It’s been a while since this blog posted a Farah Slacks-related missive. So here’s another one:
Gary Stevens, Ken Craggs, Mark Lawrenson, John Gregory, Alan Mullery and Brian Horton
Don’t they look the business? What do you mean – no? As described in the Brighton v Leicester programme of 1981:
Many supporters will know that our first team squad have been fitted out by Farahs, the Gatwick-based supplier of American manufactured clothing.
Our picture shows a recent group of Albion personalities wearing their off-pitch kit of zip-fronted blouson-type casual tops in Farasuede fabric teamed up with versatile, easy care slacks from Farah’s famous hopsack range.
The total Farah men’s and boyswear range now includes casual and more formal trousers, sports slacks, denim jeans, mens’ leisure tops, blazers and informal jackets.
Anyone up for a Farah Slacks revival? If you know where you can buy them in Brighton & Hove nowadays, please let me know…
After breaking into the Dinamo Minsk side at the age of 17, the skilful Belorussian midfielder Sergei Anatolovich Gotsmanov played on over 350 occasions for his home city, as well as serving in the army and a short stint at Brest, near where his army base was. He also played 31 times for the USSR, scoring the first goal in England’s 2-0 home defeat at the end of the 1983/84, capitalising on Mike Duxbury’s calamitous attempt at cutting out a through ball.
Apart from this, the clip below is also particularly worth watching for a splendid run by Gotsmanov in the first half, skipping past two hapless England defenders:
A game changer back then, he was even more of a talisman when he arrived in Hove, on trial from Dinamo Minsk in February 1990. As a profile in the Brighton v Bradford matchday programme said a month later:
Already he is a favourite with the Albion fans. Even before he scored in his first two full games Sergei Gotsmanov only had to warm up as a substitute to send ripples of excitement down the Goldstone.
Gotsmanov’s two substitute appearances were at Sunderland and then at home with Middlesbrough, before his full debut in the 1-1 draw with Oldham at the Goldstone at the start of March. The programme continues:
Sergei the Seagull realises he is causing something of a stir. But being the centre of attention does not suit his modest nature. The team is what matters, he says. His excellent goal against Oldham, his first for the Albion, struck first time from a through pass, was a piece of quality finishing. However, Sergei dismisses the goal and the part he played in gaining a point. Through an interpreter he prefers to talk about the team: ‘Winning games is what counts,’ he says. ‘Yes, it was a good goal but at the end of a good move. And scoring is not enough if the team loses.’
Here is the goal against the in-form Latics in the 54th minute:
Not only did he open the scoring, Gotsmanov’s star performance had supporters singing his praises. ‘We’ve got a Russian international!’ they proudly chanted.
Oh his full debut against Oldham…
His skill and vision helped to play in his team mates at times… that’s when they were as quick-thinking as him!
A midfielder by trade, Gotsmanov was used by Barry Lloyd mainly in attack following an injury to Garry Nelson. With his outstanding control, accurate passing and vision, he looked several classes above the mere mortals of the Barclays Second Division that he was playing with. However, besides artistry, he also showed gutsiness. In the next match, against Plymouth Argyle, Gotsmanov was on the scoresheet again, using his quick reactions and determination to nick this winner:
However, it was undoubtedly the Hull City match at the start of April where he firmly placed his name deep into Albion folklore with an audacious piece of magic. After rounding the keeper with consummate ease, Gotsmanov impudently celebrated before putting the ball in the back of the net:
As Barry Lloyd said:
Call it cheek or a piece of pure theatre: what everyone surely recognised about Sergei Gotsmanov’s goal in last week’s home game against Hull was that it bore the hallmark of supreme confidence.
Much has been said about Sergei since he arrived at the Goldstone. Certainly, he is a player with whom we have been delighted and he is a superb example to other players here, both in skill, technique and dedication.
But the goal was something else! Skipping round tackles and holding your arms aloft BEFORE slotting the ball into the net is the stuff of which dreams are made.
Could we possibly hold on to a star like this? Sadly, the answer was no. Everything was tried, including giving him the keys to a new Lada Samara, from Market Cars of Hove!
In the end, Albion were unable to match the terms that Southampton offered, and a £150,000 fee to Dinamo led to his unsuccessful spell at the Dell. In his brief Albion career, Gotsmanov signed off his goalscoring with this drive against Leeds in April, showing the technique and ability to find space that marked him as a class apart:
Howard Wilkinson is the only ex-Brighton & Hove Albion player to manage the England national football team, which he fulfilled on a caretaker basis in two spells, in 1999 and 2000.
In his playing career, he was an ex-England youth international who joined Sheffield Wednesday in June 1962, making his First Division debut in the 1964/65 season. After 22 League games and three goals, he arrived at the Goldstone Ground in July 1966.
