I’m very proud of what I achieved but I don’t need shirts or medals hanging everywhere
THE other players on the Wakefield Wanderers walking football squad can occasionally find themselves a bit perplexed after a victory. The fruits of their labour, the medal earned from another tournament triumph, seem to hold little appeal for one of their number.
It’s not that he doesn’t care — far from it. The 64-year-old postman was initially sceptical of joining up when he first heard the pitch in a local Subway, yet soon after walking through the doors of the leisure centre where the lunch-time social game was held, he wasn’t only playing in the team but training it too.
Extra evening sessions were quickly added for those serious about improving the club’s previously luckless streak in competition play, while any left questioning the changes would frequently hear the refrain “these aren’t Wakefield’s rules, they’re mine”.
That the subsequent physical silverware appears to mean little to John Mcclelland perhaps shouldn’t come as a great surprise though. After all, he doesn’t know where the First Division medal he won with Leeds is either.
The journey from Whiteabbey to Wakefield for the former Northern Ireland captain involved a football career of incredible longevity — 14 clubs spread across each of the four home nations and all four of England’s divisions. It was more remarkable still for just how frequently along the way it appeared to be drawing to a close.
At one time or another he’d be deemed too skinny for the Churches’ League fourth division, get released and end up working in a fish factory, suffer a horror ankle dislocation on the training pitch and be threatened with being cast into career-ending contractual wilderness.
By the time it was all over, he’d been to two World Cups, won major honours with Leeds and Rangers, had Sir Alex Ferguson try to sign him not once but twice and been hand-picked by Sir Bobby Robson from every defender in the English leagues to man-mark Diego Maradona at Wembley.
For a player whose combined transfer fees were in the region of half a million pounds and one set of low-quality jerseys, it must have felt that for every unforgetthat table night there was a day offered a reminder of the stark reality that football can be a cold business.
His father, born on the Shankill Road, had been a player himself, turning out for Cliftonville and Ballymena in the 1930s, but died when his youngest son was only nine-years-old. James Mcclelland’s Wicklow-born wife carried on in the family newsagent on the Shore Road to support the children and John would wile away the hours following his paper round kicking a ball against the wall.
Lining out for Whiteabbey Methodist, it wasn’t long before Gibby Mckenzie had signed him up at Portadown — the fee for his registration those cheap jerseys that survived only two or three washes. While interest from Jack Charlton at Middlesbrough came to nothing when the Ayresome Park side refused to pay a fee up front, a more significant blow came with his swift release from Cardiff City who had eventually paid £5,000 for his services in December 1974.
“I’d signed for Frank O’farrell and been playing for the reserves at centre forward as well as a few games for the first team,” he remembers.
“After the side got relegated, all the young players were sat along the wall of the new manager’s door. Because I’d played for the first team they all thought I’d get a contract but I was called in first and told I hadn’t progressed quickly enough.
“That’s what they always say, it’s never that you’re not good enough, just that you haven’t progressed quickly enough, that you might make it later on down the line.
“I remember saying, ‘Well, if you give me the contract then I’ll still be your player when later down the line comes’.
“It didn’t work obviously, you’re not wanted. I walked out of that door and I burst into tears.”
Irish League clubs came calling but instead he signed for Bangor City, a semi-pro outfit who promised to arrange a job for him in north Wales. To start, he spent more time digging ditches, polishing floors and shelling muscles than playing football.
“I’d barely played and when I had, they’d put me up front and I wasn’t a striker,” he says. “I would have been sacked only the manager got the bullet first.
“I’d been working an early morning shift in the fish factory and I went down to watch Bangor in the Welsh Cup. I poked my head in the door of the dressing room and the centre-half is getting roared at because he hasn’t signed his registration forms. The new manager is looking round and saying, ‘Can anybody play at the back?’
“I put my hand up, I wanted a game. I was asked when I last played centre-half and when I told him when I was 12 he told me to clear off. When I got a tap on the shoulder in the middle of making a cup of tea, that meant he’d not been able to find anyone else. That was the start of me as a defender.”
Impressing in a cup run would get him back into pro-football, instructed by Bangor to head to Chester train station and sign with a mystery manager who turned out to be Mansfield Town’s Billy Bingham. While the side would quickly be relegated to the fourth tier and Bingham sacked, the same man would give him his Northern Ireland debut less than two years later against Scotland.
“I was brought into the squad for the Home Championships because there were injuries. I was a day late and you walk in and there’s Pat Jennings, Jimmy Nicholl, Martin O’neill, Sammy Mcilroy, Gerry Armstrong... I’m John Mcclelland from Mansfield Town.
“I never expected to play but Billy Hamilton went off injured and I was thrown on at centre-forward. Nobody knew who I was and apparently they’d said on the radio I was from Carrickfergus. We were on the bus back to the Culloden and there was a phone-in. A women’s voice comes on and says, ‘I just wanted you to know that young fella isn’t from Carrickfergus, he’s from Whiteabbey’. Nobody likes to be told they’re wrong I suppose so the guy on the radio got a bit agitated and asked how she would know anyway. ‘Well, I’m his mother’.
“The bus erupted and I got a bit more stick. She was very proud. She put a photo up in the shop afterwards and I had to tell her to take it down. I’d not done anything yet really.”
A move to Rangers followed and, despite spending much of his first season at Ibrox on the sidelines with his ankle in a cast, he would make Bingham’s squad for the 1982 World Cup in Spain.
“You talk about Jamie Vardy’s rise,” he laughs thinking about that night in Valencia, Gerry Armstrong et al. “Twelve months before we beat Spain in the World Cup I was playing fourth division football and I spent most of the next year injured.”
Only upon his return to the newsagents after the side’s storied exploits in Spain did his mother finally have permission to put that picture back up on the wall.
Yet back at Ibrox, where he was now captain, he was still being paid like that fourth division hopeful he once was. “I was made promises that hadn’t happened,” he says. “In those days there’s no Bosman, so they still held your registration. If they offered you a pound more it was seen as a better contract. I was called into the room and offered a five-year deal at the same rate as before.
“I never really wanted to leave but I was sort of forced in that direction. They said they wouldn’t play me again but they’d keep my contract and keep me out of football. I thought my career was over at 28.
“But there were injuries and we were going to play Dundee United in the League Cup final and Inter Milan in the Uefa Cup so they didn’t have a choice in the end. They needed me to play but wouldn’t let me be captain for the final. When we won, I didn’t lift the cup, I just passed it along the line and it caused a bit of a stir.
“People said it was planned, but it wasn’t, it was just spontaneous. There was talk I would get done for bringing the game into disrepute. When I reflect on it now, it’s not something that I should have done.”
Ultimately the League Cup final would be his penultimate game for Rangers, the last that Uefa Cup tie against the Inter Milan of Karl-heinz Rummenigge and Liam Brady. When it came to find a new club, his suitors included Graham Taylor of Watford in one room and Alex Ferguson of Aberdeen up the hall in another.
Having been won over by Taylor, he spoke to Ferguson only to inform him that he’d be moving
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