GOTTA LOTTA BOTTLE 21st NOVEMBER 2011

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GOTTA LOTTA BOTTLE

There’s a story about an expensive foreign player who plays for Manchester City phoning his Mum on a Saturday night on the way back from an away game. After discussing the game he says, ‘Anyway, Mum, how’s your day been?’

‘Oh, terrible!’ she replies. ‘There have been riots in the streets near our house, we’ve heard the sound of gunshots and my car’s been torched.’

‘Oh, Mum, I’m sorry to hear that,’ says the pampered superstar.

‘And so you should be!’ says his mother, ‘we only came to live here in Manchester so that we could watch you play!’

Such jokes used to be commonplace twenty or so years ago when, in the early days of the overseas player influx, British fans loved to ridicule the early imports, believing that they were expensive luxuries. The widely held view was that they were alright for some fancy stuff in the August sunshine but in the wind and rains of winter, on the proverbial filthy night in Burnley, they were about as much use as Craig Bellamy at an Anger Management Convention. Older readers might also remember that many people believed (and this seems ridiculous now) that black players would never ‘cut it’ at the top level because they had no backbone, no ‘balls’ or, as it is widely called now no ‘bottle’. They had not learned the game in the traditional British ‘hotbeds’ of the North East, the North West, the West Midlands or Glasgow so when the going got tough they wouldn’t fancy it. As a kid I remember noticing how many players came from Chester-le-Street (including our own Colin Suggett) and, not realising it was actually a town I simply couldn’t believe that one street could produce such a plentiful supply of professional players!

No, if you were going to be any good you had to have ‘bottle’ and nobody summed that up more for me than Duncan Forbes. The indomitable spirit of Ron Saunders’s Norwich City was personified in Forbes; chest puffed out, sleeves rolled up and wearing that old Canary badge like a medal! I well remember my utter dismay when I heard of him being stretchered off at Highbury in the League Cup Quarter-Final – incidentally on this very day 37 years ago, 21^st November 1972 – with a collapsed lung! What a night that was! Arsenal 0 Norwich City 3 and a Graham Paddon hat-trick! The Telegraph called us ‘The First Division’s impudent newcomers’. But Duncan Forbes with a collapsed lung was something with which my schoolboy mind struggled to cope, and so did the City defence for a few long weeks till he returned.

Forbes certainly had plenty of bottle. So did Dave Stringer alongside him, and the barrel-chested left-back, Alan Black. There have, of course, been many other City ‘tough guys’, and not only at centre-back, although Bruce, Watson and Newsome do spring to mind. Kevin Drinkell, Iwan Roberts, Steen Nedergaard and Chris Sutton were just a few players with the obvious  stomach for a battle – dependable players, anytime, anyplace, anywhere.

No doubt we all have our favourites who, over the years, have made us believe that they cared as much as us by showing true commitment. However, it must be said that since the last year of the Worthington era, then under the hopeless Grant, the humourless Roeder and the hapless Gunn we were forced to endure teams that were almost in the invertebrate class. Perhaps it was partly down to loans but that’s not the whole story. Never mind the famous away day debacles at Fulham, Plymouth and Charlton I’ve lost count of the number of times I left away grounds feeling that we, the fans, had worn our colours with more pride and commitment than the team.

Because I happen to think that you measure this mythical quality –‘bottle’ – partly by looking at away form. It’s not all about strutting your stuff on the Carrow Road carpet in front of 25,000 but also about getting stuck in on a ploughed field at Stockport or in a gale at Hartlepool. Until recently we’d reached the stage where an away game meant an almost certain defeat. Not anymore. In all competitions, not including the Brentford game when he was just in a ‘watching brief’, Paul Lambert’s Norwich City have Lost 2 (both very unfortunately –MK Dons and Leeds) Drawn 2 and Won 6 away games.

Another indicator of ‘bottle’? Coming back from behind. Today’s recovery at St. Mary’s, coming on top of saving points against Charlton (H) and Gillingham (A) after trailing in the game, suggests that good habits are being created.

So we might not have any hugely expensive foreign imports like Manchester City and all the other Premier League primadonnas  but I’m happy with the modestly priced Jens Berthel-Askou,  the rejuvenated Gary Doherty and Adam Drury, and the burgeoning Korey Smith at the moment. Paul Lambert is widely compared to a young Martin O’Neill and I can see why, but for this slightly ageing Canary the similarity, at least in the character of his players, to Ron Saunders,  the first manager ever to take us as ‘impudent newcomers’  to the top flight, is more appropriate.