Post by will on Mar 17, 2024 21:53:20 GMT
I was just trying to clear the desktop on my laptop, and I came across a piece I wrote shortly after Trev's passing. Somebody who knows Ex-Pat John was organising some sort of charity match between England supporters and the supporters of some country we were playing last autumn prior to the actual match. He wanted a piece about Trev from a Blues fan for the programme, and asked EPJ to do it. Despite being an English teacher in Thailand, EPJ thought he wasn't up to it, so he asked me. I don't know if the the piece was ever used, but I thought you lot might like to see what I wrote. So here it is.
TREVOR FRANCIS – ONE OF US
If you examine Birmingham City’s league positions between 1970 and 1979, you’d probably laugh at the suggestion that that particular era was the club’s biggest opportunity to break through into the big time of English football. A best finish of 10th in the First Division, only one other finish in the top half of the table, several close shaves with relegation and a couple of disappointing FA Cup semi-final defeats hardly tell the tale of a club on the brink of joining the elite. And yet …
For a couple of years the club had the fourth biggest fan base in the country with average home crowds higher than clubs like Leeds, Spurs and Chelsea, and a youth system that saw the likes of Bob Latchford and Kenny Burns beginning careers which would lead to international recognition. But most of all, we had Trevor Francis.
For a fan like me who became a teenager in 1970, seeing a player who was barely three years older than me playing for my team, and being lauded by the National Media as “Superboy” and “A Future Great”, it was mind-boggling. I, and the rest of the Blues fans at the time, we were used to searching the back pages for the smallest mentions of our team, and hoping for a Cup run so that we’d get on Match of the Day or Sportsnight with Coleman. Trev changed all of that, and while he was around, we had hope.
At the age of 16 years and 150 days he made his debut as a substitute in a 2nd Division match at Cardiff, and seven days later scored the first of his 133 goals for the club on his first start. After a handful of appearances he was wrapped in cotton wool for three months by manager Freddie Goodwin, but then the fun really started.
In his next 14 games he scored 15 goals, including the famous game at home to Bolton when he netted four times two months shy of his 17th birthday. The football world outside Birmingham sat up and began to take notice, especially when, in the next season, the Blues earned promotion with TF adding 12 goals to Latchford’s 23 and Bob Hatton’s 15; the Holy Trinity was born.
Still aged only 18, he was less prolific in his first couple of years at the top level, but that forward line pushed the club to its best league finish since 1956, and then avoided relegation (at the expense of Manchester Utd!) And here’s where you discover why the lad from Devon is held in even greater esteem in Brum than his Birmingham-born teammate Latchford. There were quite a few Blues fans at the time who preferred Latchford’s more, erm, “direct” style, and saw Francis as a bit of a “Fancy Dan”, a typical artisan over artist reaction from a typically “working-class” fan base.
But halfway through that second season in Division 1 Latchford pushed for a transfer, and got his wish when Everton were happy to swap Howard Kendall, Archie Styles and a barrow-load of cash for Latchford’s goal-scoring expertise. Many fans were disappointed when Bob retired to hear him describe Everton as his club. Yes, he spent a long time there, but even so …
Trev was once thought to have been injury prone, but unbelievably played every single game of the 76/77 and 77/78 seasons, and that includes league, FA Cup, League Cup and even the Anglo-Scottish Cup for goodness sake! However he was a target for the hatchet men of the 70s, and occasionally one of them would catch up with him. When he returned from injury just before the 1975 Semi-Final over 4,000 turned up to watch him play for the reserves in the Football Combination.
Nevertheless, the sight of him turning Frank McLintock inside out (twice) before scoring a memorable goal against QPR is just one example from his “Best of …” video compilations shows that he usually got the better of his markers. Other highlights include a masterful performance on an ice-rink at Leicester, helping himself to a goal and Burns to a hat-trick, and another on a mud-heap at the Baseball Ground. Only Joe Bradford scored more goals for Blues and not many made more appearances, so there’s no doubting his loyalty to the club as a player.
However, the proof of his claim that Birmingham City was his club came partly from when he was the club manager, and partly in his later role as a broadcaster, and both involved League Cup Finals. To see him sobbing his heart out when Andrew Johnson missed in the 2001 penalty shoot-out tugged at the emotions of all but the most flint-hearted observers, but his comment at the final whistle of the 2011 Final, just minutes after Obafemi Martins’s winner showed exactly why most Blues fans of his generation will always see him as their all-time favourite; asked for his reaction, he replied that his first reaction was to look at the referee and the linesman to check that they hadn’t thought up some obscure reason to disallow the goal. I have to admit that was my reflex too, and I suspect that of many who had suffered so many disappointments in the previous 40 odd years.
