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As
football becomes an ever more businesslike game, the care that’s
taken of the players becomes increasingly complex, both in terms
of their training, their dietary habits and, in particular, the
way in which they’re rehabilitated after injury.
But
it wasn’t always that way for even in the comparatively recent
past, the way in which a footballer’s health was cared for
was still rooted in the Dark Ages.
One player who recalls those days very well is Tony Brown, record
goalscorer and appearance maker at West Bromwich Albion. 279 goals
over 700 games in a career that started in 1963 and went through
to 1981, taking in an England cap, winner’s medals in both
FA Cup and League Cup, relegation and promotion and forays into
European competition.
“Bomber”, as he was known because of the ferocity of his
shot, saw plenty of changes, and, listening to him now, it’s
amazing he came through it all.
Even
so, like most players of his era, he still bears the scars which
include a couple of hip replacements, continuing back trouble and
an ankle that’s the size of a grapefruit. These are wounds
that today’s players will largely escape, something he’s
grateful for.
“The way the medical side has changed is phenomenal with a
load of staff, doctors, masseurs, physios, conditioning coaches,
dieticians, the lot. Back when I started, we just had the one to
cover everybody, the whole squad, youth players, the lot, and then
he worked at Warwickshire with the cricketers in the summer.
He
had this little treatment room, about seven feet by seven feet,
one bed in there, one heat lamp, a heat pad, and if you had a knock,
you just queued up outside, waiting to see him. But there was nothing
sophisticated about the treatment you got because the technology
wasn’t there to use.
“Basically, if you ever got yourself injured, if you were struggling
for Saturday with a bad ankle or something, what they’d do
is take you down the hospital on a Friday morning, get an injection
in it, strap it up Saturday afternoon and stick you out on the pitch.
That was it.
They more or less ordered you out to play and right through my career,
not just me, but every player, a lot of the time you’d be playing
when you were nowhere near fit. You’d play and when you came
off at the finish, after an hour, you’d just stiffen up and
you couldn’t work, literally. You had that many injections
you were like a pin cushion. Whatever you had, ankles, knees, shoulder,
back, it was stick the needle in, strap it up.
“I remember a game against Sheffield Wednesday at The Hawthorns
and in the week leading up to it, I’d turned my ankle over.
It came up like a balloon. I had a day of treatment on it then on
the Friday morning I went down the hospital, had a cortisone injection
on it. It was still blown right up, I could hardly get my boot on,
but come three o’clock on Saturday, I was on the pitch.
I hobbled round for 90 minutes, played through agony, and to this
day, the one ankle is still twice the size of the other one. And
you couldn’t just give it 20 minutes and come off if you couldn’t
carry on because there was only one substitute allowed then, so
you just had to get through it – there weren’t any subs
allowed at all when I first started playing.
“Players wouldn’t put up with that now, and rightly so.
There again, back then, you wanted to play not just because you
loved the game – and I’m sure that hasn’t changed
– but because half your money was made up in appearance money.
The wages were nothing like they are today, so if you missed the
game, you really missed that money and because we weren’t paid
the same kind of money there is in the game, you really needed it.
So a lot of times you’d go out knowing you were injured, just
to make sure you got paid! But like lads who play when they’re
injured now, you also wanted to be out there just to make sure you
kept your place in the team.
“I’m sure pretty well all the lads who play today are
carrying some kind of knock or whatever because it’s an old
saying in football that if you only played when you were 100% fit,
you’d probably play three games a season, and they’d all
be in August! I think the medical people are more aware of injuries
now and they won’t let players play in certain situations because
they don’t want to make something worse where when I played,
they perhaps didn’t know as much, and the squads were a lot
smaller as well – most first team squads had 15 or 16 players,
so you pretty much had to get out there.
“On top of that, you were frightened to death of the manager,
all the time, every player. You didn’t dare tell them you were
injured! We heard stories about Bill Shankly for instance, and about
how if you were injured, he wouldn’t even acknowledge your
existence because you were no good to him. If you were walking down
the corridor and he
was walking the other way, he’d blank you!
It
was the same sort of thing with Jimmy Hagan who was manager when
we won the League Cup by beating West Ham, Moore, Peters, Hurst
and all in 1966. Players were terrified of him. If you said you
weren’t going to be fit for Saturday, he’d come and give
you your fitness test!
Not the physio, the medical man. He would do it! He took some convincing
not to play you, I can promise you that.
