Replacing The Irreplaceable...

It’s considered ‘good PR’ these days to bury bad news with a slightly more palatable alternative that  helps to soften the initial upset felt.

A well trodden path that is referred to as spin doctoring, a speciality that, amongst others, a certain Alistair Campbell has been seen to excel at.

It’s not unique to politics of course. It’s been as much a tactic as 4-4-2 and the hard press in football for decades.

John Bond knew enough about how to handle a bad story back in 1976  to know that the best way to fight a fire was to start one of your own, ensuring, in the process, that your fire turns out to be bigger and to burn more fiercely than anyone else’s.

Which means everyone will be talking about your conflagration rather than the other one.

A wise move. Because even if Bond had been able to assemble a team of spin doctors that included the Dalai Lama, JFK and Lord Nelson, there was never going to be any positive way of extracting positives out of  Ted MacDougall’s imminent departure and no amount of spin that could be conjured up to do justice to it.

Yes it was really that bad. If you’d like a modern day comparison, then consider this.

Teemu Pukki has just scored his hat-trick against Newcastle. Everyone is talking about him. He’s the man that is pushing Norwich onto the back pages of newspapers that aren’t owned by Archant.

He’s a bit special. And he’s ours.

So imagine the collective seethe if, 48 hours or so after he’d very publicly dismantled the Newcastle defence, the Canaries went and sold Pukki to Nottingham Forest.

For around ￡600,000.

Ted was the Teemu of the day. He’d rattled in the goals for Bournemouth in the old Third Division but big money moves to big clubs in the form of Manchester United and West Ham hadn’t worked out for him.

Yet it all came good for him at Norwich under Bond. 134 first team appearances and 62 goals. Including, gloriously, two hat-tricks in consecutive home league games against Aston Villa (5-3) and Everton (4-2).

Yet, for all that, Ted found himself pining for Hampshire. So, when Southampton waved a cheque for ￡40,000 in the direction of the Carrow Road boardroom, it was a case of “…so long, and thanks for all the goals”.

And Ted was gone.

Bond knew that the only way to cut short the collective yellow and green caterwauling that chased Ted all the way down to his new home at The Dell was to get his replacement in straight away.

As in, on the same day. Who knows, they may even have passed one another on the A11?

The man given the singularly unenviable task of replacing Ted in the hearts and minds of Norwich supporters was 26 year old Viv Busby who joined the Canaries from Fulham for just ￡40,000, the same amount that Norwich had received from Southampton for MacDougall.

Now, bear in mind that Ted was so popular amongst the Norwich support that, short of signing Allan Clarke or Malcolm McDonald, Bond was on the proverbial hiding to nothing with regard to who he brought in. Because the immediate reaction of the Norwich support would have been “…well he hin’t as gud as Ted, is he?”

And maybe that’s what some of them did say. But at least it meant that everyone ended up talking about the new boy rather than lamenting about the one that had just departed.

It probably wouldn’t have helped matters if they’d known that Viv had hardly been aching to get away from Fulham. Far from it. Because he was very happy where he was, as he explained to me when we met up for a long and wonderfully revealing chat for My Football Writer.

“I’d  signed for Luton as a professional when I was 20. It was the best day of my life when I put pen to paper on that form. I’d been around loads of clubs, having trials and getting rejected, time and time again. I wasn’t big enough, strong enough, fast enough. Or good enough, according to some. I’d been working in an office and was beginning to think that football wasn’t going to be for me”.

“So, of course, when I signed as a pro, I had a little bit of a celebration. It was a big moment for me after all, the culmination of a lot of hard work and effort. I was just beginning to enjoy myself when my Dad took me to one side and said, ‘You think you’ve fucking made it, don’t you?’ ”

“I was shocked to hear him say that”.

“No Dad, of course not. But this is a special day for me so I just wanted a little celebration”.

“But Dad was unrepentant”.

“Now you’ve signed, the real hard work begins. You’ve now got to be at it every hour of every day. Every week, every month, every year. Never stop working hard. Because the moment you do, you’ll be back in that fucking office pushing paper around again before you know it”.

“I never forgot that. I made sure that, whatever ever I did in the game, training, playing, whatever-I always put the maximum of effort in. Never hid. Worked hard. Gave it everything”.

