Tag: Norman Giller

Sparks flew in Brighton v Chelsea FA Cup clashes

BRIGHTON v Chelsea in the FA Cup sparks memories for supporters of my generation stretching back several decades.

Many began as Albion followers the day the then First Division side from Stamford Bridge visited the Goldstone Ground in February 1967 when a dubious refereeing decision denied Third Division Brighton a shock win.

Others, me included, recall a fiery encounter in Hove six years later when Second Division strugglers Brighton were beaten 2-0 courtesy of two Peter Osgood goals in a game marred by violence on and off the pitch.

That third-round tie in January 1973 was dubbed “a day of shame” in the newspapers after two players were sent off, five were booked and crowd trouble erupted.

The chance for lower ranked teams to pitch their lesser talents against the big boys has always been at the heart of the FA Cup’s appeal.

That was certainly the case when Archie Macaulay’s mid-table Albion hosted Tommy Docherty’s top 10 Chelsea on 18 February 1967. To give it musical context, Georgy Girl by The Seekers had just taken over from The Monkees’ I’m A Believer at no.1 in the pop charts!

At a time when home crowds were normally 12,000 – 13,000, a sell-out gate of 35,000 packed into the Goldstone.

Cup fever had certainly captured the imagination of the Sussex public. In the previous round, 29,208 watched Albion beat Aldershot 3-1 in a third-round replay for the chance to take on the top division Pensioners (as Chelsea were called back then).

The two clubs hadn’t met in any other competition for 34 years – back in January 1933 Brighton beat the London side 2-1 in a third round FA Cup tie.

After such a long gap, maybe it was understandable that Albion’s young captain, Dave Turner, at 22, fell off the settee at home in excitement when he saw the cup draw made on the television.

Canny Brighton decided to sell tickets for the game at a reserve home fixture against Notts County, meaning a stunning 22,229 paid to watch the second string win 1-0 in order to secure their entry to the big game.

The matchday programme revealed how Docherty and several of his players had watched the Aldershot match to check out what would be in store for them.

Docherty meanwhile was very complimentary in his programme notes, declaring: “Chelsea know that we have a hard and difficult task today, and are not facing it in a complacent manner.”

He added: “We know that there is great potential for the Albion club. They have a First Division set-up at the Goldstone Ground, and First Division ideas, as well as a first-class pitch.

“The day cannot be very far away when they become one of our top clubs, and I am just one of many people in the game who will welcome their promotion to a higher class.”

However, the game was only five minutes old when Bobby Tambling gave Chelsea the lead. But before half-time, Chelsea’s John Boyle (who would several years later joined Albion on loan) was sent off for kicking Wally Gould. And just four minutes into the second half, Turner gave Albion parity.

Goalkeeper Tony Burns, who had top flight experience with Arsenal, made several decent saves in the game and, with the clock ticking down, a cracking strike by winger Brian Tawse in the closing minutes of the game looked to have won it for the Third Division side.

“I smashed a volley past Peter Bonetti from 20 yards out with the score at 1-1 and thought I’d got the winner,” Tawse told Brian Fowlie of the Sunday Post in 2015. “It was a goal that could have made my career – but the referee chalked it off.”

Unfortunately, the official had spotted an infringement by Kit Napier and the ‘goal’ was disallowed.

As Brighton would discover again only too painfully in the 1983 final, these winning chances rarely happen twice, and, sure enough, in the replay at Stamford Bridge Chelsea ran out 4-0 winners in front of a massive crowd of 54,852.

Chelsea went on to reach that season’s final at Wembley only to lose 2-1 to a Spurs side that had Joe Kinnear at right-back and Alan Mullery in midfield.

Hardman Ron ‘Chopper’ Harris, their captain in 1967, was still leading the side by the time of the 13 January 1973 game and John Hollins and Tommy Baldwin also played in both. The dismissed Boyle was on the Chelsea bench in 1973. Only John Templeman (right) played in both games for Brighton.

The UK had just joined the European Economic Community (as it was then called) and You’re So Vain by Carly Simon was no.1 in the charts. Albion had moved up a division under Pat Saward having won promotion the previous May, but the side was struggling at the foot of the Second Division, unable to cope at the higher level.

Nevertheless, there were two players looking forward to the cup tie: Bert Murray and £28,000 signing Barry Bridges had both won silverware at Chelsea in the 1960s.

Barry Bridges slots home for Chelsea in a FA Cup tie v Peterborough and, pictured by the Daily Mirror’s Monte Fresco, ahead of the 1973 match against his old club.

“It’s a tremendous draw for the club and a dream draw for Bert Murray and myself who both started our careers at Chelsea,” Bridges told Goal magazine. “Personally, it will be nice to see most of the Chelsea lads again. I grew up with Peter Bonetti, Ron Harris and Ossie (Peter Osgood).”

