Through his Irish father Jim, Wythenshawe-born Byrne qualified to play for the Republic of Ireland and he won 13 of his 23 Republic of Ireland caps while a QPR player playing in the old First Division.
His place in the annals of QPR’s history was etched courtesy of following two other greats (Rodney Marsh and Stan Bowles) into the no. 10 shirt.
“I was always conscious of the traditions at Rangers and so I was dead proud to wear the Number 10,” he told qprreport in 2008. “I think I did the shirt justice most of the time.”
In the same way Brighton fans remember his highly effective striking partnership with Mike Small in the 1990-91 season, so QPR supporters recall his combination up front with Gary Bannister.
Bannister and Byrne
“I enjoyed playing up front with ‘Banna’,” he said. “He was a great centre-forward, right out of the top drawer. I don’t know how our partnership worked but we just seemed to have a good understanding.
“He was more of a prolific goalscorer than I was. He also had superb quality and awareness for bringing people into the game.”
Byrne, who later became a familiar voice as an expert summariser for BBC Radio Sussex coverage of Albion matches, has always been happy to indulge requests from Rs writers to look back on his four years at Loftus Road.
As would become something of a pattern in his career, it was an impressive performance playing against QPR that led them to sign him. He featured in a two-legged League Cup game for York City against Rangers, and he recalled the game at Loftus Road when talking to qprnet.com in 2013:
“It was so brilliant to play in that stadium under the floodlights and coming from York to run out at QPR was something to remember.
“Afterwards I said to our assistant manager Viv Busby that I would love to play here every week. Lo and behold a couple of weeks later I was!”
The man who took him to west London was none other than Alan Mullery, the former Brighton manager, during his unhappy six months as QPR manager.
It’s now generally recognised that some of the senior pros at the club were none too pleased with Mullery taking over from Terry Venables, who had moved to Spain to manage Barcelona. Byrne admitted: “It was difficult for me to fully understand having been signed by Mullery but you could feel it with some of the senior pros.
“The likes of Terry Fenwick, John Gregory and Steve Wicks were big Venables men and, understandably, as he was obviously a great coach. You got a feeling that a few of them weren’t overly impressed with Mullers at the time.”
As it turned out, Mullery’s time in charge came to an abrupt end and Byrne remembered playing under caretaker manager Frank Sibley before Jim Smith got the job permanently.
“Frank was lovely; he was a really nice man and probably too nice for football management,” said Byrne. “He really helped me a lot, he would always welcome a chat with you and put his arm round you to talk about your game. I had a lot of time for Frank.”
And of the former Birmingham and Oxford boss Smith, who went on to manage Newcastle and Portsmouth, among others, he said: “Smithy was brilliant. I loved playing for Jim. He loved you, he hated you but he would never ignore you or freeze you out.”
It was in 1986 when Byrne suffered the first of three losing experiences in Wembley finals. QPR went down 3-0 to Smith’s former club Oxford United
“Unfortunately we never turned up for the final,” Byrne told QPRnet. “I just remember that after we were introduced to the dignitaries I went off for the warm up and I had nothing in the tank. I had heavy legs before the game and I think a lot of the players felt like that.
“At the end of the day we didn’t perform and Oxford were better than us but there should be no excuses we were a better side on paper and we should have won.”
A far happier memory from that spring of 1986 happened three weeks previously when the Rs thrashed Chelsea 6-0 and Byrne scored twice (Bannister netted a hat-trick and Michael Robinson the other).
“I’ll never forget that day,” said Byrne. “It was just one of those occasions when everything went right for us.
“I remember one of my goals where I picked up possession on the halfway line. It was funny on that plastic pitch, because bodies would fall all around you if you got into your stride. So eventually I wriggled free and slotted a shot into the bottom corner.”
Another of his favourite QPR memories was scoring in two home games against Manchester United, the team he had supported as a boy. Recalling a 1-0 win in March 1986, he said: “I remember lobbing the ball over two defenders’ heads in the box. Then I flicked it back before shooting past Chris Turner in goal at the Loft End. It was great for me – especially being a Manchester lad as well.”
In much the same way as his move to QPR came about, it was in a couple of friendly matches against Le Havre that the French side liked what they saw of him and QPR were happy to accept their bid for the player.
