Mar 152012
 

For the third time in less than a year, Dons fans and players of a certain age will be wearing mourning clothes, literally or figuratively. David Innes reminisces on Jens Petersen, a man whose dedication to the Dons in the 1960s makes him truly worthy of legendary status among Reds followers.

It was with heavy hearts that we learned of the death of Jens Petersen, a stalwart servant of the mid and late 1960s whose brave battle against death ended in noble defeat on 8 March 2012.

This follows far too closely the deaths of Eddie Turnbull in April 2011 and Francis Munro in August last year.

Another one of the Reds family has gone, and it hurts.

For the many friends Jens made during his time at Pittodrie, the hurt is because they knew him, they appreciated his determination to succeed and the inspiring leadership that he offered, but most of all, the lasting friendship that they formed with someone who is unanimously regarded as one of the genuine good guys.

Among the fans who remember Jens, it hurts because we too have lost someone we looked up to, someone who played the game in its proper spirit and a man who took delight in meeting fans, taking an interest in them and making them feel that they, as much as the players, were all part of the same whole.

We have lost a hero.

Jens arrived in Aberdeen with fellow Danes, Jorgen Ravn and Leif Mortensen, all signed by Tommy Pearson in 1965, when Scottish clubs realised that Scandinavia was a new hunting ground for players of good quality who fitted into the Scottish style of play. Whilst Ravn and Mortensen left Pittodrie after a short while, Eddie Turnbull spotted that Jens had something special that would fit with the Turnbull football vision and not only kept him on at Pittodrie, but made him a key member of the first team.

In 1966, the jewel in the Reds’ crown was Dave Smith. His performances in midfield and in the curious “sweeper” role that Eddie Turnbull introduced meant that he was an attraction for bigger, more predatory teams. I recall, to a background of Yellow Submarine, the news coming through in August 1966 that our star had signed for Rangers and that the Dons were £45000 better off.

The money was unimportant; we had lost our most influential player. How, the devastated 9 year old me worried, could we go on without Dave Smith? Eddie Turnbull had a cunning plan: Jens Petersen.

What the Boss had seen in Jens was someone who could naturally play the role that Smith had made his own, a man possessed of an unflappable temperament, comfortable with the ball at his feet in defence or midfield, an athlete, excellent in the air and with an ability to break from defence with the ball, striking panic into the opposition, a sight to behold.

US sports fans were amazed that the players did not wear body armour

The statistics tell us that Jens Petersen made 203 appearances for Aberdeen and scored 11 goals.

These are merely numbers. Influence and dynamism cannot be enumerated.

It’s a long time ago, but I can still remember his late spectacular goal against Morton to put us into the League Cup semi-final in 1966, my uncle’s surprised comment, “Look, the Dane’s wearin’ san’sheen”, when Jens decided that a frosty pitch later that season needed alternative footwear, and his ill-luck in the 1967 Cup final where his shot into an open goal was miraculously saved by Celtic’s Ronnie Simpson’s sliding clearance from the goal line.

When Jens left the Dons in 1970, his number 6 shirt was bequeathed to Martin Buchan. That illustrates the level of talent at which he operated.

My own contact with Jens was limited to a couple of phone conversations about the 1967 Washington Whips. Chalky Whyte gave me Jens’s number and encouraged me to call him in Denmark. He answered in Danish. I said, “Hello, I’ve been given your number by Jim Whyte”. Jens’s response (and that of his wife Dora when I called on another occasion) was that he was delighted to speak to me, but before he spoke about the USA in 1967, how were his friends at Pittodrie?

My lasting memory of the discussion was that he was asked by a US interviewer, “Petersen, have you ever burst a ball with your head?” and that US sports fans were amazed that the players did not wear body armour. His English, and Dora’s, was better than mine and he was a joy to interview.

Chalky, Ally Shewan and Ian Taylor have often spoken to me about the friendship they maintained with their great pal Jens and their memories and anecdotes will help ease some of the hurt that these guys and their colleagues are feeling.

Jens was only just 70 when he died, which is no age at all these days, and he was an outstanding athlete, still running marathons into his 60s.

The Northern Lights are significantly dimmer with his departure.

Image Credit: Aberdeen Voice is grateful to Aberdeen Football Club for use of Photographs. 

Dec 212011
 

It was an emotional day in Pittodrie’s Richard Donald Stand on December 17 when the AFC Heritage Trust and the club’s Former Players’ Association unveiled their memorial to Eddie Turnbull, Dons manager from 1965-1971. It was a bitingly cold morning, but Voice reporter Faye Keith was there to capture the warmth.