Posing with Bob Fuller, an Albion reserve
At Brighton, he is remembered as a smart and direct outside-right who could skin a full-back for pace and put in a good cross. Even so, in his book ‘Managing to Succceed’ in 1992, Howard Wilkinson described how he was ‘gaining no sense of fulfilment from being a Third Division footballer with Brighton.’ Perhaps this was because after an injury in December 1966, he never fully re-established himself and was often substitute.
He went on to say that:
‘When I was a player at Brighton, under manager Archie Macaulay’s guidance, we had some remarkable preparations for important matches and cup-ties. There were liberal doses of sherry and raw eggs, calves foot jelly, fillet steak, and plenty of walks on the seafront where we were taken to fill our lungs with the ozone.’
After featuring sporadically in 1969/70, Wilkinson found first-team chances limited by the emergence and form of Peter O’Sullivan. As a result, he was given a free transfer in May 1971.
With his propensity for hugging the line, Wilkinson was rarely a goal threat himself in his time at Brighton, getting on the scoresheet just twice in his final two seasons. When he entered management, Wilkinson’s idea of the role of a wide man did not bring out the best of a future Albion player:
The highly skilful Mark Chamberlain was an England international winger. Graham Barnett, his coach at Port Vale, described him as ‘like a bloody gazelle… a black jewel… he’s got the bloody lot… he’s class… so much better than John Barnes.’
This explosive goal for Stoke City against Brighton in 1982/83 is an example of what he was capable of:
Although he had slipped down the England order by then, a disastrous move to Wilkinson’s Sheffield Wednesday in 1986 for £700,000 put paid to any hopes of further caps. As Chamberlain told 90 Minutes magazine (24 July 1993):
It was a nightmare. I just didn’t fit in with his scheme of things. Like all of his teams, Wednesday played to a very strict pattern and anybody who slipped out of that pattern was seen as a liability. In the end I couldn’t really get away quick enough.
He joined Portsmouth in 1988 but endured injury problems and loss of form. When Jim Smith arrived as Pompey boss, it led to a renaissance in his career:
‘He told me that I wasn’t just a winger who should sit out wide and wait for things to happen, that I should get myself involved throughout the game. Last season, things really clicked. I felt a lot happier with my consistency and I think I played the best football of my career since I left Stoke.’
After a hernia operation in summer 1994, Chamberlain arrived at the Goldstone for a trial. He scored on his debut against Plymouth in August with this splendid drive:
Thereafter, though, he struggled for form having lost a lot of his pace, and 24 years after Wilkinson received the same fate from Brighton, Chamberlain was released at the end of 1994/95. Perhaps Archie Macaulay’s methodology, described above, involving sherry and raw eggs, calves foot jelly, fillet steak, and plenty of walks on the seafront, might have done wonders for Chamberlain’s twilight years. As it was, when he joined Exeter, he took a more conventional step for an ageing winger seeking to extend his career, by shifting to right-back position.
In the match programme for Brighton v Charlton Athletic in October 1983, Jimmy Melia wrote:
We aim to provide more entertainment and hopefully this will produce the goals we want. We need a bit of adventure, we need to allow players to show their skills and inventiveness, and that is the only way we will bring people back through the turnstiles to watch our matches.
A crowd of 11,517 was rewarded (well, the Albion fans anyway!) with a goal frenzy that lived up to Melia’s emphasis on attacking play and enjoyment. In Match Magazine (22 October 1983), a short article called ‘Case cracker’ waxed lyrical about the Albion, and Case’s, performance:
Brighton hot-shot Jimmy Case set the Goldstone Ground buzzing with his hat-trick goal in the demolition of Charlton.
His third goal was a spectacular effort straight out of the Case text book and one which has become his trademark over the years. A thundering shot from the edge of the box and the ball was in the back of the net before the ‘keeper had time to move.
Says Jimmy: “They are the sort of goals the fans love to see and players love to score – it certainly gave me a lot of pleasure. I’ve always been aware that long-range efforts like that excite the crowd and that’s probably why I’m prepared to have a go from any distance. Sometimes they don’t come off, but I have always said that if you don’t shoot then you don’t score. And I think more players are adopting that attitude this season, which has got to be a good thing.”
Jimmy’s moment of magic wasn’t the only thing that Brighton fans had to cheer against Charlton as the Seagulls romped away to an emphatic 7-0 win.
He says: “The supporters deserved to see a good performance because we hadn’t played too well at home until that game. All the players were keyed up before the match and determined to turn in a good display… and once we got the first two goals there was no stopping us. Everyone was full of confidence and every time we went forward we looked like scoring, it wasn’t much fun for Charlton, but our fans went home happy.”
Brighton’s seven-goal display was in stark contrast to their performances at the start of the season when they lost their first three games.
