Rebooted: England’s first black male manager takes on mission impossible

“While we were defending a free-kick in the first half, the lights went out.”

England’s Under-20 World Cup campaign in Nigeria had not been going particularly well. But standing in the pitch black against Japan in a do-or-die matched watched by FIFA president Sepp Blatter was perhaps the most bizarre moment yet.

Having become the first black male England manager in the FA’s 156-year history, it was supposed to be the proudest moment in Chris Ramsey’s fledgling coaching career. But the trepidation and fear of taking a young England team to Nigeria with the possibility of a terrorist attack, proved to be an unnerving experience. The football is probably best forgotten too.

“When I first went there it was a bit of a culture shock,” Ramsey tells The Athletic. “It was an unknown scenario and there were a lot of rumours about Nigeria being dangerous. People were thinking twice about going to the tournament, they thought it was going to be volatile. A lot of staff didn’t want to go.

“We stayed on a campus and there were guards outside. It was one of those scenarios where you looked at it and thought, ‘Flipping hell.’ There was a lot of security around us. We played the USA in the first game and there were rumours that there was going to be a terrorist attack, that we weren’t safe. So we had to increase the security everywhere we went.

“The facilities that we had were all right — it wasn’t the Marriott Hotel, put it that way. But we went to Kano and Bauchi, less built-up areas. I would imagine if we had stayed in places like Lagos or Abuja it probably would’ve been a different experience.”

Adrian Bevington was the FA’s media relations officer at the tournament. He went on to become head of communications and later Club England’s managing director.

“We shared a hotel complex with USA, Spain and Japan,” he says. “Guinness put security on for us and they were in our hotel all the time. The players were a great group of lads. Went off to an orphanage while we were out there and we took loads of gifts and gave them out. It was a rewarding day for everyone. Anyone who went on that trip remembers it fondly. Yes, there were challenges and we had issues with players having bad stomachs, which resulted in some having to come off during training. But they treated us well in Nigeria and the people there were absolutely sensational. Whenever we trained we had lots of people watching our training sessions. It was in the thousands.”

Blast from the past. With QPR's Chris Ramsey – @england Head Coach at U20 World Cup in Nigeria 1999. pic.twitter.com/k7ppXwbRBF

— Adrian Bevington (@ABevington11) February 21, 2015

Ramsey initially worked for the FA as a regional director of coaching. He became head coach of the under-20s when Howard Wilkinson, then technical director, was appointed caretaker manager for the senior team following Glenn Hoddle’s sacking. This was an exciting task for Ramsey, whose prior experience amounted to a role as player-coach for Naxxar Lions in the Maltese Premier League and a spell as assistant coach for the USL Premier Development League team Cocoa Expos.

Much like now, there were few black managers in the game. Ruud Gullit was at the helm at Newcastle United, John Barnes was manager of Celtic, while the late Keith Alexander was in charge of non-League side Ilkeston Town.

“One of the hardest things about being in charge of a team as a black person was that people didn’t think you were the manager,” he says. “It really pissed me off at the time because you used to see a lot of Caucasian men with grey hair and blazers, and actually you’re the one in charge. I would be thinking, ‘Hold on a minute, why are you asking him for? I’m the manager.’ But I suppose it’s also important to realise what people are used to, because I was the first black person to work at that level in the FA in the men’s game. I would’ve been 36 at the time, so I was really young.

“It was only me and Hope Powell, who was in charge of the women’s team, so to have two minorities managing an England team at the same time was quite revolutionary. There was a big reaction to it because it was in all the papers. It did open a lot of doors, and the minds of people. When I got the job as regional director there was no initiative to hire a black person in those days.

“In all honesty, I probably could have turned down the opportunity to manage the team. It was a big role and there were a lot of responsibilities like managing top young players and I also had to take a group of staff abroad. I was in charge of everything. Because of the political situation and the rumours about things being a bit dangerous in Nigeria, I had to deal with all of that stress.”

Ramsey also had the expectations that come with managing a previously successful team. At the 1997 Under-20 World Cup, an England squad which featured Jamie Carragher, Michael Owen, Matthew Upson, Danny Murphy, Jason Euell and Kieron Dyer reached the last 16, eventually losing 2-1 to Argentina (Juan Roman Riquelme and Pablo Aimar scored for the victors, Carragher got what proved to be the consolation).

But on the eve of the 1999 tournament, expectations levels were low. Peter Crouch, Ashley Cole, Andrew Johnson and Matthew Etherington were the only notable names in an under-strength 18-man squad. The rest of the players would go on to represent teams in the lower echelons of the English league.

Kevin Nicholls was the captain and he was assigned that role later in his playing career at Luton Town, where he won two promotions and the Football League Trophy. Stephen Wright played most of his career at Sunderland and Paul Rachubka was a trainee at Manchester United but played for 19 different clubs.

