Chapter 5 – Sergeant Major Tom
'If you didn’t want a clip round the ear, don’t cross Tom Walley'
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by Lionel Birnie. Audio version read by Colin Mace.
There was no more fearsome sound to a young player than the booming voice of Tom Walley. When he shouted, his rasping Welsh-accented bawl would stop players in their tracks and force them to run a quick mental check to ensure they hadn’t been up to something they shouldn’t have. Just as often it was a signal that braced them for some hard physical work or warned them a clip round the ear or boot up the backside was coming.
Walley turned boys into men in the old-fashioned sense. He prepared them for the harsh realities of professional football but he did it in a way that meant the players grew to love and respect him too. If at first they thought of him as a terrifying sergeant major, many came to see him as a father figure. Ask any player who grew up under Tom Walley and they will speak with affection and gratitude. Many have kept in touch to this day. Over the years some have given him their international shirts but these mementoes do not decorate the walls of Walley’s home in Nascot Wood. He appreciates the gestures but he does not crave them. As he sees it, he was just doing his job. The players were the ones with the talent, he simply coaxed it to the surface and made them work for their success. And, boy, did he make them work.
Tom Walley was born in Caernarfon, north Wales. He wasn’t much cop at school, didn’t like sitting still or concentrating. But football, that was a different story. Even with his appetite for the game, the hard work didn’t come naturally. Young Tom thought his easy relationship with a football would be enough. ‘I didn’t have a good attitude when I was a young ’un,’ he says. ‘I didn’t like to run because I wasn’t good at it. An old Scots boy got to me when I was a kid and he said “If you want to be any good at this game, you’d better start running, boy.” So I started to run. Before too long I was doing four-and-a- half minute miles and I was getting fit. And when I got fit, the football was even easier.’
***
The scouts who used to travel round Britain looking for young players with a bit of talent knew Wales could be fertile ground. Clubs used to send someone to watch the local lads play and they’d scoop them up in a big net and take them back and see which ones they wanted to keep. The rest would be discarded.
When he was fourteen-and-a-half years old, Sheffield Wednesday took Walley back to Yorkshire and set him on the right path. He was a slight, wiry boy but stronger than he looked even though he was not tall. His touch and eye for a pass stood out even though he struggled to impose himself physically when up against the bigger boys. During a training session, the coach walked out onto the pitch and told him: ‘You’ve got the ability but you’re too small. Be a jockey instead.’ And that was that with Sheffield Wednesday.
‘Five years later, I am playing for Arsenal and we play Sheffield Wednesday twice in two days, over Christmas,’ Walley says. ‘I came on as sub at Hillsborough, then made my full debut the next day at Highbury. They’d made their decision on me when I was fourteen- and-a-half, said I was too small, and I proved them wrong.’
It was something Walley never forgot and years later he swore never to discard a player just because of their size. If they had the talent, and could do the work, they would have a chance.
Walley joined Watford as a player in 1967 and became a pivotal figure in the club’s most successful team to date. They won promotion to the Second Division for the first time in 1969 and reached the FA Cup semi-final the following year but were beaten 5-1 by Chelsea on a sandpit of a pitch at White Hart Lane. After Ken Furphy left to take the manager’s job at Blackburn, the team he’d built crumbled and by December 1971, they were in trouble. Walley’s last game for Watford was a 1-0 defeat at home to Orient, who were also struggling. Walley played with a groin injury and mis-hit a clearance that led to the Orient goal. At half-time the manager, George Kirby, blamed Walley and told him he was being substituted. Walley got in the bath only to be told Ron Wigg was injured more seriously, so he had to put his kit back on and play the second half. A few days later, Walley was sold – to Orient, as it turned out. A popular player had been given away, that’s how the supporters saw it. To make matters worse, Orient stayed up that season, Watford went down.
