The amazing night Donnie scored a goal worth about £500,000 to City
IT was a match no one inside a packed Highfield Road ground on the evening of Thursday, May 19, 1977 will ever forget.
At stake was First Division survival for Coventry City and a Bristol City team facing the prospect of relegation after just one season competing with the elite clubs of the English game. Defeat was unthinkable and a draw would only be good enough for both sides to survive if Sunderland, the other candidates for the drop, lost against Everton at Goodison Park.
Drama was guaranteed. But, as the headline to a column by then Evening Post sports editor David Solomons the following day proclaimed: “No Fiction Writer Could Have Dreamed Up This Finish.”
City reporter Peter Godsiff, later to succeed Solomons as sports editor and be my boss when I joined the paper in 1979, was not a man easily given to superlatives.
Yet in his match facts from the game, he described the entertainment rating as ‘Sensational’ and City’s team performance as ‘incredible.’
I watched the match from a standing position behind one of the goals as one of an estimated 15,000 Robins fans in a crowd of just under 37,000. To this day, I have no hesitation in describing it as the most nerve-racking, thrilling and ultimately bizarre game I have witnessed first-hand.
The scene was set when Coventry managing-director Jimmy Hill entered the City dressing room to inform manager Alan Dicks and his players that the police had requested the kick-off time be delayed because hundreds of travelling fans were still queuing at the turnstiles.
Dicks, who had worked as assistant to Hill during Jimmy’s time as Coventry manager before moving to Ashton Gate in 1967, readily agreed and the match started five minutes late.
That was to prove crucial. But first came agony for visiting fans as the Sky Blues’ tall winger Tommy Hutchison, later to work for City, lashed his side in front on 15 minutes after goalkeeper John Shaw had failed to gather a Mick Coop free-kick.
That goal came at the opposite end to where I was standing. But Hutchison’s second, smashed home on 52 minutes when had Shaw initially saved brilliantly from Barry Powell, occurred right in front of me.
There was a sinking feeling in the pit of my stomach and for a brief moment the ear-splitting vocal backing for City that I had been engulfed in while helping to create was stunned into silence.
Not for long, however. Two minutes after Hutchison’s strike, Tom Ritchie’s cross to the far post was headed back across goal by Donnie Gillies and Gerry Gow swept the ball low into the bottom corner to make it 2-1.
Now the support at the end occupied by City fans reached fever pitch, and 11 minutes from time it was rewarded when Chris Garland rose to head a Gary Collier free-kick into Gillies’ path. Time seemed to stand still as the versatile rightback, who could also play up front, allowed the ball to bounce before volleying it just inside the far post from what appeared a narrow angle.
Suddenly, it was the visitors who had the momentum and looked the more likely winners. But neither set of players or supporters could have envisaged how the game would end.
I can’t better the description Solomons used in the Post when he wrote: “I shall never forget the immaculate and suave Jimmy Hill, managing director of Coventry and football pundit extraordinary, rushing like a demented bison into the public address box behind where I was sitting yelling ‘Sunderland have lost, announce it, you bloody fools.’”
The targets of his blast did just that and the result Everton 2 Sunderland 0 suddenly appeared on the giant electronic scoreboard.
City had possession as messages were frantically transmitted from the dugouts that a draw would be good enough for both clubs to avoid being relegated.
With rival supporters united in partying and the ground ringing to celebratory chants, Coventry’s players dropped back into their own half, watching Shaw repeatedly throw the ball out to his fullbacks and get it back again.
Referee Ron Challis looked embarrassed and by most people’s calculation blew the final whistle at least a minute early. Now the scoreboard read Coventry City 2 Bristol City 2 and everywhere there was jubilation.
In his match report, Peter Godsiff estimated Gillies’ equalising goal to be worth £500,000 to City. Imagine what that figure would be today.
The Scot had hit the front pages on the national press three years earlier by scoring an FA Cup replay winner against Leeds United’s previously invincible team at Elland Road.
Yet as he took a swig of champagne, Gillies had no hesitation in describing his leveller against Coventry as “the greatest moment of my life.”
Solomons wrote of the conclusion to the game: “We shall never, any of us, see anything like it in football again – 22 footballers knowing that they could achieve the heart’s desire they had been prepared to die for a minute ago by doing sweet fanny adams.”
Of the action that preceded it, he added: “I recall that the red of City’s shirts might well have been blood, that Coventry’s sky blue was like cosmic lightning, so intensely, incredibly committed were the teams.”
The Supporters Club coaches retuned to Ashton Gate ahead of the team bus and I was among many who waited to give the players another rousing ovation as they disembarked and made their way up to the board room.
I then spent the night sleeping on a wooden bench in the waiting room of Temple Meads station, having missed the last train home.
But, wow, it was worth it!
RICHARD LATHAM, former Bristol City reporter for the Bristol Evening Post, recalls the day in 1977 when the Robins secured First Division survival at Coventry City’s old Highfield Road ground. The sides meet again in a Championship game at the Coventry Building Society Arena