We were contacted by Jason Pettigrove who is a regular writer for EPL Index. He got in touch with us to share the interview that he did with former Palace wizard of the wing Vince Hilaire. Last season Vince was inducted into our Hall of Fame here at TEB. We thank Jason, Vince and EPL Index for allowing us to share what we think is an excellent read.
Who was/is your biggest influence either personally or professionally and why?
Good question. Personally and professionally are obviously quite different. Personally I cannot go further than my parents but that is a bit boring. Any kid worth their salt, who has been brought up in the right way, will say their parents. I would be very surprised if any ex-professional player that you interview, say 35 and over, and those recently retired would say different. Players today, with the world we live in now, if you have any pretensions of being a professional footballer then you don not fall under the umbrella of parents. Nowadays you are doing stuff as 15/16/17 year olds that we would not have been doing at the same age back in the day.
You say your parents were your biggest influence, but in what way?
With regards to my mother, taking as little interest as possible in my football career, which was great. It did not matter one jot whether I made it as a footballer or not. She just made sure I was healthy and looked after. I had two brothers who both played any sport, including football, to a very high standard. I got the breaks, they did not but we all got treated the same by my mother. And my father, he was great because he never put any pressure on me. He had an interest obviously, but I think he only ever watched me once in my entire career.
So do you think pressure from parents is a real issue in the game today, especially in terms of the young players?
Well let us be honest, you would not be human if you had a kid that was half decent and clubs were taking an interest, you would think hang on a minute, with the money that is being bandied about now, I could be quids in. Therefore, you are going to take a lot of interest are you not? Of course, you love your kids and all that but there is that ‘looking after the family’ scenario. If you have a child earning thousands and thousands of pounds, it is human nature to want to be a part of that.
How about professional influence then?
It would have to be John Cartwright who I spent most of my youth career with. At Palace, he was the youth team manager. He had a very, very similar outlook on football to me and he is still about, still does a bit of scouting now and again for the FA. He had this West Ham background. He was brought up through the ranks with the great Bobby Moore and Malcolm Allison. The latter was my first manager at Palace. John had the same outlook on football as Terry Venables so it made the transition into the first team on regular basis that much easier.
The managers did not want anything different from what my youth team manager instilled in me. A lot of the ideas that John Cartwright and Terry Venables implemented on me and others during the mid seventies, other teams are only grasping now. All our training sessions were geared around looking at the methods of clubs and technical aspects of players from overseas. That was unheard of back then.
Great stuff. So what remains as your favourite playing memory, and who was your toughest opponent?
Even though I was concussed just twenty into the game, my favourite playing memory has to be promotion with Palace in 1979 when we went up to the top flight. That is purely and simply because most of the team grew up together in the youth team and as 19/20 year olds we ended up winning what is the Championship now, we did not lose many games. We beat Burnley in the last game but as I said, I remember the start and the end of it but even though it is fragmented, that has to be my best memory.
My toughest opponent has to be one of my old team mates who never gave you anything, never allowed you to feel over confident. He even told you before games he was not going to give you a sniff. That was Kenny Sansom. Definitely the toughest player I ever played with or against, I never got any change out of him, even in training. Believe me, I have played against some very good defenders, but Kenny was the best.
How would Vince Hilaire fare if he were playing in today’s game? Is he cut out to succeed in the Premier League?
I do not know. There are certain qualities that I believe I had which would enable me to play in today’s game, but in saying that, there are certain qualities that I did not possess that might make me struggle so I think the jury is out on that one. Things always seem better in the past and the majority of people I meet always say ‘you would have fared great in today’s game’ but I basically played wide apart from the very start of my career when I played up front, next to the archetypal big centre forward.
I touched on it earlier with John Cartwright and Terry Venables thinking alike but for a whole season the system that we were playing each week was the one that England were using back in the seventies which was with two strikers and I was playing the role that Raheem Sterling does now, which got me noticed as a young player. Back in the day as a winger there was a big reliance on keeping your shape and the first thing that people would say in the stand is ‘he is quiet today, he is not having a good game’ without realising that there was a reliance on people to get the ball to you and if you went looking for the ball you were told to get back out on your wing.
Invariably it was always the wide player that got hauled off. Even now, I cannot get my head round why managers take one wide player off to replace him with another wide player. It is only because his team-mates have not involved him in the game, so replacing like for like does not achieve anything. Nowadays every supporter is a pundit, not like it was in my day when you just accepted that someone was having an off day. Now we have so much media exposure that we are all experts. Supporters will say that ‘so and so isn’t playing well because of x, y and z’ and the majority of the time, those same supporters are misinformed.
Perfect example is eight years ago when England played Germany. The old cliché, ‘goals win games’. Frank Lampard had a perfectly good goal disallowed which would have changed the course of that game, but because England went on to lose we get supporters saying ‘Lampard and Gerrard cannot play together’ and the like. Rubbish.
Does it annoy you when you say today’s apprentices turn up to training and have everything done for them so there is no longer the ritual of cleaning the professionals boots and the like?
