TONY!KAY’S!GAMBLE
David Docherty looks back at an infamous better scandal that rocked football in the 1960s…
His rise... and fall
TONY Kay will always be remembered as the man who threw away his career and the chance to play in a World Cup finals for just £100. In 1963 he helped Everton to their first League championship win in nearly a quarter of a century. He also won his first full England cap that same year in an 8-1 win over Switzerland.
A combative red-haired midfielder in the mould of Billy Bremner, going into his second season with the Merseyside club he had settled in so well to his new surroundings that he was appointed team captain by manager Harry Catterick.
At the age of 27 he was at the very peak of his powers.
Then in April 1964, Kay’s world imploded - and his past caught up with him.
On December 1, 1962, his previous club Sheffield Wednesday travelled to Ipswich for a routine First Division match.
At this particular time, Wednesday were in the midst of a run in which they were destined to go fully nine matches without a win.
Kay claims that he was approached by team-mate David ‘Bronco’ Layne at some point and encouraged to place a £50 bet on his own team to lose the match at Portman Road by two goals to nil.
Kay, Layne and Peter Swan – an established England international and a member of his country’s World Cup squad in Chile – were all involved in the plot.
Ipswich duly won the match 2-0 and the three picked up a tidy £100 profit each.
On December 22, Wednesday travelled to Goodison Park and drew 2-2 with Everton.
Five days after that, Toffees boss Catterick, who had managed Kay at Wednesday, paid a British record fee for a wing-half of £55,000 to bring him to Merseyside.
Kay, who had played just over 200 games for the Owls, had not requested a transfer and was therefore entitled to a percentage of the fee.
He would also have received a hike in both wages and bonus payments on joining the ‘Bank of England’ club, as the hugely ambitious Everton were dubbed in those days.
The signing of Kay and winger Alex Scott from Rangers proved to be the icing on the cake as Everton skated to the title in what became the most protracted season ever, after the worst winter in living memory had caused havoc with the fixture list.
The following season
they competed as England’s representatives in the prestigious European Cup, unluckily going out to eventual winners Internazionale after two close-fought tactical battles.
Over the 180 minutes of attrition, only a solitary goal from Brazilian star Jair separated the teams.
By this time, Kay had pulled on an England jersey and scored his first goal for his country.
England were due to take part in the “Little World Cup” in the summer of 1964 with games in South America against Brazil, Portugal and Argentina. Kay was fully expected to be in Alf Ramsey’s plans for that tournament, which was a precursor to the finals in England two years later.
Everything in his football garden was rosy.
But just as the 1963-64 season neared its end, the bombshell struck. The Sunday People ran a sensational front page story alleging major corruption in football and naming Kay and his co-conspirators Layne and Swan - as well as seven others - in what they properly described as “the scoop of the year”.
Kay and Swan took centre stage in the match-fixing expose as they were the most high-profile of the players named and shamed.
It transpired that the famous crusading newspaper had been approached by an ex-player named Jimmy Gauld, who had been a journeyman inside-forward with a number of clubs – Charlton, Everton, Plymouth, Swindon, St Johnstone and Mansfield (alongside Layne) – and offered the story.
Gauld, having masterminded the whole betting scheme - which is said to have cost bookmakers a small fortune - was perfectly placed to give the newspaper chapter and verse on everyone and everything involved. This ‘Judas of self-interest’ got £7,000 for selling his soul.
Based on Gauld’s information, Kay was lured into a car for a private chat by a reporter named Mike Gabbett, who claimed to be a friend of Gauld’s, and was somehow encouraged to talk in some detail about the incriminating Ipswich bet.
Little did he know that Gabbett had a tape recorder running.
When the story broke Kay was immediately put on gardening leave and, some seven months later, having initially pleaded not guilty to the charge of conspiracy to defraud, he and the others involved were all found guilty after a jury trial at Nottingham Crown Court.
Kay was sentenced to four months imprisonment and fined £150. On release, he also received a life ban from football by the FA.
Pools coupons were big business in those days and the very fact that matches could be rigged was potentially hugely financially damaging to the likes of Littlewoods.
It is hugely ironic and entirely coincidental that John Moores - the man behind Littlewoods - should also happen to be the man who bankrolled Kay’s transfer to Everton in his capacity as chairman of the Merseyside club!
Kay’s life ban was lifted after just seven years but by that time age had well and truly caught up with the disgraced star and there was to be no way back for him.
He is reported to have said at some point that he got involved in the Ipswich bet because they (Wednesday) had never done well at Portman Road.
That, on examination, is not strictly true. Whilst they did lose home and away to Ipswich during season 1961-62 when the East Anglian team were surprise winners of the First Division title, on the previous occasion the two sides had met there on League business Wednesday had come away with a 2-0 win.
He also spuriously claimed as part of his own defence that he had been named ‘man of the match’ in the, by now, notorious fixture by the very newspaper which was to prove to be his nemesis.
That proved nothing and could be said to have been simply the extra effort expended by him to ensure that the pre-arranged result was indeed achieved.
The match reporter, obviously unaware of any bet, would doubtless have regarded Kay’s great endeavours as positive rather than the converse.
Whilst Kay may have thrown his career away for a piffling hundred quid, the real losers were Everton and football.
Everton lost their team captain and the £55,000 they had invested just 16 months before, whilst football lost a level of integrity from which, if truth be told, it has never fully recovered.
Many pundits have since expressed the view that the sentence meted out to Kay and his cohorts was particularly harsh but Tony Kay, better than anyone, must have known what he stood to lose – if he was ever caught.
After all, he was a gambler and for him the gamble failed.
For the lawyers amongst you, the tape recorded admissions which Gabbett obtained from Kay during the course of his ‘sting’ were adduced into evidence in court. This is believed to be amongst the first times this had ever been done.
Many considered Kay to be a much better player than Nobby Stiles so when then toothless Stiles celebrated at Wembley in his own unique way in 1966 after England lifted the coveted Jules Rimet trophy, what’s the betting that Kay was as ‘sick as a parrot?’