Elton John was instrumental in bringing Walley back to Vicarage Road in 1976 urging Mike Keen to sign him. Although Walley was only 31, he’d had one too many bangs on the knee. All those crunching tackles had taken their toll. ‘Mike was a lovely fella,’ he says. ‘I thank him for bringing me back to the club. It was sheer luck, really. None of what followed would have happened for me at Watford if I hadn’t come back as a player but I know I didn’t do it for him on the pitch, really. I did my best but my knee was gone and I couldn’t play like I had before.’
When Graham Taylor took over in the summer of 1977, he knew Walley was no use to him as a player. At their first meeting, the Welshman sat down and rubbed his knee subconsciously as he spoke. ‘We weren’t going to offer Tom a new contract,’ says Taylor. ‘His knee was the problem. Some days he only had to look at it and it swelled up.’
But as the pair talked, Taylor liked what he heard. ‘Instantly, I sensed his enthusiasm. There was just something about him that made me think I wanted to keep him at the club. I can’t honestly say I knew he’d turn out to be the asset he did but I sensed that he could be useful. There was a discipline and a steeliness to him. He wasn’t someone who was looking to take shortcuts. Even though he couldn’t run, he didn’t hide. He gave the best he could.’
Walley had already worked out his playing days were coming to an end and Orient had offered him a job running their youth team. Taylor offered him the same job at Watford and when he outlined the idea of building a network of scouts to unearth young players who could make it in the first team Walley knew he had to stay put. He replied: ‘I want to do it but I have to go back up home and talk to the missus first. If I’m going to do it and be successful it’s going to be a 24-hour-a-day mission. We either do it full-on or we don’t bother.’ The job would have an impact on his wife, Pauline, too. ‘If a player’s mam or dad rings up the house and I’m not in, it’ll be my wife who answers,’ he says. ‘If they hear a disinterested voice or are just asked to leave a message, they might get the sense no one is really interested in their lad, so my wife had to be committed to the whole idea as well.’
Walley’s first job as youth coach was to tell Taylor what he thought of the players already on the books. ‘He asked me what I thought we had. I said “There’s some good players but they ain’t been worked on yet.” There was Luther Blissett. They were going to let him go. He was supposed to go with my brother Ernie to Crystal Palace because Watford were going to release him. I said “Don’t release him. He’s different gears, yeah, but he needs work. He’s raw, he’s rough but he if we get to work on him I think we’ll find there’s a player in there.” Same with Ross Jenkins. Lovely footballer but no one rated him. Should never have been in the fourth division but he needed work. They needed to learn the runs and work on the finishing.’
***
To say Tom Walley inherited a youth team is stretching things. Dave Butler, the club’s first team coach and physiotherapist, used to run a few training sessions in the evening but he had enough on his plate and could not dedicate the time to nurturing the youngsters. Facilities were non-existent. They used to train in the car park at the bottom of Occupation Road outside the stadium, with a pile of tracksuit tops for goalposts. Taylor had given Walley the authority to start from scratch and that is what he did.
‘I started with 24 lads,’ Walley says. ‘I only kept three. The goalkeeper [Mark Fordham], Ken Jackett and Nigel Callaghan. I had to start again, we had to build up. Dave had got it going a bit but he never had the time to dedicate to it because he was the physio as well. If you want to produce players you have to live it, every day. We had some good people helping with the coaching, like Tommy Darling, Jimmy Howard and Dennis Gibbs, Nigel’s dad. I brought everyone together and said to them, ‘If you hear of a player, let me know and we’ll watch him and we’ll get him in and see if he’s for us.’
Walley travelled all over the place looking for players. Those who know him say his ability to spot a player was the key to his success. For Walley, it was simple. ‘The main thing is, have they got a bit of technique,’ he says. ‘Is he quick? Has he got a bit of know-how? Can he pull away from people? Has he got good balance? Does he use what he’s got clever, like? If he’s not a big strong lad does he find a way around that, because then you’ve got an intelligent player? You don’t just want strength. If you’re strong at 13, that’s great, but the others are going to catch up so there has to be more to it. I saw some young lads, small boys, who could run rings round the bigger lads but a lot of scouts see the size and the power first and think they’re picking the player for today. They’re not, they’re picking a player for tomorrow so as teenage boys you’re looking for someone who understands the game.
