As we’ve seen both recently and down the years, a number of players – some of them local, others talent-spotted from further afield – have risen through our youth ranks to wear the blue and white of Albion’s first team. Spencer Vignes looks back at the young guns who made the grade, continuing with a long serving midfielder-turned-defender whose career very nearly hit the buffers before it had even started…
It’s the dying days of 1996. Outside the manager’s office at the Goldstone Ground, nine second-year Albion YTS players sit waiting to hear if they’ll be taken on as full-time professionals. Last in is Kerry Mayo, a Peacehaven lad who’s been on Albion’s books since the age of 11. Once again, it’s the same story – we want to take you on, we can’t take you on, the club’s got no money, blah blah blah. But then something bizarre yet utterly inspiring happens. Albion’s increasingly beleaguered manager, Jimmy Case, offers to take a £150 per week pay cut so that Kerry can have his first pro contract, albeit on a month-to-month basis. The bean-counters nod in agreement. The deal offers little long-term security, but Kerry comes away with his trusty left foot in the door to another world...
Kerry, take us back to the beginning. Was it always football for you as a youngster, or were you drawn to other sports?
It was always football. The school I went to and the area I lived in, which was Peacehaven, encouraged it. By that, I mean we were able to get out on the council estate greens and play football. We’d be out until the street lights came on – that would be our cue to go home. We’d arrange tournaments between three or four estates in the same area, playing home and away games against each other. I had, whisper it, a Manchester United kit. I didn’t get a Brighton kit until I was around nine. It was all Manchester United, Liverpool and Arsenal then. Chelsea didn’t get a look in. But whenever we went to visit family, I’d always get my parents to drive down Old Shoreham Road so I could have a look at the Goldstone Ground.
How did Albion discover you?
I’d been with a team called Peacehaven Pirates, playing either centre forward or centre midfield, running rings around lads twice the size of me. That’s when I got picked out by Brighton. This would have been in the late Eighties when Barry Lloyd was manager and George Petchey oversaw the youth team. Three or four of us from Peacehaven went for a trial, which turned into training one night a week, and every year I kept getting asked back.
So when did it start to get more serious?
By the age of 15 I was playing every week against the likes of Arsenal, QPR and Tottenham, and that led to me being offered a YTS with the club. George was still the youth team manager, but Barry had been replaced by Liam Brady. At that point I was playing left wing and Liam, having been a left midfielder himself, was a legend. I was buzzing. I’d think, ‘Whatever he tells me to do, I’m going to do it to the best of my ability.’ But then Liam left because of what was going on off the field, and Jimmy Case took over. The club was being run into the ground. If it hadn’t been for Jimmy [see previous page], my story would have probably ended right there.
Instead you made your debut within a matter of weeks...
… on a cold, damp Wednesday evening in November [1996] against Carlisle United at the Goldstone. We lost the game 3-1 and I think Warren Aspinall might have scored a worldie for them. He was coming towards the end of his career having played for some top clubs. He was in my face before the ref had even blown his whistle. Let’s just say the language cannot be repeated here; in fact, I’d never heard anything like it before, but I started giving it straight back to him. ‘You one-tooth has-been!’ This went backwards and forwards between us all game. He was going to put me up in the air, so he said, so I told him, ‘Only if you can catch me.’ In fact I told him my grandad was quicker than him! I could feel his blood boiling. He must have intimidated players throughout his career, but I didn’t care. At the final whistle, I thought he was going to kill me, but lo and behold he came over, shook my hand and said, ‘You know what, you got me good and proper. Well played.’ He even bought me a beer in the players’ bar. Of course later on, Micky Adams went and signed him for us and he’d always greet me at training with the same colourful language he used for me that day!
You enjoyed a long, successful career with the Albion, but are there any regrets?
Not really. My last game was 28th March 2009 against Tranmere at Withdean. That was when I mucked my hip up. After that I had to retire through injury. That’s probably my only regret. At that time I was coming up to 32 but probably the fittest I’d ever been. I’d come into a team full of drinkers – that was the culture of football in the Nineties – but by the end it was all about sports science, nutrition, ice baths, heart-rate monitors and so on. And I embraced all that. I could’ve kicked on, had I not been injured. But, hey, I look back now and think, playing 413 times for a club I supported all my life, that’s not exactly a bad career.
We have to end with the Hereford game...
I never got nervous… except for at Hereford. You couldn’t ignore the build-up. You couldn’t ignore what it meant, not just for us, but them as well. This had never happened before, a scenario where on the last day of the season one of two teams playing each other was going to drop out of the Football League. Stuart Storer’s winner against Doncaster the previous Saturday had put us above them and second from bottom for the first time in months. Only one club went out of the Football League then, so we could afford to draw. But it was away from home, and we were terrible away from home. All our points had come at the Goldstone.
And you then go and score an own goal in the game...
The game was terrible. There was no football played whatsoever and the pitch was bobbly. There’d been a bull on it just before kick-off [as is the pre-match tradition at Hereford] and it was, to all intents and purposes, a cow field. Then yes, I go and score an own goal. They were going to score anyway. They had two strikers behind me and I tried to slide in and cut it out for a corner so it wouldn’t get to them. Instead it came off my right foot straight into the top corner past [Albion keeper] Mark Ormerod. It happened in front of our fans and all I wanted was for the ground to swallow me up. It was like some kind of premonition in which you’re going to die. After all the hard work I’d put into my career, I was about to send Brighton out of the Football League.
But then up stepped Robbie Reinelt...
I scored four own goals in my career, and we never lost any of those matches. Robbie Reinelt scored the equaliser, the goal that kept us in the Football League, and you can imagine my relief. I was the first one up to him, jumping on his back shouting, ‘You’ve just saved my life, you beauty!’ At the final whistle, oh my word, we went crazy. Then, after a few minutes, you realise there are all these wounded men on the floor in Hereford shirts. Their livelihoods, their jobs, are up in the air. They’re in tears. Of course we went mad in the dressing room afterwards, but that didn’t half bring us down to earth. Talk about two sides to a coin.