Viv’s mentor at Luton was manager Alec Stock who rated Viv enough to take him to Fulham with him so, after 16 league goals in 77 league games for the Hatters, Viv headed off to the bright lights of London and Craven Cottage in time for the start of the 1973/74 season.

“I couldn’t afford to live in London mind you. So I stayed put in Bedford. It ended up being quite a commute from there to London and back every day. But Alec was a generous man (!) who made sure I was given ￡8 a week towards my travelling expenses”.

Moving to Fulham was a step up for Viv in no end of ways, not least the calibre of player he now found himself playing alongside.

“John Lacy, John Cutbush, Alan Mullery, Jimmy Conway……”

A long pause follows before Viv speaks again.

“…and Bobby Moore, of course”.

Viv’s respect and admiration for Moore is unbridled. I tell him how, not long after Moore had been appointed manager of non-league Oxford City, Norwich had reportedly asked him about succeeding John Bond as the club’s new manager but had seen their offer turned down as Moore didn’t want to leave his new club so soon after joining them.

“Well that’s Mooro (Moore). He did things properly”

“I couldn’t believe I was playing alongside him. It had only been a few years earlier that I’d been watching him lifting the World Cup. Now I was playing in the same side as him. What a player he was. He couldn’t run, he couldn’t tackle, he didn’t really move much at all. But he could play. He’d be talking to me throughout a game; this  is a defender knowing what sort of runs a forward should be making. But of course he knows, as he’s had to deal with them throughout his career”.

“He was always talking”.

“ ‘Make your run when the defender does such and such. Take him back then make your move across there. I’ll be knocking the ball up to you and it’ll land on your chest’. He’d say what was going to happen and it did. Then he’d say what he was going to do with the ball and he’d do that as well. Mooro would then look over to me and say, ‘…that’s your game Viv, that’s your game’. He’d take the ball out of defence, calm as you like before clipping a pass right to the feet of Les Strong, ‘…deal with that, Strongy’, he’d say and I’d be looking on and thinking, ‘Jesus, how does he do that?’”.

 “It was fate we ended up playing West Ham in the 1975 FA Cup Final. Because I don’t know how the bloody hell we got there otherwise. Carlisle absolutely battered us in the quarter finals and how we got past Birmingham in the semi-final, well, I still don’t know today. But there you go. It was fate for Bob to play his old club in the final that year, that’s all I can say”.

It’s a somewhat trite question to ask but I do so anyway. What’s it like, I ask Viv, to play in an FA Cup Final?

“Mooro told us that, above all, we had to enjoy ourselves on the day. To forget the occasion, forget our nerves and to ignore the crowd. To focus on playing your game and winning the match. It was, don’t forget, a huge occasion back then, more so than it is today. We threw ourselves into it, team lunches, meeting Michael Parkinson, all the TV and radio interest for a couple of weeks or so beforehand”.

“There’s 100,000 people in that great old stadium. You’re playing there with Bobby Moore. It’s a second home to him. I’m sure he enjoyed the day and yes, we lost 2-0, but I still enjoyed it, it’s something I’ll never forget”.

Life was good for Viv down by the Thames. The culture of the club and the high calibre of teammates he was now playing alongside certainly brought his game on.

“I grew up fast at Fulham. Became a lot more confident in myself and my game, a little bit arrogant even. That’s what I tried to take on the pitch with me. I was strong, I had a bit of pace about me and I could score goals”.

Viv played and scored in one of Fulham’s pre-season matches prior to the 1976/77 season. It was in the old Anglo Scottish Cup tournament at Craven Cottage, a 1-1 draw against the Canaries.

“I went around Duncan Forbes and Roger Hansbury to score that one. Believe me, not many people got around Duncan, bless him.”

Viv thought nothing more of it but, a little over a month after that game he was summoned to Alec Stock’s office.

“I wondered what I’d done wrong! Alec didn’t mess about, he said that Bondy (John Bond) had been on to him and that Norwich were interested in signing me as they needed a striker to replace Ted MacDougall”.

“I wasn’t interested in moving and said so. I was happy at Fulham and didn’t feel as if I wanted to go anywhere else. But Alec wouldn’t listen, he went onto say that things were starting to happen at Fulham, new people were getting involved at the club and he thought that meant he probably wouldn’t be there himself for very much longer”.