‘I wanted to see a bit of technique but more importantly I wanted to see a bit of vision. Can they pass it, how are they thinking about the game? Can they see a forward pass, can they spot a bit of danger they can cut out with a little run or a bit of thought. The rest, the physical stuff, I could give them with a bit of work.’
One of the first players he spotted was a 15-year-old called Steve Terry, who had been at Tottenham and West Ham, who had shunted him over to right-back, instead of giving him a chance at centre half, where he preferred to play. As a result, he failed to impress. Walley saw him play at centre-half for a small non-league side, Cheshunt, and invited him to train at Watford. ‘He’d slipped through the net at Spurs and West Ham but there was a player there. He was good enough to get a game for them but not good enough to get a game in his best position and so many good kids fall out of the game that way. If you can spot those ones you’ve got half a chance.’
On a trip to Wales, he stalked the touchlines at local matches, casting his eye over five or six games at once, trying to spot something that glittered. He was like a magpie attracted by a shiny piece of silver foil dancing in the breeze. He could watch one game but see out of the corner of his eye a neat turn or a piece of skill three pitches away.
Gradually people got to know who he was. One day Walley bumped into the Swansea manager, John Toshack, who asked him what he was up to.
‘Like you,’ he said. ‘Hunting. I want players.’
‘Well, this is our patch down here,’ Toshack replied. ‘Everywhere’s my patch, old son,’ said Walley.
At the big matches between county teams, parents would look around, wondering who was there on a scouting mission and whether their boy had caught the eye of anyone important. Walley liked to keep his cards close to his chest and if there were a mumber of scouts at a game he’d not let on who was interesting him. If he liked the look of someone, he’d slip a lad a bit of pocket money to take a piece of paper with his name and number on over to the mum or dad, then slip quietly away and wait for the phone call.
One by one, Walley picked up players and started to work on them. He had to be selective. He didn’t have the time or the money to gather up every youngster who had a bit of promise. Instead, he had to pick the ones he thought might make it and polish them the way a master jeweller does with a rough cut of a valuable stone. As Watford rose from the Fourth Division to the Second, Walley’s job did not change because right from the start, he was trying to identify and nurture boys he thought might make it in the First Division because by the time they were old enough to push for a first team place that was where the club hoped to be.
***
Watford quIckly forged a reputatIon as a good place to learn about the game. It was a crowded catchment area, with Arsenal, Tottenham, Chelsea, Queens Park Rangers and the rest of the London clubs competing to get the best youngsters. Walley worked hard to convince parents to let their boy join Watford instead of one of the more famous alternatives. It was a hard job when the first team was in the Fourth Division but Walley’s drive and determination, his discipline and his commitment to his young players went a long way. That Watford had Bertie Mee and Graham Taylor taking a keen interest in the youth set-up often did the rest to persuade a reluctant parent who thought their boy could do better. And, of course, as Watford started to rise through the divisions, and particularly once young players began to get their chance in the first team, the club’s reputation flourished.
One youngster who Walley was interested in early on was Jimmy Gilligan, a gangling 13- year-old who had not yet grown into his near six foot frame. Gilligan played for Hertfordshire Schools at Woodside stadium in Garston and, although they lost 5-0, had impressed a couple of scouts with a persistent, if fruitless, performance at centre forward. A scout from Chelsea had a word with him after the game, inviting him to join them for a training session.
Excited by the prospect of training with Chelsea, the club he supported as it happened, Gilligan couldn’t wait to get home and tell his parents. ‘Mum, mum, I’ve got a trial,’ he said when he got home.
‘I know,’ said Mrs Gilligan. ‘At Watford.’
‘Tom had rung my mum before I’d even got home. In my eyes, I was going to Chelsea but Tom rang my mum and asked her permission instead of coming up to me. He explained what Watford was all about and that mattered a lot to my parents.’
