With thanks to Longside poster Stephen aka 'ColinWaldron'
John Connelly The Interview
To say John Connelly is a modest man who likes the quiet life is an understatement. Today, he avoids the limelight. He is happy to play golf and take time away from home in his touring motor home and for years he ran a successful fish and chip shop in Brierfield.
All the Burnley players of yesteryear I have met whilst writing books and articles have always come across as just ‘the bloke next door’ and John Connelly is no exception to the rule. When I met him at his home near Barrowford, of course the marvellous solo goal he scored at Reims was mentioned… by me… not John.
Two hours flew by and I doubt we touched on a fraction of the stories he has to tell. When you have played alongside people like Best as he did at Manchester United, and all the great names who were his colleagues in ’66; when you have been in the game for as long as he has, then for sure you have a tale or two to tell. He has been offered money to tell the kind of stories that ‘reveal all’ but has never been interested in that, or any kind of controversy. He began a book with Clarets fan and writer Bill Evans but Bill sort of disappeared. If you’re out there Bill, then get in touch with John who is curious to know what happened to you.
Like most if not all of his generation John Connelly made no great fortune from the game and had to work for a living afterwards. Even as a young player he had what one might call the daytime job, working as a joiner for the NCB instead of National Service. Training was after work or in the evenings. It’s hard to imagine that kind of routine now. He was one of that fledgling group of younger players signed and nurtured by Alan Brown when he joined the club from St Helen’s Town. He recalls the occasion when he signed and the imposing Brown sent for him, not a man that you argued with. “Put some kit on,” he was told. He did, and there was a photographer there to record the event in the dressing room. “Now get your clothes on and come with me,” was the next instruction. Off they went to the station and Brown disappeared to the luggage office and came out with the most battered old suitcase you could imagine. He gave it to Connelly. Then he handed him the grubbiest old Mac you could ever imagine. “Put that on.” The photographer appeared and took pictures of him with this tatty Mac and shabby suitcase standing by the steam train on the platform. “John Connelly arrives to sign for Burnley,” he thinks might have been the caption. “My mother was mad as hell when she saw that picture,” he recalls laughing, “she thought I looked like a refugee.”
A Mac by the way… do the very young readers know what a Mac is these days in this trendy designer age we live in. Mac… Macintosh… raincoat… named after the chap who first designed it in 1823, Charles Macintosh, a Scotsman, discovered how to dissolve rubber and used it to cement two layers of cloth together.
Before he joined Burnley, Connelly used to watch Everton one week and Liverpool the next. Billy Liddell was his idol and on meeting him in later years at a charity event he was just awestruck. He remembers watching Harry Potts in his Everton days. “Great diver,” he recalled grinning.
“I just loved playing,” he said with a smile. Bearing in mind that he was a goalscoring winger, and not particularly robust, he did well to avoid serious grievous bodily harm in what was frankly a quite brutal age.
“I scored goals and that meant going in where it hurt. Probably the hardest opponent I faced was a chap called Don Megson from Sheffield Wednesday. When he walloped you, you knew about it. Bolton too had a big side and they had Tommy Banks at full back. He was hard but I was lucky he was just ending his career as I was starting. He was never fast and when I played against him he was even slower. Mind you there was one game when I thought I’ll switch wings with Brian Pilkington to get away from him. Then I looked across and saw it was Roy Hartle on the other side so I stayed where I was. You knew you were going to get wellied but you just got up and got on with it. And the boots we wore in those days were like concrete. They were so stiff, you had to break them in and wear them a few times at Gawthorpe to soften them, before you could ever wear them for 90 minutes in a game. And we didn’t get a new pair every couple of weeks. They were repaired over and over again at Cockers in Burnley.”
I mentioned the legendary game in the mud at Bradford City. It’s a shame there’s no archive film of the game to show people today just what conditions were like in those days. John claimed the two goals, scored in the last five minutes to grab the draw, but not one spectator was able to tell as 22 players, black from head to foot, impossible to recognise, slid around in the morass.
“Sandra and her family were there to watch. I was only courting then. After the game I asked Harry Potts if I could go home with them instead of on the team coach. I can remember to this day what Harry said. “You can go anywhere,” said Harry beaming. “I actually lost a boot in the mud that day, it was so deep. It just got sucked off my foot, though I did find it.”
