A veteran Fleet Street football writer once told a story about bumping into Stan Bowles in a betting shop in Nottingham shortly after his 1979 move to Forest. Bowles was disconsolate, but not because he had supported another loser.
“What’s wrong, Stan?” the reporter asked.
“This manager,” Bowles replied, then told a story about Brian Clough.
The first time Bowles sat down in the Forest dressing room, Clough had looked straight at him and said: ‘You. What’s your name?”
“What do you mean, what’s my name?” Bowles replied.
“What’s your bloody name,” Clough persisted.
‘I’m Stan Bowles. You’ve just signed me for QPR.’
Clough thought about the answer and said, ‘I want you to take the ball and give it to that fat guy over there [pointing to the great John Robertson].” According to the old reporter, Bowles, who has died aged 75, joined the bookies with the suspicion that he had joined the wrong club. When Clough tried to beat the ego out of him, conformity was always an unlikely outcome.
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Signed by Clough to offer Forest “time and space”, according to Peter Taylor, his assistant, Bowles was indeed expected to provide that service for Robertson and complained bitterly about being played out of position. The relationship lasted a season. Lining up between the pair, Clough shouted: “You cockneys are all the same.”
‘Excuse me,’ said Bowles, ‘I was born and bred in Manchester.’
When they added the term ‘maverick’ to a generation of 1970s footballers, Bowles was at the front of the queue for the badge. His autobiographies are a litany of dog tracks, drinking holes, punch-ups, villains, gambling clubs, broken relationships and debts to bookmakers.
A maverick without talent wouldn’t have made the headlines, but Bowles had enough of that. In a memoir written with Ralph Allen and John Iona, Terry Venables said in the foreword: “He fell into the category of Dalglish and Beardsley. Was he a midfielder going forward or a striker coming back? Nor do I hesitate to place him in their company; he was that good.” Denis Law said of him: “He has 100% skill. No one in English football can work a ball better from close range.”
To Queens Park Rangers supporters, Bowles was the chaotic genius of their greatest side. For modern audiences, the misfits are endlessly fascinating. Beneath the surface of their all-day cash-drinking lifestyle lies the question: How long would they last in today’s game? The Premier League’s armies of analysts and data crunchers are said to have met their Waterloo with Bowles, who had overslept at Manchester City in the late 1960s before a pre-season flight to Amsterdam and hid in a friend’s house for so long that the police put him on the list. a missing person.
Two fistfights with Malcolm Allison, City’s assistant manager, were extreme even by the standards of the 1960s and 1970s, and before Bowles could find ‘true happiness’ at QPR he went into exile at Bury, Crewe Alexandra and Carlisle . The popular image of him as a dilettante is partly contradicted by his long career as a professional: eight league clubs from 1967-1984. At the last of them – Brentford – he was persuaded to sign in 1981 by “£4,000 in readyies”, which he took to White City Dogs and largely surrendered to his old friends the bookmakers.
While 507 appearances in club football spoke well of his ability to combine chaos with majesty, his five England caps placed him squarely among the distrusted performers of the 1970s: the players spectators often believed had rescued England from the wilderness of non-qualification for tournaments.
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Maybe. All that dribbling and deceptive passing earned Bowles just one trophy: the 1979 UEFA Super Cup, at the end of his short time at Forest. He played in Alf Ramsey’s last match and was picked by two of his successors (Joe Mercer and Don Revie). Similarly, he left England after being taken off in the second half against Northern Ireland in the second half of 1974, leaving again for White City when he should have traveled to Scotland. There, with the dogs, a friend punched a Daily Mirror photographer who had followed them to report that Bowles had not turned up for the Scotland match.
After QPR and Forest he entered the twilight zone of his time, before the mega-wages, and joined Leyton Orient, where he threw a bucket of water on abusive Grimsby fans. QPR had been his peak. He moved to Loftus Road in 1972 as a replacement for Rodney Marsh, who had signed for Manchester City, and formed an immortal bond with Dave Thomas, Don Givens, Gerry Francis and Frank McLintock in a side remembered almost as fondly by neutral players like QPR fans.
Francis called him “a cheerful type who lives from day to day” – a euphemism given his struggle with what would now be diagnosed as a gambling addiction. At the time, the urge to gamble was seen as a colorful character trait and a wealth of good anecdotes rather than as a disease that needed treatment.
HMRC was also less vigilant. Bowles always swore that Hamburg wanted him, before Kevin Keegan, in 1977. QPR chairman Jim Gregory offered him £4,000 cash to stay: a deal they honored with an afternoon of champagne. Keegan was twice European Footballer of the Year.
Like George Best, Bowles maintained a defiant attitude about his drinking and gambling. One of his books ends with characteristic jokes: ‘I have enough money for the rest of my life – provided I drop dead at 4:30 this afternoon. I also have a large mortgage to pay off: that of my bookmaker.”
The tempestuous story off the pitch clouds the lasting memories of him on the pitch, especially in the blue and white hoops of QPR, where he was always a good choice to catch the eye. Forest bought him, Taylor explained admiringly, “because he could play”, even though Clough pretended not to know his name.