You go to tackle and there’s dust. When the dust settles you come out with the ball. The fans go berserk!
LEGENDARY HARDMAN JIMMY CASE ON GETTING STUCK IN — AND THE HEARTACHE FOLLOWING BRIGHTON’S ’83 FA CUP FINAL
The purple shoebox Jimmy Case fetches from an upstairs room tells you that the FA Cup final he played in for Brighton and hove Albion against Manchester United, 35 years ago, really ought to be on the fringes of his football reminiscence.
The contents are small but monumentally significant and were all won with Liverpool: three european Cup medals, four First Division Championship medals and a slightly more substantial League Cup winners’ tankard. Case has always liked that one.
Yet the 1983 final against United, who Brighton face again in the competition today, has been branded on his mind from that day until this — and not only because his team-mate missed the chance of a lifetime to win the game.
The way an already relegated Brighton side blew it was immortalised by the words of BBC Radio commentator Peter Jones — ‘And Smith must score’ — which striker Gordon Smith promptly failed to do, with only Gary Bailey to beat and moments of extra time remaining against Ron Atkinson’s team at Wembley. Smith shot straight at Bailey, United escaped and won the replay 4-0. Jones’s words became the title of a Brighton fanzine.
‘You knew there and then that was it,’ Case reflects now. ‘You knew that was our chance to win and there wouldn’t be another one. If I had our team lined up and had to choose one player in that scoring position it would always be Gordon Smith. Always. But you knew that was it.’
Civic leaders went ahead with a reception in the team’s honour at Brighton’s Convention Centre that night, though Case left early, unsettled in a way which, though he’s played it back through his mind so many times, he has never been able to put his finger on.
his parents were down from Liverpool for the game, staying at Case’s house near the Goldstone Ground, and his mother hadn’t been feeling too well when he’d left for the reception. ‘I’ll have a piece of toast and a cup of tea,’ she told him before he went.
They were her last words to him. Dolly Case, who’d only just retired after years cleaning school floors in Liverpool, died that evening aged 63 when her heart seemed to give out.
‘It was probably too much for her in the day,’ says Case, who quite clearly adored her. ‘All night long, I was thinking, “There’s something strange, here, something not quite right”. The ambulance was outside the house with the lights on as I got home.’
As Brighton awoke to a Sunday-morning realisation of how close they’d come, Case and his brother David were heading up to Liverpool to get word to their youngest sibling, Frank. ‘We didn’t want to tell him over the phone or let him hear it on the radio. he was coming out of his house to get the morning paper when we reached him,’ he says. Dolly’s unquenchable proletarian spirit certainly lived on in her one-time footballer son. he was an apprentice electrician who played for the Liverpool Blue Union Stevedores and Dockers Club before he broke into Bob Paisley’s great team in 1975. And though he might be best remembered as a formidable midfielder who scored against United in a 2-1 defeat in the 1977 FA Cup final, that work ethic saw him play for a further 15 years after Bob Paisley sold him in 1981. he played until the age of 41 — and yet still the work went on. For three years he was a van driver, delivering stationery for a firm owned by his former Southampton team-mate David Armstrong. he never wanted to leave his beloved hometown team, of course. The suspicion has always been that he was released because the club felt Case was
‘If I had to pick one player in that scoring position it’d be Gordon Smith’
‘I popped him on the nose with my elbow. It brought tears to his eyes’
pushing the legendary hard-living spirit of that Liverpool team a little too far.
There was a fight with a hotel landlord in a bar at Llangollen, North Wales, which saw Case and his great friend Ray Kennedy land in police cells, though Case has always felt Kennedy was elbowed first. ‘I always looked out for him. He told me he’d been chinned so I said, “Let’s sort it out”,’ says Case, who has witnessed Kennedy’s long struggle with Parkinson’s disease in a friendship which has prevailed through all these years.
Yet Case’s four years at Brighton and a further six at Southampton did finally give him the chance to operate in the heart of central midfield, patrolling in a position to which, with no little longing, he had seen Graeme Souness given the keys at Liverpool.
There is an image of those two monumental gladiators taken at Middlesbrough, just before Souness signed for Liverpool, which captures the Scot moments after Case had ‘popped him on the nose with my elbow’, as the Liverpudlian so delicately puts it. ‘It brought tears to his eyes and it looks like he is crying,’ Case recalls with a smile.
