Love of the Game , livre ebook

Pitch Publishing Ltd - Ricky Hill

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167 pages

English

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Ricky Hill grew up beneath the shadow of Wembley Stadium, where he sold programmes at England games as a boy. When he was seven, he was told by a teacher that only two in every hundred boys could possibly make it as a professional footballer. Ricky told her he would be one of the two. Ten years later, this gifted midfielder scored on his debut for Luton Town. Ricky stayed with Luton for 14 years, made 508 appearances and became a club legend. Emerging at a time when racism was rife, he was only the fourth black player to represent England. Later, as a coach, he had to fight to smash down barriers holding back black managers, and devised an equivalent of the NFL's 'Rooney Rule' to help BAME applicants secure senior coaching jobs in English football. While Ricky has won trophies and awards overseas, he has been overlooked in this country. In Love of the Game, he tells the shocking story behind his short spell in charge of Luton, and reveals just how much the football decision-makers in England have ignored him and other black coaches.

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Love

Love (disambiguation)

Informations

Publié par	Pitch Publishing Ltd
Date de parution	15 mars 2021
Nombre de lectures	0
EAN13	9781785319099
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,0000€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

Extrait

First published by Pitch Publishing, 2021

Pitch Publishing
A2 Yeoman Gate
Yeoman Way
Worthing
Sussex
BN13 3QZ
www.pitchpublishing.co.uk
info@pitchpublishing.co.uk
2021, Ricky Hill with Adrian Durham
Every effort has been made to trace the copyright.
Any oversight will be rectified in future editions at the earliest opportunity by the publisher.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, sold or utilised in any form or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the Publisher.
A CIP catalogue record is available for this book from the British Library.
ISBN 978 1 78531 826 9
Typesetting and origination by Pitch Publishing
Printed and bound in India by Replika Press Pvt. Ltd.
Contents
Foreword by Ian Wright
1. Joy and Pain of the Game
2. In Love with the Game
3. How Do I Break Through?
4. The New Luton Town Manager
5. If You Can t Play Without Losing, Then Don t Play At All
6. First-Generation Black Players
7. Memories Forever Young
8. England and the Big Move That Never Happened
9. Loyalty, Then Deceit
10. Success Soured in Florida
11. The Lack of Black Coaches
12. Back in the USA
13. Italian Approval
14. Happy to be Back
15. The Club Needs Fixing
16. Rooney Rule
17. Title at Tampa
18. What They Say About Ricky
Managerial Career
Acknowledgements
Bibliography
Index
Photos
Foreword by former Arsenal and England striker Ian Wright
RICKY HILL meant a lot to me, and he still means a lot to me. He was without any question one of the pioneers. And what a footballer! He played the kind of football that black players played when me and my mates were just knocking a ball around while we were growing up. He was exciting, dynamic, he wanted to attack all the time, but he always worked so hard for the team as well. I loved his curly perm, that juicy hair, and I really loved the way he played, with that swagger in the midfield.
When Crystal Palace offered me a trial and then a contract in 1985, I was a Sunday league player with Ten-em-Bee, an all-black team in London. We played in an annual tournament and Ricky was always there, every year, watching the games, watching players, and by this time he was an established young professional at Luton. We all knew he was one of us, a black kid from London, who hadn t been picked up by a professional club as a boy but someone who had properly made it in respects of being in and around the England scene and being among the best players in the top division, and being admired by fans and people in the game. Ricky was up there at that level, but he took the time to come and see us play. It meant so much to me and everyone else.
He really doesn t get the credit he deserves for what he did as a player and what he s done to help black coaches and managers after playing. But at the same time, every black player will know that Ricky had a prominent influence on the rise of black players back in the day. Ricky Hill has always been an inspirational figure for all of us.
1
Joy and Pain of the Game
I HAVE always loved football and I still love it. From kicking a ball around outside my house in north London, to playing for England at Wembley, four miles from where I grew up, being in and around football all my life has been a joy. I was the fourth black player to represent England, after Viv Anderson, Laurie Cunningham and my schoolboy friend Cyrille Regis. I was the first British South Asian to play for England, the first of Indian origin to wear the Three Lions shirt.
I ve got a pure love of the game, but I ve also experienced the pain of the game as well.
I ve been with my amazing wife Sharon since 1982, and we have been married since 1986. She s been the rock not just for me but also for our family, coping with move after move as I tried to build a coaching career. But despite me playing for Luton over 500 times, as well as England, she only saw me play a few matches in my entire career. Why? Because the first time she watched me she was sickened by the racist abuse I was subjected to. It was at QPR, less than three miles from where she was brought up in Kensal Rise, north London.
