Johnny Haynes(1934–2005)

John Norman Haynes was born at the terraced house at 17 Park Lane, Edmonton in north London on 17 October 1934, only son of Edward Haynes, a Tottenham post-office clerk, and Rose Davies. He was schooled at the Latimer School, Edmonton through the wartime evacuation years and back, kicked a ball about on the recreation ground at Pymmes Park after school, was spotted at fourteen by the Tottenham Hotspur scout Bill Nicholson playing for the Edmonton schoolboys side, and was offered a Tottenham apprentice form. He did not sign it. He had already promised the form to Fulham, the second-division London club that played at Craven Cottage on the Thames opposite Putney bridge, on the strength of a previous offer from the Fulham talent-spotter Sam Bartram. He signed Fulham amateur forms at fifteen in 1950 and professional forms at seventeen on his birthday in October 1952. He played for the same club for the rest of his eighteen-year senior career.

The position was inside-forward, the deep-lying creative midfield role on which English football's whole tactical organisation in the 1950s and early 1960s was built. The classic 2-3-2-3 W-M formation of the period put the two inside-forwards (the *number eight* and *number ten*) as the architects of the team's attacking play; the inside-forward whose pass set up the chance was the player whose contribution would now be called the assist, and the inside-forward's accuracy of long-passing was the technical skill that distinguished the position from the wing-half work behind him and the centre-forward work ahead of him. Haynes was, by the consensus of every contemporary observer (the manager Bill Nicholson he had turned down said in 1962 that Haynes was the best passer of a ball he had ever seen in any position), the most accurate long-passer of his generation in the British game. The thirty- and forty-yard pass struck from the centre circle to land at a winger's feet on the touchline thirty yards downfield without a bounce was the move he made his career on, and it became known at Craven Cottage simply as *the Haynes pass*. He made his first England appearance against Northern Ireland in October 1954, three days before his twentieth birthday. He played fifty-six times for England across the next eight years; he captained twenty-two of them.

The maximum-wage system was the central labour problem of English professional football through the 1950s. Wages had been capped by the Football League at twenty pounds a week through the post-war years, with the consequence that the leading players in the country (Haynes, Tom Finney, Stanley Matthews, Bobby Charlton, Duncan Edwards before his Munich death) all earned roughly the same as a tube driver in the same year. The Professional Footballers' Association under Jimmy Hill threatened a strike in January 1961, and on 18 January 1961 the Football League conceded and abolished the maximum wage. The Fulham chairman Tommy Trinder, the music-hall comedian whose ownership of the club had been a sentimental project, had told the press the previous summer that Haynes was a hundred-pound-a-week player. He had said it as a turn of phrase. When the wage cap fell on the morning of the 19th of January, the Fleet Street journalists held him to it: he signed Haynes to a new contract that afternoon on a hundred pounds a week. Haynes was the first British professional footballer paid that wage, and the figure became the headline number of the first post-cap year of English football.

The Blackpool car accident of August 1962 was the event that changed everything. Haynes was returning from a Blackpool weekend after the 1962 World Cup, in which he had captained England's group-stage exit in Chile, when his Jaguar saloon left the road outside Blackpool in heavy rain and rolled. His knee was badly damaged on the rolling. He was twenty-seven. The injury cost him the rest of the 1962-63 season and never fully healed. He played another seven seasons for Fulham at reduced fitness, made the team's transition into the new First Division they had been promoted to in 1959, and did not play for England again. He was, by his own assessment in his post-career interviews, never the player after Blackpool that he had been before. He left Fulham in 1970 after 658 first-team appearances, the second-highest total in the club's history, and spent the next few years at Durban City in the South African league as a player-coach.

He came home in 1974, worked as a Fulham scout, ran a newsagent business with his wife Avril at Edinburgh's Marchmont area, and lived a quiet retirement in the Scottish capital for the next thirty years. Fulham named the stand at Craven Cottage opposite the Thames the Johnny Haynes Stand in 2005. He died in an Edinburgh car accident on 18 October 2005, the day after his seventy-first birthday, when his Vauxhall hit a parked taxi on the Sciennes Road close to his house and threw him through the windscreen. He never married Avril formally; the funeral was at Mortonhall Crematorium in Edinburgh. The Haynes name in the English-side catalogue is the triple-stream surname of Flemish Hainault immigration, the English hay-enclosure, and the dialect form of John's son; he carries it from a Edmonton recreation ground into the foundation event of post-cap English professional football.