‘He missed less than a handful of games in my career and considering I played over eight hundred, that is damn good going for a labouring man,’ he begins warmly. We lived in a tenement in a rough part of Easterhouse. Pat Nevin is telling the tale of the night the great Jock Stein decided to test his mettle. I play for this club.” The next week I walked out with Paul and they sang his name, which was great.’It was not just Bates who confronted Nevin, who says he received letters from the National Front.
They tried to wind me up mercilessly and got confused when it had no effect whatsoever.’ Nevin’s love of music and technology meant he would put together videos to play for his team-mates on their bus journeys to matches, as he explains: ‘I learned how to make videos and copied The Tube and Top of the Pops if there was a decent thing on. He had a choice of Everton or Paris Saint-Germain. He was rejected from Celtic’s youth program because he was thought to be too small. ‘My dad and all my family were Celtic supporters so we’d go to the games but, more than that, my dad trained me every day. Foden is the future of Man City – Nevin Phil Foden can replace David Silva when the Spaniard leaves Manchester City, according to former Chelsea and Everton winger Pat Nevin. I was never nervous in my life about it. Chelsea bought me for ninety-five grand, which was buttons at the time, and I still did not think at all I’d be a professional footballer. ‘We were on the back pages of all the papers. Pat Nevin was a talented, expressive forward, most notably for Chelsea, Everton, Tranmere and Scotland. It gave me this big advantage and was what made me good enough to become a professional footballer actually – getting that base.’‘I went to the boys’ club and from there Celtic Football Club saw that Dundee United were going to sign me and so they signed me up as a schoolboy.
‘I’d go and make tapes for him,’ says Nevin, who provided rather more than compilation cassettes for his team-mate, defending Canoville publicly after he became a target for abuse from a section of the club’s supporters.At the time Stamford Bridge was a magnet for right-wing extremists; Canoville had bananas thrown at him on his debut against Crystal Palace and it was after another fixture against Palace, on 14 April 1984, that Nevin spoke out. It could have grown into something big but John Neal got ill and then the magic was broken a little bit. Nevin describes enthusiastically a BBC website feature he produced using a programme that allowed him to appear on a CGI Goodison Park, walking among the players as he explained where Everton were going right and wrong.The Stamford Bridge of today seems a world apart from the ground that Nevin knew. No, it’d be a nightmare because you can’t walk about the streets. That night we were playing at Alloa and it was rock-hard and I was having a total stinker. With a semi-final against Manchester United to look forward to as well, some may still bemoan the return of football but us Chelsea fans, we are having a ball. Pat Nevin » Internationals for Scotland / Friendlies, EURO Qualifiers, WC Qualifiers Europe, EURO, World Cup It wasn’t drummed into us by my mum and dad.
Then there were National Front thugs in the Shed End and a chairman, Ken Bates, who erected a twelve-foot electric perimeter fence to deter the hooligans (albeit it was never switched on, thanks to the intervention of Greater London Council).But for Nevin, a twenty-year-old college student from Glasgow, this was the place where he made his name in English football. P.G. Then I started making videos, which would be music with a comedy bit, and they’d watch it on the coach.’Expanding on his work today, he says: ‘Away from football, I don’t have a massive competitive instinct. But if you put that effort in and you have skill on top, you’ve got a chance. I trained with them but still had no concept of making it as a footballer – I was too busy enjoying it.
It was early 1985 and Nevin had been making waves in his debut season in the First Division with Chelsea. ‘You can smell honesty a mile away and that’s Colin,’ he adds.Unfortunately, Nevin’s ensuing Everton career was not as successful as either man would have wished. ‘They found it funny. It was a wee moment of fate. But I was just normal.’ ‘There were a lot of hooligans at the time and I’ve no time for the retrospectives people are doing about the casual movement now.
‘He’d been a boxer but he wanted to know as much about the technical side as possible. And I didn’t need a religion for that. And I did. well, his sentences an infectious stream of colour and detail. He was shaven-headed and he wasn’t very pleased with me.