Cyrille laughed it off when racist sent him a bullet
We came through at a time when you had to laugh the racism off or you wouldn’t make a living in football and nobody felt that more than cyrille Regis — a player I was so proud to call my friend.
I remember, in 1982, when he received a bullet through the post because he happened to be black and selected for england. ‘I got a bullet but you got nothing!’ he joked when we were with the national team.
Laurie cunningham, who’d been picked for england a few years earlier, received very unpleasant letters, too, but I escaped because I was born to defend and kick people, which made people look at me in a different way and maybe feel less threatened.
cyrille displayed skill and the ability to create on the field. He wore gloves and long- sleeved shirts and that made him a ‘fancy dan’ in the racists’ eyes, someone they could hate.
We would talk about this — cyrille, Laurie, their West Brom team-mate Brendon Batson and me. It was cyrille’s refusal to take the abuse to heart which stays with me.
He arrived at West Brom after two years in non-League, so he’d had a taste of how difficult things were going to be. He talked about how we were sure of ourselves in a way the little people who gave out this abuse would never be. cyrille knew if he reacted to the monkey chants and other abuse, he’d be seen as the one with a chip on his shoulder. So he just got on with what he did and we didn’t talk about it much.
my main objective when he and I were with england was to avoid facing him in training. He was quick and strong — big shoulders and arms — incredibly fit and so good in the air. When you’d been called up, you wanted to impress the manager, Bobby Robson. Facing cyrille in training was a sure way of not doing that.
We faced each other a lot in the First Division during the seven years we both played in the midlands, cyrille at West Brom, me at Nottingham Forest. We were top of the First Division in 1978 when he saw to it that they beat us in an Fa cup quarter-final — the competition we never won.
Paddy mulligan played a ball over the top and cyrille ran on to it and hit it first time. He didn’t even catch the ball that well but it was in the corner of the net before you could blink. That was typical cyrille — scorching pace and that early strike. He liked to shoot early because he said it didn’t give the keeper a chance to compose himself. He had such confidence.
It was some team Ron atkinson had, with Derek Statham and Bryan Robson, as well as cyrille, Brendon and Laurie. Johnny Giles had brought that pair into the first team, as well as signing Laurie, and cyrille felt Giles didn’t get the credit he deserved.
That period in the early 1980s was the time of our lives. even when the racism was at its worst, it didn’t diminish cyrille’s love of the game.
I saw him three months ago at manchester city’s training ground. He was looking at a young player and I was there because my son is at the academy. We hadn’t seen each other in a while but we dropped straight back into conversation. He was just a lovely man. That’s why I’ll miss him.