“He summed it all up by saying, ‘personally speaking Viv, I think you should go’”.

“What could I do? I went up to Norwich to have a chat with Bondy and he sold the club to me. No problem. He was quite a character, a little bit of this, a little bit of that. But I could tell he wanted me at Norwich and that he was a manager who looked out for his players. So after not wanting to leave Fulham, it became an easy decision to do so in the end”.

“I moved into a place near Long Stratton. There was a stud farm near us in the village which was really peaceful. We loved the country life we had up there, it was perfect as far as we were concerned, for bringing up our daughter. And I loved the coaching sessions that Bondy put on. He wasn’t, maybe, quite so good on the actual man management at times but I think that is because he just wanted us to do well as footballers, he perhaps didn’t see that other side of us sometimes. Having said that, he did look after us. We’d all gather in the players’ lounge after a home game and he’d buy us all a pint. He’d also pay for our tickets so we could go along to the PFA Dinner at the end of that season as well as ensuring we stayed in a nice hotel”.

“But it didn’t pay to disagree with him on things, you never got anywhere if you had a different opinion to Bondy about something. I learnt a lot from him which I ended up taking into coaching and management myself. I remember, even at the time, I decided I’d be remembering and applying all the good things that I learnt from him whilst ignoring the things that we didn’t agree on.”

Viv’s Norwich career started well. He made his Canaries debut in a 0-0 draw against Derby County at  Carrow Road  on September 18th 1976. A 1-1 draw at Tottenham (for whom a teenage Glenn Hoddle scored) followed before, on October 2nd, Viv scored his first Norwich goal in a 3-2 home win over Newcastle United. Three days later he did so again in another 3-2 win, this time at QPR.

His best performance of that season came in the New Year’s day game at home to Leicester City when he became a member of that special breed of players who have scored a top flight hat-trick for the Canaries. Norwich won 3-2 with one report of the game describing Busby as ‘rampant’.

Things were going well.

“I made a lot of mates at Norwich. Ryano (John Ryan) of course, who now lives near me out in Spain. We’d been together at Luton. Jimmy Neighbour, Graham Paddon and Roger Gibbons as well. My best buddy at the time though was probably Kevin Keelan. Now he was a lunatic. I’d watch him in training, he did NOT like to be beaten, even during a training session. He’d make sure you knew that as well, he’d come up to me and say, ‘…you’ll never get it past me today’. He couldn’t half punch a ball! I roomed with Keelo on away trips and absolutely loved him to bits, still do”.

“ Bondy’s coaching was a different class. It was all about passing, his mantra was ‘pass, pass, pass’. Keep moving, don’t stand still. As much as I had enjoyed my time at Fulham, I’d never had coaching of this standard and learnt so much about how to play the game but not just as a forward but as an overall player with a much more rounded outlook about the game. But how could you not improve as a player when you had so much quality around you. Duncan Forbes, he could play the game you know. Colin Sullivan, another good player. Then of course, there was Martin Peters”.

Another reverential silence follows. I break it by pointing out to Viv how fortunate he was to have enjoyed the company of both Bobby Moore and Martin Peters at two of his club sides.

“Yes. Martin was wonderful to play with. His attitude was ‘let’s go out and play’. And he did”.

I asked Viv if he remembered fellow MFW contributor and all round journo and broadcaster Mick Dennis accompanying the players on the coach to Norwich’s away games?

“I remember Mick. He was alright. Not like at Sunderland. We’d have six or seven, maybe more local journalists covering everything that the club did. They were an evil bunch”

Back to all things yellow and green on the pitch and that 1976/77 season, the only full campaign Viv had with Norwich. I mention that he ended it with 11 goals from 17 appearances, scoring stats that would unquestionably had been better had his season not been interrupted with a series of niggling injuries.

“11 from 17? That’s not too bad really, probably the best spell in my career.

Norwich finished the 1976/77 season in 16th place. A little disappointing, perhaps, but there were grounds for optimism at the start of the following campaign which commenced with a 3-1 win at West Ham, the Canaries first away win in the league for nearly eighteen months. Viv started the game playing in attack with Kevin Reeves and, despite a 4-0 defeat at Manchester City on September 3rd, a late Roger Gibbins goal against Bristol City a week later meant that Norwich were sat in 9th place and looking more than capable of holding their own in the top flight for another year.