The question of which of the two of them was the harder is the only one he struggles with in the course of a compelling two hours of conversation in his small house, 10 miles north of Southampton.
‘That’s a difficult one,’ says Case, whom Paisley deployed on the right side of midfield. ‘It’s not so much that you’re harder than him. I gave my all and he did too. But I would have loved to have played that position — his position — for Liverpool. It’s a controlling role. A really influential role. Graeme was not so much “in the way”, he was just very good at it.
‘When I moved to Brighton and Southampton I was a ball-winning midfielder. The opposition would have the ball far more. I’d have to take it off them. Someone’s ill-treating my winger over there: I’ll ease over that way, make sure there’s nothing . . . you know! That’s the way the game was and 50-50 challenges — especially later on at Southampton — they used to love it. You go in and there’s dust and when the dust settles you come out of the other side with the ball. The fans would love it. They’d go berserk.’
What was not appreciated until Case joined Brighton was that he had hearing impairments in both ears, because of a condition — otosclerosis — which brings an abnormal growth in the middle ear.
‘I only discovered the problem because I found I needed the TV turned up so loud,’ Case says. ‘The doctors told me I could have a plastic piston put in my ear but that if I got a bang when I was playing and it was dislodged, I’d be totally deaf. So I told them I didn’t want it.’
He wore two hearing aids when not playing but midfield instincts had to compensate on the field. ‘It benefited me in a way,’ he reflects. ‘Normally, someone would tell you, “Man on”. But my hearing was such that I was more aware of where I was and where other players were, because I wasn’t relying on my hearing.’
What he took to the South Coast from Anfield was a Paisley philosophy — which feels rather anachronistic today — about not t needing a manager to tell you what your job was. That’s certainly how it was when Brighton manager Jimmy Melia took that 1983 team to Wembley.
‘Jimmy was a scout, really,’ Case reflects. ‘He wasn’t necessarily a manager. Jimmy would say one or two things but then he would leave it either to me or Steve Foster to sort things out. I’m not saying he wasn’t the manager but the team more or less picked itself. Players should know.’
It’s impossible to overstate how unshakeable the spirit of collectivism was in the Brighton team which arrived in London on that bright Cup final spring day.
They’d travelled by helicopter — the property of their sponsors British Caledonian, the airline which ceased operations five years later. It was considered a good gimmick. It picked them up from a school playing field at Hove and dropped them at another one near Wembley. The comedian Bob ‘The Cat’ Bevan — a Brighton enthusiast — was on board to lighten the mood.
There were also the usual high jinks involving the 5ft 5in Melia. ‘Steve Foster would walk behind him slapping his head,’ says Case, grinning at the memory.
‘As we went into the changing room, everyone was relaxed. You have to remember we’d got to Wembley by winning at Liverpool, beating Manchester City and Newcastle N United. We know we’re not supposed to beat th those teams. We felt something w was going on that year. Why co couldn’t we win? It was as if the le league programme was insignificant. n The town didn’t even se seem to recognise the league.’
Case, who’d scored in four su successive rounds en route to W Wembley, ran Brighton’s game in the final. It was he who clipped th the ball over the top to Michael R Robinson which created that hi historic opportunity for Smith. (A (And, for the record, Case always fel felt that Robinson should have str struck the ball, not passed.) Som Some of Case’s best days remained ahead of him. Two years later he moved to Southampton, where in the early 1990s he was regarded as one of the First Division’s best midfielders. Interestingly for an ex-Liverpool man, Manchester United offered Brighton £60,000 for his services in 1985, though that wasn’t for him. The decision to sell him was arguably one of Paisley’s very few mistakes.
He is 63 now, dividing his time between fishing for rainbow trout on the River Test near his home and playing an active part in the lives of his grandchildren. It can seem quiet at times, considering the sound and the fury of those long playing days. But he’s still got the Brighton tracksuit top he wore on the Wembley pitch, as well as the match programme.
‘At Liverpool we called the ones who don’t win the nearly men,’ he reflects. ‘But it didn’t feel like that for us. What a day that was.’