Old Baggies - WBA Former Players

One of the great joys of being a professional footballer is being part of a team, a squad that drives on together, shares the good and the bad and which, hopefully, creates a genuine atmosphere of family and camaraderie in the dressing room – it’s that environment as much as anything else which inspires players to keep on going well into their 30s, as the likes of Bob Taylor have proved in recent times.

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Equally frustrating however, is that if you are part of a team that’s struggling, that’s having a rough time of things, and which fails to achieve anything of real significance, the achievements which you post as an individual are often forgotten or overlooked as people dwell on the collective failure rather than the quality of the individual. That has been the lot of Don Goodman to a certain degree, for when people list the great Albion strikers down the years, Baggies fans try to blot out the final days of the late 1980s and early 1990s as the club reached its lowest ebb and memories conveniently skip from Regis to Taylor, missing out a spell when Don Goodman was the king of The Hawthorns, banging in goals at an incredible rate of knots, with a scoring record that matches both of those Albion icons.

In a career that took in 140 league starts and 18 sub appearances in the blue and white, Don notched 60 goals, or one every 2.6 games, while Cyrille’s figures are one every 2.9 and Bob’s one every 2.8. Which makes Don one of the best goalscorers we’ve ever had at this place, figures that are even more impressive when you consider that apart from one season, he was the spearhead of a side that was struggling to stay in the old Division Two and which eventually succumbed to the nightmare of Division Three football, this club’s nadir.

Sadly right from the outset, Don found himself at a club that was struggling to find its way back to former glories, as he recalls.

Photo from WBA Archive

“Ron Saunders was the manager who bought me for Albion, on deadline day in March 1987. Basically, he’d been under instruction to reduce the wage bill at the club and as I came in, Garth Crooks and one or two other boys had either left or were about to leave so he was changing the team around and I came in as a replacement for Garth. I was training that morning at Bradford City and I got dragged off the training ground to be told that the club had agreed a fee with Albion, £50,000, so if I was interested, I could get myself down to the Hawthorns and talk to the club. I jumped in the car and remember feeling very frightened all the way down! I didn’t have an agent in those days, and there I was, a 20 year old lad, ready to try and negotiate a contract with the infamous Ron Saunders, which was pretty scary. But we got there in the end, he pretty much told me what I could have!

“Everyone had the image of Ron as a daunting kind of bloke and that was certainly the impression I had going down there but I managed to have a really good working relationship with him, though people who’d played for him before at Aston Villa like Tony Morley and Andy Gray said that he’d lightened up a bit, he was nothing like the way he used to be there as regards the disciplinary side of things, so I can only imagine what he was like there! But he encouraged me and I’ll thank him forever for that, he was always asking me to stay behind after training and work on my weaknesses, work on my left foot, all sorts of things. I owe him a lot if for nothing else than giving me a chance because West Brom was the place really where I established myself as a footballer and got to grips with it, and began to believe I was going to have a career out of the game and have a real bash at it.

“Looking back, there probably was pressure and expectation on me to follow on from the likes of Cyrille Regis, but when you’re that age, you really don’t know any fear, you just get on. I’ve seen it later with lads that have come through when I’ve been the senior citizen, players like Robbie Keane, who still just plays that way to his credit. But I just went out there and just tried to give it my best shot which is all I’ve ever done since then as well. So I didn’t feel under too much pressure, and the lads were good in helping me through it to start with because I didn’t score for quite a few games before I got a couple to finish the season off, so it never really got to me. We got one or two decent results and that made it easier because it kept us out of the relegation picture which was vital, so nobody was getting on my back.

“Ron left the following season and that’s always a worry when the manager who bought you moves on because you never know if the new one is going to want you. I was sad to see Ron Saunders go because he’d been really good with me, but Ron Atkinson breezed into the place and he was superb, a real joy to work for. I only had a fairly short spell with him, but to this day, when I get asked which are the best managers I’ve worked for, I still like to give him a mention. Once I got to know him and Colin Addison it was great, they were a good combination, worked well together and gave me all the encouragement I needed and I enjoyed everything about going out and representing them. It was great fun, from the training ground to the games, it was a real education.

“And we had a lot of good experienced professionals about the club as well and that was brilliant as a youngster, absolutely brilliant. Andy Gray came in my second season, Derek Statham was there, Martyn Bennett was struggling with injury but made the odd appearance, I became great friends with Tony Morley, George Reilly was there as well, so there was an awful lot of experience in there which was ideal for the younger players like me, Carlton Palmer and one or two others, it helped bring us along – we’ve both had pretty decent careers, so something started us off the right way!

“Brian Talbot was playing in that team as well, I think it was Ron Atkinson who brought him in, and he made a big impact, gave us someone to play through in midfield, and he was someone who created lots of chances for me, put me in plenty of times and got me going. Then he took over as manager and we were flying for a while under him. I’ve seen it since where so many players go into management and they totally change, almost overnight, and they go totally overboard, they go mad to just establish themselves as some kind of authority figure, but Brian didn’t do that, certainly not to start with anyway. He just carried on, stayed exactly the way he had been as a player and he was a breath of fresh air, just one of the lads. Although he was in charge and organising everything, he behaved just the way he always had and he got the respect of the lads for that, we loved playing for him and consequently we went off on the best run of form that we ever had in my time at the club.