That game against the Robins turned out, however, to be Viv’s last for Norwich with his sudden demise from the first team in the wake of that match as much a surprise to him as it was the club’s support, especially as the Canaries start to that season, if not spectacular, had certainly been a promising one.

“We went down to West Ham on the first day of the season, played well, won convincingly. First away win in the league for ages. So all the boys were sat on the coach afterwards in a good mood. Except that someone has got one of the local papers that has a big preview of the game in it. It includes a few words from Bondy that didn’t exactly speak of him having much confidence in us”.

“’We’ll need our fairy godmother to get a result here’ was what he said. What a gee up for the lads. It’s a good job we saw it after the game. But, even though we’d won and played well, he’d still given us a bollocking in the dressing room afterwards. I was sat there ready to have a go back at him but the lads were all looking over at me and saying, ‘…shut up Viv, keep quiet…don’t say anything’. Most of them were more used to him and his ways than I was, and I guess they just wanted to get home. But it wasn’t right what he was saying. Give the team a bollocking if they haven’t played well yes, I’ve done it myself. But after a 3-1 away win on the first day of the season? Come on!”

The bollockings didn’t end there.

“Second game of the season, 1-1 draw against Middlesbrough. We’re in control but they nick a point in the last few minutes. Come off, dressing room, another bollocking. I’m even more wound up this time but, again, the lads are saying to me, ‘…leave it Viv’ –so I do”.

“A few days later we’re playing QPR at home. We’re bossing the game but, in the second half, they come back into it and the game ends 1-1. Back to the dressing room, everyone is quiet as if they know what’s coming next”.

“Well. I’ve never heard a tirade of abuse like it in all the years I’ve been in the game. Bondy absolutely lays into everyone. He’s going round the team, one by one. When he gets to me, it’s full on abuse for two minutes. He then moves onto Jimmy Neighbour and does the same to him. Before coming back to me. Then it’s off to someone else before, again, he comes back to me and lets me have more of the same. I’ve had enough by now and none of the lads are going to prevent me from having a go back”.

Viv duly ‘had a word’…

“ Excuse me gaffer but that’s four points from our first three games. You’d have been delighted with that at the start of the season”.

“And with that, I take my shirt off and throw it at him”.

“Bondy storms off to the Physio’s room. I get my boots off and start to change. But he’s soon out again and comes right over to me, puts his finger on my nose and says, ‘…that’s a two week fine for you for back chatting to the manager’”

“Fuck off. You can stick your fine up your arse. You’re useless”.

Bond’s reaction was to leave Viv out of the squad altogether for the Canaries next match, a League Cup tie against Burnley which saw Greg Downs, then only 18, take Viv’s place in the team. He missed a good chance to score and Norwich lost 3-1.

Four days later, Viv, who has, by now, been placed on the transfer list, is back in the side for the game against Manchester City at Maine Road. Norwich lose 4-0 with two of the Sky Blues goals coming from Mike Channon, his first for the club. Needless to say, John Bond, again, gives his shell shocked players the hair drier treatment after the match.

“At that point I was thinking of my old manager, Alec Stock, who I played under at Luton and Fulham. I’d had rows with Alec on more than one occasion and, after one particularly bad one, I decided to get to the ground early and, one way or the other, have it out with him. We were meant to report for training at Fulham at 10am but I was there by 9:15am and went straight to his office”.

“Good morning, Viv…”, he goes, “…you’re in early this morning”.

“Yes gaffer, I wanted to apologise for what I said to you after our last match”.

“Think nothing of it Viv. It’s all part of the game and it shows you care. It’s forgotten”.

“You wouldn’t have had that response with Bondy!”

There was, at least, a chance for Viv to move on and continue his career elsewhere at this point. He didn’t want to leave Norwich, but, when John Bond called him over at training one morning, there seemed little chance of that happening.

“Viv, West Brom have come in for you. Will you get yourself up there and meet up with Ronnie Allen?”

“I did just that. They were a good club and Ronnie Allen was a good man and manager. The clubs agreed a fee, ￡60,000 I think it was and I was set to go”.

But John Bond had, it seemed, changed his mind.

“No Viv, you’re not going anywhere”

“You what? You want me out but you’ve decided you won’t sell me to another Division One club? That’s out of order”.

