not, however, the exemplary hat-trick that Derek Smethurst put past New York’s hapless second-choice goalkeeper Kurt Kuykendall. It was Marsh, down on his knees, taunting a team that featured the greatest player of all time. 

The Englishman, playing his first NASL season, opened up and flaunted a full bag of tricks that day. There were cheeky back-heel passes, nonchalant dummies, and a flawless back-heeled lob over his own head down the left wing that saw him breeze past a floundering opponent. On another occasion he effortlessly robbed an oncoming Cosmos player of the ball, then passed it forward down the line to a teammate, all the while holding his left boot, lost in action moments before. Marsh fully exploited the vast space in midfield that the Cosmos and the 35-yard offside line (see chapter 7 for more on this NASL innovation) permitted him, prompting CBS’s co-commentator Paul Gardner to say at the end of the afternoon, ‘Marsh has overshadowed Pelé, no doubt about it.’ When he left the field shortly before the end of the game, he received a standing ovation… 

"In England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you"

European players flocked to the North American Soccer League in the mid-70s for one main reason – the opportunity to make money. Once here, however, many found good reasons to stay longer than they’d intended. The change in climate, lifestyle and culture surprised many who’d grown up in a country like grey, repressive Britain. When they coached and communicated at the educational clinics that they were contractually obliged to conduct, players stumbled upon the chance to develop both their careers and their personalities. The open-mindedness, the vastness and the possibilities of America were still relatively unfamiliar concepts in the 1970s to young lads who’d spent their lives focused on nothing but themselves and their football within the very narrow environment of the British game.

Gordon Banks can't quite shake
off his roots in Fort Lauderdale.

In Chapter 3 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Leaving old Europe behind’, several players cite the enthusiasm of the home crowd as a reason why they loved playing in the NASL, as opposed to the open hostility they would encounter from even their own supporters. As former St. Mirren defender Charlie Mitchell says, in Scotland ‘if you made one mistake then the crowd would boo you and be right on your back.’ You also had to ‘fight like a bastard’ to get into the team. At his new club the Rochester Lancers, though, the crowd didn’t understand the game well enough to know when he’d even made a mistake, and if they did, then they didn’t care. 

Here’s a short extract reflecting how some of the NASL’s more famous names enjoyed finding themselves in a world where they could function as normal people:

‘One of the reasons I came to America was that I didn’t think I could live up to the standards I had set back home,’ said Gordon Banks, shortly after joining the Fort Lauderdale Strikers in the late 1970s. ‘If I can’t live up to it, people here won’t be saying, I remember him when. This takes a lot of weight off your shoulders. I won’t miss the finger-pointing kind of thing. I wasn’t the kind of person who liked it any­way.’ Franz Beckenbauer was more explicit. ‘Everybody likes to be famous,’ he conceded. ‘But it is an enjoyable difference here [in New York]. In Munich when I went out at night I could read in the paper the next day every place I had been, who I went with, what I ate. Photographers and journalists followed me everywhere. I had a big house surrounded by a big wall. After a game I went home, locked the gate and shut out the world. In the US I can go unrecognized. I have a private life. I had none in Germany.’ The German press, he said, only aimed to ‘tear you down’.

Former Manchester United goalkeeper Alex Stepney came to Dallas in 1979 and enjoyed the simple pleasure of a trip to the amusement park with his family. Back home, he said, you ‘couldn’t go out for a quiet drink or dinner. There was always someone who knew who you were, and it became a bit of a bind. People were quite ruthless. When my wife and kids were here, we went to Six Flags, and it was absolutely fabulous. No one knew us. We wouldn’t do things like that in England.’

A trip to Six Flags amusement park was absolutely fabulous. The kind of activity most average parents dread for weeks and then endure for a long and expensive day was, for Stepney, a wonderfully mundane trip free of some knucklehead fol­lowing him around and shouting out ‘Fuck Man United!’ Peter Osgood, upon arriving in Philadelphia in 1978, was also enjoying the lack of on-street recognition. ‘It’s nice and easy at the moment,’ he said. ‘Nice and quiet. You don’t get too many people bugging me. I’m enjoying the obscurity. It’s a much more quiet, much more relaxed life.’ Ex-Coventry forward Alan Green was happy to return full-time to the Washington Diplomats after a loan spell, despite a very English penchant for watching Benny Hill over a cup of afternoon tea. ‘One of the big reasons,’ he said, ‘was that when I came here I had a lot more confidence in my ability. I’m the type of player who needs a pat on the back, but in England you make one mistake and 25,000 fans get down on you.’

Bermudan striker Clyde Best – one of Britain’s first black soccer players in the late 1960s and early 1970s – left West Ham United for the Tampa Bay Rowdies in 1975 because of the naked racism in England at the time, both on and off the field. Even though he made almost 200 league appearances for the Hammers, and was eventually accepted by the home support, ‘I began to think, why should I go out there and per­form when I have to put up with that sort of stuff? There were problems with the amount of abuse I was taking and I decided I didn’t have to put up with it.’ Rather than point fingers at the English, and without explicitly mentioning that the abuse was racial, Best generously called it ‘a situation that is all over the world. No matter where you go, you can’t find a place where that sort of thing doesn’t exist.’ In the US, though, such abuse was presumably less prevalent, given that he spent the entire final decade of his career there.

