Coton There To Be Shot At

An Autobiography
1. Auflage 2017
ISBN: 978-1-909245-61-7
Verlag: deCoubertin Books
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 0 - No protection

E-Book, Englisch, 250 Seiten

Tony Coton is considered as one of the best goalkeepers never to play for England. In There to be Shot At, he tells his extraordinary life story for the first time. Born in Tamworth, Coton overcame rejection at Aston Villa and Wolverhampton Wanderers to claim legendary status at three other clubs during a career in football that is now well into its fourth decade. Tough and uncompromising, Coton was regarded as one of the infamous 'Birmingham Six' group during his time as the number 1 at the club he supported as a boy, Birmingham City. He joined Watford during Elton John's tenure as chairman, where his relationship with future England manager Graham Taylor bloomed. Coton, though, would not represent his country and here, he explains why. Six tumultuous years at Manchester City ended when he moved to fiercest rivals Manchester United, where he later was appointed as Sir Alex Ferguson's first goalkeeping coach during the most successful period in the club's entire history. A reflective man with strong views on the direction of modern football, Coton deals with the minutiæ of goalkeeping: what it takes to succeed, how to improve - whether, as commentators say, you really need to be mad to be one.

Born in Tamworth, Tony Coton played more than 500 games during a 16-year goalkeeping career with Birmingham City, Hereford United, Watford, Manchester City, Manchester United and Sunderland. After retiring in 1997 with a broken leg he joined Sunderland as a reserve-team manager, before moving to Manchester United a year later to become their first full-time goalkeeping coach. He has since worked as a scout for numerous clubs and served briefly as assistant manager to great friend, Mick Harford at QPR. He is now head of recruitment at Aston Villa.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Coton, Tony

Leseproben

1

GILLWAY BOYS, WE ARE HERE

IT’S FAIR TO SAY THAT THE HALCYON DAYS OF MY HOME TOWN have long since passed. Tamworth, situated fifteen miles north-east of Birmingham, was once the seat of power from which Anglo-Saxon royalty ruled the kingdom of Mercia. The ancient castle, founded by Ethelflaed – the eldest daughter of Alfred the Great, no less – and later rebuilt by the Normans is a proud monument to its historic past, and the stone motte-and-bailey seemed to be a constant reminder when I was growing up that I had probably missed out on all the action.

Me and the mates I grew up with would have loved the odd bit of pillage and plunder at weekends. Especially during the summer months, when the football season had ended and we had to make do with games of cricket and a bit of apple scrumping for our entertainment. I would eventually go into battle for the Mercian – the pub for which I started playing against the hard-drinking, hard-as-nails men of the local Sunday league when I was an impressionable fourteen-year-old with an unerring aptitude for growing pimples rather than quaffing pints. Tamworth was once home to the factory that produced the three-wheeled Reliant cars made famous by the television comedy series Only Fools and Horses. Down the years, I’ve had more than a few escapades that Del Boy and Rodney would have been proud of – and one or two more that wouldn’t have been suitable for family viewing. In fact, I am pretty sure that it was only football that prevented me from having a taste of what life was like in another legendary British sitcom: Porridge.

A few of my pals – and more than fifty years later, those same lads I grew up with on the Gillway council estate are still my muckers – spent some time behind bars. And, looking back, I can see that I often seemed to be on the same rocky route to some remand centre or young offenders’ institution. In fact, not long after I had made a £300,000 move from Birmingham City to Watford in 1984, my solicitor was so sure I was about to be sent down for ABH that when it came to sentencing, he advised me to wear a cheap suit and to leave any jewellery at home. There but for the grace of God and all that.

Don’t get me wrong, Gillway wasn’t an inner-city sinkhole or a no-go area for the police – and still isn’t. Tamworth is close enough to Birmingham that your football allegiance is either Blues, Villa or West Brom, and my recollection of it is as a friendly, close-knit community where the people looked after each other.

None of us were bad lads. But the one trait I have in common with the friends I made is that I’ve never been able to turn the other cheek. I’ve also always believed that if a mate needs your help, then a true friend gives it unconditionally. For better or worse, that’s who I am.

MY CHILDHOOD WASN’T LAVISHED WITH THE FINER THINGS IN life – in fact, the first time I ate a fillet steak was when I ordered it for my pre-match meal before I made my First Division debut for Birmingham as a nineteen-year-old at Christmastime 1980. But I was blessed in so many other ways. As the youngest of three children born to William and Gladys, I had a childhood that was packed with love.

When I came into the world on Friday, 19 May 1961, Gladys and Bill already had a son, Paul, and a daughter, Carol. There are thirteen years between my brother and me and I’m ten years younger than my sister, so you could say I was a surprise arrival. Dad was a lorry driver, the hardest-working man I have ever known, and my hero. In my mind, he is sat on the shoulders of Pat Jennings and Muhammad Ali like a winning FA Cup Final captain being carried around Wembley. I spent most of my life trying to make my Dad proud. Not because he was one of those overbearing parents you see stood on the touchlines of park pitches shouting at their shell-shocked sons to ‘get stuck in’. But because he gave me nothing but his total support. I can’t remember a day when I didn’t speak to him up until his sudden death in 1997.

