Playing for Uncle Sam by David Tossell

Author:David Tossell
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub
Publisher: Mainstream Publishing
Published: 2012-02-21T04:30:00+00:00

13. New Kids on the Block

If you had plotted the well-being of the NASL like a hospital patient’s graph, the start of the 1978 season would mark its peak of health. Coming off a memorable and emotional climax to the previous season, the new campaign saw the realisation of Phil Woosnam’s dream of reaching 24 teams. ‘That was as far as we wanted to go with expansion,’ he says. ‘If other cities wanted to come in, they would protect us in case we were losing a city. We didn’t need any more. It was a great satisfaction to me to achieve that number but credit goes to others as well.’

The final foundations for Woosnam’s 24-team tower had been the successful 1977 season. Driven by the Cosmos and Pelé, NASL attendance had increased by 33 per cent to roughly 13,000 per game, with an average of more than 29,000 for the play-offs. Seven games were televised on the TVS syndicated network, the most soccer seen on US screens for almost a decade.

There had, as usual, been changes at the beginning of the 1977 season, with the Boston and Philadelphia franchises going into receivership and several other teams moving. As well as Miami’s switch to Fort Lauderdale, San Diego went to Las Vegas, Hartford ventured to New Haven to become the Connecticut Bi-Centennials, and, most intriguingly, San Antonio became Team Hawaii under Austrian coach Hubert Vogelsinger. Among Hawaii’s new acquisitions had been Brian Tinnion, who had been told he had no future by Cosmos coach Gordon Bradley when the club made plans to sign Yugoslav forward Jadranko Topic.

In Hawaii, Tinnion discovered a franchise doomed to failure. ‘For our second game we were at home to New York and only drew a few thousand. Everyone else was getting 30,000 for games against the Cosmos. With all the travel we had to do as well, you could tell it wasn’t going to last.’ It was fun for a while, though. ‘Some of the single lads thought they had gone to heaven,’ Tinnion adds. ‘There were plenty of pitfalls in places like Hawaii.’

The San Jose Earthquakes welcomed an English player who revelled in the showbiz atmosphere of the NASL. Alan Birchenall had carved out a decent career as a forward at Sheffield United, Chelsea, Crystal Palace and Leicester, the final three of whom had all paid six figures for his services. Birchenall’s outlook on the game, and life, was that it should be approached wearing a smile. With his eye-catching shock of blond hair, ‘The Birch’ had been one of English football’s most colourful characters in the past decade, although injury had robbed him of his one chance of real glory in Chelsea’s 1970 FA Cup run and the missing ingredient of a Marsh or a Bowles had limited him to four England Under-23 caps.

Legendary for his one-liners and his penchant for belting out a tune in front of a band, Birchenall was the perfect showman for the US audience. ‘He should have been a damn comedian,’ says Earthquakes teammate Paul Child affectionately.

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