Adam Oliver made 23 league appearances for West Bromwich Albion and was forced to retire at the age of 21 following recurring knee injuries. Craig Dudley started his career at Notts County before he retired in 2006, also due to injury, and became a driving instructor. Adam Chambers, now a 39-year-old defender for League Two side Walsall, is the only member of the squad who still plays professional football.

“It was a difficult time and going to that tournament there were a lot of players pulling out of the squad,” recalls Ramsey. “It was similar to what you get now and we were missing players like Steven Gerrard, Michael Owen, Jonathan Woodgate and Ledley King. So you had to take what was left, which was a lot of the stand-by players.

“We had to get Crouch from his youth tour in the Dallas Cup with Tottenham. We had to get him to come back, so we were very short on numbers. Believe it or not, Ashley Cole was originally in one of the stand-by squads, but he came. Ashley got the player of the tournament for us and he was outstanding. He had just turned into a full-back. I worked with him previously because I was Ashley’s tutor when he was a scholar at Arsenal. Paolo Vernazza was another good player we had in the squad. He was Ashley’s good mate and so was Greg Lincoln, who was also on the books at Arsenal at the time.

“We had good players, but we were a thrown-together team and there were a lot of players that weren’t used to that environment. It was a team that had never played together. They were from the stand-by squad and we were probably the youngest team there. Brazil had Ronaldinho, the Republic of Ireland had Robbie Keane and Damien Duff. But we didn’t send our best team. The expectation levels wouldn’t have been high because most people knew we were sending an under-strength side.”

Bevington agrees. “We had in the region of 60 withdrawals from the squad. There were all sorts of issues around whether it was going to be safe so lots of clubs withdrew their players. In some circumstances parents withdrew players from travelling on the eve of the tournament. I remember we had one player who pulled out of the squad while we were on the shuttle bus at the airport in Amsterdam.”

They paid the price for the lack of players. On April 5, two days after the tournament kicked off with a 1-1 draw between Nigeria and Costa Rica, England played the USA and lost 1-0 in front of 19,000 people, the largest crowd most of the players will have played in front of at that point in their careers. It was an American side featuring future Premier League stars Tim Howard and Carlos Bocanegra and they held on after going ahead in the 12th minute. “The night before the US game we played a match on the stadium pitch and we didn’t have enough players to make it XI v XI. I was one of a few members of staff who actually played so I was the right-back. From memory we actually beat the first XI.”

Worse was to follow. On April 8, they returned to Kano in the north of the country to play Cameron, and again lost 1-0 with Richard Cooper scoring an own goal. The midfielder, now coach at Mansfield Town, would later play for Nottingham Forest, York City, Alfreton Town and Eastwood Town.

Cole was booked for the second game in a row, substitute John Piercy was taken off and didn’t feature in the final game. “We played Cameroon in the middle of the afternoon in the most baking of suns in Kano and we lost 1-0,” adds Bevington. “The thing is we actually played them off the park and unfortunately we just didn’t convert our chances. If we won that match we would’ve gone through, which would’ve been a remarkable achievement.”

There was still hope, though. Ramsey knew that a win over Japan in their final group game and a USA defeat by Cameroon could open the door to qualification. Even some third-placed teams went through to the last 16.

But it was not to be. Despite making changes to the starting XI, including the goalkeeper, England lost 2-0. It had been a tournament to forget.

Ramsey’s side were the only team in the tournament that failed to score a goal. Only Honduras and Kazakhstan performed worse, having conceded 10 and nine goals respectively.

However, happily it wasn’t the end of Ramsey’s involvement with England. He would later become assistant coach of the under-16s at the European Championship in Israel in 2000 and he was also a scout for the men’s first team under Kevin Keegan. 

“It was an honour to be manager of the under-20s during that tournament. It was just a shame we couldn’t achieve our full potential by bringing our best players.”

In 2001, Ramsey became manager of American side Charleston Battery, who play in the division below the MLS. In 2003, his team won the USL A-League championship. Ramsey returned to London a year later and worked as head of player development with Tottenham Hotspur’s academy.

In 2008, his work was recognised by the “Voice Newspaper” who listed the 57-year-old among the 30 most influential black people in football. After a 10-year spell at Tottenham, he was appointed assistant manager of the England Under-17 national team in 2014 and later became head coach at Queens Park Rangers. Five months ago Ramsey received an MBE in the Queen’s Honours Birthday List for his services to football and diversity in sport.

In 1999, he arrived in Nigeria with trepidation. But 20 years later, it turns out Ramsey had nothing to worry about.

(Top photo: Matthew Ashton/EMPICS via Getty Images)