Rest in Peace Trev – you were truly one of us.
TREVOR FRANCIS – ONE OF US
If you examine Birmingham City’s league positions between 1970 and 1979, you’d probably laugh at the suggestion that that particular era was the club’s biggest opportunity to break through into the big time of English football. A best finish of 10th in the First Division, only one other finish in the top half of the table, several close shaves with relegation and a couple of disappointing FA Cup semi-final defeats hardly tell the tale of a club on the brink of joining the elite. And yet …
For a couple of years the club had the fourth biggest fan base in the country with average home crowds higher than clubs like Leeds, Spurs and Chelsea, and a youth system that saw the likes of Bob Latchford and Kenny Burns beginning careers which would lead to international recognition. But most of all, we had Trevor Francis.
For a fan like me who became a teenager in 1970, seeing a player who was barely three years older than me playing for my team, and being lauded by the National Media as “Superboy” and “A Future Great”, it was mind-boggling. I, and the rest of the Blues fans at the time, we were used to searching the back pages for the smallest mentions of our team, and hoping for a Cup run so that we’d get on Match of the Day or Sportsnight with Coleman. Trev changed all of that, and while he was around, we had hope.
At the age of 16 years and 150 days he made his debut as a substitute in a 2nd Division match at Cardiff, and seven days later scored the first of his 133 goals for the club on his first start. After a handful of appearances he was wrapped in cotton wool for three months by manager Freddie Goodwin, but then the fun really started.
In his next 14 games he scored 15 goals, including the famous game at home to Bolton when he netted four times two months shy of his 17th birthday. The football world outside Birmingham sat up and began to take notice, especially when, in the next season, the Blues earned promotion with TF adding 12 goals to Latchford’s 23 and Bob Hatton’s 15; the Holy Trinity was born.
Still aged only 18, he was less prolific in his first couple of years at the top level, but that forward line pushed the club to its best league finish since 1956, and then avoided relegation (at the expense of Manchester Utd!) And here’s where you discover why the lad from Devon is held in even greater esteem in Brum than his Birmingham-born teammate Latchford. There were quite a few Blues fans at the time who preferred Latchford’s more, erm, “direct” style, and saw Francis as a bit of a “Fancy Dan”, a typical artisan over artist reaction from a typically “working-class” fan base.
But halfway through that second season in Division 1 Latchford pushed for a transfer, and got his wish when Everton were happy to swap Howard Kendall, Archie Styles and a barrow-load of cash for Latchford’s goal-scoring expertise. Many fans were disappointed when Bob retired to hear him describe Everton as his club. Yes, he spent a long time there, but even so …
Trev was once thought to have been injury prone, but unbelievably played every single game of the 76/77 and 77/78 seasons, and that includes league, FA Cup, League Cup and even the Anglo-Scottish Cup for goodness sake! However he was a target for the hatchet men of the 70s, and occasionally one of them would catch up with him. When he returned from injury just before the 1975 Semi-Final over 4,000 turned up to watch him play for the reserves in the Football Combination.
Nevertheless, the sight of him turning Frank McLintock inside out (twice) before scoring a memorable goal against QPR is just one example from his “Best of …” video compilations shows that he usually got the better of his markers. Other highlights include a masterful performance on an ice-rink at Leicester, helping himself to a goal and Burns to a hat-trick, and another on a mud-heap at the Baseball Ground. Only Joe Bradford scored more goals for Blues and not many made more appearances, so there’s no doubting his loyalty to the club as a player.
However, the proof of his claim that Birmingham City was his club came partly from when he was the club manager, and partly in his later role as a broadcaster, and both involved League Cup Finals. To see him sobbing his heart out when Andrew Johnson missed in the 2001 penalty shoot-out tugged at the emotions of all but the most flint-hearted observers, but his comment at the final whistle of the 2011 Final, just minutes after Obafemi Martins’s winner showed exactly why most Blues fans of his generation will always see him as their all-time favourite; asked for his reaction, he replied that his first reaction was to look at the referee and the linesman to check that they hadn’t thought up some obscure reason to disallow the goal. I have to admit that was my reflex too, and I suspect that of many who had suffered so many disappointments in the previous 40 odd years.
Rest in Peace Trev – you were truly one of us.