“It was disappointing to leave QPR but I think it was probably the right time to go,” he recalled. Unfortunately, he broke a leg only three weeks into his stay with Le Havre. But when he was fit again, a few English clubs started watching his recovery with interest.
And it was following a friendly Brighton played against Le Havre that prompted Albion boss Barry Lloyd to bring Byrne back to England to play in early September 1990. He made his Seagulls debut for the reserves in a 1-1 draw with Charlton Athletic and then went on as a sub for the first team in Albion’s 3-2 home win over the same opponent 10 days later.
He scored on his first start, in a 2-1 win away to Blackburn Rovers, and on his first start at home he netted in a 3-3 draw with Swindon Town, who were managed by Ossie Ardiles.
Crocked in the last game of the league season against Ipswich
How the rest of that season panned out was covered in my previous post about Byrne, as were his subsequent moves, the most successful of which saw him play for Sunderland in the 1992 FA Cup final when Liverpool beat the Wearsiders 2-0.
“I scored in every round except the final then missed a sitter on roughly thirteen minutes twenty seconds; I see that one every day!” he told QPRnet.
Byrne’s future work as a podiatrist came about largely through the network provided by the Professional Footballers’ Association.
“When I finished playing football in the late 1990s, I was hoping to become a physio but couldn’t get a place at university to study it,” he explained. “Then the ex-Manchester United star Norman Whiteside advised me to look at the PFA’s course for podiatry, because he was a podiatrist himself. The PFA said they would help me with finance and backing.”
He went on to graduate from university in 2001 – gaining his BSC Honours degree was the hardest thing he’d done in his life, he said.
“My brain had been dormant for twenty years playing football, but I’ve been qualified now for nearly 10 years,” he said in a 2010 interview with Sussex Life. “I love my NHS career and also the private work I do and I get a lot of job satisfaction improving patients’ foot problems.”
And in his interview with QPRnet, he added: “I was lucky, I look back now and I had a good career, I played for some great clubs and whilst I might have had disappointments with finals I have got plenty of great memories.”
ENGLAND World Cup winning hat-trick hero Geoff Hurst gave Colin Pates his Chelsea debut as an 18-year-old – and what an extraordinary footballing baptism it was.
Replacing the injured Micky Droy for a visit across London in a second tier match against Orient, young Pates was involved in a madcap 10-goal match that saw Chelsea win 7-3.
“It was an amazing feeling to go out there but it was chaos, “ he told chelseafancast.com in a 2021 podcast.
And in another interview, he recalled: “It certainly wasn’t a good advertisement for defenders but as long as you come away with the win the fans are happy. It’s one of those days where you’re so fired up it just goes so quickly.
“You come off the pitch at the end and have no recollection of what happened really. I was up against some good, experienced pros and it was quite daunting, but I really enjoyed it.”
That game at Brisbane Road marked the start of a Chelsea first team career that spanned 346 matches, 137 of them as captain, in a turbulent period for the club.
Pates’ future Brighton teammates Gary Chivers and Clive Walker were also in that side at Orient and Walker scored two of Chelsea’s hatful (Lee Frost (3), Micky Fillery and Ian Britton the others).
Pates and Robert Codner celebrate reaching the Wembley final
Fast forward 12 years and Pates was reunited with Chivers and Walker when he joined Brighton on loan from Arsenal in February 1991 to help out after young Irish centre-back Paul McCarthy was sidelined by injury.
Manager Barry Lloyd pulled off something of a coup to persuade his old Chelsea teammate, George Graham, then manager of Arsenal, to loan Pates to the Seagulls for three months.
The Argus Albion reporter John Vinicombe described it as a “masterstroke” and doubted that Albion would have made it to the divisional play-off final at Wembley without him.
Match magazine pic of Pates at Wembley
Lloyd’s faithful no. 2, Martin Hinshelwood, said Pates got better and better over the three months, pointing out: “He has steadied us a little bit. He talks to players, he is a great trainer and he has brought a lot to our back four.”
The player himself told Luke Nicoli of the Albion website in a 2021 interview: “Although I was dropping down a division, it didn’t matter to me – I was just happy to be playing football.
“I immediately struck up a partnership at the back with Gary, and it was like the good old days at Chelsea again.
“I spent three months at the club and I loved every minute; I loved the area, the Goldstone, the club, the fans and, of course, we went all the way to Wembley that season in the play-offs – where the turnout from our fans in the final was incredible.
