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http://www.squawka.com/news/the-half-legend-of-joey-beauchamp/487134
By Seb Stafford-Bloor
Back in July of 1994, Joey Beauchamp made his one and only West Ham appearance during a pre-season friendly with Oxford City. That game is notorious, but not because of Beauchamp.
Low on available first-teamers and equipped with a penchant for creating folklore around himself, then assistant manager Harry Redknapp substituted a watching fan into the game for the second-half.
And so that match, played in front of a few hundred supporters in a nondescript Oxfordshire suburb, has eternal life. It’s part of the Redknapp mythology now, and the sort of anecdote which will be granted immortality by its inclusion in stocking-filler books and offbeat memoirs.
Joey Beauchamp will never be forgotten, either.
His is a well-known tale, and for as long as Beauchamp’s name is remembered, it will feature on those cruel run-down lists of bad transfers. 58 days after West Ham had paid Oxford United a club-record £1.2 million for him, the winger had tired of the M40 traffic and, claiming homesickness, convinced his new employers to sell him to Swindon Town at a £400,000 loss.
And that’s Joey Beauchamp, that’s who he is to the world today..
Interviewed many years later, Billy Bonds – first-team manager during Beauchamp’s brief stop-over – was damning with his assessment:
“He said he couldn’t settle at West Ham, that the club was too big for him. The boy was a total wimp, and it was disastrous for the club…. What could I say to the kid? I couldn’t threaten him. I just told him he’d better keep his nut down because the fans weren’t going to be too happy with him.”
Redknapp has been similarly scathing, revealing at the time that Beauchamp had broken down in tears on his first day at training and, decades later, he’s still telling the world that he was the worst professional he had ever encountered.
Bonds would ultimately leave his job in August 1994, with the promoted Redknapp taking his place and quickly washing his hands of the club’s record signing. Still, the perception lingered that the botched transfer had made Bonds’ position untenable, and Beauchamp was cast as the outsider who had dethroned a club icon.
The acrimony was clearly fierce. Somewhere in YouTube’s depths, there’s an interview with Beauchamp from the day he was unveiled at The County Ground. Shy and softly-spoken, he looks semi-traumatised by the events of the past six weeks. His soft Oxfordshire bur betrays a small town boy and someone who, to a hardened veteran like Bonds and a gregarious bluster-man like Redknapp, probably did seem too delicate for the Premier League.
Troublingly though, little effort has ever been made to approach this from Beauchamp’s perspective or, crucially, to understand how it was that he ended up at West Ham in the first place.
During the 1990s, Oxford United were a financial mess. Rendered insolvent by the death of Robert Maxwell and the unravelling of his affairs, they spent the decade lurching from one crisis to another, and were periodically hamstrung by the forced sales of their star players – and Beauchamp was one, as he recalled in an interview with the Oxford Mail.
“Oxford United told me that if I didn’t join West Ham, then Oxford would be over; they had no money. What was I supposed to do? I could never have lived with myself if I refused to join West Ham and then Oxford did go under.”
It provides a different perspective on the story. Beauchamp was born in Oxford, raised as a fan, and bred in the club’s youth academy. In today’s world it may seem fanciful, but he was a local boy who never wanted to leave the area, yet was forced to do so by circumstances beyond his control. He had the ability to go as far as he wanted, but seemingly the desire to go nowhere at all.
Tellingly and in spite of the obvious opportunity and life-changing benefits, he initially declined the move to Upton Park. He didn’t want more money and didn’t seem to crave fame; he wanted to stay at home.
His move to Swindon was only successful in the sense that it devalued him to the point at which Oxford could afford to buy him back. John Gorman was sacked halfway through his first season at The County Ground, and his replacement Steve McMahon thought little enough of Beauchamp to marginalise him almost entirely from the first-team.
So, in October 1995 and just 16 months on from being forced through the exit, he returned to The Manor Ground for just £75,000..
The tragedy for Joey Beauchamp is that his ability should’ve taken him far beyond the level he reached. The greater regret however is that the associations his name carries hide what a wonderful footballer he was – and that’s something which is worth fighting against.
