Cologne’s top guy came to buy me but Cloughie made him wait in the car park!
Woodcock is backing Arsenal as his old clubs meet
TONY WOODCOCK never caught the name of the airport porter who slipped a piece of paper into his pocket and suggested he call the number.
‘I was at Nottingham Forest and we’d just landed back at Heathrow, from pre-season training or something, and this airport guy comes up to me,’ said Woodcock yesterday. ‘It was before agents really existed but someone had obviously paid him to get to me. I called the number when I got home, and I won’t say who it was because he might still be involved in football.
‘He said he could get me to any number of clubs in Europe; I just needed to sign a mandate with him and he’d do the rest,’ added the 61-year-old.
‘As a local lad at Forest I did feel I wasn’t getting the best deal. I’d told Brian Clough what I wanted at the end of the season and he’d said no. The players clubs brought in on big money always seemed to be treated better. I wanted to be that player and I’d always fancied playing abroad.’
This was the summer of 1979, a couple of months after Forest won the European Cup, and Woodcock’s England team-mate Kevin Keegan was already playing in Germany for Hamburg.
‘I called Kevin for some advice. He said, “Pick the club you want out of those he’s mentioned and sign a mandate with him for just that club”.
‘So I picked Cologne. We’d played them in the semi-finals of the European Cup so I already knew a fair bit about them. And they’d won the double the previous season, at a time when the Bundesliga was probably the best league in Europe.’
The negotiations for what, in the end, was a German record transfer of £600,000 for a foreign player did not exactly go smoothly.
‘ When the president of FC (Cologne) came over to Nottingham, Cloughie wouldn’t let him in the ground — he made him sit in the car park. But we got there eventually and I moved over in the October/November and we then had a friendly a few weeks later as part of the deal. I put a header past Shilts (Peter Shilton) in a 1-1 draw and after the game Cloughie begged me to come home on the plane with them,’ Woodcock said. Tomorrow Cologne meet Arsenal, the club he then left them for in 1982 — only to then rejoin them four years later — in the Europa League.
Woodcock thinks Arsene Wenger’s Arsenal side will be too strong for a German club back in Europe for the first time since losing to Celtic in the first round of the UEFA Cup in 1992.
‘I have two daughters who still live in Cologne so I go there a lot,’ said Woodcock. ‘ And I’m still in touch with some of my old teammates. I saw [goalkeeper Harald] Schumacher very recently and he’s now the club’s vice-president. They are a very different club to the one I was part of. I think we had 16 internationals in our squad; some big names. And in my time there I played under coaches of the stature of Hennes Weisweiler and Rinus Michels.
‘ More recently they’ve been through some difficult spells. They’ve been relegated and come back, and they’ve been out of Europe for a long time. I was at the game last season when they qualified for the Europa League. The place went nuts.
‘ They’ve started the season badly. They haven’t won a game yet and they’re struggling for goals after selling Anthony Modeste in a big-money move to China.’
Because of their 25-year European absence, Woodcock knows fans of the Billy Goats will travel to London in great numbers, and a fearsome atmosphere awaits the Gunners at the RheinEnergieStadion on November 23.
‘ The club always had great support. The training ground is open to the fans, they even have restaurants there for them, and 10,000 must have turned up for my first training session. I’d never seen anything like it. I’m told for the allocation of 2,900 tickets for the Emirates they had 30,000 applicants. At the moment they’re talking about either expanding their current ground from 50,000 to 75,000 or building a new 80,000seater, because they know they can fill it.
‘They don’t have any real star players, but what they do have is a team with identity. I think eight of their players are from Cologne. And while they might struggle this week, the atmosphere when Arsenal play there will be amazing.’