Says Jimmy: “We were forced to use three different goalkeepers in as many games, which didn’t help, and we gave away some silly goals. But, since Joe Corrigan arrived, we have had more stability at the back and confidence has spread throughout the team. The turning point was probably the 1-0 win against Derby, which set us back on the right road. We still weren’t 100 per cent happy when we went into the Charlton game, however, and we decided to change our style a little bit. We played with a more attacking formation and it paid off.
“We always try to play entertaining football, especially at home, and that is obviously going to help bring the fans back through the turnstiles. In fact I think that more and more clubs are realising their responsibility to provide the public with open, attacking football and, of course, plenty of goals.”
The performance was all the more impressive as Charlton arrived at the Goldstone far from being lambs to the slaughter. The Addicks were previously undefeated and had only conceded three goals in seven matches. However, the Seagulls made mincemeat of the Athletic defence, with diagonal balls proving especially troublesome. Terry Connor’s speed down the wing caused havoc, with Gerry Ryan taking advantage with the first two goals, before Gordon Smith tucked in another Connor cross to make it 3-0.
Then, Case smashed the fourth in from the edge of the area after efforts by Connor and Kieran O’Regan had been well saved by the busy Charlton keeper Nicky Johns before Connor notched up a well-earned goal through a header before half-time.
In the second half, it was the Jimmy Case show. As Pat Needham in the Sunday Mirror wrote:
Case flicked home Smith’s cross before completing his first League hat-trick with the goal of the match. O’Regan and Ryan broke from deep inside their half and Case nearly burst the net from 20 yards.
After the match, Case was presented with the match ball:
It was the first Albion hat-trick since Gordon Smith’s at Coventry almost exactly three years before.
And if you wish to celebrate the Charlton match with a Jimmy Case T-shirt, please head here to the ‘Cult Zeros’ site. There is even a design for the unfortunate Charlton keeper on the day, Nicky Johns.
Here’s the Evening Argus headline for its Night Final on Saturday 16th April 1983:
I imagine most of us know in minuscule detail what happened on the pitch on that famous day of the FA Cup Semi-Final over Sheffield Wednesday at Highbury.
Inside, though, there is a story of how Gordon Smith’s parents Bill and Edith Smith travelled 500 miles from Ayrshire to see the game, and will be looking after the player’s three year old son Grant and daughter Lyagh-Ann, 12 months.
Meanwhile, Joan Shipp, secretary to the club’s commercial manager, Ron Pavey, tied up her stockings with a special lace garter made from yellow and blue ribbons. Decency prevents me from reprinting the shocking image of Joan flashing her thighs for the Argus here.
Elsewhere, at Forfars, work on Saturday kicked off early at midnight for some of its 45 workers, so they could all watch the game. Tim Cutress, the production director, said: “We have pushed everything out so we can all get up to London. Some came in at midnight and everyone started two hours earlier.”
Putting their dough on an Albion victory are Tim Cutress, John Joyce, Matthew Cutress, Graham Taylor (no, not that one) and Chris Budd.
Finally, we end with a story of …lurrrrve.
This couple in love set off for Highbury knowing it was their last chance to cheer Albion in this year’s cup.
“We are getting married on Final day so we know we would not be going to Wembley,” said communications engineer David Lewin, 22, a dedicated fan.
His marriage to 21-year-old Deborah Locke, of Devonshire Place, Brighton, was arranged before the team started its FA Cup charge.
“There is no way we can re-arrange the date,” said David of Eastbourne Road, Brighton. “But we will really enjoy today.”
Deboroah added: “We do not get married until 4pm so we can watch the first half of the Final on TV.
So, with Albion 1-0 up at half-time against Manchester United at 3.50pm, if you ever wanted to know why the soccer gods turned against the Seagulls, it’s because these ‘dedicated’ supporters David and Deborah turned off the telly at that moment. Bad fans!
Having your own van must have been a big deal in the 1970s. The Endeavour Motor Company of Brighton kindly provided the Albion with a transit van for the Seagull Lottery. Here you can see Commercial Manager Ron Pavey and skipper Brian Horton taking delivery of the vehicle in 1978:
A year later, Caffyns got in on the act.
As the Brighton v Cambridge match programme puts it:
During the next week or so Albion fans will have a chance to see vans in Seagulls’ colours around the area as a result of the generosity of Caffyns. Our local British Leyland dealers have supplied the club with two minivans for use by the lottery staff who cover many miles distributing tickets which help to keep finances straight.
Caffyns have also supplied cars for manager Alan Mullery and for Peter Ward and it is these two who took delivery last week of the vans at the ground.
The manager and striker are seen in the picture together in the sunshine with Caffyns Group Commercial Venture Sales Manager Steve Hoy.
Seems a little unfair, if you ask me. If you were in the Albion first team at the time and not a pint-sized striker with a bubble perm, you’d be quite within your rights to ask why you weren’t getting your own car too. Hopefully, the other Brighton players protested. And if they did, it wouldn’t have been the first time that British Leyland was associated with industrial strife in the 1970s!
