The Goldstone Wrap

From Shoot! magazine in 1979:

The morning training session is over. Eric Steele, Watford’s £100,000 goalkeeper sits back in a comfortable chair and enjoys a refreshing cup of tea. But you won’t find him idle for long!

He’s too busy settling in at his new club, getting his own career back into top gear, and planning how best to continue the schoolboy coaching he built up so successfully in Brighton.

But there is time to look back on the move that took him back into the Second Division, in October.

“I didn’t want to leave Brighton,” he says. “That’s the first and most important point. It wasn’t my decision, it was Alan Mullery’s. I think he was wrong and I’ll be proved right in time. Once he’d made up his mind, I had to resolve myself to leaving.

“But it hurt. It took me a long time to get to the First Division and I think that in the ten games I played, I proved I was good enough to keep my place at that level. But once I knew I was on the move, I wanted to get away as quickly as I could.

“I went on the list on a Thursday and Watford came straight in for me the next day. I’d signed for them within a week. I was very happy to join such a progressive club. I would never have come here if I didn’t believe we would be a First Division side in a couple of years.

“Since I arrived at Vicarage Road, I’ve been impressed with the whole set-up. I like the way people look at the game. I’m sure I’ve made the right move. Some people may wonder why I went to a Second Division club. My answer is, I’ve taken one step back to take two forward. I’ll return to Division One, with Watford.”

At Brighton, Eric filled much of his free time by coaching schoolboys and helping handicapped people. He intends to carry on the good work in Watford as well as keeping an interest on the South Coast.

“I’ve been interested in coaching ever since I left school,” he explains. “I was going to train as a teacher, but then I got the chance to join Newcastle United and I took it. But I never lost my interest in coaching.

“The main idea I want to get across to the lads is that they should enjoy their football. Professional players have to live with pressure, but while you’re at school it’s fun. If any of the kids think they’re good enough to earn their living from the game, they should work hard on their skills. But they should try to get some qualifications behind them first.

“If they’re good enough to make the grade at 16, they’ll still be at 18. Football is a very insecure business. You’ve got to have something to fall back on.”

Eric has seen the cruellest face in football. Young apprentices of 17 or 18 who have failed to live up to their early potential. They’re on the list, with nowhere to go. They feel washed up, before their young lives have really begun.

“That’s why I tell the lads to work hard at their school work, as well as their football.”

Eric did just that, when he was a lad, up on Tyneside. He left school with three ‘A’ levels, but still found plenty of time to play football.

“I played three games, every weekend,” he smiles. “I’d finish my school match on Saturday morning, then dash off to play for Wallsend Boys Club. A lot of good players, like Ray Hankin and Chris Waddle, came from there. On Sunday mornings I had another match and every Sunday afternoon… I died!”

Eric’s enthusiasm for the game always comes across when he coached schoolboys. But would he like to see more stars taking the time to give something back to the game, at grassroots level?

“A lot of people say players are too selfish to give up their free time, but I don’t think that’s the reason so few do it. SHOOT readers might be surprised to hear me say this, but a lot of professional players lack self-confidence. The thought of standing up and talking to a crowd of youngsters brings them out in a cold sweat.

“Every player has his own personality. Some are good at talking to people, some aren’t. But the ones who are shy often enjoy coaching, once they’ve got over the first ten or 20 minutes. I noticed that when Brighton had a sponsored scheme last year. Every week, two players would go out to a local school and talk about the game.

“Some of the players weren’t too keen, but they all relaxed and enjoyed themselves in the end. Now, at Watford, people at the club seem to think along the same lines as me. People are encouraged to work and get involved with the local community. I think that’s the way it should be.”

Watford’s soccer stars of the future will be getting plenty of sound advice from Eric in the months to come. Talented youngsters need help. And who better to give that help than the local soccer stars?

“Professionals do have a fair amount of free time on their hands. I think it should be used to put something back into the game. Coaching can be hard work, but when you see your idea getting across to the players, it’s very satisfying too.”

If more thought like Eric Steele, the future would look brighter for British soccer. And after the controversy and disappointments of recent months, Eric’s future looks rosy again, with Watford.

“The club’s only going one way,” he says, finally, “and that’s up.”

While reading the Brighton v Watford matchday programme in December 2012, I was intrigued to read Spencer Vignes’ nostalgic article ‘Married to the Mob’ which celebrated Central TV’s youth drama Murphy’s Mob which ran for four series from 1982 to 1986.

Depending on your age, you may have enjoyed it. As a kid, I do remember it on Children’s ITV at the time. However I was slightly too young to appreciate it and instead gave my love to the supposedly much inferior Jossy’s Giants (1986-87) instead. Sorry!

Nevertheless, as Spencer explains:

‘Directed by former ‘Hey Hey We’re The Monkees’ drummer Mickey Dolenz, Murphy’s Mob charted the lives of a group of teenagers who followed an English lower league outfit called Dunmore United, in particular their efforts to set up and run a junior supporters’ club. You name it, Murphy’s Mob had it – school classroom angst, punch-ups, football rivalries, snogging (plenty of that) plus a catchy theme tune sung by the late Gary Holton who would find fame playing Wayne in the TV show Auf Widersehen Pet.

The show was originally filmed in Hertfordshire and even used clips from matches of Watford, then the new upstarts in the First Division and, by all accounts, finding life at the top a doodle. Ambitiously, Murphy’s Mob even combined real footage with sequences involving actors, as this video gem demonstrates:

Note the first clip is from Highbury, before it switches to Vicarage Road (or is it Stamford Bridge?) when the keeper catches the ball!

In November 1982, BBC’s ‘Match of the Day’ cameras arrived to see Graham Taylor’s high-flying Watford side blitz the Seagulls with the visitors playing about as well as that blundering keeper above. By the final whistle, the score was 4-1 with goals from Luthur Blissett (2 pens), John Barnes and Les Taylor, before substitute Gerry Ryan replied late on for the Albion. As Spencer laments:

A couple of weeks later Central TV went in search of footage from a Watford match to incorporate into Murphy’s Mob. They needed a game in which the Hornets, playing the part of Dunmore, had dominated and scored plenty of goals. Needless to say one particular fixture caught their eye.

Throughout 1983 and 1984 I, along with Albion supporting 11 to 16 year olds everywhere, had to endure countless school yard jibes every time footage of Watford’s (or should I say Dunmore’s?) rampant win over us appeared in Murphy’s Mob, which was regularly.

When I read those words, I was amazed. Could it really be that Brighton & Hove Albion had a significant, albeit a stooge-like, part to play in at least one of the episodes of this children’s TV series? Unfortunately, there wasn’t much footage unloaded to YouTube or indeed on other sources on the internet. However, after some detective work, I eventually did track down all 54 episodes, and scrolled through each one (sad, I know!) to find the episode where Dunmore gave Brighton a trouncing.

And do you know what? It’s still a mystery which edition it was because the only footage I could find with Brighton in it was this:

Perhaps some cuts had to be made to a re-running of the series, seeing as the BBC had the TV rights to the match:

By the end of the 1982/83 season, Watford were runners-up in Division One and Brighton had finished bottom. Both clubs enjoyed a run to Wembley in the FA Cup around that time before the unthinkable happened. In 1985, Central TV began using Derby County as the focus for its football footage, with Dunmore colours changing to blue and white. From Vicarage Road to the Baseball Ground, I wonder if Eric Steele remembers being a Dunmore player at either location.