Absolutely right. I am not going to harp on it but right up until I signed professional terms, one of the jobs that Terry Venables took away from the apprentices, and I mean all of them, was the cleaning of boots and sweeping of the terraces. For the simple reason that he wanted you to channel all your energy and learning into how the game should be played. He said ‘I employ people to clean your boots, the club employs you to play football so you have to give it 100 percent.’
That was unusual for the time was it not?
Very unusual. This was about 1975/76. The only boots I cleaned were my own. I had lots of friends and mates at other clubs who had to do it but Venables made a conscious decision with our bunch of young players to keep us away from that as long as we always gave him 100 percent commitment. At the age of 15/16 it is difficult because you have other things going on in your life.
As an ex-professional, what advice would you give to anyone trying to make it today, particular academy graduates?
Along with Billy Gilbert, I was manager of Havant and Waterlooville for a couple of years and I was not that popular with the players. It was to do with the fact that normally I am happy and very easy going but on the field you would not recognise me. As much as I love beautiful football and everything else, I just wanted to win all the time. I always get asked why more players do not make the grade and then it dawned on me. If you want to be a professional and are professional and you have issues with the coach for whatever reason, if he is picking you out on certain aspects then you might think he is digging you out.
In my opinion nine out of ten coaches are looking at you personally, they are looking at you as a footballer and they will talk to you accordingly. What I mean is, when I was manager at Havant, there were players there that could comfortably play at Championship level, what are they doing playing at semi-professional level? And the reason is, any criticism was taken personally and therefore a player has a problem with you.
Do you think that should apply across all levels? For example, I know of parents with kids at academies who are unhappy with how they are spoken to. Does a line need to be drawn at a certain age? Would such criticism be seen as normal for kids at the very early stages of academy football?
The best coaches can put points across without having to scream and shout. The worst coaches are those that shout more, less patient and therefore effecting the younger players. To me, that is not down to the player or the coach, it is down to the people above the coach that believe that guy is up to it. If he has adopted a policy that is upsetting players then it is down to those above to address the issue because otherwise they are saying that they are perfectly happy with how the coach is working.
Look at it a different way. You have got a bunch of kids that all like their coach but they are not really improving, it is not about how you speak to someone, it is about how you put it across. It is why Sir Alex Ferguson was what he was at Manchester United. David Moyes could not command that respect. To be honest, I cannot fathom why people get into sport and then seem happy about losing, like it does not matter. Of course it matters, winning is the whole purpose of sport is it not? Looking at the England performance against Switzerland, was it really that outstanding for people to keep going on about it? At the end of the day, people are going ‘well he picked a great team’ but let us be honest, Switzerland were rubbish, they were crap. In my opinion England have played tougher opposition and probably played just as well and been getting beaten. It is always going to be about opinions.
Given the recent Malky Mackay furore, has this shown that football has not really changed attitudes since the late seventies and early eighties? How was it for you playing at that time, as one of the first high profile black players alongiside the likes of Laurie Cunningham, Cyrille Regis and Brendan Batson. Do you think campaigns like ‘Kick It Out’ are doomed to fail because of the prehistoric attitudes of those still in the game?
Society is changing. I have still got all my family in London. It is a city that has changed so much, but I have travelled everywhere and to me London is still the best city in the world but it is so multicultural I do not think anyone can learn anything more by travelling. Next best thing is meeting people from different cultures if you cannot afford to travel.
Regarding the footballing side, I played in an area where it was pretty unbearable to be honest with you. Pretty unbearable is putting it lightly, it was just unbelievable. That was when I made my debut in the mid seventies, finished playing in the early nineties and by the time I finished playing 15/16 years later, it was completely different playing at away grounds to what I first experienced. All that was telling me was that people are learning.
The only thing I get angry at now is that there are still some ignorant people around and I get annoyed at the fact that a country such as ours, bracket too many people with this ‘he is a bigot, he is a racist etc’. By that I mean sometimes you might say something, for example, when Hodgson made that comment ‘here is the monkey, feed the monkey’. If he at any point was talking about a player or a players colour, a comment he made in all innocence with no racial undertones whatsoever, it was a statement about giving someone the ball, make sure he gets the ball all the time.
If it was any other player than a black player in that position nothing would be said but because it is a black player people look to make something out of it. And this is where people have to be careful. I thought people died in the Second World War for freedom of speech, if someone says something wrong in jest but if you hold your hands up and say ‘that was completely the wrong terminology, I want people to know that what I meant’ that is the way to go about it. I am not one for people going on after the event, like Malky Mackay saying sorry. He knew what he was saying but some people did not know what they were saying and the easiest way is to ask them what they meant by it.
What annoys me is when people say ‘it is just banter’ or ‘I have black friends, I cannot be a racist’. Is that an easy way out?
Well yes, I do not enter into that sort of inverted commas ‘banter’. They know what they are saying, but thinking they can get away with it using the word banter. I do feel genuinely sorry for people who really do not mean some of the stuff that comes out of their mouths sometimes. Someone said to me the other day about where I was not wearing a watch and my skin was a little bit lighter there and they said ‘you have a tan line there’ like they were surprised. Some people would turn around and say that is out of order, but he was just making a statement and carried on talking. To me it was not wrong, he was just stating a fact. It was not derogatory, some other people may have felt that.
