The monkey chants, the bananas and Cyrille Regis’s unending courage

Them was rotten days, all right, and many of the younger fans who stand in applause in remembrance of Cyrille Regis across England’s football grounds this weekend will probably have little idea of just how bad it was.

Regis's sudden death this week, at the age of 59, switched the spotlight on to those days in English soccer that seem more vivid and lunatic the further they recede in time. In a terrific radio interview with the Birmingham channel Unity FM Regis pointed out that over two decades as a professional footballer he had experienced racist abuse from fellow professionals just twice. But from the stands and terraces came a torrent of hyperhatred week in and week out.

He listed the cities and grounds where it was particularly keen – Millwall, Newcastle, Leeds, Birmingham, Chelsea – and remembered the intensity of the vitriol as “extraordinary” and “beyond the pale”. And then he said: “Not just one or two people. I’m talking 5,000 to 10,000 people shouting racist abuse at us. We used to get thrown bananas on the pitch, monkey chants, all sorts of derogatory terms.”

Ron Atkinson quickly dubbed his three black footballers the Three Degrees. 'The moniker stuck. What can you say?'

Try to imagine what that must have felt like and what it must have taken in moral courage and stamina to go out and not just face that hostile energy and hatred but also have the grace and concentration to then play 90 minutes of top-flight football. The referee could do nothing. Team-mates could do nothing. It came with being black and in England at that time.

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West Bromwich Albion’s recruitment of three black players in the late 1970s was accidental: first Ronnie Allen, then chief scout at the club, was smitten with the talent of Laurie Cunningham. Then he spotted Regis, on his way to life as an electrician, banging home goals for non-league Hayes. When Ron Atkinson replaced Allen as manager he brought Brendon Batson with him – and quickly dubbed his three black footballers the Three Degrees. “Typical Ron. Sharp witted and very intelligent,” Regis said agreeably at a function a few years ago. “The moniker stuck. What can you say?”

The tag seems dated now. But the presence of three black footballers on one team was, as Regis says, radical. It must have been provocative to the point of being incendiary. In the late 1970s English soccer was about to descend into a nightmarish decade of hooliganism and instinctive racism that eventually led to the sweeping reforms through which the league was gradually reinvented as one of the most popular and lucrative professional competitions in world sport.

When Regis came through, those poisons were regarded as a problem with football. But what happened on the field was largely fine and sometimes brilliant. The darkness that rained down on Regis and his team-mates from the terraces had to do with deep-rooted racist tension and bitterness released from the anonymity of the gang. WBA’s three black players made for easy targets, as did Viv Anderson at Nottingham Forest.

Brendon Batson remembers that, after leaving the Hawthorns, his or Regis's jacket would usually be smeared with the spit of visiting supporters

In Paul Rees's book The Three Degrees Brendon Batson remembers having to make a dash on Saturdays from the players' car park at a nearby school to the Hawthorns, after which his or Regis's jacket would usually be smeared with the spit of visiting supporters. It was, he said, a sign of the times. Indeed.

Regis’s death this week made it clear that he has for years been a hugely important figure in the imaginations of young black men who have made it in the English game. His legacy has travelled through two generations of footballers. But it is surely impossible to fully gauge the positive influence they made on English society in general.

It must have been trippy for the WBA home crowd of 1978, almost exclusively white and male, with well-defined ideas about England, to suddenly find themselves thrilled by three emigrant Englishmen. But they became, and remain, folk heroes at the club.

Regis was born in French Guiana in 1958, just a year after Harold Macmillan, the British prime minister, told the people: “You’ve never had it so good.” Regis’s family arrived in England in 1963, Philip Larkin’s lightning-rod year. It’s clear, when you consider Regis’s experience, that two Englands were steaming along just then: the Swinging Sixties country of pop-cultural memory and the one that was struggling to integrate Commonwealth immigrants into its old industrial cities, of whom Regis was just one, doing his apprenticeship as an electrician when he caught Allen’s eye.

So what can't ever be fully measured is just how important Regis, Cunningham, Batson and Anderson were to the thousands of black youngsters who watched them on Match of the Day in the 1970s and 1980s. And Regis was a centre forward, the revered position in England, shaped by Nat Lofthouse and Bobby Charlton.

It just so happened that all four were cool out and excellent communicators: when Johann Cruyff was hoping to bring Regis from Coventry to Ajax, in the 1980s, he pegged him as “a physically strong attacker with charisma”. Anderson became the first black player to win an England senior cap, in 1978, provoking even more nativist hatred. Regis was selected for England just five times – a desultory return for such a long and illustrious club career. But it helped to break the barrier: John Barnes won the first of 79 caps in 1984, when he scored a famous goal in the Maracanã against Brazil and was abused by National Front members on the plane for his efforts.

And, gradually, black players appearing in club or England colours became more common and, eventually, unremarkable.

It is ironic that England's football grounds are now among the very few places where racist behaviour is met with zero tolerance

The startlingly white profile of managers in English football – just five black, Asian or ethnic minorities of 92 available positions – is rightly held up as evidence of the fact that soccer has further to travel before it achieves racial equality. Yet it is ironic, in the era of Brexit, that, some 40 years after Regis’s breakout season, England’s football grounds are now among the very few places where racist behaviour is met with zero tolerance.

So this weekend the applause will ring out in those the same football grounds where so many fans were reduced to rage and hatred because Regis had different colour skin. They are older now, of course, those men who chanted and cursed, easing into the grandparents’ role, and you can bet that many, but not all, are quietly ashamed of what they once were on those terraces.

With luck Cyrille Regis knew how much he meant and to how many. But it is time for the Football Association to fully honour his place in a small and hugely significant group of footballers whose importance and contribution to the game far transcend mere goals and caps and conventional glory.