I started on £17 at Hartlepool, Keegan came from Scunny.. today’s players are living the dream.. if they don’t look after streams.. the river will dry up
PEANUTS were once the nation’s bar-stool snack of choice, but they were also the currency of champions.
John Mcgovern was on just £250 a week when he lifted the European Cup for Nottingham Forest 40 years ago.
“It might not seem a lot now, but it was much more than my £17 a week when I was starting out at Hartlepool in 1966,” said Mcgovern.
“That felt like a lot of money for doing something I’d have done for nothing.
“Sometimes I despair when I read about players towards the top end haggling over wage deferrals or taking a pay cut in the grip of a crisis.
“The most frightening thing I ever saw in football was not a bad tackle. It was the day when the trainer at Hartlepool pinned a sheet of A4 paper on the dressing room wall at the end of the season.
“In one column was a list of the players being retained and in the other was the names of those being released.
“While you were waiting for that piece of paper, players would be sat in the dressing room, shaking and white as a sheet, wondering if they will be able to pay the mortgage or put bread on the table for their families.
“I never forgot that image or the smell of fear. It kept you grounded, kept you humble.”
Mcgovern (right), now 70, later polished the art of humility by playing at four clubs under the tutelage of Brian Clough, winning the title at two of them and conquering Europe in consecutive years with Forest.
The golden age where English clubs won the European Cup seven times in eight years belongs on another planet from today’s orbit of pandemic, peril and Project Restart.
But Mcgovern is not impressed by football’s failure to look after its roots while keeping the tree’s top branches watered.
“You are the generation who have been living the dream – it’s time to give something back,” he said.
“If you earn £100,000 a week, it’s not going to change your lifestyle if you take a 30 per cent pay cut – but it might keep a few non-playing staff in their jobs.
“And if 30 clubs go out of business in the lower divisions, where are the top teams going to go shopping for players? When we won the European Cup in 1980, Kevin Keegan was playing for Hamburg – but he started out at Scunthorpe.
“If we don’t look after streams, the rivers will dry up. Harry Kane set a good example by sponsoring Leyton Orient’s shirts next season.
“People might say he’s the England captain, he earns millions and he can afford it, but at least he’s helping out a smaller club.
“If players who can afford it aren’t brainy enough to realise this is the time to give something back, they have forgotten what football gave them in the first place.”
But don’t let Mcgovern’s concern about the game’s most glaring blind spot remove the nostalgic haze of Forest’s golden era.
This week has been a
40th anniversary celebration of their 1-0 win against Hamburg in Madrid (below), where Peter Shilton’s acrobatic display in goal and his training session on a traffic island the day before the European Cup final became the stuff of legend.
“Peter was moaning he had not had enough practice in the build-up because he couldn’t dive around on a tennis court,” said Mcgovern.
“So we found this roundabout with a decent patch of grass in the middle and the lads gave him a quick shooting session.
“We lost a couple of balls which flew down the hill and some of the looks we got from Spanish motorists were priceless.
“But in fairness to Shilts, he played really well and we are still the last British club to retain the European Cup.
“I prefer to call it by that name because most of the teams in the Champions League are not actually champions in their own country.
“The prestige of lifting that beautiful trophy is massive. But it’s not really the Champions League if you can win it by finishing fourth in your division, is it?”
THE FA Cup has also been given the green light to return.
FA chiefs have confirmed the four quarter-final ties will be played on the weekend of June 27 and 28.
The semi-finals and final (last year won by Manchester City, below) will all take place at Wembley behind closed doors over the weekend of July 18-19 and on August 1 respectively.
It comes on the back of the Premier League confirming it will return on June 17, and the FA Cup games will all be shown live across the BBC and BT Sport.
It is thought neutral grounds won’t be used for the quarter-finals. The draw is: Leicester v Chelsea, Newcastle v Man City, Sheffield United v Arsenal, and Norwich v Manchester United.
‘I despair when I read of top players haggling over a pay cut in grip of a crisis’
‘Harry Kane set the example when he sponsored the shirts of Orient’