“We lost (3-1) to Notts County, which was one of those games where it just wasn’t meant to be.”
It has since emerged that Lloyd’s insistence on changing a successful formula by playing Romanian international Stefan Iovan as a sweeper in that match upset the players.
But Pates said: “I know we changed formation that day, and maybe that contributed to our defeat, but I didn’t look at it like that – it was just one of those games where it wasn’t meant to be.”
“We came with a fantastic late run in the league, but it proved to be a game too far for us,” he recalled in a matchday programme article. “We made a slow start to the game and that defeat still hurts, knowing what it meant to everyone connected with the club.”
In another interview, Pates said: “The result in the play-off final didn’t go our way but it was a fantastic experience for the team to play at Wembley, the side was so close to the Premiership, or First Division as it was called then.
“I’d been lucky to have played there before but to others it was the pinnacle of their careers.”
Indeed, the last time Pates had played there was five years previously when he made history by becoming the first-ever Chelsea player to lift a trophy – the Full Members Cup – at the iconic stadium (when Ron Harris lifted the FA Cup in 1970 it was at Old Trafford, where the replay had taken place after a 2-2 draw at Wembley). That was arguably the pinnacle of his career.
The Full Members Cup was a short-lived competition between North and South clubs from the top two divisions of the league, with the regional winners meeting in a national final. It was introduced after English clubs were banned from competing in Europe following the Heysel disaster. In truth, it struggled to be taken seriously and it was a surprise it lasted as long as seven seasons.
The most remarkable element of Chelsea’s win was that the game took place the day after they’d played a league game at Southampton – when Pates scored the only goal of the game with a deflected free kick past Peter Shilton in Southampton’s goal.
Chelsea beat Manchester City 5-4 but extraordinarily were cruising at 5-1 before City scored three in the last six minutes (one an 89th minute own goal by Doug Rougvie!).
“When the referee blew his whistle, was I relieved!” said Pates. “It’s great to play at Wembley with thousands of fans screaming their heads off, and once you’re on the pitch you don’t care what cup it is, you just want to win it.”
Born on 10 August 1961 in Wimbledon, Pates went to school only five miles from Stamford Bridge and was a Chelsea fan as a boy. He signed for the club aged 10, starting training with them in 1971, the year they won the European Cup Winners’ Cup having won the FA Cup the previous year. Pates worked his way through the different age levels and as an apprentice cleaned the boots of hardman defender Ron Harris.
He made that first team debut on 10 November 1979, by which time he had already played five times for England Youth that autumn. A further six appearances followed in 1980, alongside the likes of Micky Adams, Gary Mabbutt, Paul Walsh and Terry Gibson. Mark Barham, Steve Mackenzie and Terry Connor featured in the early 1980 games.
Pates in action for Chelsea against Albion’s Terry Connor, a former England Youth teammate
Simultaneously, Droy’s lack of fitness meant young Pates got an extended run in the side. However, because he was comfortable on the ball and could play in a number of positions, manager Hurst often used him as something of a utility player.
For example, in 1980-81, his 15 appearances were spread across all back four positions. But when John Neal took over for the 1981-82 season, Pates was ever present in the centre alongside Droy.
While the side’s league fortunes didn’t improve under the new man (they finished 12th), they had the consolation of reaching the quarter finals of the FA Cup after beating reigning European champions Liverpool 2-0 in the fifth round (Pates had the job of man-marking Graeme Souness).
Remarkably, Chelsea only narrowly avoided relegation to the old Third Division in 1983, and, as a result, manager Neal had a clear-out of the ‘old guard’ and Pates’ performances and attitude earned him the captain’s armband just before his 22nd birthday.
“I think he wanted someone who had come through the ranks and knew the club,” Pates said. “I was fortunate enough to be one of the few players – along with the likes of John Bumstead – who he kept on from before.”
Pates has nothing but praise for Neal and his assistant Ian McNeill (who played more than 100 games for Brighton between 1959 and 1962) and their eye for good players, like Pat Nevin, Joe McLaughlin, Nigel Spackman, David Speedie and Kerry Dixon, who were brought in to rebuild the club.
“I loved John Neal, he was a man of few words but when he said something you listened because it was going to be something poignant or important,” said Pates. “He was a good man-manager and would always take care of you if you had problems and be there for a chat. You wanted to play for him.”