I moved to Oxford in the early 1990s, and with distance and youth providing a natural barrier to London and my first love, The Manor Ground became a natural, temporary home. A collection of odd, incongruous sheds at the top of Headington Hill, it was a funny little place with a sloped pitch and a cripplingly low capacity.
Beauchamp didn’t quite belong there. He did in mind, clearly, but he was too talented for the Manor’s narrow stage. Blessed with searing pace and a left-foot which could shell peas, he terrorised full-backs at that level. It’s been 20 years, but I can still see what I saw from the London Road end now: Beauchamp edging towards the box from the touchline, squaring up his marker and darting down the line.
And I remember how the crowd used to sound when he got the ball. Certain players are able to change the mood in the ground just by being on the pitch. They offer hope; irrespective of how many times they lose the ball or how infrequently their crosses find a man, those first few touches in dangerous areas are golden.
Beauchamp was one of those. He used to make the terrace pulse with energy; old men would urge him forward, young boys would strain for a better view through the bodies. He was at home on the left side, but would drift into other positions too, and whenever he was on the ball in the final-third, that same noise would emanate from the stands.
I was young then and I know that, in all likelihood, some of these memories have grown in my mind, but I also know what I saw and I know that it’s a tragedy for that side of Beauchamp to have been lost to history. He existed before social media, and while the internet was still in its infancy, so a lot of what he did belongs only to the memories of those who saw him play.
By the end of the 2001/02, he was finished as a professional. His career at Oxford died a slow death, and while he marked his final game for the club with a gorgeous, steered volley from the edge of the box, injury had by that point made his departure inevitable. That magical technique was still there, but the pace was gone. A month short of his 31st birthday, he left league football for good and faded from view.
There are no goal compilations with which Harry Redknapp’s oft-repeated charge can be answered, and there’s no obvious way to challenge the all encompassing myth that surrounds him. Fragments of his career can still be found in odd places, and grainy videos give the vaguest hint of the kind of player he was. It’s not enough though, not even close – nothing can separate him from West Ham and those 58 days which continue to define him.
Research tells you that retirement hasn’t been a happy place for him. Local press reports tell stories of depression and an instance of drink-driving, but also of someone who has evidently learnt from his mistakes and fought hard to rejoin the working world.
After a tricky pursuit, I spoke with him on the telephone in early 2015. I introduced myself as a fan of his – a coy description, given that I used to imitate him in the playground – and as someone who had a deep admiration for who he was as a player and that, if possible, I would like the chance to tell his side of this story in more detail.
He was friendly on the phone and we chatted about his job, but I never heard from him again. No response on the phone, no reply to emails. And who can blame him for that? Maybe a more credentialed writer would have better luck and put him more at ease, but maybe I should’ve just never mentioned West Ham?
No excuses, I knew better.
I lived in Oxford for 14 years before leaving home, and I know that there, in that tiny corner of the football world, he’s far more than just a peculiar anecdote. The year at Swindon is mentioned and in interviews he’s claimed that local supporters still give him grief about that year at The County Ground, but they also know that, had things been different, he might well have played for England.
The game has grown up a lot in the last 20 years. Although we all have our complaints about what it’s been allowed to become, it’s now more aware than ever about its responsibilities. In 2015, Joey Beauchamp probably would’ve been in safer hands. Oxford would still have been his home and he may still have had the same difficulties leaving it behind, but football would’ve probably made it easier for him to do so – and possibly given him a figurative hand to hold as he moved up the divisions.
In 1994 he may have fallen down the stairs on his own, but football gave him a kick on the way. His post-career life implies that, as a person, he has some vulnerabilities and, through that prism, some of the comments aimed at him through the years now look fairly reprehensible.
It’s all hypothesis and there’s no way of really knowing what he could’ve been in a time better suited to who he was. Nobody can change the past and, unfortunately, nobody can alter the perceptions that it creates.
He’s part of a strange story, and time has probably gilded some of those memories, but believe me when I say that Joey Beauchamp could really play.
If you saw him, you know – and you also know that he doesn’t belong in that box into which he’s been placed.
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