Chris Waddle lined up for Marseille at the Stadio San Nicola in Bari for the 1991 European Cup Final as one of the world’s finest footballers. A fluid winger of rare laconic grace, Waddle was also in Italy a year earlier for a World Cup semi-final – that night in Turin with a never-to-be-forgotten personal finale. Twelve months before that, he’d left Tottenham for Provence as the third most expensive player in history.
Today, such a talent would have advanced through an academy system from the age of six: honed, developed, nurtured into a multi-million-pound asset. Yet at the beginning of Waddle’s stellar career, he was earning £3 a week at Tow Law Town in County Durham, combining his non-league duties with a job at a sausage factory.
“I’d been feeling a bit sorry for myself after failing to get an apprenticeship at Coventry,” Waddle tells FourFourTwo now. “I didn’t know what to do. I thought I was nailed on to be taken on, but it didn’t work out. My parents said to me, ‘You’re not going to sit around on your arse all day doing nothing. Get yourself a job’. I went for a few interviews and ended up seasoning sausages in a factory.”
To begin with, even Tow Law – a Northern League team from a tiny hilltop town of just 2,000 people on the edge of the Pennines – was a step up for him. Waddle first turned out for Clarke Chapmans, an engineering firm whose ground was across the road from Gateshead International Stadium.
“I only had the last half of the season with them, and I asked the manager if he knew anyone who’d give me a game in non-league on a Saturday,” continues the 62-year-old. “He said he knew a guy called Billy Bell, who was the boss of Tow Law Town. I didn’t have a clue where Tow Law was.
“Because the majority of the players were from Newcastle, they trained in the city, in Jesmond. It was the end of their pre-season – that Saturday, they were playing a friendly at Frickley, a Conference team. I was told to take my boots, although I wasn’t certain to play. We went down in a minibus to Frickley, a big mining town in Yorkshire, and I found myself playing because we only had 11 men. We drew 2-2 and I’d made both of our goals.
“After the game, Billy wanted to know all about my history and where I’d come from. He said, ‘Our first game of the season is next Saturday and you’re in the team’. He was true to his word and I was paid £3. As the season progressed, I clicked into gear. Tow Law was basically a one-street town, but I was happy.
“Billy was my first real coach – someone prepared to work on my game. Before that, it had been basically: ‘Get the ball and do what you want’. He put us into a system – a 4-3-3, which no one really played at that time. We went on a run and I was scoring goals.”