In this era, racial abuse of players was commonplace. Chelsea s Paul Canoville was targeted by fans of the club he was playing for, and John Fashanu told me that when he scored for Millwall, large sections of their fans would call it an own goal because they could not tolerate a black player scoring for their team.
That day at Loftus Road, Brian Stein and I were the only black players on the pitch. Sharon was just 18. She took her seat and then listened to the vicious hate towards the two of us. It took all of her strength of character not to respond to the cowards. Afterwards she was adamant she would never attend another game. As I recall she only came three more times to watch me play the game I love; the two League Cup finals in the late 1980s and a league match at Luton. Thankfully she wasn t there to witness me suffering a horrible injury on the pitch in a game in 1987, and so she didn t hear the subsequent shouts of nigger, hope it ends your career raining down from the terraces.
Personally I could deal with that type of direct racial abuse. I m certainly not excusing it or saying it s acceptable, but I learned to deal with it in my own way.
It s the covert racism that seems impossible to change. It s embedded in the systemic culture of all the institutions within the UK and elsewhere. That, in my opinion, is the real offensive racial discrimination as it prevents black people like me from living an equal life, with equal opportunities. Those decision-makers who freely quote if they re good enough they ll get their chance are never then asked how, over the last 30 years, so many black or Asian minority coaches have been excluded from not just managerial opportunities, but more importantly, a chance to coach at the senior professional level in order to create a track record, and be in the conversations when managerial vacancies appear.
Just as black players found it hard to be accepted into the professional game in the 1970s, black managers years later would find that acceptance equally difficult.
It always seemed slightly strange to me. Think about it: the greatest footballer on earth was universally acknowledged to be Pele, and he just happened to be black. He took the football world by storm as long ago as the 1950s. As a boy in the 1960s, and into my teenage years in the early 1970s, in the European leagues and in particular the English leagues, black players who were attempting to carve out a career in the world of professional football were rejected and in most cases totally ignored. And along with that reaction came the stereotypical statements such as black players don t like the cold weather ; black players are too volatile ; black players can t head the ball . It was as if those in positions of power in football - managers, coaches, chairmen and the Football Association - were making a conscious effort to propel those stereotypes throughout the industry. Here is an example from 1983 in Shoot! , the most popular football magazine at the time, in an article about why black players were becoming more and more successful in that decade, Twenty years ago the chances of Cyrille [Regis] managing to bridge the gap between non-league football and the big time would have been strictly limited, probably nil. Black men did not play league football in those days. The trouble with most black footballers hoping to make a career in the British game in those days was that they bore all the physical attributes necessary to play but had glaring weaknesses in technique and attitude. They often lacked commitment, they struggled to concentrate for a full 90 minutes and tended to wilt under pressure.
I don t remember Pele wilting under pressure or lacking commitment when Brazil won successive World Cups in 1958 and 1962. The amazing thing about this article is that it was written by (or ghost-written for) a black player - the late Justin Fashanu. In a feature piece titled My Soccer All Blacks , Justin picked out an all-black team, and I m grateful I was selected. Either those negative words about black players were put into Justin s mouth, or it shows the level of conditioning in this country about attitudes towards those with black skin. It was so ingrained that even some black people believed it.
It didn t make sense to me that since the age of five, when I had developed my love of the game, there seemed to be such a limited black presence around the English professional leagues, despite the fact that I had seen and played with some really magnificent black players throughout my school years. They are the lost generation: I m saddened that ALL those champion players from before my time as a professional missed out because of the wrongful perceptions and wilful racism of those in the game. They were denied an opportunity to make it in football.
Gradually that changed. One by one, through the outstanding exploits of the black professional players, the stereotypical statements were proven to be nothing but a conspiracy founded by a generation who were really not educated in tolerance or acceptance, with an overriding fear of the unknown. Thank goodness for the few open-minded managers who looked beyond what they knew, the ones who extended the hand of friendship and opportunity to all - including me - based on ability, not colour.
But here we are decades later and the racism still exists. I ve received three Coach of the Year awards outside of the UK, yet up until 2019, I had only ever had one reply to countless applications for coaching roles in England in the past 20 years or so. That decency and respect came from Sir Alex Ferguson, who turned me down for a job coaching h