We bury the great Bob Cass today up in lovely Durham. Bob was an old style football journalist who never took himself too seriously and his passing breaks another link with an almost forgotten era in the relationship between footballers and football writers.
If I talk to young players now about the way things used to be they look at me as if they are seeing the dinosaurs in Jurassic Park for the first time. I say ‘lads, this is a time very long ago,’ before evolution had allowed footballers to grow big earphones out of the sides of their heads and completely ignore the world around them.
It was a time when if you played a decent game on a Saturday afternoon the journalists wouldn’t try to follow your four wheel drive with the blacked out windows through the players only car park. They’d follow to you to the Tube and sometimes, with very little encouragement, they’d get on the Tube with you and ride along for a few stops. Somehow, by the time you got off the Tube, the Saturday evening pink edition of the Evening Standard would be on the newsstands and you’d be quoted.
You couldn’t but love Bob. He could annoy you and wind you up as well as any journalist, but if you complained to him, he had that way about him that said you were just heaping another exasperation onto his life and that you should stop taking yourself so seriously.
I lost count of the times over the years that I had sociable drinks and a few laughs with Bob after games only to pick up the paper the next day and see that he had given me four out of ten for my performance. I once said said to him, “Bob what you know about football I could write on the back of a postage stamp”. And Bob grinned and said, “Aye Quinny, with a great big paint brush.”
Players today won’t believe you if you tell them that they are missing out on something as they live life in the cocoon. When I started playing back in the Victorian era, dealing with journalists was just one of those things that you learned to do as part of your job.
Once, as a young lad, I mentioned to the renowned Daily Mirror journalist Tony Stenson in a conversation that I was becoming a bit fed up with life at Arsenal. The club had signed Alan Smith – who was one of those freaks of nature who never got booked and never got injured – and I was beginning to feel that my career would be spent watching Alan from the sideline. Tony nodded sympathetically while scribbling away.
About a year later, Alan suffered a rare knock and I started a game, delighted to have got the chance at last. I scored. A good day. The next day, the journalist from a year previously ran a big story about my disenchantment and disgust at how I was being treated at Arsenal.
It killed me stone dead. George Graham hauled me into his office for a stern chat. It was a coming of age. It was the first time I had been turned over. I was sufficiently cheesed off to speak to Tony Stenson about it in much the same tones that George had spoken to me. That’s how you grow up, and yet I still count Tony as an old friend.
The football journos were larger than life characters back in those days. There was Brian Woolnough, who wasn’t just larger than life but larger than me. Brian had a mole in the Arsenal camp who was feeding him inside dope from the dressing room. It went on so long that it became fun. We used to go out every Tuesday, a notorious drinking club at the time, and I remember we had a Hunt the Mole Day, seeing if we could expose the mole through the medium of alcohol. Brian would tease me years afterwards, “You’ll never guess who my mole was”.
He was right, I never did find out.
Then there was the legend Harry Harris, who is said to have written two of the greatest opening lines in the history of sports journalism. Filing copy from Jerusalem, he once wrote of his surroundings as the, “Birthplace of the legendary Jesus Christ”, and later matched it writing from an impressive sounding hotel in Asia overlooking Mount Everest. And I fondly remember Steve Howard, who raised our view of journalists as a breed when he started showing up to matches with the Dynasty actress Kate O’ Mara on his arm.
As my career went on, I spent a lot of times with journalists. I was injured for the 1994 World Cup in America and went to the tournament with the media and spent a few weeks in press buses and press boxes. It was an education and though my heart ached to be playing I had a lot of fun.
Not long afterwards, I started to write a regular article with the Guardian working as a Dublin papist alongside Belfast protestant Michael Walker. The Northern Ireland troubles were at their worst but the articles were less about football and more an aerial view of life in the North East.
Michael was a tough task master but brilliantly versatile in understanding and heralding social issues. I don’t think he knew that I am actually a cousin of the great football writer James Lawton. I’m not sure if James is the relative that my side never talk about or if I’m the relative that his mob never talk about. But the link is there. I can write like James can play football and vice versa.
Steve Tongue of the BBC once kindly tried to get me started in radio. Steve asked me to do a Wednesday night show for two weeks when I was out with a knee injury at Man City. To my horror I got there and Steve said cheerily, “OK, you’re on in 20 minutes.”
Arsenal had won the Cup Winners’ Cup the day before and David Seaman had been invited along for me to talk to. I’m not sure if he was winding me up but Dave decided to answer all questions with one word. I had written about 20 questions to fill the three hour slot we had. I got through the twenty questions long before the first report from any of the matches came in.
I wanted the ground to open up. I was reading out results from the Scottish third division and I remember hearing Steve in my ear telling me to hand over to Roddy Forsyth at Kilmarnock. I had no idea at the time that Roddy was a journalist so I said, “There’s a fella from Kilmarnock called Roddy wants to speak to us now”. I hid for a week afterwards. Deeper cover than Salman Rushdie.
My only review came from team mate Alan Kernaghan at City. He rang me and said, “At least you had the nerve to make a show of yourself, nobody else would have done it”. I took that as a rave review.