As a black footballer, I have experienced derogatory comments, I have experienced hatred from the terraces and we are a bit hard on some sections in this country because it is going the right way. Let us get our own house in order and then let us sort out the rest of Europe. Do not make people apologise for something they do not understand. Trust me, the one thing I took with me, I played in front of one of the most partisan crowds, I ended up playing for them and loved my time up there, fans were brilliant. It was at Leeds United. They did give black players some awful stick. The same with Chelsea. It was terrible there and my club, West Ham United.
I have had stick at all those places. I still like to give people the benefit of the doubt. It is not what you say, it is how you say it. Think about any rap record that comes out of the States, because of who is saying it, it is acceptable. It is not acceptable if it was a white guy saying exactly the same thing because it would be seen as derogatory.
If you mean to belittle someone, that to me is the crime. If you do not mean those things, hand on heart you are not looking for a cheap laugh and stating a fact
You now work in a hospitality capacity at one of your old clubs, Portsmouth. Tell me your thoughts on their fan owned business model. Could this be the way forward for a lot of clubs outside of the Premier League?
Absolutely. There is only one club in the city. I have adopted Portsmouth, I have always loved the club, supporters have always been brilliant to me. It was completely and utterly mismanaged over a number of years and the best thing about a club being run by the fans is that they do not come out with stupid statements. They will still come out in their thousands but they do not say things and come out and get the board to spend money they have not got, which is what the problem was in the first place. They accept things a lot easier, and having a fan owned club it just dampens people’s expectations. Walking before you run. One of the sayings I have always kept with me came from one of my managers Alan Ball. He said ‘death comes quickly in football, you do not see it creep up, you are just dead.’ You can never ever rest on your laurels.
I was not aware before the interview started that you were a West Ham United fan. What are your thoughts on the move to the Olympic Stadium, current playing style etc?
All my family are around ten minutes walk from the ground. Julian my youngest brother lives less distance away. He is a West Ham fan too and worked for them for a few years. Everyone that I grew up with lives close to Upton Park. One of the proudest days of my life was actually playing against West Ham. I wish I could have ended up playing for them, in fact I did play for them once in Patsy Holland’s Testimonial. We played Tottenham and won 5-0. I will never forget the feeling of pulling on the shirt, even though it was just a testimonial. The problem with West Ham is they are one of these clubs that are steeped in tradition and I think that unfortunately, and I do not want to have a go at West Ham fans because I am one of them and I am from there, but it is a fact there is a lot of moaning going on from West Ham fans about the ‘West Ham way’ but I would say 50 or 60 percent have not seen them play the West Ham way because they have not played that way for years. I do not see too many of them moaning when we managed to stay up last season. All of the arguments before hand were the style of Sam Allardyce. I feel a bit sorry for him to be honest.
Do you think that Allardyce is the right man?
I suppose West Ham fans would say no but I do not know if he has gone there and people had preconceived ideas about him. The problem with West Ham is a lot of the fans have got long memories and anyone who could be good for them would not be given a chance. Someone like Glenn Hoddle would be brilliant at West Ham but because he is synonymous with Tottenham Hotspur, as soon as something went wrong, they would be on his back. The only people that have half a chance at that football club from the word go, without having to earn that right, would be former players or people that have had no basic contact prior to that. Someone like Di Canio, even though he messed up at Sunderland, they would welcome him with open arms, he is a hero there. Trevor Brooking managed for three games a while back, they would welcome Billy Bonds back.
How about Harry Redknapp?
No. Because he is blamed for most of the problems prior to Allardyce. He would be the only exception to having legends back. I have known Harry since I was 14 and he is a diamond bloke but Harry is Harry and he would not be welcomed back. The problems for West Ham are steeped in history and the fans have now got to the stage of moaning for moaning’s sake, and once a club goes down that road it is a very slippery slope. I do not think it changes with the move to the Olympic Stadium, because that move is two years away and they have got to stay in that division, because trust me, they will not fill that stadium. Most West Ham fans live in Essex now, many that go to games do not live in the local area anymore. Changing grounds, one of the things about these small to medium clubs is the tightness of their grounds and the atmospheres they generate. I will be really sad that we are leaving Upton Park because I have a lot of memories.
Okay, one final question. What are your hopes for English football in the future?
I like the direction it is going in now. I would like to see the plans in place for when Roy Hodgson goes and I would like to know that the next England manager was going to be, the continuity. Manchester United is a good example. David Moyes should have shadowed Sir Alex Ferguson for a couple of months before taking over full time. He would still be in the job now if that was the case. I would like Hodgson to be saying ‘I have got this person with me now as my assistant because the FA and I have agreed that he will be the next England manager’. So the young players in the team already know that the assistant will be there, things wont have to change. That is how the progression should be.
Thanks very much for your time Vince, much appreciated.