The mention of Sandra reminded him of a Bob Lord story. “He was a wonderful man who’d do anything for his players and looked after us financially. When I got married in 1960 I’d arranged to hire a car and was supposed to collect it the day before. But then the hire firm decided I couldn’t have it. It was in the summer and Harry Potts was away on holiday so I rang Bob Lord for help. Probably rang Albert Maddox first who probably said ‘see Bob’. So I went to see him at his Lowerhouse meat factory. There he was in his white coat and cap. What can I do for you he said? I explained about the wedding and honeymoon and the car. Well what do want me for, he asked? Well, I said if you can’t help me nobody can. And that was exactly the kind of thing to say to Bob Lord to set him in motion. People who made demands got nowhere, but appeal to him like that, and he rose to the occasion, you had to set him a challenge.
‘Tell your lass not to worry there’ll be a car for you if you come down the day before you marry’, he said.
“So down I went and there was the biggest Wolseley you’ve ever seen and I thought I’ll never drive that it’s enormous. Anyway I did and we went down to Newquay for the honeymoon thanks to Bob Lord. I think it took me two days to drive it there. There’s so much that he did for people that no one knows about.”
Do many people know that he had the chance to come back to Burnley in 1966? It was in ’64 that he left for Manchester United and was there for two years. At Old Trafford it was great players rather than great coaching or training that won trophies. Whereas Harry Potts was an ever present at Gawthorpe, training and taking part in the 5 a sides, Matt Busby was rarely seen at The Cliff training ground. He would give a short team talk on a Friday and that was largely it. The Cliff was frequently waterlogged so makeshift training took place at Old Trafford, very often under the stands or round the pitch when an impromptu obstacle course was laid out. At Burnley and Gawthorpe the training and facilities were ahead of their time. There was a coach to collect the players at Turf Moor and take them to Gawthorpe. At Man United it was pile into your car in muddy kit to go to and from wherever was available for training, and your car filled up with squelchy mud.
But with players like Herd, Charlton, Best, Law and Stiles, and the simple instruction ‘just make sure you pass to a red shirt’ the wins piled up. Connelly remembers it was an era when players played when injured. Cortisone injections were commonplace. You played even if you were unfit or injured. Just about the only player who as good as refused to play if he wasn’t fit was Denis Law, ‘The King’, who could stand up to Busby. If he wasn’t fit he wouldn’t play although that wasn’t very often. Connelly’s memories of just how ad hoc and casual the training was echo those of people like Noel Cantwell who when he arrived there was astonished at what he found. But until John Connelly had a disagreement with Busby and asked for a transfer, he enjoyed his time there and is still in touch with people like Charlton and Stiles. John would not be drawn into saying what the disagreement was about but he did say that he had the chance to return to Burnley.
When Bob Lord found out that he was available he sent trainer Ray Bennion to see Connelly. Bennion turned up in a taxi and sounded him out about the possibility. It went as far as Connelly visiting Bob Lord at his home in Read, but he turned down the chance. Can it ever be as good again, if I go back, he thought? Is it wise going back to a club? And by that time, Jimmy Adamson, whom Lord was determined to hang on to, had been appointed coach, meaning that there was already a jockeying for position going on between Adamson and Potts.
Connelly chose Blackburn Rovers instead. “My one regret is that I was a bit hasty, not in asking for the move away from Old Trafford but in not taking more time to choose where I went.”
In that magical spell at Burnley when he was a part of the team that slammed goals in for fun he remembers how Adamson even as a player would take charge of some aspects of the practices at Gawthorpe. “All of the throw ins and free kick routines on the right hand side of the pitch Jimmy would organise. Harry would do them on the other. Even at that early stage before he became coach he had a large input.
“He was a natural and a good captain, good at talking to the younger players. But he never spoke about the England job. I was in Chile with him when he was there as assistant manager but he never talked about why he turned down the offer of the England manager’s job after Walter Winterbottom.”
When I asked what he would name as the best eleven players he had played with, he would not be drawn into giving an answer to that.
“I couldn’t do it; I’ve played with so many great players. Bobby Charlton would be the first man I’d pick but then after that… there’s Greaves, Jimmy Mac, Best, Johnny Haynes. Ted Phillips of Ipswich had the hardest ever shot. Alf Ramsey was the best manager. Harry Potts was a lovely man. Maybe Jimmy Adamson was a bit more ruthless. Players were scared of Alf. He had this manner… like a headmaster, an aura, a presence. We had to call him Alf. But if after a game you left and said ‘see you next time Alf’, he’d look at you, and reply, ‘don’t be too sure about that’. He made sure you knew that you could be dropped and that no one was sure of a place. Greavsie was such a character though. There was one blackboard session and Alf was drawing diagrams and there were arrows all over the place. None of this meant anything to Jimmy so he just shouted out, ‘Alf which of us are the bloody Indians?’
