Ally Brown, Mick Martin, Bryan Robson in China.

By Dave Bowler

The world has changed very swiftly these last 30 years. The end of the Cold War, the demolition of the Berlin Wall and the collapse of the communist states, globalisation, the internet, all these things have served to open up the world, such that, perhaps North Korea and the most inhospitable corners of jungles, deserts and forests aside, nowhere on the globe is a complete mystery to us any longer.

In 1978 however, not only was there the Iron Curtain to contend with but a Bamboo one too. China was a greater mystery still, more remote than the USSR, less welcoming to any foreign visitor, less tolerant of any dissenting voices. This was not the same China that just over a year ago played host to the Olympic Games.

President Nixon and Prime Minister Heath had both ventured to China on diplomatic missions in the early 1970s but as ever, sport was on the agenda as a political weapon. The England team had bee scheduled to go out there in the summer of 1978 to play some games but after the failure to qualify for the World Cup in Argentina, that was shelved.

Ally Robertson and other players.

FA Committee man Sir Bert Millichip was also the Chairman of West Bromwich Albion at the time and so his club stepped into the breach and jetted off to China in May 1978 in perhaps the most unusual club tour there has ever been. So trendsetting was the trip that not only did the nation’s press get on the junket with them, but the BBC followed them too, the prestigious “The World About us” filing a full scale, hour long documentary about the jaunt. This was some coup in the days when “The World About Us” was second only to “Panorama” in the documentary stakes, and devoting an hour of prime time television to a football tour in the days of just three channels was unheard of.

When the Beeb returned, they and the show’s presenter Julian Pettifer had come back with some television gold in the form of “Albion In The Orient”, a real moment in time piece of film making that not only captured a look at life in a country that would soon change forever, but also a look at a profession that was just about to be transformed.

The Albion players of the time were doing pretty well. FA Cup semi-finalists a month earlier, with the “Three Degrees” of Brendon Batson, Cyrille Regis and Laurie Cunningham making waves among the first group of black players to make an impact on the English game, and with Ron Atkinson as manager, they were a group that was suddenly in the limelight. Yet they were barely removed from the supporters who idolised them. The still lived in the local community, would have a pint where the supporters drank and while their earnings were better than average, they were still nothing special. There were few airs and graces about them, no sense that they should be kept apart from the rest of us, no star trips or tantrums. They were a bunch of 20-something, ordinary working class blokes. Which perhaps did not make them best suited to a trip of cultural significance.

Bryan Robson on a China tour.

Off camera, Irish international Mick Martin was so bored that he spent he trip entertaining the other players by reading out elaborate suicide notes that he was composing to send to his wife. A diplomatic incident was narrowly averted when an impromptu cricket match in their hotel grounds was halted by one side running up a white flag in surrender, apparently a horrible insult in China. And Bert Millichip had to find a swift change of clothes when, in opening a door, he upset a bucket of water over himself, the contents having been meant for one of the other players.

On screen, things were watered down, but the same antipathy prevailed. Bryan Robson, then just a pre-England youngster complained that the previous year, the team had gone to Alicante, which had been a lot more fun because he liked sunbathing. Confronted by huge banquets, most of the Albion players scurried off to the table of English food, scorning the local nosh. Nowadays, it looks insensitive, but back in 1978, before we became blasé about foreign travel and other cultures, that insularity was simply an example of what each and every one of us would have done.

Elder statesman Bertie Mee, on the trip as an FA representative, bemoaned the fact that few players went on the cultural excursions that had been set up for them, preferring instead to stay at the hotels. In their defence, this was the era of hardcore communist China where the players had no freedom to move around on their own and felt hemmed in by the situation. Many of the players on the trip have subsequently said that it was the worst they ever went on, but now, as 50-somethings, they wish they could go and do it again. Such is the way that youth is wasted on the young, as was the value of the experience.

As it is, the film is best remembered for one quote from midfielder John Trewick on the one trip that everyone went on – a visit to the Great Wall, Ron Atkinson later suggesting that, “I’ve bent free-kicks round bigger walls than this!” As part of a longer interview where Trewick talked about the impressive scale of it all, one quote was used. “You’ve seen one wall, you’ve seen them all”. So if you want to know where the glorious art of footballers being stitched up started, and why they now prefer to say nothing, it’s down to “The World About Us”.

That aside, it’s a truly fascinating film, both for its glimpses of sportsmen abroad, of communist China and for a world, both western and eastern, that’s long since disappeared forever. We’re all the same now. Kind of.

Ron Atkinson on The Wall in China.