Walley didn’t win them all. There was a boy who had been training with Watford for a few weeks. Walley rated him. He had a great touch and he could drop the shoulder and go past people. His name was Paul Merson. One night he failed to show up for training. Walley explains what happened. ‘I said to Tommy Darling “He’s gone, Tommy” and Tommy says “Don’t be daft.” But I knew he’d gone. And he had, to Arsenal. And his old mam got a brand new washing machine out of it. We never paid for young players, we never offered their parents anything. We weren’t at it. But we never had a chance to offer Mrs Merson a washing machine and I reckon we might have made an exception for him.’
Walley would drive hundreds of miles in a battered old Transit van with wooden benches in the back, picking his boys up for training sessions or matches. He put in hours and hours and Pauline would wash the kit and make sandwiches for them.
The thing Walley wanted was to see what a player was made of. He wanted to assess their attitude. ‘A young boy of 13 or 14 doesn’t know what he’s like, or what he thinks, he’s still a boy and he’s learning about himself,’ he says. ‘So you have to find out. You have to work them. Push them, see what they push back with. If I get a lad in, the deal was I’ll work with you and have a go with you and you do as you’re told. You had to moan at them, shout at them, no matter how good they are. Get onto them, see if they come back at you.’
Fitness and discipline were the core values. ‘You can’t play about if you want to make it in the game,’ he says. ‘Once you start playing about you may as well give up. You’ve got to look after your body, you’ve got to be as fit as you can be and you do that by working hard. You can learn the technique, in fact you never stop learning in this game, but fitness is everything.’
Charlie Palmer, who was one of Walley’s apprentices when the youth system really took off in the early 1980s, says: ‘We would finish training up at Stanmore and he’d kick us out of the minibus on our way back to Vicarage Road and make us run the last three miles back to the ground. He would drive along a bit and wait to see who was running and who was walking. He wanted to see who was sulking and who was getting on with it.
‘The opportunity to improve ourselves was always there. He would give us the chance to come in early and do sprints or weights. He’d stay late to work on technique. If you wanted to stay till midnight he’d have been with you. You never had any excuses not to put in as much as you wanted to. He was committed to us.’
‘Tom’s a great person,’ says Gilligan. ‘But he was tougher than a sergeant major. He’s the hardest man I’ve met in my life. He ruled with fear at times but he loved us and he wanted the best for us. At times you had no idea why he was pushing you so hard. The gaffer, Graham Taylor, was a very tough, stringent man and he and Tom shared so many principles. That’s why it worked so well.’
Neil Price says: ‘Tom made men of us and he made you want to run through brick walls for him.’
Anyone who stepped out of line was instantly knocked back into it.
‘You’d get the odd clip round the ear,’ says Ian Richardson, who was a pacy striker. ‘I’m not sure you could get away with some of his coaching methods now.’
‘Tom was a tough man, but so what?’ says Gary Porter. ‘You knew where the line was. If you didn’t want a clip round the ear, don’t cross Tom Walley.’
‘You were either one of his blue-eyed boys or you took a bit of stick,’ says Paul Franklin, yet another who graduated from the system and played for Watford’s first team. ‘I took a bit of stick. He liked me as a player but I think he thought I was a bit quick with some of my replies. But if he was hard on you, it was a sign he rated you.
‘He pushed us very, very hard. We’d be carrying each other up and down the terraces. Just when you thought you’d done your last run, he’d have you lapping the pitch again. He took you to the point where you wanted to give up. We could have buckled under that but it actually bonded us together and we said “Look, whatever happens, we won’t let him beat us.” It was done with real affection and you wanted to impress him on the pitch. If he said after a game “You played well, boyo,” you felt amazing.’
Walley taught his boys not to be intimidated by the flasher kids at Tottenham and West Ham. ‘He taught us to get right into teams,’ says Palmer. ‘We’d see Spurs turn up in their suits and we’d be in our old tracksuits and he’d say “Don’t you worry about that.” We were a physical team, very direct. He taught us to get in there and upset teams.’
