‘IT’S ONLY BANTER … AN EXCUSE I GREW TO DETEST’
FULHAM were losing at Elland Road with time ticking away when Leroy Rosenior and Paul Parker ran to retrieve a ball as it rolled out of play for a corner.
As they approached the fence before a terrace crammed with Leeds fans, the teammates froze in horror.
“There must have been about 10 000 people,” said Rosenior. “All focused on me and Paul, all going ‘sieg heil, sieg heil’ and doing Nazi salutes. I remember it all in slow-motion.
“There was hatred in their eyes. If they could have got through that fence at that moment in time I could have been a dead man. It has stayed with me. One of the scariest things I’ve seen from a crowd of people.
“Paul went on to a great career and I had a decent career and I think it drove us on. It wasn’t going to stop us. You could either get out – believe me I was on the verge – or you built up your defences. It’s only banter.”
Rosenior, 52, has called his auto-biography It’s Only Banter. The title is designed to challenge a dressing-room excuse he grew to detest during a life in football as player, coach, manager and broadcaster.
The book should provoke thought. He hopes, too, that he does not appear ungrateful. “There’s no bitterness,” he said. “For me the good times in football far outweigh the bad.”
There was the buzz of goals on debut for Fulham and West Ham, an international cameo with Sierra Leone, promotion as Torquay manager and pride when son Liam followed in his footsteps to Craven Cottage.
Rosenior was born and raised in South London, where he was a close friend of Paul Gadd, son of the disgraced rock star Gary Glitter.
Rosenior’s parents, Willie and Gladys, had arrived from Sierra Leone in the 1950s.
His book is a social commentary as much as a football biography and opens with a powerful account of one of his early games for Fulham when he was the target of persistent racial abuse by two opponents. “I took to the field a young man with something to prove,” he wrote. “I left as a young black man with something to prove.”
Many years later, Rosenior accepted an apology from one of those aggressors and declined to name and shame them. “I didn’t write the book to dig people out or label them racist,” said Rosenior. “Everybody makes mistakes.
“It wasn’t a rare occurrence, it happened regularly. That one had the most profound effect on me because it was the first.”
He was spat upon by a child at Portsmouth and refused entry to a boardroom when player-manager of Gloucester City. While he was at QPR, the racial insults from the ranks of his own fans were so hurtful that his parents and sisters stopped attending games.
All the time, the silence of his teammates was deafening. “Lots of players went through it,” said Rosenior. “Not just in games but also in training from their own managers and peers. Many players disappeared from the game because of it. We lost a lot of good players.”
He likened football in the 70s and 80s to the slave trade because the “white establishment” would admire black players’ physique but belittle their intellect and attitude.
As a manager, he has witnessed racism in the form of limited opportunities. In three and a half years at Torquay, he excelled and won promotion to League One playing attractive football which helped him land a job at Brentford, where he lasted only five months and required a police escort to make a safe exit past furious fans.
A decade on, Rosenior is a leading presenter at Premier League Productions, the TV company which beams Premier League around the world from IMG Studios in Middlesex.
He will not rule out a return to coaching and son Liam, 32, is taking his qualifications while playing at Brighton, but the question of opportunity persists.
At the country’s top 92 clubs, there are three black managers: Chris Hughton at Brighton, Keith Curle at Carlisle and Marcus Bignot at Grimsby. “We need to find an allround solution,” said Rosenior. “It would be nice to see more people from ethnic minorities in positions of authority within football.” – Daily Mail