Mum’s life revolved around taking care of the family. Some would call it old-fashioned these days, but she got job satisfaction. Mum just loved being Mum. Following my unexpected arrival, it became clear that the house my parents rented at 21 Hawthorn Avenue wasn’t quite big enough to accommodate the growing Coton clan. My memories of my first home are dim and distant. I still wasn’t old enough to attend the local primary school at Flax Hill when we moved around the corner to a slightly bigger property at 45 Laburnum Avenue.

The first thing I noticed there, was that behind the cast-iron railings at the top of the back garden was a full-sized football pitch. In my formative years, that luscious piece of turf would become my field of dreams. Dad even cut a hole in the fence so that I could come and go at my leisure, and pretty soon I had become part of a gang of lads that would kick a ball about for hours on end, come rain or shine. Life was lived on the go. The only time I sat down was to eat my meals. We didn’t have luxuries like PlayStations, iPads or mobile phones to occupy us – and this meant we had much healthier and active lifestyles. Sport wasn’t a pastime; it was a way of life.

One of the tragedies of growing up in the twenty-first century is that kids don’t seem to be in love with sport enough to actually play themselves. They are happy to watch Messi and Ronaldo on the telly, but the closest they get to actually trying to be one of their heroes is when they turn on a games console. Too few of them want to play the real thing. They don’t seem to immerse themselves in football and other sports like my generation used to. So, as a consequence, they often become fixated with the concept of being a footballer and the wealth it brings rather than the game itself.

There was a dozen of us, all of a similar age. Ant Barlow, my next-door neighbour, is still a great friend, while Phil Rainsford, Paul Archer, Chris Betteridge and Lloyd Johnson were also part of the Laburnum crew. Chris Wilson, who is my cousin, Gav Mooney, Andy Miller and Martin Thompson, aka Tommo, are also lads I grew up with who I know I can trust with my life. Our options back then may seem limited in the eyes of youngsters today, but we were never bored. It was either football or cricket, hopping on our bikes or swimming at the outdoor baths.

We were also a group of boys all growing up together, so making our own entertainment inevitably got us into bits of bother. But we were hardly the Peaky Blinders. Our idea of a heist was sneaking into the local Corona factory, nicking a few bottles, and biking down to the Second World War bomb hole in Wigginton Park to drink it so fast that it felt like our bellies would burst. And, for those of you who aren’t of a certain age, I’m talking about the place where they produced dandelion & burdock and cream soda, not the Mexican brewery.

We did have one run-in with the law in our early teens when we commandeered a motor-bike for a few hours without the owner’s consent. I was fined £3 for my indiscretion, as well as being forced to pay 75p compensation. I also got an old-school telling-off from my Dad – and, despite his very best efforts to keep me on the straight and narrow, it wouldn’t be my last.

All I cared about from an early age were the three Fs – family, friends and football. I can’t remember a time when I didn’t want to be a footballer. My bedroom was a shrine to my favourite players, covered in posters torn from the weekly copies of Shoot! magazine that became my bible. My early years in junior football were split between playing in goal, as a centre-back and even on the left wing, but a pointer to where my future lay was that my boyhood idol was the Tottenham, Arsenal and Northern Ireland goalkeeping legend Pat Jennings. Many years later, I was lucky enough to meet Pat on a coaching course and found him to be a gentleman. He told me a tale or two about what life was like for a footballer in London during the swinging sixties. I’ll just say I was absolutely gobsmacked and leave it at that.

I have only ever asked for two autographs in my life and both are treasured mementoes up until this day. Perhaps it’s fitting that Pat and Muhammad Ali are my two sporting icons because I also earned a living using my hands. My career path was laid down at the age of eight when I decided it was time to get serious and Dad took me down for a trial with the local junior club, Gillway Boys, who played at Wigginton Park. I arrived to discover that the other players were all a year older than me so, in the age-old tradition, the little ‘un went in goal. I didn’t care. I was a weedy little kid who was so desperate for a game that I was willing to play anywhere. I just did what came naturally to me – in other words, I got stuck in and threw myself around so that I would be covered in mud. At the end of the game, Gillway’s manager, a lovely man called Peter French, came up to me and said: ‘Right, son, from now on you’re our goalkeeper.’ And so a star was born – at least in my mind. I had no doubts that this was my first step towards becoming a professional footballer.

ANOTHER GILLWAY BOY MADE THE GRADE BEFORE I DID. STEVE Fox was a few years older than me and, when he signed professional forms with Birmingham City and progressed from youth team to first team, he became a beacon of hope for...