‘I was always a very combative player,’ says Price, the left-back. ‘Tom said I’d kick my own grandma if I had to, which was probably true. I was from a council house background and I think Tom saw a bit of himself in me. He wanted us to be hard. I remember playing QPR at Stanmore one Saturday morning and they had a winger called Wayne Fereday who went past me twice. I didn’t get near him. The next time, Tom was yelling at me to stop him so I forearm smashed him. We both went down and were grappling on the floor. I got sent off and we lost the game. Afterwards Tom was having a go at everyone and he turned to me and said “As for you Pricey, you should have hit him harder”.’
‘Tom pushed us hard but he taught us a lot,’ says Franklin. ‘He’d talk to you about the game and his knowledge was unbelievable. He knew the strengths and weaknesses of youth team players at other clubs. We were playing Southampton and they had Danny Wallace up front, who went on to be a top player, and it was my job to mark him. Tom would be in trap two in the toilets, you’d be outside, and he’d be straining away while telling you what Wallace was good at and what he was bad at.’
Steve Harrison worked under Walley when he first began his coaching career. ‘Get inside their heads, Harry,’ he used to say.
‘He taught me the ins and outs of individual coaching,’ says Harrison. ‘One to one, there’s no embarrassment, not like there is in a group, so you can talk to them about every aspect of their game and their life too. Tom taught me how important it was to get to know each player and how to deal with people individually. You had to figure out what works for each person. You have to simplify things for some people, come up with something they can understand. You might come up with something to teach a defender how to face up to their opponent by saying “Don’t let them see the number on your shirt.” It sounds simple but it gets the idea across very easily that you want them to face up to their opponent and not get turned.
‘Tom was fantastic at things like that. But he used to strike the fear of God into them too. You couldn’t get away with the language he used these days but that’s how it was then and I don’t think anyone that went through Tom’s system thought they’d had a rough deal.
‘Sometimes he used to get his words out wrong, or mess up a phrase, and I had to warn the lads not to laugh at him. I remember him once saying to someone “Any more of this and I’ll knock your shoulders right off your head.” I was trying not to laugh. Another time we were all in the van and he was talking about this lad. “There’s this lad, 14 years old, he’ll play for England I tell you. He wants to come but it’s the mother, see. She wants him to go to Arsenal. She’s the eye in the ointment.” The lads were sniggering and I had to flash them a look to stop them from laughing because he’d lose it if they laughed.’
The players were taught the importance of structure and discipline by working with Walley, who kept an eye on them all the time. He knew they were young lads of 16 and 17 and that there were other things in life to divert their attention. Girls and booze. ‘I’d ring them up on a Friday night and I’d want to speak to them, to make sure they were in by 10pm,’ Walley says. ‘I said to their parents and their landladies “Look, you work with me, not them. If they’re out, I need to know. If they’re in, I want to speak to them and then I’m happy.”’ As John Ward says: ‘The parents were on Tom’s side. He could have their lad in a head lock and they’d say “That’s the way, Tom, you tell him.”’
Sometimes, before a match day, he’d have half the youth team staying in bunk beds in the spare room at his house. One night Colin Hull was in the bunk above Jimmy Gilligan and it collapsed. Thinking the roof had just caved in, Walley rushed upstairs. ‘He opened the door, saw me lying underneath Colin and half the bed, laughed, shut the door and left us to get on with it,’ says Gilligan.
‘I never saw him play but I can imagine exactly how he played,’ says David Bardsley, who joined Watford from Blackpool and didn’t come through Walley’s youth system but still learned from his coaching. ‘I bet he was tough, completely uncompromising, hard working, and a leader of men. I saw him recently and he’s never changed. The best people never change.’