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“Stuart Pearson was our coach when Brian was there and he had a huge influence on me and even now, when I fill in surveys and things and get asked who was the biggest influence on your career, aside from my parents, I always say that Stuart was the biggest influence on my game. He carried on the process, kept me back after training, worked on me, worked in more detail than before because I was that bit older and better able to take it in and use it in games and really he changed me from a striker who would score once every four or five games to somebody who’d get a goal every other game.

“We were scoring goals all over the place, thumping teams week in week out and we sailed to the top of the league, competing up there with Chelsea and I’ll never forget that, going top of the Second Division as it was then, above Chelsea. It was the most prolific period of my time at Albion, and things were looking great and unfortunately it just tapered off after Christmas really. I think then was the time when the board could have taken stock and invested a little bit of cash and there was a rumour at the time that Brian Talbot had lined up David O’Leary and Niall Quinn because he knew them from his time at Arsenal, and we could have had them both for £450,000, an incredible bargain really, but it wasn’t to be, the board didn’t sanction it and we slipped away. I’m sure had we got those boys then, West Brom would have been in the top flight long before they finally got back there.”

Until recent times, that 1988/89 season was the last time we seriously threatened a return to the top flight as we destroyed all-comers with some bright, breezy, fast flowing football, taking 33 points out of 42 from October to the beginning of January, rattling in 34 goals in the process. Promotion looked a genuine possibility. And then came a third round FA Cup tie with Everton, which changed everything.

“The game was at The Hawthorns and we played really well and should have beaten them, deserved to win but they got an equaliser from a penalty and it finished 1-1, but the big problem was we lost Colin Anderson with a nasty injury. I’ve still got that game on video and I dig it out from time to time, my little boy has a look at it sometimes and can’t believe how skinny I used to be, how tight the shorts used to be!”

Goodman in particular had terrorised the Everton defence in that game and prior to the relay, all the talk coming from their camp was “Stop Goodman!” Which they did…

“I remember being crocked by one of the Everton lads up at Goodison after I’d given them a tough time in the first game at The Hawthorns and to be honest, it was a rascal tackle that did me up there, and it meant I was out with a bad ankle injury for a few weeks. History will show that that was where the season started to slide because we didn’t have the squad to handle those injuries.”

Albion began a stately descent down the table to end up in 9th spot, 27 points behind the division’s champions, Chelsea, the team we’d led on New Year’s Day. Rather than being a springboard for better days, Albion never recaptured that form again as defensively we began to fall apart. The Whyte – North partenrship which had been so solid the previous year began to creak and 1989/90 was a season best forgotten as the Baggies finished 20th, only three points safe of relegation, yet still boasting one of the best strikers in the division.

“I got 21 goals in 38 games, my best ever season, but we were leaking goals as well and the team couldn’t quite get it together and we finished not far away from getting relegated and it was a real shame. On paper we had a really strong side but like the cliché says, football’s not played on paper and we just didn’t click and I remember us consistently giving crazy goals away, but that paved the way for the next season which was just a nightmare, I got a calf injury to start the season off with and then I got a hamstring tear after I came back and I missed nearly two-thirds of the season, played 16 games and got 8 goals. It was frustrating, especially as the side was doing so badly and I couldn’t do anything about it. To this day, it’s the only time I’ve ever been relegated as a player so that was a really low time.

“I’ll never forget going to Bristol Rovers and sitting on the side there and not being able to do anything because I got injured in the game before it against Newcastle after I scored one of the best I ever got for West Brom, a free-kick from 20 yards, rifled into the top corner. I’d been in good form, scored in three successive games but I did my hamstring and missed it and to sit and watch this great proud club get relegated to the old Third Division was heartbreaking really, one of the worst days of my career, just the same as the Woking defeat a few months earlier, when again I had to sit and watch from the stands because of injury, powerless to do anything about it because I failed a fitness test on the morning of the game.”

With Albion in Division Three, financially things got ever tighter while for Don, the need to look after his own career meant that a parting of the ways was almost inevitable, the move coming when Sunderland made us an offer the bank wouldn’t refuse.

“When I left for Sunderland, the vibes coming from the boardroom just weren’t right, I just felt we’d had opportunities to go out, consolidate, improve the club, speculate to accumulate if you like, but you don’t know what goes on behind the scenes. Given the current climate, you look around and in hindsight, you think maybe they did the right thing after all. But at the time, as a player, it was frustrating, it’s a short career and you want success quickly.

“Overall, I look back on my time at The Hawthorns with real fondness and it was the place where I established myself as somebody able to get the ball in the net on a regular basis, a half decent player. It was a shame, I was on the way up as Albion were going the other way. It would have been interesting to have the chance to play alongside Bob Taylor, who knows what would have happened.

“But I loved playing there, met some good people who are still there now. Bernie McNally was the first Born Again Christian that I ever came across, which was even more unusual in football than it is now. When the boys used to go for one of our nights out, he wouldn’t touch a drink, but you couldn’t tell. I was sure he was taking something, he was just so bubbly! He was full of life, just joined in, a lovely bloke. Shakey was a great lad too and with the pair of them as midfielders, I forged great understandings with both of them and they knew the type of runs I’d make and they tried to put the ball in the right place for me. A lot of my goals in that later period at West Brom were created by those two. Nothing but praise for them and the club.”