“I had a bad shoulder one time and he gave me the test at Spring
Road on Friday morning. He had me doing a shoulder charge for about
10 minutes non-stop, against him. It was killing me, I thought my
shoulder had come out. At the end of it, he said, “Nothing
wrong with you. You’ll be alright for tomorrow!” Nowadays,
if a player’s struggling, they’ll get everybody on the
case, the doctor, the physio, they’ll all be assessing your
fitness, whether you can stand up to the game.
“What they do much better now is prevention as well. Warm ups
were pretty much a token gesture before a game. We’d come out
about half an hour before kick-off, have a few shots at the ‘keeper,
a couple of sprints on your own, have a chat amongst yourselves,
then go back in. Later on, when Johnny Giles came to the Albion
as player manager, things got more structured because he brought
in the ideas that Don Revie had used at Leeds. Leeds had had a proper
warm up routine on the pitch, proper exercises and so on, and John
brought that in here.
We did that for a spell, but it dropped off again after he left
and the last couple
of years I was here, a lot of us just had a hot soak in the big
bath in the dressing room. We had twenty minutes in the bath, did
your stretches in there and that worked really well because I don’t
think I had any muscle strains once we started doing that, I felt
that I was very supple after that, and it just seemed to suit us.
It’s a lot more complicated now, but sometimes I watch them
running around and I think they’ll be knackered before the
game’s even started! That’s how far fitness and preparation
has moved on.
“The pace of the game has moved on so much that players have
to be more athletic now or they won’t be able to cope. The
pitches are better, the equipment’s better, the training’s
better so if you’re not an athlete, forget it. But even when
I played, we had some wonderful athletes, players like Colin Bell
at Manchester City who was outstanding, and there was no bigger
athlete in the game than Bryan Robson, but there weren’t so
many of them as there are now.
The demands now mean that depending on your position, you’ve
got to be like an Olympic sprinter or a marathon runner, you have
to have certain standards of pace and stamina. A few still get by,
but it’s fewer and fewer now.
“Nowadays, players know that even in the close season, they
need to keep on top of fitness. There aren’t the players carrying
a bit of weight now like there used to be. Some of them came back
in all shapes and sizes for pre-season training but now they have
a weight target and all that kind of thing. We used to get a letter
telling us when to report for the start of pre-season, and at the
bottom it would tell you to make sure you brought a pair of hard
wearing, heavy shoes with you.
That was what you ran in for the first week, your ordinary shoes,
up and down the terracing for hours. I got a few injuries doing
that, I did my Achilles tendon doing that, when Don Howe was our
manager, running up the terracing, carrying another player on your
back! I was out for six months with that, it just gave way and that
was a terrible injury.”
“When I came to the Albion as a kid, I lived in digs –
I’m from Mamchester originally, so I was here as a 16 year
old. I lived just over the road from the ground, and on my way in,
I’d stop and get a cup of tea at the café by the side
of the ground.
It was run by Teddy Sandford who’d been in Albion’s team
when they won the FA Cup in 1931. He was in a bad way, he couldn’t
walk, he was on crutches.
He
had arthritis in the hips, which is the problem I had later in my
life, which is ironic really. In his day they didn’t have artificial
hips like they do now, and he was just scrambling about on these
crutches, it was terrible to see. Thankfully the medical advances
since then meant I’ve been able to have my hips done otherwise
I’d have been in the same state as him.
“But the treatment you got as a player can’t have been
much different in 1966 from what it was in 1936. They had a wax
bath at the time, they used it for your feet or if you were having
trouble with your ankle.
We called it the chip fryer, it was like something you’d put
your chips in! It used to feel like it was about 200 degrees hot
in there – you’d put your foot in it and it was scalding.
The physio would force your foot in it but the damage it must have
done is unbelievable. They still had it even when I left. When you
sit and think about it, it’s terrifying.
“In the late ‘60s, one of our youngsters, Ally Robertson,
went to see the physio because his leg was killing him, he was having
a real problem with his shin, he couldn’t bear the pain, it
was agony. So the physio said, “Let’s test it out. Put
your weight on it and jump up and down on the one leg.” Ally
started hopping on this leg and suddenly, there was this almighty
crack, and his leg just went underneath him. They rushed him up
to the hospital and they set to work on him, but that was the medical
knowledge we had in those days.