Combined with the new arrivals, Pates and his pal Bumstead were part of a core of local lads Neal relied on (it included Dale Jasper, Chivers and Fillery): they all came from the same estate in Mitcham.
In his first season wearing the armband, “Pates stepped into the role with ease and led the team to the Second Division title” wrote Kelvin Barker.
“Colin’s classy displays in the top division catapulted him into the limelight, his impressive captaincy of a club on the up particularly catching the eye.
“A string of niggly injuries after Christmas led to him missing a handful of matches and his importance to the defence was highlighted when, in his absence, Chelsea slipped to consecutive defeats at Coventry and Ipswich.
“Pates made a total of 48 appearances during the 1984-85 campaign and scored once, the goal coming in a stunning 4-3 win at Goodison Park against the season’s champions, Everton.”
It had been a proud moment when Pates led Chelsea out at Highbury for the 1984-85 season-opener against Arsenal. The game finished 1-1, Paul Mariner opening the scoring for the Gunners on 35 minutes, Dixon equalising for the visitors four minutes later.
Chelsea made a decent fist of their return to the big time, finishing sixth. They also reached the semi-finals of the League Cup only to be knocked out over two legs by a Clive Walker-inspired Sunderland.
Chelsea did make it to Wembley the following year but it would be fair to say winning
that Full Members Cup final ultimately damaged their progress in the league. Chelsea were riding high in the top flight at the time and being spoken of as title contenders but immediately after that trophy win they were beaten 4-0 at home by West Ham on Easter Saturday and 6-0 by QPR at Loftus Road on Easter Monday.
Pates’ future Brighton teammate John Byrne scored twice for the Rs playing alongside Michael Robinson and Gary Bannister, who got a hat-trick. Substitute Leroy Rosenior (father of Liam) scored the other.
Byrne later remembered: “There were some big name players in the Chelsea line-up, including centre-back Doug Rougvie who seemed like he wanted to kill somebody when the score was 5-0! He was certainly looking for blood!
“We had the Milk Cup Final coming up and I remember saying to Banna with about 15 minutes to go ‘I ain’t going anywhere near Rougvie’. And Gary replied: ‘Neither am I!’ So we both ended up playing on the wings with no one in the middle!”
Pates and Doug Rougvie both played for Chelsea and Brighton
There was talk that Pates might force his way into the England squad for the Mexico World Cup that summer but Terry Butcher, Alvin Martin and Terry Fenwick were ahead of him.
Competition at club level emerged at the start of the following season when centre-half Steve Wicks was recruited and Pates was moved to left-back. However, injuries to Wicks meant Pates was soon back in the middle.
In his sporting-heroes.net piece, Barker continued: “As Chelsea’s farcical season went from bad to worse, he found himself being played in midfield again. With the Blues looking down the barrel of a drop into Division Two, Colin was returned to the centre of defence and relegation was averted.”
An injury-disrupted 1987-88 season also saw Pates have the captaincy taken off him and given to fellow defender Joe McLaughlin. Pates actually missed the start of the season having had a cartilage operation and when he returned in October the team were on something of a downward spiral. Injured again at the end of March, by the time he was fit to return, Chelsea were heading close to the relegation trapdoor.
At the time, as part of a restructuring plan to reduce the top division’s number of teams from 22 to 20, the team finishing fourth bottom of Division One had to play-off against the third, fourth and fifth-placed teams in Division Two. The top two in Division Two were promoted automatically and the bottom three in Division One went down.
Chelsea ended up fourth from bottom and had to play Middlesbrough (who’d finished third in Division Two) over two legs.
Boro won the first leg at Ayresome Park 2-0 but Chelsea only won their home leg 1-0, so they were relegated. However, history has since remembered the match more for the riotous behaviour of Chelsea supporters.
gazettelive.co.uk recalled: “There was trouble before, during and after the high-stakes game. Chelsea fans invaded the pitch on the whistle and stormed the away end sparking hand to hand fighting with barely a steward in sight.
“And it was only the intervention of mounted police that eventually cleared the pitch. The trouble didn’t stop there with more attacks outside the ground as Boro fans returned to their cars, coaches and the tube.”