Here’s Peter O’Sullivan, brimming with confidence ahead of the 1972/73 season:
Note his professional ambition was to ‘win a full Welsh cap and play in Division One.’ The latter happened much later in his career but getting full international honours was to come his way much earlier, in March 1973, despite the Albion making a pig’s ear of competing in the Second Division.
Shoot! magazine revisited Sully the following season, 1973/74, after Brighton had landed back with a bump in the Third Division. By the time of the interview, Pat Saward had made his exit, Brian Clough had arrived, and the Welsh winger and midfielder was buzzing with optimism about the new appointment:
Towards the end of last season, Peter O’Sullivan was on the verge of asking Brighton for a move. In three seasons with the club he had tasted the headed heights of success.
There was promotion from the Third Division, five Welsh Under-23 caps plus a full international against Scotland. But just as quickly, a dream of further success faded as Brighton surrendered their Second Division status after just one season.
“I was bitterly disappointed at that,” said 22-year-old O’Sullivan.
“It seemed at last I was getting over the depression of being in the Manchester United reserves for four years when life began to turn sour again.”
O’Sullivan, who hails from Colwyn Bay in North Wales, thought hard about his future, and after Brighton’s dismal start to the current campaign, wanted away. In these days when forward talent is so precious there would have been no lack of bidders for the young winger’s talents.
Then Brian Clough arrived.
“Suddenly the whole atmosphere down at Goldstone Road changed,” explained Peter. “And I am sure that under Mr Clough and Peter Taylor, Brighton can really do well again.
“I’ve been impressed with their ideas, and they have completely overhauled the set up down here.
Now I am more than happy to stay – that is if Mr. Clough still wants me and help Brighton back into the big time.
“The potential down here is enormous and I am sure we will realise it under Mr. Clough.”
Peter can have few worries about whether Brian Clough will keep him.
Peter also points to the huge crowds Brighton can draw when they are getting results as a sign that the club have all the ingredients of a top flight side.
“Some of our home games have been watched by 30,000 fans.
That is a marvellous total for the Third Division. It just shows what we can do if we are successful.
“Once that confidence comes flowing back we will give them something to cheer about. I can’t promise goals, but I can promise 100 per cent effort to get them.”
O’Sullivan was ever-present in 1973/74, hitting four goals, including Albion’s first goal in the infamous 8-2 home defeat to Bristol Rovers. His excellent dribble and drive brought the score back to 2-1 to the visitors. Not for the first or last time, Sully’s creativity with giving hope to the Albion.
A rarely seen Albion team photo for 1979/80, but look who’s over yonder, there a-yawning?
Why it’s first choice keeper Graham Moseley!
This photo was sent by Kevin (thanks Kevin!) who said:
It was given to me by a family member who didn’t appreciate it, as he is a Chelsea fan. I took it to a far better place and now hopefully will be hung somewhere at home. This family member trained with albion at some point but never went on to play pro.
As Jimbo26 put it on North Stand Chat:
Looks like Moseley had been at the Hove Park Tavern the night before. Good lad!!
Thankfully, Mose perked up enough for this other snap to be taken:
Back row: Giles Stille, Teddy Maybank, Malcolm Poskett, Gary Williams, Mike Kerslake, Gerry Ryan.
Middle row: Steve Foster, Andy Rollings, Graham Moseley, Eric Steele, Martin Chivers, Mark Lawrenson, John Gregory.
Front row: Paul Clark, Peter Sayer, Brian Horton, Peter O’Sullivan, Peter Ward.
It was this version that made it in the quite spectacular Evening Argus wallchart that was given away to readers before the 1979/80 season:
Despite Moseley’s sleepiness here, it certainly wasn’t a boring season as Brighton proved themselves worthy competitors in their debut campaign in the First Division. By mid-September, many fans would have given up on filling in the results, especially with the Seagulls regularly getting beaten by this point. Credit to the original owner of the wallchart for taking the time to complete the stats to the season’s close!
Not sure whether this article furthers or puts back the cause of women’s lib. Still, a cracking photo, nevertheless!
Wearing the colours of her home town soccer club, Brighton and Hove Albion, Nicky Bradley, 20-year-old Miss Brighton, sets the pace for Manchester City players Alan Oakes, Cliff Sear and Dave Connor as she trains with the City team at their Maine Road ground.
Nicky, who holds her beauty queen title for the second successive year, was the Brighton area 100 yards sprint champion when she was at school and also won many other running events.
Doubtless her admirers have difficulty keeping pace.
She believes that regular exercises have given her “‘that little extra over other girls” and furthered her career as a model and beauty queen.
In the words of Spencer Davies: “Keep on running!”
The Goldstone Wrap 