Pre-order Rock n Roll Soccer here (UK) or here (US).

Eusebio "was like a little kid. He wanted to be in every attack"

A second extract from Chapter 2 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Pelé vs Eusebio: Hot Property Getting Mobbed’, looks at the 1976 North American Soccer League season, when Pelé was expected to lead the New York Cosmos to the title. Yet it was the awkwardly named Toronto Metros-Croatia – who had taken Eusebio from the financially troubled Boston Minutemen - that quietly and unexpectedly progressed to the championship game. The turning point in their season was the consequence of a running row between Eusebio and Toronto’s Yugoslav coach Ivan Marković:

Eusebio at Toronto (left): Knackered knees on a plastic pitch

As at Boston, Eusebio was at the centre of the team’s tactics. ‘It was a team effort but he was our fulcrum,’ says [Bob] Iarusci. ‘He played behind our two strikers, and when he collected the ball things happened. He was so brilliant in terms of decision-making and understanding the space he was given. Both of his knees were in terrible shape. It was funny, when he walked he really hobbled, but when he was on the field he picked up speed and it was almost as if the knees realized that they could hurt later, but not at that moment. He did some wonderful things even at the ripe age of 35, and without him we wouldn’t have won.’ [Damir] Šutevski also recalls Eusebio’s ability despite a ‘shattered knee, it was really in bad shape. Before each game he’d have to submerge his knee in a bucket of ice in order to play, and he barely trained between games. I guess compared to Europe it must still have been a secondary kind of play to him. A lot of the goals were from free kicks; he had an incred¬ible shot. He was like a little kid: he wanted to be participating in every attack we had, and he would ask for the ball in every attack.’25 

Toronto started the 76 season well, winning eight of their first ten matches, and Eusebio, who missed the first two games, scored six in six appearances. There followed a mid-season, seven-game slump when the team won only on penalty kicks (three times – through this season, drawn games were decided on penalties if no one scored during sudden-death extra time), and failed to score in open play for all seven games – a highly unusual sequence for the high-scoring NASL. After that sev-enth game, the Yugoslav coach Ivan Markovic´ was sacked, but it wasn’t just because his team had lost its scoring touch. It was because of Eusebio. 

The two men had already fallen out at training, with Eusebio resenting that Marković would come in to the dressing room and tell him what boots to wear. ‘Marković was a genius, but geniuses are sometimes like fools,’ says [Carmine] Marcantonio. ‘He lived for the game, and he was a Croatian guy who grew up coaching Hajduk Split, then Marseille and the Yugoslav youth national teams. He was a genius and he could teach us young guys even how to tie our shoes. He had his own bag of cleats and would say, “Today it’s a bit dry, you need this type of cleats.” He’d bring that bag to the game and tell us what we should be wearing. But imagine you’re Eusebio and you have this guy telling you what kind of cleats you should be wear¬ing – they almost came to blows about it…” 

To find out the rest of the story, pre-order Rock n Roll Soccer here (UK) or here (US).

"I'm thinking about getting him caught in a Playboy club"

Chapter 2 of Rock n Roll Soccer, ‘Hot Property Getting Mobbed’, looks at an extraordinary game featuring Pelé and Eusebio in June 1975, just one month after both had signed for their new North American Soccer League teams. At a later nullified game in a 12,500-seater college stadium (Nickerson Field) in Massachusetts between Pelé’s New York Cosmos and Eusebio’s Boston Minutemen, the two players faced off in a competitive match for the first time since the 1966 World Cup. Neither Boston nor the NASL were prepared for the far-beyond-capacity crowd that turned up that night, nor the riot that resulted from a disallowed Pelé goal…

Promotional tool for later
Pelé-Eusbeio clash in the NASL

Like Pelé, Eusebio had come to the NASL just the month before [May 1975], but without any of the fanfare of Pelé’s multi-million dollar contract, and certainly on a comparatively smaller sal­ary – the Toronto Star reported that Eusebio would be paid $1,000 per game. Still, that wage was enough to cause unease in the Boston dressing room, where most players were still on peanuts and holding down part-time jobs to supplement their soccer money. In New York, under the auspices of Cosmos’ owners Warner Communications, Pelé could be paraded as a superstar and used for all kinds of marketing misdemeanours. The Minutemen, however, seemed to have no idea what to do with Eusebio, especially as he was by now pretty much hobbled thanks to several knee operations. The team’s PR director, Fred Clashman, said that Eusebio’s signing had not triggered a surge in season ticket sales, but added, ‘I’m getting crap from up top because I’m supposedly not pushing Eusebio. He’s been profiled in the paper, but I’m thinking about get­ting him caught in a Playboy club or something. People want a human personality. He hasn’t really caught on.’
    Prior to the game at Nickerson Field, the out-of-training Pelé had played one hastily arranged, and televised, exhibition game on Randalls Island against Dallas (he duly scored in a 2–2 draw), and one home game against Toronto (a 2–0 win in front of 22,000). Eusebio had played one away game for Boston, a 4–1 defeat at Rochester, in front of what had been Rochester’s lowest gate of the season (just above 4,000). It’s impossible to say whether it was Pelé alone that brought so many to the game that night, or the belated realization among the local Portuguese community that one of their national heroes was in town for the medium term at least. But come they did, prompting the Boston Globe to write the next day: ‘For a league that prides itself on being professional, it was a hopelessly amateur display of planning and crowd control.’

