Garth Wattley talks with Clive Pantin The faces in the black and white photograph are fresh and youthful. It is a picture of the 1959 FA Trophy football champions, Casuals. Forty-four years on, Clive Pantin's hair is a whole lot greyer than in that photo of which he is a part. But at age 70, there is still a glow to his face. In his manner, too, there is little to distinguish the man of many parts of today from the youth who was just exploring his options back then. We are sitting in a simple office in the Foundation for the Enhancement and Enrichment of Life (FEEL) compound. Boxes with clothing and piles of files and other documents surround the room and cover the long table in the centre. Outside lies a warehouse stacked with more goods. This is a working man's environment, not a retirement pad. Decades spent in education, and further ones in government, have evidently left Pantin with an abiding need to serve. But it is also clear this morning that some of his greatest joys were experienced on the field. As a useful inside-left whose powerful left-foot had to compensate for a right one which "was for walking purposes", Pantin had his days in the sun. Good enough to have played for the national team over a period of six to seven years, Pantin had the pleasure of scoring tooon debut against Suriname at Skinner Park in a 2-1 winand twice in a 4-2 defeat of Jamaica on his first overseas trip in 1960-61. That Jamaica squad included the West Indies wicketkeeper Franz Alexander, "a very good footballer", according to Pantin. Trinidad and Tobago were no mean side either. No side that had Delbert Charleau as captain and included Doyle Griffith, Jim Lowe, Cax Baptiste, Pat Gomez, Ken Hodge and Son Baptiste could be. "The big difference between the teams that played in my era as against today, we can't match the skills of the people today. I tell you something, they can't match our brain," he says to me. "We played with brain...all the players in all the teams. And there was a spirit! My first tour when I went to Jamaica, the thrill of putting on that red, white and black uniform...We didn't get a single cent and that did not bother us at all, we were just thrilled to be playing for Trinidad and Tobago, that was our greatest salary." The late 50s and 60s were quite a time to be playing and watching football here. "Unbelievable," Pantin gushes, trying to explain. "I mean the thrills that people got, the crowds that used to come to the (Queen's Park) Savannah on a bumpy old field to watch the teams play...unbelievable. "When there was a North/South match, and I will always remember my first North/South matchdidn't play very wellbut it was a thrill to come out in the colours and to play. If you ever saw that crowd, Garth, in that North/South match, you would understand how it felt. It was tremendous, it was 10-15,000 people!" For Pantin, the excitement was greatest in '59 when the Casuals boys lifted that FA Trophy. "It was the greatest thrill to be handed over that trophy, because the FA trophy in those days was the signal of greatness to the country. When you won the FA trophy, you were the top team in the country." It was a title well earned given the teams Casuals had to get past. Maple, the famous Malvern of "cha-cha-cha" fame and the strong TPD outfit from South were all beaten by a single goal. They were stopped by a side that made up with grit what they lacked in flair. That resilience was needed in the semi-final against Carlton "The General" Franco's Malvern. "My brother Geoffrey, I think, scored the goal," recalls Pantin. "It was a scramble goal or something. Garth, the thing about Casuals that I remember most, when Casuals got on top against a great team like Malvern, after that, once you leading by one goal, not a man could pass inside that area! We went right back, because we knew we were limited." That tactic had already served Casuals well against Maple, where Pantin himself did the business. "I will always remember when we were attacking, I remember Alan (Joseph) particularly saying, 'mark his left foot, mark his left foot', because I would draw away to try and get the ball...The ball came over and I had a fairly good header and I got up and I rocked the ball into the back of the net with my head. And I remember somebody in the crowd saying: 'Mark he head! Mark he head!'" He has a good laugh at that recollection. Casuals were living on the edge. But they had put their stock in their defensive game marshalled by the late Raffie Knowles, "a master of defence". In the final, it paid off in the biggest way for the underdogs. "TPD was the top team in South. They were a petroleum place, and they were able to have a large number of very, very good players," Pantin says. "Son Baptiste comes to mind immediately, Jim Lowe, who I consider one of the best centre halfs this country has ever produced...those were the kinds of players. They had wiped out everybody in South. We knew we had to play 200 per cent to even match them." Casuals, though, put their best foot forward early. "Aubrey Welch chipped a ball to me, I headed it across to Dave Cabral and he put it in the net. Well, after that, we formed a barrier across the half-line and the title of the barrier was: 'None shall pass'...We just defended. I was the only player that crossed the half-line...I never prayed so much for that 60 minutes to finish." Perhaps only Pantin's teammate, the fine goalkeeper Pat Gomez, his head bandaged following an on-field injury, was more desperate. The reward for Gomez and company was great, though, the trophy and the honour of being lifted off the field by the crowd. It would probably be fair to say that Pantin would gladly have bottled up the spirit of those times for posterity's sake. He probably would have used it liberally now, in these troubled times. "This is one of the points I want to make, Garth, and I think it's important in today's scenario. "Casuals was essentially a team of white guys. Colts, TPD were essentially Africans. We played hard on the field, but as soon as the match was over, you put your hands round each other and, for example, Casuals would say for example, 'alright fellows, let's go and have a drink in the club'. Next match, we played them, (they would say) come up by the Belmont way, we'll have some drinks." Several years later, in the 1970s, Pantin would have also gladly lifted a glass to what, for him, was another golden moment, this time, in the days of Shell Shield cricket"A cover drive by Bernard Julien for four when we beat Barbados for the first time in years." That was the famous "cockroach ent fraid fowl no more" match of 1971. Pantin was by then wearing another of his many hatscricket commentator, in the animated style of Knowles. Julien, along with players like Richard Gabriel and Larry Gomes, had been one of the products of the Wes Hall League with which Pantin was also involved. Pantin has many tales to tell of that cricket league, happy stories, stories as intriguing as the one about his brief entry into the fight game as the first manager of former local welterweight champion Michael Parsons. He negotiated an $8,000 purse that first time. The memory seems to tickle him as much as the FA win. Almost as much. |
Clive Pantin: the the footballers of yesterday were smarter Former Fatima Principal reminisces about his football career and Casuals' historic FA win of 1959 |
Clive Pantin taught at Fatima for twenty odd years and was Principal for approximately the last ten. He left in 1981 to take up a career in politics. VB |
