IT’S ONLY BANTER*
Spat on by a child and racially abused by my own fans but...
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 team-mates 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 autobiography 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 inside the football community. 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 Fifties.
Willie, an electrician, was almost killed in a racially- motivated attack with a bottle in a pub in Tooting but Leroy insists he was ‘blissfully unaware’ of the simmering racial tensions of the time. At least until his football took off.
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 playermanager 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 team-mates 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 Seventies and Eighties 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.
‘They were having a go at me,’ said Rosenior. ‘But not once did anyone say: “You black this or you black that”. They didn’t see the colour.
‘We didn’t do the job. We didn’t have the resources but the point was we weren’t winning games. I was on a level playing field. I have the utmost respect for Brentford supporters.’
Progress of sorts. Brentford was the first of three short, sharp shocks which drew his managerial career to a close.
There were two games in charge of Sierra Leone. The first, a 1-0 defeat against Togo, ended in disaster when the helicopter shuttle from Freetown to Lungi Airport crashed after the match. Among the 22 dead were Togolese officials including sports minister Richard Attipoe. Rosenior had travelled in the same aircraft days earlier and Togo’s players were scheduled on its next flight.
The next game ended in a 6-0 defeat against Mali after which he had to buy his own plane ticket home because the Sierra Leone FA had run out of money.
Then, there was an infamous 10-minute return to Torquay at the behest of chairman Mike Bateson.
‘Mike was trying to sell the club but couldn’t get the price he wanted,’ said Rosenior. ‘So he asked me to come and keep the
team ticking over for a couple of days a week. There was no contract and we only had about three pla players but we had a press conf ference with a few cameras and I said it was good to be back.
‘I was walking out of the press conference when Mike rang and said: “You’re not going to believe this, I’ve sold the club”.’ The takeover was duly completed and Rosenior became the an answer to a trivia question. ‘I was watching Have I Got News For You when my face appeared, the 10-minute manager,’ he said. ‘In reality it was more like four days but from the press conference to the phone call was 10 mi minutes and it’s fine by me.’
A decade on, Rosenior is a leading presenter at Premier League Pr Productions, the TV company wh which beams Premier League ar around the world from IMG St Studios in Middlesex.
H He will not rule out a return to co coaching and son Liam, 32, is ta taking his qualifications while pla playing at Brighton, but the question of opportunity persists.
At the country’s top 92 clubs, th there are three black managers: Ch Chris Hughton at Brighton, Keith Curle at Carlisle and Marcus Bignot at Grimsby.
‘We need to find an all-round solution,’ said Rosenior. ‘It would be nice to see more people from ethnic minorities in positions of authority within football.
‘I had to go to Torquay, one of the smaller clubs, and I’ve always told my kids they’ll have to do a little bit better than everybody else.
‘One thing we can’t do is sit on our hands.’
‘IT’S ONLY BANTER’ R’ THE AUTOBIOGRAPHY OF LEROY ROSENIOR is out today via Pitch Publishing ‘It’s fine that they call me the 10-minute manager’