“I was furious and went off to see the Chairman. It was Sir Arthur South. He was a nice chap but he didn’t really help, he just said, ‘…well Viv, he is the manager you know’. So that was that”

By now, Viv had played in the game against Bristol City where, in front of a crowd of just 13,940 at Carrow Road, he didn’t even play the full 90 minutes after being substituted and replaced by Roger Gibbins who ended up scoring the only goal of the match.

It seemed a case of ‘the King is dead, long live the King’.

“Sure enough, just after that game, another summons from Bondy. ‘Stoke are in for you, get up there and meet George Eastham’. He was an ex-player of theirs, a lovely man. Maybe too nice to be a manager, the complete opposite of Bondy”

“Stoke, of course, were in Division Two. So he wasn’t worried about selling me to them”.

Viv signed for Stoke and spent four years at the club. He wasn’t always considered a first team starter, not least because Garth Crooks was then making his way into the game and team at the time. But it was, at least, a settled period in his life.

“I didn’t see Bondy again until the PFA Dinner in 1982 when I was Assistant Manager of York City. He was there, saw me and came up, ‘…how you doing Viv?’. I only had one question for him really, which was, ‘why did you treat me like a piece of shit at Norwich?’”

“Ah, Viv. It’s what Ron Greenwood would have done. Greenwood was his mentor at West Ham”.

“John, you’re no Ron Greenwood”.

“Viv, I shouldn’t have sold you. I know that now. I’ve learnt from it”.

“So had I. I was getting into coaching by now and had long decided that I was going to put into practice all the good things that I had learnt from Alec Stock whilst, at the same time, making sure all the things I didn’t do related to those I’d experienced with Bondy. I should say, mind you, that his coaching sessions were tremendous and I took a lot of the things that he did with us at Norwich to the clubs I ended up coaching and managing”.

“We met up again when he was in charge of Shrewsbury and I was at  Hartlepool. I saw him in the car park in his big car, went out to meet him and we had a big hug. We ended up becoming great friends in the end”.

Of all the clubs Viv was associated with after he had left Norwich, it’s very clear that he still has an enormous soft spot for Sunderland for whom he worked as Assistant Manager to Dennis Smith. Under their management, Sunderland benefitted from Swindon Town’s off pitch misdemeanours and were promoted to the First Division in 1990 only to end up being relegated again a year later after a 3-2 defeat to Manchester City in the final game of the season.

“We had 15,000 fans at Maine Road that afternoon. Who saw us relegated. Once the game had ended we were sat in the dressing room, it was a miserable place as you can imagine. Then the Chief of Police came in and said, ‘Viv, your lot haven’t left the stadium yet. You’re going to have to get out there so we can send them home’. Now, we’d just been relegated and he’s asking us to go out and thank the fans! But we did. And they gave us a tremendous reception. They’re amazing people up there, they love the club. If someone can make it really take off in Sunderland, well…..”

Did he fancy having another go? Viv laughs. “Yeah, why not?”.

We talk about the (at the time of writing) managerial vacancy at the Stadium of Light and I mention some of the names being linked with the job.

“Gareth Ainsworth”

“Yeah, yeah. He’s doing well at Wycombe”

“Kevin Phillips”.

“Has he? Interesting”.

“And Steve McLaren”.

Another silence before….

“Fucking hell!”.

And said with feeling. The words and emotions of a man who is, clearly, still in love with the game of football. One who still feels, to this day, he wasn’t given a chance at Norwich to show both his manager and team mates, as well as the club’s fans (“…they’re brilliant, the fans at Norwich, absolutely first class”) what he was really capable of doing.

Viv is now 70 but still plays the game regularly-he’s involved, along with another ex-Canary, John Ryan, in a group that meets to play ‘walking football’ although, as he admitted to me, “… we don’t walk, we still run!”

Before we finished the second of the two long chats we had, he told me that, later that day, he was meeting up with Ryan as well as Kevin Bond for a chat, a few drinks and a bit of a catch up. I have little doubt that Kevin’s Dad, who, sadly, passed away in 2012, will be one of the topics of conversation.

John Bond was a larger than life football manager. But then Viv Busby was a larger than life professional footballer.

Which meant the sparks were always going to fly, both on and off the pitch!