Of course the one question I had to ask was what happened at the end of 61/62? It was the season that Burnley looked certainties to do the elusive ‘double’. In the League during the first thirty something games they were superb, winning games with mammoth scores and playing magical football. And then it all went wrong and they ended as runners-up. Was it just one win in the last ten games? Whatever: ask any player of that team what happened and why, and none of them really know. Jimmy Mac thinks the adrenalin just stopped flowing and their legs had gone. Ray Pointer thinks that nerves and fear crept in. John Connelly remembers that they were all gutted, to use his own word.
The Cup Final he thought was wonderful, and as a football memory was on a par with the World Cup on the day the teams came onto the pitch for the opening ceremony. But in the FA Cup Final they just didn’t play well.
“I’m not saying we would have won but before they scored from their penalty there was a free kick that should have been given to us.”
The other game I wanted to ask about, he mentioned before me. Clearly it was still imprinted on his mind. In 60/61 it had been Spurs who did the double as Burnley attempted, and failed to win four trophies. Burnley and Spurs seemed to meet regularly and they met at Villa Park in the FA Cup semi final. The game is still vivid in his mind. “I didn’t like Villa Park. We lost 3 – 0. Jimmy Robson had a perfectly good goal disallowed. It was a perfect goal. Afterwards, Maurice Norman their centre half came up to me and said it was the biggest injustice that it had been disallowed.
“We played in front of some huge crowds as well in those days, Everton one Christmas, 75.000.”
I told him I had been there; I think I was about 15 or thereabouts. I mentioned we had won 3 – 0.
“Did I score?” he asked with a cheeky grin. I told him I couldn’t remember.
“Tell you one person who would know and that’s Jimmy Robson. He knows EVERY goal that’s ever been scored. And the goal that Greaves scored in the Cup Final. When I see him I tell him he miskicked it and it just bobbled in. No I meant it, he always tells me. There is a ’66 reunion every year and we all meet. It’s at Harrogate this year and it’s Norman Hunter’s turn to organise it.”
If he describes THAT goal at Reims, it is then that he is at his most diffident and self-effacing. It’s always fun talking about things like the greatest ever Burnley goal… was it Tommy Cummings at Turf Moor, John Connelly at Reims, or Ashley Hoskins at Swansea? Maybe it is the Connelly goal because it had the added edge of taking Burnley through to the next round of the European Cup at a ground that was so hostile that they feared for their safety. He laughs and jokes about it now.
“I’ve never known a place so hostile and I was reminded of it when I saw Lille versus Manchester United last week. At Reims they were sending fireworks across the pitch, not up into the sky, but across the pitch. And cheating, I’ve never known cheating like it. Every free kick as soon as the referee’s back was turned, they were moving the ball forward ten yards. When I took a corner I stood with my arms over my head as the bottles came down over the netting. I’d never seen netting before. And the goal I scored… all I could do was keep running with the ball. I knew there were players behind and I knew if I stopped or paused to look for a man to pass to, I’d have been nobbled and trampled. So I just kept running and let fly. It went in. Somebody gave me the video of it a while back but I’ve never watched it.”
When his wife Sandra returned from a trip into town, I looked at my watch and was astonished to see that I had been there nearly two hours. One final comment he made gives a picture of the man. I’d asked him if he still went to games at Turf Moor.
“Yes I have a friend with a box in the James Hargreaves and I enjoy that when I go. But what I don’t like is being in the other one, the Bob Lord. Sometimes people will shout out to me, ‘you should be playing’ or ‘you could do better than this lot’. It’s embarrassing and makes me cringe.”
Not unsurprisingly, John looks at the pitches of today and envies the players who have the chance to play on them, especially with the balls now that dip and swerve and change direction three or four times. The thought of John Connelly playing today in these conditions is frightening. In an age when a twenty yard goal was a rarity on account of balls that weighed a ton when they were wet, and pitches that today would be deemed unplayable, he still managed to score screamers from the edge of the box with ease in so many games.
A winger who can score 20 goals in a season? What price today? Who knows? But clubs like Arsenal, Chelsea and Man United (again) would be beating a path to his door. And when I got home I looked to see if he did score in the 3 – 0 December win at Everton in 1960. Jimmy Robson got two, and who got the other… John Connelly… I should have known.
Dave Thomas March 2007