Unfortunately the Albion game was one of several former Worthing schoolboy Bonetti missed through injury and illness in the 1972-73 season, John Phillips deputising in goal at the Goldstone.

How this young supporter recorded the team info in his scrapbook

Dave Sexton, a promotion winner with Brighton in 1958, saw his Chelsea side put the ball in Albion’s net within the first 10 seconds of the game but Bill Garner’s effort was ruled out for offside, to the bemusement of the football writers watching. As the game unfolded, not only did it end in defeat for the Albion but it attracted ugly headlines for all the wrong reasons as Harris and Brighton left back George Ley were sent off.

Ley was dismissed in the 85th minute for bringing down Baldwin from behind and then getting involved in a punch-up with England international Osgood, the scorer of Chelsea’s goals in the 17th and 60th minutes, who himself was booked for his part in the altercation.

Albion’s Eddie Spearritt had been the first to go in the book on 23 minutes (for a foul on Alan Hudson) and on 73 minutes was involved in the incident which led to Harris being sent off for the first time in his career.

Esteemed football writer Norman Giller recorded it like this: “Harris got involved in a tussle with Spearritt, and, as he pushed him, Spearritt went down holding his face as if he had been punched. The referee directed Ron to an early bath. All the bones he had kicked, and here was Harris being sent off for a playground push.”

1970 Cup winner Dave Webb went in the book for wiping out Spearritt, joining colleague Steve Kember who was cautioned for fouling Steve Piper. Albion’s Graham Howell also went into referee Peter Reeves’ notebook for taking down Baldwin.

The kicking and aggression on the pitch led to fighting on the terraces with 25 people arrested. And Leicester referee Reeves had to be given a police escort off the pitch.

Former Spurs captain-turned-journalist Danny Blanchflower, writing in the Sunday Express: declared: “This FA Cup third-round tie was as disgraceful as any match I’ve ever seen.”

In the opinion of Albion scribe John Vinicombe in the Evening Argus: “Football anarchy gripped the Goldstone during the last 20 minutes of Albion’s FA Cup tie with Chelsea.

“In the frenzy, players fought one another, hacked and kicked, and the violence tiggered an all-too-predictable chain reaction on the terraces where rival factions became one mass of writhing, mindless hooligans.”

Interestingly, Harris’ dismissal was subsequently overturned, Giller recording: “A Brighton-supporting vicar, with a pitchside view, wrote to the Football Association telling them what he had witnessed, and ‘Chopper’ was vindicated.”

Chelsea made it through to the quarter-finals of that season’s tournament before losing 2-1 to Arsenal in a replay. Arsenal lost in the semis to Sunderland, the Second Division side who stunned the football world at the time by beating Leeds United in the final.

Steady Eddie had plenty of strings to his bow

ONE TIME Albion captain and utility player Eddie Spearritt played in the top flight for Ipswich Town and Carlisle United.

He made five starts and five appearances off the bench for second tier champions Ipswich at the beginning of the 1968-69 season before joining third tier Brighton for £20,000 in January 1969.

Play anywhere Spearritt was then a permanent fixture in the Albion line-up for almost five years, making 225 appearances, before Brian Clough turfed him out at the end of the 1973-74 season.

But he found himself back amongst the elite when newly promoted Carlisle United snapped him up for their one and only season (1974-75) amongst the big boys.

Spearritt made 17 starts and six appearances as a sub for the Cumbrians but, in spite of a superb winning start when they briefly topped the division, United finished the season in bottom spot.

Spearritt shapes to challenge Aston Villa’s Ray Graydon

Equally comfortable playing in midfield, at full back or sweeper, Spearritt had on-off spells as Albion’s chosen penalty-taker as well as chipping in with goals from open play. He even turned his hand to goalkeeping when necessary.

Another key attribute to his game was an ability to send in long throw-ins which could sometimes be as effective as a free kick or corner. It was a skill which earned him a place in a Longest Throw competition staged by BBC’s sport show Grandstand in 1970-71, although he didn’t win it.

Born in Lowestoft on 31 January 1947, Spearritt went to Lowestoft Grammar School and on leaving school was picked up by Arsenal. But when the Gunners didn’t keep him on, he returned to East Anglia and joined Ipswich as an apprentice in August 1963.

He signed a professional contract with Town in February 1965 and, as Tim Hodge details on prideofanglia.com, he made his league debut in the 1965-66 season in a 1-0 win away to Preston in the old Division Two.

That was the season when substitutes were first introduced into the English game and the record books show that Spearritt was the first Ipswich sub to score a goal.