Before inviting Eddie Turnbull’s daughter Valerie Low and his granddaughter Carolyn to unveil the permanent memorial, Heritage Trust Deputy Chairman David Innes described Turnbull as “among the greatest Dons’ heroes of all” and read tributes to their mentor from former goalkeeper Bobby Clark and 1960s skipper Ally Shewan.

Clark’s own admiration for the man he followed from Queens Park to Pittodrie in 1965 is summed up by his admission that the training sessions he runs in the US, nearly fifty years after he and Turnbull first worked together, are still based on techniques that he learned under the man they still call ‘boss’.

Valerie spoke unplanned and off-the-cuff in the most emotional tribute of the day when she praised the kindness of the Dons and “Eddie’s boys” to the man himself and to the Turnbull family. Some of these boys wiped away a tear as she told them:

“You respected, feared and loved him, but he adored you”.

The final words of the day came from Martin Buchan who read a message sent by the Dons’ legendary defender Henning Boel. Ian Taylor interactively contributed his version of Turnbull’s own unique method for dealing with Henning and the Scots/Danish language barrier before the 1970 Scottish Cup final.

As well as Buchan, Shewan and Taylor, Dons of the Turnbull era including Harry Melrose, Paddy Wilson, Alistair Sandison, Jimmy Wilson, Joe Harper, Jim Whyte, Tommy Wilson, Ron Keenan, Tam McMillan and Ian Cumming attended, testimony to their shared respect and admiration for a true Aberdeen legend. One fan, learning that Ernie McGarr was in attendance, said that this was no surprise, as it was an icy morning and there was a gritter parked outside.

Eddie himself would have laughed loudly at that. So would Ernie. It was that sort of day.

The obvious affection these men still have for each other is proof that Turnbull was a team builder of a rare and very special kind and the memorial is a simple and dignified tribute to a great football man.

The memorial is on public display in the Richard Donald Stand concourse and will be given a deserved place of prominence in the new stadium.

Aug 182011
 

Earlier this year, on Eddie Turnbull’s birthday – that’ll be 12 April, then – the writer of this article opined that that Dons great would live  forever. He died a few weeks later and there was a genuine, deserved, widespread expression of grief from the Scottish fitba community. The Boss was 88. Of course he couldn’t be expected to live forever, but when one’s heroes or icons die, the world seems a dimmer place.
This week, Dons fans of a certain vintage, among them Voice’s David Innes are mourning the loss of Francis Munro, rarely mentioned in pub and online debates about Great Reds, yet from 1966-68 the most dynamic and explosive individual in a supremely-talented squad.

The statistics show that Francis Michael Munro played 59 games for the Dons and scored 14 goals.
In today’s multi-media analytical world, his number of assists, the yards he covered during 90 minutes, his percentage successful passing rate would all be monitored and published. Had  such analysis been available in Franny’s time at Pittodrie, his value would have been far more obvious 45 years on.

But it still wouldn’t have told the full story.

When I interviewed Eddie Turnbull in 1997 for an as yet unpublished account of the Dons 1967 USA adventure as The Washington Whips, I asked The Boss about Franny in particular. Why? Because on Christmas Eve 1966, I was to witness this teenager rule the midfield in a top of the table head-to-head with Celtic, a mere five months before Jock Stein’s team lifted the European Cup.

Stein’s midfield of the time included luminaries such as Bertie Auld and Bobby Murdoch, yet it was Munro who bossed the game and, had it not been for Ronnie’s Simpson’s breathtaking save just before the end, Munro’s piledriving late goal attempt would have secured a rare victory over Celtic. He achieved instant hero status from this wide-eyed loon.

He wasn’t about blood and thunder, though. He was as graceful an athlete, despite an ongoing weight problem, as any of the more high-profile figures of the time.

During the 1997 interview, his manager told me,

“It shows how if you’re aware or alert what can happen. In the early days, before I came to Aberdeen, I was in charge of the Scotland Under-18s. And I remember Francis as a fifteen or sixteen  year old, and I thought, ‘This is some player’. Of course he was a Dundee boy and he went to Dundee United, but Jerry Kerr couldn’t handle him and he started getting into the wrong company.

“He was one of the finest long passers of a ball that I ever saw in my life, that I ever had under me, that I ever played against. He would say, ‘I can’t do that’, and I would say, ‘You’re the most skilful of the lot’. That was when he first came in, he was an introvert. A lovely lad. For a big man, he was so light on his feet. He’d great vision, could see everything on the park.”

In his pen picture of Franny in a programme for a Washington Whips fixture in summer 1967, The Boss described his protégé as being “as nimble as a ballerina”.

