You were England’s first black player and one of few playing in the top flight at the time.
Was the intolerance of the time something you were constantly aware of
or were you able to put it to one side when you were playing?
I’ve got to say that Cyrille [Regis] and Laurie [Cunningham], who sadly are not with us now,
they were trailblazers as well.
Laurie was the first black Under-21 international
and everyone would say ‘Was there much rivalry between you two?’ but no, not really.
We shared a room with England a couple of times
and we never discussed it, we talked about cars and stuff like that.
He was at Real Madrid at the time and we talked about what it was like there and everything else.
Clearly it was a big thing at the time and you don’t dismiss that fact.
When I first started and I watched Match of the Day the only black face I ever saw was Clyde Best, who used to play for West Ham.
I made a conscious effort of saying ‘I’d like to be on Match of the Day and I want to play football’,
and I was lucky to be at a club with a manager who was there at the time that helped me on that path.
What sort of things were you forced to contend with just because of your colour?
I remember going to Newcastle when they had the great [John] Tudor, [Malcolm] Macdonald and that sort of team,
really early on in my career – maybe three games in...
and I walked out to have a look at the pitch beforehand and I got dog’s abuse.
I went back in the dressing room and I said ‘Mr Clough, I don’t think I’ll play tonight,’
and he just said ‘You’re playing!’ He was great in that respect.
So I played! It was one of those things you had to get on with,
if you didn’t you wouldn’t further your career and that’s really fundamentally what I wanted to be: I wanted to be a footballer.
I wanted to play at the top level and try to achieve something.
What do you remember of that night against Czechoslovakia, your debut at Wembley?
It wouldn’t be played today because half of the pitch was hard
and the other side was soft, so I wore rubbers first half and studs second half!
In those days you came out the back of Wembley, you didn’t come out from the side as it is now,
you came out the back so you heard the roar getting louder and louder as you came up the pitch.
I remember getting a great cheer coming out,
and they say I had a hand in the goal
but if a hand in the goal is you play the ball to somebody, he runs 70 yards
and he crosses it in and somebody scores, then I’ll take it all day long.
You won two European Cup winners’ medals with them before the age of 24 under Cloughie (Brian Clough).
I didn't know that!
If you say so. You’ve done your research so yes, I’m happy with that!
Do you still have the medals?
Oh yes, of course I’ve got them.
I know exactly where they are, they’re in my garage somewhere.
To win the league for me is the biggest achievement.
I’m not taking away from the European Cups but the European Cups were around eight games,
not 19 or so and group stages and all the rest of it.
It was eight or nine games of knockouts, so if you have a bad night, you’re out.
To win the league is the biggest thing because you have to be consistently good throughout a nine-month period of a season.
You can’t have two bad weeks, or three bad weeks, because you don’t achieve anything
You have to be consistent as a player and a football club.
So I thought us winning the league was our biggest achievement in my view.
You spent a few years at Arsenal
and then you were Alex Ferguson’s first signing at United.
I think he signed me on the back of me playing for Arsenal against Manchester United,
and me standing up to Norman Whiteside at the time.
He kicked us from pillar to post!
I think we’d gone 18 games undefeated and came to Old Trafford,
and Norman just kicked everybody that moved.
Arriving at United, what were your initial experiences of Sir Alex like?
I get the phone call from Bryan Robson saying ‘We’ve got a new manager and he wants to sign you’
and my contract was up at Arsenal, so I said to tell him I’d meet him.
So we arranged to meet in this hotel in Nottingham.
I go in, I walk in on my own and sit down and the next thing the door opens.
Sir Alex was in and says ‘Pleased to meet you, have you seen the chairman?’
I said ‘No, I’ve been here 10 minutes, I haven’t seen him,’ so he goes to find him.
Next thing you know, the chairman walks in and says ‘I’m the chairman, Martin Edwards, pleased to meet you, have you seen the manager?’
I told him he’s just been in two seconds ago and it was like a revolving door!
Finally we all got together and we sat down, we talked it through and we came to a deal.
So my first impression was ‘What sort of club am I going to?
They must have come in the same car, so what happened in between?""
United had finished 11th in 86-87 and finished 2nd in your first season.
Were there signs already that the club was getting back to where it used to be?
He bought the likes of me and other people at that time to get back to the level it was,
but when we finished second that year we couldn’t play the Manchester United way because the pitch was so bad.
What we used to do was knock it in the corners and Mark Hughes used to elbow people, boot people,
and we’d get up the pitch that way and we’d end up winning games.
It wasn’t pretty at times because the pitch wasn’t the best,
the drainage wasn’t good, so he got all that sorted.
So it was hard work that year,
but we achieved what we achieved and it gave us a springboard
to say we’d finished runners-up that year and could do a bit better the year after.
And we had a lot of young lads coming in like the Giggsys and Scholes, which is all history now,
but we had a few years where people thought the lads coming through at the time
were going to be as good as these ones but it turned out not to be for whatever reason.
I remember Giggsy coming and playing in a first team v reserves game
and he nutmegged me!
I went ‘You don’t do that again!’
Myself and Bryan Robson went to see the youth team play at Preston one night,
and that night [Bryan] went ‘That boy’s going to be a superstar’ You just knew it.
He came from school, he must have been 15, playing for the youth team in a Youth Cup game,
and he was going to be a superstar.
And then about six months later he comes out of school and plays for the reserves in this little knock-about
at The Cliff and nutmegs me and I go ‘You want to make a career? You ain’t going to be doing that again!’
Giggs always got the limelight but I remember the physio who was there at the time saying
‘The little ginger lad’s going to be a player. Scholesy.’
I always saw Giggsy, and presumably Scholesy played that night as well but Giggsy stood out for me.
But the physio kept saying ‘Everyone’s talking about Giggsy but I think the little ginger lad’s going to be a decent player,
he may be better than Giggsy.’ We would say ‘What would you know, you’re a physiotherapist!’”
What was the most difficult thing to come to terms with after your playing career ended?
I was fortunate that I was offered a contract by Sheffield Wednesday,
but I got a call from a chairman called John Dennis at Barnsley Football Club
and he said he wanted me to be player-manager.
I didn’t know if I was ready to be a manager, I had no inclination to be a manager,
but I had a think about it and thought ‘Why not, I’ll give it a go.’
Danny Wilson was my room-mate and I said ‘Do you fancy coming?
You’ll play and I’ll play, and we’ll get one of the coaches at the football club
– a lad called Eric Winstanley – to do the talking on a matchday.’
So we did it, and after a while they needed to hear the sound of the manager.
I was playing, Danny was playing, doing OK.
We changed the system for three at the back to a back four,
which took a while to get used to.
But at half-time I would be out of breath, Danny would be like ‘I can’t talk, I can’t talk’
and Eric would be talking, trying to say what we should be doing.
He’d say ‘Is there anything you’ve got to say, boss’ and I’d be trying to recover so I could play the second half!
So that wasn’t good, and I ended up stopping playing even though I could have kept on playing
because they wanted to hear the manager’s voice,
and I thought it was the best thing in the end.
To stop completely, that was hard but your body tells you when it’s time
and I was 38.
I ended up going to Middlesbrough and still being the oldest player even to this day, 39 I was!
I had to play four games in their promotion year because there was illness about,
so I had a player’s contract although I was assistant-manager
and I played four games at the end.
So 39 is a great innings when you’ve started at 17,
and ending at Middlesbrough in their promotion year, what better way to go out?