He went on for Irish international Danny Hegan in a match away to Derby County on 15 January 1966 and scored Ipswich’s second goal. The game finished 2-2; Gerry Baker having scored Town’s first.

Over the next three years, Spearritt made a total of 69 appearances (plus 10 as sub) for Bill McGarry’s side, scoring 14 goals along the way. Twenty of those games came in the 1967-68 season when Ipswich won the old Second Division.

A 1-0 home defeat to Spurs in October 1968 was his last for the Suffolk club and he parted company with Town shortly after McGarry left Portman Road to take over at Wolverhampton Wanderers.

A debut v Crewe (left) and slaloming through the Plymouth Argyle defence (right)

Spearritt was one of Freddie Goodwin’s first signings for Brighton – just a few weeks before my first ever Albion game. He made his debut in a 3-1 home win over Crewe Alexandra and kept the number 10 shirt to the end of the season, by which time he had scored five times, including both Albion’s goals in a 2-2 draw at home to Tranmere Rovers.

In the 1969-70 season, not only was he part of the Third Division Albion side who pushed his old manager McGarry’s First Division Wolves side all the way in a memorable third round League Cup tie, it was his header from Kit Napier’s free kick that put the Albion 2-1 ahead just before half-time.

Scottish international Hugh Curran scored twice in eight second half minutes to clinch the win for Wolves but a bumper Goldstone Ground crowd of 32,539 witnessed a terrific effort by their side.

A few weeks’ later, in a marathon FA Cup second round tie with Walsall that required three replays before the Saddlers finally prevailed 2-1, Spearritt took over in goal during the second replay when a concussed Geoff Sidebottom was stretchered off on 65 minutes. Albion hung on for a 1-1 draw.

Spearritt was a midfield regular in his first two seasons but Goodwin’s successor, Pat Saward, switched him to left back halfway through the 1970-71 season and that’s where he stayed throughout 1971-72 when Albion won promotion from the old Third Division as runners up behind Saward’s old club, Aston Villa.

It was in the first half of that season that Spearritt took a call from ex-Ipswich teammate Ray Crawford, the former England international centre forward, who had returned homesick from a short stint playing in South Africa.

He persuaded Saward to offer Crawford a trial and although he didn’t make the league side he scouted upcoming opponents, played for the reserves and subsequently ran the youth team.

Meanwhile, Spearritt was a key part of the promotion side and player-of-the-season Bert Murray generously declared the award could have gone to Eddie for his consistency that season. As it happened, Spearritt did get the award the following season, although somewhat more ignominiously considering Albion were relegated.

All smiles as Pat Saward’s side toast promotion in 1972

In the close season after promotion, Spearritt tied the knot with Penelope Biddulph, “an accomplished professional dancer,” the matchday programme told us, and they moved into a new home in Kingston-by-Sea.

Spearritt started out at left back in Division Two but after ten games was ousted by the arrival of George Ley from Portsmouth. He then switched back into midfield, but by the end of that relegation season was playing sweeper alongside Norman Gall (for nine games) and Steve Piper (for two).

He scored (pictured above), along with Barry Bridges, in a 2-0 win at Huddersfield on 14 October but the team went on a disastrous run of 16 games without a win, although Spearritt did get on the scoresheet three times, including notching two penalties.

When Albion went to that footballing outpost Carlisle on 16 December, they had lost five in a row without managing a single goal. Carlisle were 5-0 up, goalkeeper Brian Powney was carried off with a broken nose, replaced between the sticks by Murray, then Albion won a penalty.

Spearritt took up the story in a subsequent matchday programme. “I used to be the club’s penalty taker but, after I had missed an important one at Mansfield in 1970, I lost the job. Penalty-taking is really all about confidence,” he said. “After I had missed that one at Mansfield, which cost us a point, the players lost confidence in me and the job went first to John Napier and was then taken over by Murray.

“Bert would have taken the penalty at Carlisle. He has already scored two this season. But he had gone in goal and it was decided it was too risky to fetch Bert out of goal to take the penalty.

“Nobody else seemed to want to take it so I just picked the ball up and put it on the spot. We were 5-0 down by then but I thought from a morale point of view that it was extremely important that I scored. You can understand my relief when I saw the ball hit the back of the net.

“Everybody was beginning to wonder when we would score again. I suppose with the run of bad luck we have been having it was almost inevitable that we should break our goal famine from the penalty spot.”

Towards the end of the dismal run, Albion drew First Division Chelsea at home in the third round of the FA Cup. The game was won 2-0 by Chelsea but it was an ugly, violent affair – The Argus labelled it ‘Goldstone day of shame’ – in which five players were booked and each side had a player sent off.