My playing career finished sooner than I had expected after I had a row with Howard Wilkinson at Sunderland. We played West Ham, Howard’s first game on a Saturday. I didn’t start but came on as a late sub. We lost and I realised there wasn’t really any place for me at the club anymore.
I’d had a bad few days with Howard before that game and knew the writing was on the wall. Not long after the final whistle I told the chairman I was off and a few days later, after 20 years in England, the Mrs, kids and I piled all our stuff into a horsebox and drove back to Ireland via Holyhead. Sensibly, I had no plan about what to do next.
I wanted nothing to do with the game for six months, but it’s like the Mafia; just when I thought I was out they pulled me back in. In my case it was the persistent nagging of Geoff Shreeves and Andy Melvin from Sky Sports that did the pulling. I fobbed them off for a while until Geoff and Andy came over to Dublin to tempt me.
And because I am a man of principle, when they had bought me enough food I agreed to go over for a game. On the day of the agreed game I rang and told them some cock and bull story about the airport being closed due to thick fog or something. I wasn’t really ready for it.
When starting out on a media career as an ex-player and you walk into a press room in a stadium you’ve previously graced pitchside, you might as well be a leper with a bell. People who pretended to hang onto your every word when you were playing now have zero respect for you. In the press room, like on the football pitch, you had to pay your dues.
I’d met Bob Cass a couple of times when I played at Manchester City. He was a great friend of Alex Ferguson which made us all at City a bit suspicious of Bob. I got to know Bob a bit better on a couple of Ireland trips back in the days when players and journalists would all end up post-match in the same bar together till dawn.
Bob was always fun. When I went back to Sunderland he was massively helpful to me. He became a friend.
Since I went to England as a kid, I had always gone to the races at Cheltenham every year. Just for a day. It was a religious observance that eventually got written into my marriage contract. Whatever happens matrimonially, I am still allowed the annual trip to Cheltenham. Some years, to be honest, I don’t feel up to it but I have to go anyway because any breach of the contract will make it null and void.
The year 2003, after I retired, was the first time that I was able to go to Cheltenham and stay a night. So I stayed for the whole three nights. Somehow it ended up with Bob sleeping on the floor in my room. Booking and paying for hotels is an art that most journalists haven’t mastered. Bob came to Cheltenham every year afterwards till this spring when he was too ill to travel.
Part of the comedy of being with Bob was his bad luck with horses. He once came on a team day out to the races at Sedgefield with the Sunderland squad of Phillips, Gray, Sorensen, and Lee Clarke. We all chipped in for a box and myself and Alex Rae did the job of bookmakers for the day.
As it worked out with the race meetings and dog meeting that were on that day, there were 24 horse races and 24 dog races. Bob placed a fiver on each race. By the time he had lost for the 47th consecutive race, Alex and I felt sorry for him and made a show of presenting him with a 50 quid refund. Bob ever the optimist stuck the whole fifty on the 48th race of the day… and lost .
Every year at Cheltenham we’d all chip in twenty quid a day for the “naps challenge”, a thousand pounds to the winner. May God strike me dead now if this is a lie but for 13 years in a row Bob led the naps table going into the last day and lost every year. That was just part of the laughs. He’d start singing and telling yarns in Cheltenham’s Crest Bar in the middle of Gold Cup afternoon. With full attention, he loved interrupting the fun to take a call from Fergie. He was always entertaining.
One of my favourite Bob Cass stories concerns a time he was in the doghouse with his wife Janet. Bob got a call from an old Sunderland striker (not me) who told him he was in the same boat. Not allowed out. The player called Bob and said, “Listen I need you to ring me up later and say you’ve been let down for a presentation, some Newcastle lad hasn’t turned up. Say you need me to do a favour, that way we can have a few pints together down the Shakespeare”.
So Bob calls.
“Yeah”
“What do you mean, ‘yeah’. It’s Bob. I’m here in the pub and my Janet is fuming but you said to call so we could have pints.”
“Bob? Yeah? What can I do for you?”
“Do I have to actually say it?”
‘Eh, what do you mean Bob?”
“OK, got ya. I am at a presentation for the football writers’ player of the year and a big hitter from Newcastle has let me down. Could you kindly come to the Ramside Hall Hotel in half an hour to present the prizes. Is that ok?”
“Look, hang on a minute.”
Bob hears the striker speaking to his better half. “Love, Bob Cass is on the phone…”
He repeats the whole line word for word to his missus. Bob is still listening.
The wife says,“Well, you can tell Bob Cass to get someone else because he hammered you in last week’s match report, he’s no friend of yours”.
The player gets back on the phone, “I think you heard that. Get lost Bob.”
And he hangs up.
To hear Bob telling the album version of that story and a million others was to realise what I’d have missed out on life if I had a big pair of headphones to shut myself off from the world with.
This afternoon, we’ll retire to the famous Shakespeare pub in Durham and we’ll tell Bob Cass stories for hours and hours and still we will have forgotten more good yarns than we can remember. He was one of the those characters who gave me and all who knew him a richer view of life.
Football doesn’t make them like Bob Cass any more.
Niall Quinn is a former Arsenal, Manchester City, Sunderland and Republic of Ireland striker. He currently works as a pundit and co-commentator for Sky Sports, and also writes for Sportsvibe.