Underneath the tough exterior, Walley was a softie, though, and nothing choked him more than having to let a player go. He remembered the cold sting of rejection he’d had at Sheffield Wednesday and knew it was the worst feeling in the world. ‘Every now and then you had to tell them they didn’t quite have that something extra,’ he says. ‘You couldn’t promise everyone a place. That was the hardest thing about the job. You didn’t want to let them go. You had given everything to them and most the time they’d given everything back but it hadn’t worked out and they reached the end of the road. That was hard, that. You felt like you’d failed the lad because no boy goes into football thinking they’re not going to make the grade. Whenever I let someone go I tried to fix them up with another club and I used to say “Now, you go and prove me wrong, boyo. You get out there and prove me wrong and make it in this game.” Some of them did and they came back and showed me and I was delighted that they had.’
***
Within a couple of years, Watford had a youth team to be proud of, consistently finishing near the top of the South East Counties League. The youth programme cost £70,000 a year to run but it was more than paying for itself because players were beginning to roll off the production line and into the first team able to play a big part in the club’s success. It saved the club a fortune in transfer fees.
Other clubs had noticed the quiet revolution at Watford too. As the first team rose through the divisions and stood on the verge of the first division, the club had a youth system to match the best in the country. In February 1981, Bill Nicholson, the legendary double-winning Tottenham Hotspur manager recommended Walley to his old club. ‘I told Graham I had to go and see Spurs but I had promised the parents I’d be here a few years,’ says Walley, explaining why he opted to stay put. ‘I can’t let people down. I put my lads above going to Tottenham. The parents had committed themselves and their lads to me, so I couldn’t go back on that. I had to stay and see it through with the boys I had convinced to come to Watford instead of Tottenham and the other big clubs.’ It was a strong tug at the heart-strings, though because Walley had supported Tottenham as a boy and his brother had played for them.
In 1982, Walley’s boys beat Manchester United in the final of the FA Youth Cup, the most prestigious competition in the country. It was official. Watford had the best youth team in the country. In the semi-final, Watford led Wolves 2-1 after the first leg but were bracing themselves for a tough game. On the day of the match, the players were waiting at Vicarage Road for the coach to arrive to take them to the Midlands when Walley got a call to say the match had been called off. So he told them to get changed into their kit and had them running round the pitch and up the terraces instead. There was no such thing as an afternoon off. Then another call came through. ‘Stop, stop, stop,’ Walley hollered. ‘The game’s back on.’ Watford hammered their opponents 5-1 that night.
Winning the youth cup was not the accolade Walley wanted, though. He never lost sight of his main goal, which was to produce players fit for the first team. ‘Some youth coaches thought they were football managers,’ says John Ward, who was later to become Watford’s reserve team manager and worked closely with Walley on the coaching staff. ‘They wanted to build the best team they could and didn’t like it when their players were called up for the reserves. Tom wasn’t like that. He wanted his youth team to win matches but he wanted to develop the players and see them move on. If one of my players got called up to the first team, I’d pick Tom’s best players to fill in. He saw that as an opportunity to test some more youngsters.’
Walley’s contribution to the club was huge. He ensured that the players the youth system developed fitted the Taylor mould and played the way the manager wanted them to. ‘He blows you away, does Tom,’ says Taylor. ‘I was the manager but I could not have achieved half of what I did without certain key people around me and Tom was one of them. I feel so fortunate that I spotted something in Tom when I first arrived because the easy thing would have been to shake his hand and let him go. I told him that if he could open the door every year and throw a player in to me, that’d be great. Well, for a number of years, he threw two or three players in every year. The names are well known by Watford supporters – Nigel Callaghan, Kenny Jackett, Steve Terry, Nigel Gibbs, Worrell Sterling... we played in Europe with half a youth team...’
But that is another story...
Next time: Graham Taylor’s style of play begins to attract attention in the media. But it sparked a question: What’s the difference between a long ball and a long pass?
Enjoy the Game, the story of Watford Football Club in the 1980s was written by Lionel Birnie and published as a hardback book in 2010. The audio series was recorded by Colin Mace and produced by Jon Moonie.