Spearritt, the first to be booked, found himself caught up in a huge controversy which resulted in Chelsea hard man Ron Harris being sent off by Leicester referee Peter Reeves; remarkably the only time in his career he was dismissed.

The Brighton man insisted he’d been hit by the defender and Saward said in diplomatic terms after the game: “Spearritt said he was struck on the mouth and that it was not an involuntary action but a blow. From what I saw, I couldn’t understand it.”

Esteemed football writer Norman Giller subsequently recorded it like this: “Harris got involved in a tussle with Spearritt, and, as he pushed him, Spearritt went down holding his face as if he had been punched. The referee directed Ron to an early bath. All the bones he had kicked, and here was Harris being sent off for a playground push.

“A Brighton-supporting vicar, with a pitchside view, wrote to the Football Association telling them what he had witnessed, and ‘Chopper’ was vindicated.”

Whatever the truth of the matter, Spearritt told Argus Albion reporter John Vinicombe that he’d been threatened by a Chelsea player after the incident. “He spoke to me several times and made it quite clear what he had in mind.”

Albion’s Ley was sent off for bringing down Tommy Baldwin and then getting involved in an altercation with Peter Osgood, who scored both Chelsea goals. Two minutes later David Webb went into the book for a ‘blatant foul’ on Spearritt.

Albion finally returned to winning ways the following month with a 2-0 win over Luton (on 10 February), and then beat Huddersfield, Carlisle and Swindon, prompting Saward to refer to “some outstanding individual performances” and adding: “I have been particularly pleased with the way Eddie Spearritt has been playing in recent weeks.

“He has maintained a high level of consistency this season and his work in defence and in midfield has been invaluable as the side has plugged away trying to turn the tide of results.”

Saward made Spearritt Albion’s captain at the start of the 1973-74 season back in Division Three and with the return of central defender Ian Goodwin and then the emergence of Piper in the sweeping role, he was soon back in midfield.

But when Saward was sacked in October and sensationally replaced by former Derby County League title winning management duo Brian Clough and Peter Taylor, Spearritt was one of the first to have his nose put out of joint by the new arrivals.

Journalist Spencer Vignes described what happened in Bloody Southerners (Biteback Publishing, 2018), his excellent book about that era.

Clough sought out long-serving centre back Norman Gall and, because he hailed from the same part of the country (ie the north east), told him he was making him the captain. Gall told Vignes: “Suddenly I’m captain, which I was really happy about. Eddie Spearritt didn’t like it though. He’d been captain up until then. In fact, he didn’t talk to me after that. That was the beginning of the end for Eddie.”

Spearritt was part of the side who capitulated 4-0, 8-2 and 4-1 in successive games against Walton & Hersham, Bristol Rovers and Tranmere Rovers, and he was dropped for six games, along with Ley (who never played for Albion again). Clough went into the transfer market and brought in midfielder Ronnie Welch and left back Harry Wilson from Burnley.

Although Spearritt was restored to the team in mid January, and had a run of seven games — including his 200th league game for Albion — when he was subbed off in a home win over Hereford United on 10 March 1974, it was to be his last appearance in an Albion shirt.

In five years he’d played 225 games (plus seven as sub) and scored 25 goals.

Come the end of the season, Spearritt was one of 12 players released by the club in what became known as the great Clough clear-out.

Perhaps surprisingly, though, his next step was UP two divisions to play in the First Division with then newly promoted Carlisle United.

One of his teammates there was defender Graham Winstanley, who later joined the Albion. The side was captained by Chris Balderstone, who was also a top cricketer. Journeyman striker Hugh McIlmoyle played up front while John Gorman, who later played for Spurs and became Glenn Hoddle’s managerial sidekick, was also in the team.

They memorably topped the division after three games…but predictably finished bottom of the pile by the end. In his two-year stay with the Cumbrians, Spearritt played 29 times, was sub twice and scored a single goal.

He moved back south in August 1976, signed by Gerry Summers at Gillingham, and made his debut in a League Cup first round second leg tie against Aldershot, then made his league debut against Reading.

In total, he made 22 appearances in his one season at the club — one of them at the Goldstone Ground on December 29 1976, when the Albion won 2-0 on a slippery, snow-covered pitch. Spearritt scored just the once for the Gills, from the penalty spot against Rotherham United at Priestfield.

He emigrated to Australia the following summer and settled in Brisbane where he played 56 games for the Brisbane Lions between 1977 and 1980 and was their head coach in 1979. He subsequently coached Rochedale Rovers in the Brisbane Intermediate League, steering them to promotion to the Premier League in 1983.

Outside of football, he became estates manager for L’Oréal and in later years was better known as the uncle of Hannah Spearritt, once of the pop group S Club 7, who became an actress in the ITV drama Primevil.