Boro striker Bernie Slaven remembered: “We were locked in the dressing room celebrating promotion for maybe an hour while the police dealt with the trouble and cleared the pitch then we went out and celebrated again with the Boro fans who had been kept back in the stadium.
“The trouble and the ugly atmosphere was a real shame because it took all the headlines away from what we had achieved.”
John Hollins resigned as manager and was replaced by Bobby Campbell. One of his first moves was to sign the powerful central defender Graham Roberts who he made captain.
Pates was given a testimonial as part of the pre-season friendly fixtures (a 0-0 draw with Spurs) but the season was only three months old when he suddenly found himself unwanted at the Bridge.
As Pates returned to the dressing room at the end of a 2-2 Littlewoods Cup home draw with Scunthorpe United, Campbell informed him Charlton Athletic manager Lennie Lawrence was upstairs waiting to sign him, the club having already agreed terms over the transfer (a £400,000 fee).
“It came right out of the blue,” said Pates. “At first, I was taken aback. I have been at Stamford Bridge since I was a schoolkid. Chelsea has become a way of life.”
When the Albion visited Chelsea for a Division 2 league game on 29 October 1988, the matchday programme carried an article headlined ‘Colin’s farewell’, detailing the circumstances.
“The transfer of Colin Pates to Charlton Athletic not only surprised many Blues fans but Colin himself,” it began.
And reflecting on what happened many years later, Pates told Luke Nicoli: “I was allowed to leave and did so with a heavy heart as I wanted to stay.”
Nevertheless, the move at least presented the defender with the chance to return to playing in the top division, and he admitted: “After 11 years at Stamford Bridge, this is a new lease of life for me.”
Charlton, who had to play home matches at Crystal Palace’s Selhurst Park at the time, finished 14th by the end of that 1988-89 season, but Pates had left for Arsenal by the time the Addicks were relegated in 19th place at the end of the following season.
Despite those moves across London, and to the south coast, Chelsea hadn’t seen the last of Pates, though. He subsequently became head of football at the independent Whitgift School in South Croydon, where he coached most sports and was the first football coach in what had previously been a rugby-dominated school and pupils Victor Moses and Callum Hudson-Odoi both went on to play for the Blues.
Pates was also seen back at the Bridge on matchdays working in the hospitality lounges.
IT seems extraordinary to think Robert Isaac had to wait FOURTEEN MONTHS to experience a win as a Brighton player after joining the club from Chelsea.
The young defender who had realised every schoolboy’s dream by playing for the team he’d always supported left a disgruntled dressing room at Stamford Bridge only to join a side sliding inexorably toward the relegation trapdoor of what is now the Championship.
“I must admit it was a bit depressing at first because we just couldn’t do anything right,” Isaac told Dave Beckett in an Albion matchday programme article. “We just had no luck at all; if we had I think we might well have survived in Division Two.”
Isaac also appears to have gone out of the frying pan into the fire. Telling thegoldstonewrap.com how he’d left Chelsea because the management was losing support of the players and he wanted regular first team football, he added: “When I joined Brighton in February 1987 they were in freefall. The dressing room was even more at odds with the manager than at Chelsea.
“Barry Lloyd dropped Dean Saunders, our only hope of surviving the drop. I found Barry rather rude. He’d blank me in the corridor and make me train on my own.”
The young defender made his Seagulls debut on 21 February 1987 in a 2-1 defeat at home to Oldham Athletic and featured in four draws and five defeats by the season’s dismal end.
Back at what was for so long Albion’s normal level of third tier football, Lloyd’s side did begin to pick up points – but Isaac wasn’t involved because of a groin strain and a troublesome hernia injury that sidelined him for months.
“I had stomach trouble quite a lot but no-one could put their finger on the problem until I saw a specialist in Harley Street,” he explained.
“After the operation, I was out of action for the best part of six months and at times I didn’t think I would get back to full fitness. I had around 40 internal stitches and even when I began playing again they would stretch and pull and I felt sick after games.”
It wasn’t until March 1988, with Albion in sixth spot, that Lloyd shook things up, initially drafting Isaac in at right-back in place of Kevan Brown, and then selecting him to replace suspended captain – and Isaac’s former Chelsea teammate – Doug Rougvie at centre back alongside Steve Gatting.