In the States, he proved his worth, even scoring a hat trick in the largely-forgotten but supremely thrilling President’s Cup final. He followed that by becoming the first Aberdeen player to score, and the first Don to score a hat trick in a European tie, both in the 10-0 extirpation of KR Reykjavik, the Dons’ debut competitive European outing.

He wis some boy

Wolves, who had been on the receiving end of Franny’s hat trick in the USA, eventually persuaded the Dons to transfer him to Molineux in 1968. He was immediately converted into a centre half, the Wolves number 5 shirt as comfortable on his back as his Pittodrie number 4 had been. At Wolves, he won a League Cup winners’ medal in 1973-74 and became a club legend.

I hope that two Wolves fans for whom I have almost as  much long-distance affection as I had for Franny – Led Zeppelin’s Robert Plant and Dexys’ Kevin Rowland – idolised him as much as I did.

During my research in 1997, I spoke briefly with Franny on the phone. I hope I didn’t come across like a babbling, tongue-tied teenager. He was very polite, informative and interested in what I was doing, but was obviously in poor health, an affliction which continued until his death on 16 August 2011 aged 64, no age at all really.

That he shares his date of death with Elvis is a coincidence that I will regard as wholly indicative of the level of Franny Munro’s talent.

Sleep easy, big fella.

May 052011
 

Voice’s  David Innes pays tribute to a true football legend.

Mere words are difficult to fashion into any sort of coherence to describe the gratitude those of us of a certain age feel for Eddie Turnbull, who roared into sleepy, plodding Pittodrie in 1965 and gave Aberdeen fans their pride back.

I had the pleasure of meeting him fourteen years ago, and the afternoon I spent with him in the Barnton Thistle Hotel I still regard as three of the best hours of my life.

He was 74 then, frail after a lung operation and tiny in frame. Not so in personality, neither in enthusiasm and passion for the game which was his obsession. Twenty six years after he’d left Pittodrie having just failed to win the league title with the Dons, he still retained great affection for the club and his recollections when probed by me on trainspotterly specifics of the 1967 USA tour were as clear as the water with which he would later dilute the bottle of 12 year old Glenlivet gifted him as a token of my gratitude and respect.

From 1965 to 1971, this “wee mannie frae Falkirk” as he described himself, revolutionised Aberdeen FC.

That is not too strong a verb. His first result, beating Rangers 2-0, endeared him to the fans. His new-broom coaching methods and legendary fierce discipline earned him the respect of the players and his iron will even had the club’s directors wondering if they’d perhaps have preferred a yes man in charge, for he wasn’t that.

Having endured the perils and hardships of serving in the North Atlantic merchant fleet running cargo to Murmansk during the Second World War in the face of fascist bombs and torpedoes, a few local businessmen in suits and trilbies were hardly going to frighten Eddie Turnbull.

None ever refers to him as “Eddie”. He was, and is “Boss”. That’s respect, but it’s also affection.

The 1970 Scottish Cup win was his most tangible achievement and the following season’s thrilling title chase was proof that the squad he had patiently assembled was equal to Celtic’s which had reached the European Cup final the season before.

Many of us of that vintage, who marvelled at the coolness of Martin Buchan, the energy of Davie Robb, the sniper-like predatory accuracy of Joe Harper and the guile of Steve Murray remain convinced that had the manager not returned to his beloved Hibs, the title would have been won in 1971-72 and sustained success would have been ours a decade before Fergie took us to previously-unimaginable heights.

The Hibs team he built in the early 1970s played beautiful football and it is surprising that 1972’s League Cup was their only trophy success. A major regret, he told me, was that Hibs did not beat Aberdeen to European success a decade before Gothenburg, succumbing tamely on reaching the quarter final of the European Cup-Winners Cup.

“They didn’t want it enough”, was his opinion.

He left Hibs in 1980 and was lost to club football – a huge oversight given the state that it’s now in and considering the foresight he might have brought to it. Yet, he said that the greatest pleasure he derived from football was seeing young men make their way in the world, helping them develop their innate talent and seeing them and their families thrive and prosper.

Although he was a hard man, this was an indication of the standards that he set and which he bred into those who shared his fitba vision and passion.  I still have regular contact with some of his Pittodrie players. None ever refers to him as “Eddie”. He was, and is “Boss”. That’s respect, but it’s also affection.

Not only have the Dons and Hibs lost a legend – that’s a TRUE legend, look up its definition – the football world at large has lost an innovator, a tactical genius and above all, a passionate advocate for all that was good and artistic in the game.

I thought he would live forever and I suppose for those of us with memories of his Aberdeen teams from 1965-71, he will.

Sleep easy Boss, you’ve earned it.