The Opening Paragraph

Here are the opening two paragraphs of ‘Rock n Roll Soccer’. When I'm in a  shop, here's how I decide whether or not to buy a book: I read the blurb on the back. If I make it through the blurb on the back, I read the opening paragraph. If I really like the opening paragraph, I buy the book. If I really, really like the opening paragraph, I stand there and keep reading until my legs start to ache, and then I go and buy the book.

It’s therefore an understatement to say that I spent quite a bit of time making sure I was happy with the book’s opening paragraph. The introduction is headed by a quote from the North American Soccer League’s irrepressible commissioner, the wonderful Phil Woosnam, who did more than any single figure (including Pelé) to push the league briefly into the US sporting stratosphere.

NASL commissioner Phil Woosnam

‘This sport will take off. There is absolutely no way that it will not bypass everything else. This country will be the centre of world soccer. In the 80s there will be a mania for the game here. There will be three to five million kids playing it. The North American Soccer League will be the world’s No. 1 soccer league. And it will be the biggest sports league in the USA.’

—North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam, 1977.

No one ever accused the North American Soccer League Commissioner Phil Woosnam of lacking in optimism. It was, after all, the former Aston Villa forward’s drive and diligence that had rescued the nascent professional soccer league from the brink of extinction after just one year of play in 1968. Less than ten years later under his stewardship, the League was not only succeeding and expanding beyond the wildest of expectations, but was turning into a roller-coaster phenomenon that really might fulfil Woosnam’s brash and bullish forecast: number one sport in America, number one soccer league in the world. Yet again, the Yanks were coming with their arrogance, their money, their revolutionary vision and their self-belief, sweeping aside a century of tradition as they stormed forward into a shiny future that was splashed with character, colour and cool.

    A few months after Woosnam’s bold forecast, the New York Cosmos beat the Fort Lauderdale Strikers 8–3 in a sold-out NASL playoff game at Giants Stadium, New Jersey. The attendance was 77,691, and the Cosmos starting line-up featured Pelé, Franz Beckenbauer, Carlos Alberto and Giorgio Chinaglia. The NASL was at its zenith, and this single game sums up everything the league stood for – a huge crowd, tons of goals and some of the biggest names in world soccer. There were celebrities in the stands and leggy cheerleaders on the touchline. What could possibly go wrong? It’s easy to ask that question now with a knowing smile. Arguably of more interest are the things that went right...

Why I Wrote Rock n Roll Soccer

My forthcoming book Rock n Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League (Icon Books, September 2014) will for the first time examine and analyse a daring, garish football league that was out of place and out of time. The NASL was an attempt to make football work as a business in one of its largest unconquered markets – the United States and Canada – in the 1970s, when the rest of the world had barely thought about the game’s commercial potential.

After a reckless, nigh-on suicidal start in the late 1960s, the NASL stabilised on a low budget with mainly no-name foreign players. Yet when the New York Cosmos signed Pelé in 1975, it suddenly bloomed and boomed, and the world’s biggest names (Eusebio, Cruyff, Best and Beckenbauer) came to ply their trade and earn some cash. Meanwhile, wealthy North American sports entrepreneurs sought to teach the world how the game should be run – for the sake of pure entertainment, with an eye to making a profit, and preferably without the interference of FIFA.

As a journalist covering Major League Soccer and the US national team in the early years of this century, it often struck me how many untold stories there were from the NASL days, and how many players were still in the game to tell them. A colleague who’d proposed writing such a book ten years earlier told me that no US publisher had been interested. But now in London, England, one small independent publisher has had the conviction to take Rock n Roll Soccer on board and allow the remarkable story of the NASL to be told in full.

During the relative euphoria of the US national team’s exciting campaign at the 2014 World Cup, several hacks posited the idea that football had now truly arrived in the US. In fact it truly arrived decades ago, mainly in the form of European and South American players who not only came to play in the NASL, but to coach the game by tirelessly conducting clinics in thousands of schools across the country. Once the NASL went bust, many of them stayed on to make a living in a continent they’d come to love, and many are still here today. It wasn’t Jürgen Klinsmann who built US soccer, it was men like Rodney Marsh, Alan Merrick and Jimmy Gabriel.

Rock n Roll Soccer is a fluid narrative of excess, bravery, adventurousness, folly and football at its finest, played by international heroes among third division journeymen and young native hopefuls. Some of the things that the NASL attempted are retrospectively ridiculous, but many of its ideas and innovations have since became staples of the modern game. No one ever gave the NASL credit, though, which is one of the main reasons that this book now exists.