“You were scared to death of getting injured. If you got the
wrong sort of injury, you could be in real trouble, things that
today would be treated with no trouble at all. If you had something
like a cartilage problem then, people used to reckon you were finished,
and even if you came back, it took ages to get fit and it’s
not often that you were the same player again.
If I’m honest, some players were butchered by operations, but
in fairness to the medical people, you didn’t have keyhole
surgery like now, that wasn’t around at the time. They had
to open your knee up and that takes some recovering from if you’re
a footballer who puts so much strain on the knees.
“I slipped a disc doing weights down at our training ground
and that was the longest spell I had out. I finished up down at
the local hospital three times a week, having traction.
It was like going on the rack, being tortured! They’d put you
in a brace, your legs and your upper body and the machine had a
wheel on it. They turned the wheel and virtually stretched you and
I had that three times a week, it was horrendous. That thing must
be in a museum now!
“The kind of injuries that you get are different now as well.
Nowadays it’s more from the pace of the game, strains and twists,
where back in the ‘60s, a lot more of it was contact injuries
after Norman Hunter or Ron Harris had kicked you six feet up in
the air, when the tackle from behind was perfectly acceptable, defenders
could come and take everything, go through you, over the top of
you and you got virtually no protection from referees.
I think the crowd got a lot of excitement from that but the way
that has been outlawed has been good for football because it means
the skilful players can flourish a bit more, though probably the
tackles are made at a faster pace now than before.
“You do still get horrible injuries and that won’t change
because it is a contact sport. But unless a player is very unfortunate,
they will more often than not be able to come back from them these
days. When I played, a broken leg meant at least a year out and
probably you were ever going to be the same again, but you look
at that terrible injury Cisse had for Liverpool last year, it looked
horrific, yet he was back inside six months like nothing had happened.
If that had happened to him in 1964 instead of 2004, he’d have
probably never walked again, never mind not played again. He’d
have had a plaster cast from the top of his leg down and been in
that for months, and just waited for nature to take its course.
I don’t know exactly how they treated Cisse, but it certainly
worked wonders for him.
“Things started to move on in the 1970s. In 1971, just after
Arsenal did the double, their coach, Don Howe, came to Albion as
manager and he brought George Wright, the physio, with him - that
was when it really began to get more professional here, they introduced
ideas that are still used now. George upped the ante a hundredfold.
He had all the say on whether you were fit or not, not the manager.
If he thought you could stand up to a game, he’d pass you fit,
but if he thought you’d struggle, then he’d tell the gaffer
not to pick you.
The treatment was very hands on, not relying on injections so much.
If you were injured, George would treat you but he’d work you
at the same time. If you had a bad ankle, he wouldn’t just
let you rest, he’d work your upper body instead to keep that
in condition while you were resting your ankle.
That was unheard of. In my early days, if you were injured badly
enough that you couldn’t train with the rest of the lads, you
didn’t do anything, they’d just treat your injury, you’d
sit there reading the paper while they put some heat on your ankle
or whatever, and then it was rest, rest, rest, nothing other than
that.
“George was bang up to date with modern methods, everything
was totally professional where it had probably been a bit lackadaisical
before that. All we ever had in my early days was heat, a machine
that looked like a Dalek and they’d use that to apply heat
to the muscle or whatever, and then you rested.
If it had been something where you were laid up for a month say,
by the time you got back and could start working the injured part
again, you were out of condition and you had to work all your body
to get fit again. Under George, there was less of that because he’d
kept the rest of you in shape.
Apart from the obvious reasons, once George came in, you didn’t
want to be injured because he worked you harder than when you were
training normally, you were back every afternoon for long periods,
having treatment, doing your rehab.
“Diet was something that changed a lot over time as well. Your
pre-match meal when I played was always steak, without fail, maybe
baked beans and toast as well, but you always had steak.
Things improved as it went on and by the late 1960s, you got a bit
of variety – you could have chicken or steak! I hate to think
how much toast you’d have as well, loads of it, but now of
course, people have told us that that’s the last kind of thing
you want to be eating.
Don Howe was the first to bring any attention to your diet when
he came in. He got shot of the steaks, he had us eating corn flakes,
fruit salad, pasta. And we got relegated, so it worked a treat!
I had my problems with Don, that’s well documented, but he
was ahead of his time in a lot of the things he did, probably too
much so, tried to do too much too quickly and we couldn’t handle
all the different things he wanted us doing. Nowadays, it’s
part of the players’ lives. It’s moved on light years.”
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