Isaac also stepped in when Rougvie missed a couple of games with a ‘flu virus and, although a win in Seagulls’ colours continued to elude him in his first three games back in the side (a defeat and two draws), he kept the no.5 shirt ahead of the rugged Scot. That elusive win finally came in a 2-1 away win at Notts County on 4 April.
Five wins and a draw followed and the successful run-in saw promotion gained as divisional runners-up behind Sunderland. Isaac was one of three former Chelsea players in that back four, with Gary Chivers (who’d arrived from Watford) at right-back and Keith Dublin at left-back.
Dublin had played for England under 19s with Isaac three years earlier. They both played four games in Dave Sexton’s side at the Toulon Tournament in the south of France in 1985 (England beat Cameroon 1-0 and Mexico 2-0, lost 2-0 to the USSR and succumbed 3-1 to France in the final at the Stade Mayol in Toulon).
Sadly, the subsequent fortunes of the two players went in opposite directions: Dublin went on to become such a success with the Seagulls that he was the 1989-90 Player of the Year and was sold to Watford for £275,000; the injury-beset Isaac had to quit the game after only 33 matches in a Brighton shirt.
After Albion bounced back to the second tier, the defender played in the first 11 matches of the 1988-89 season – eight of which were defeats – but his appearance in a 1-0 defeat away to Leicester turned out to be his last as an Albion player.
“I got injured at Leicester,” he recalled. “I didn’t feel it until the next day and then it really hit me. My knee just blew up. Come Monday morning I couldn’t even walk.”
He required an operation to repair the patella tendon in his left knee and, as he sought to regain fitness, spent a fortnight at the National Rehabilitation Centre at Lilleshall.
Meanwhile, Lloyd signed experienced central defender Larry May (whose own playing career would be ended by injury later that season) and, subsequently, Nicky Bissett.
A programme item in the 1989-90 season reminded supporters that Isaac was still around, although he hadn’t played at all throughout 1989.
Looking ahead to 1990, Isaac said: “I just hope I have a better year. I’d like to think that I deserve it after all the frustrations of the last few years with two major operations.”
Sadly, it didn’t happen and in August 1990, he was forced to quit football. After retiring, he worked as a chauffeur for the Maktoums, the ruling family in Dubai, before running his own vehicle business.
Born in Hackney on 30 November 1965, Isaac was Chelsea through and through from an early age.
“We lived in Chelsea and my great grandfather went to the first ever match at Stamford Bridge,” he told thegoldstonewrap.com. “My family have been going to matches home and away since. I went to see Chelsea play Stoke in the (1972) League Cup Final aged six.”
Isaac went on to join the club as a junior, made his reserve team debut at the tender age of 15 and was named Chelsea’s young player of the year in 1984.
It was on 9 October 1984 that his promising career could have been snuffed out before it had even begun: it’s a horrifying tale, told the following day on the front page of The Sun, and covered in detail by that1980sportsblog.
Three knife-wielding Millwall thugs slashed his back from his shoulder to the base of his spine in a dark alley near the south London club’s notorious old stadium, The Den.
Isaac needed 55 stitches to repair the damage and only the thickness of a leather coat he was wearing prevented the wound being potentially life-threatening.
Remarkably, later the same season, in March, he had recovered well enough to make his Chelsea first team debut in a 3-1 win at Watford, although Eddie Niedzwiecki, a Chelsea coach who later worked with Mark Hughes for Wales and at several clubs, told Kelvin Barker’s Celery! Representing Chelsea in the 1980s: “He was a young, up-and-coming apprentice at the time and luckily he managed to pull through, although he never really recovered from it.”
In the 1985-86 season, Isaac played two league cup games for Chelsea and three times in the league. The following season saw him get a mini-run in the side, playing four consecutive league games in November, but his fifth match – a 4-0 home defeat by Wimbledon in which Rougvie was sent off in the first 10 minutes for headbutting John Fashanu – proved to be his last.
The website sporting-heroes.net said of him: “A steady, reliable centre-half and occasional full-back, Robert did little wrong during his time in the Chelsea first-team, but was unfortunate to play for the club at a time when Colin Pates, Joe McLaughlin and, a little later, Steve Wicks, were all demonstrating their considerable talents at the heart of the defence.”
Isaac asked for a transfer after a disagreement with manager John Hollins and his assistant Ernie Walley, and that led to his transfer to Brighton for a £50,000 fee.
In parallel lines 