Porterfield's new Korea

Ian Porterfield, now a wing heeled Alan Whicker among managers, has led unfancied Busan I'Cons to victory in the Korean FA Cup - the holders, the favourites and the league champions all defeated on the joyful journey to the Christmas Day final.

If not quite iconic, he has earned demi-god status in South Korea's second city. "Mr Chong, the chairman, was very pleased," he says.

Known on Wearside simply as Porter, he was so sure I'Cons wouldn't even reach the final that he'd booked a family holiday in America.

"Obviously 1973 is still very important to me, a magic occasion, but this was a different sort of emotion," he says. "It was the biggest thing that's ever happened to Busan I'Cons, just a dream for us all, and, like Sunderland, totally expected.

"I had an incredible feeling of happiness within myself, to know that they'd benefited from my guidance. It was certainly a different way to spend Christmas Day."

Twelve years his junior, his Trinidadian wife Glenda continued with the holiday with their daughters. "Winning the cup was the only way he'd have got away with missing family Christmas," she says, without ever once taking affectionate eyes off him.

He'd flown out next day, spent time in New York, New Jersey and Canada, has been back to Scotland to see his old mum, enjoyed last weekend in Whitburn with former Sunderland team mate Len Ashurst and returns to the 11 month K-League season - and to the last year of a three year contract - on Friday.

Now he's just Special K.

We meet in the bar of one of Edinburgh's more refined hotels, a Friday evening fun lover shifting a pint of heavy in one hand while vigorously scratching his exposed and expansive stomach with the other.

In the lounge, to which gratefully we adjourn, the pianist is tinkling on about the bonny, banks of Loch Lomond.

Will he no' come back again? "I think it 85 per cent certain that my next job will be abroad, either in Korea or elsewhere," says Porterfield, 59 next month but with the appearance and the enthusiasm of a man much younger.

Glenda wouldn't be too keen, either. "I love the Scottish people, but every time I come here it rains," she says.

The life story of the Fife miner's son who became a Wearside legend, was given five hours to live after a car accident 18 months later, has managed four national teams and been in eight cup finals could overflow a 300 page book, much less a 1600 word column and at the end of it they'd still have to write "End of part one." He has plans neither to stop, nor to decelerate.

"Bill Shankly was about my age when he went to Liverpool and built a great team and I have the most enormous respect for what he did.

"He worked and worked and sadly he died fairly soon after he retired. This game gets into your blood, your bones, you become so involved with it. I don't think now's the right time to give up working.

"To me, the more I've stayed outside the UK the better coach I've become. If a job was offered over here there's no doubt I could be up for it, but I think it would be at a lesser club now. It would be nice to be back in the UK, but it's not something I linger over."

Twenty years or so ago there were also what he prefers simply to describe as personal difficulties. "I'd have liked to have been great, who knows but for that."

Named after Glenda Jackson - "my mother named all her children after movie stars" - his wife knew so little about football when they met that at her first match she asked Porterfield's sister which side the linesmen were on.

"It's a trade off," she says. "I still don't much understand football but I have a fantastic lifestyle and a wonderful husband. Maybe one day we'll return to the Caribbean; most Trinidadian girls are quite keen to leave; Ian just met the one who wasn't."

The Wembley goal against Leeds United was unusual because he didn't score too many - 17, he says precisely, but in 254 games - and because it was with his right foot, the one that balance expert Len Hepple had worked so hard upon.

It preceded Monty's double save, Bob Stokoe's final whistle euphoria, delirium over half the North-East and incredulity over the rest. In the absence of much else to celebrate in the succeeding 32 years it has been recalled and replayed at every opportunity, 1973 still part of Porterfield's e-mail address.

He also owns the match ball and the boot - a left boot - dipped in gold to mark the occasion and last valued at £95,000.

Whenever the unforgettable heroes gather, however - and reminiscence shows no sign of running its course - Porter, travelling lightly, is almost always the absentee.

"If I were over here I'd be involved like Billy and Bobby and the boys, but I can't be and everyone accepts that," he says, without after-effects of the late night crash near Sunderland Airport which left him with severe injuries.

Moved to Newcastle General Hospital - older fans still remember the line about the last player transferred from Sunderland to Newcastle - he survived surgery, was back on the training ground within a month and was disappointed ("I'd given them total commitment, 110 per cent") when the club tried to cash in on the insurance.

After Sunderland he played over 100 games for Jack Charlton's Sheffield Wednesday and a few on loan for Reading. He led Rotherham and Sheffield United to championships and United to further promotion, succeeded Alex Ferguson at Aberdeen, returned south to manage Reading and Chelsea and began a round the world tour that has embraced the national sides of Zambia, Zimbabwe, Oman and Trinidad and Tobago before the move - Korea move - to Busan in November 2002.

As a youngster from Lochgelly Welfare, however, he had ended a spell with Don Revie's Leeds because he couldn't settle - "I wouldn't care, but my mum had recommended me" - turned down trials with Hearts and Rangers and joined Raith Rovers because it was closer to home.

He joined Sunderland in December 1967 for a Raith record £45,000, but still went home every other weekend.

Now his passport has more stamps than Stanley Gibbons' catalogue, and whatever the accent may be - "I believe I'm a good coach who can manage a bit" - the accent remains deeply, distinctly Dunfermline.

Busan I'Cons have an interpreter; Glenda Porterfield doesn't. How does she understand him? "With great difficulty," she says and smiles widely, as always.

The Zambian national team had lost 18 players in a plane crash shortly before his arrival, but under his leadership missed World Cup qualification by a point and rose to 18th in the global rankings. After 15 trouble free months in Zimbabwe he steered Trinidad and Tobago from 65th to 25th in the international pecking order.

It was also where he met Glenda - "She had a nice private education and I was from the mines" - and where he met Sir Bobby Robson, shortly before his move to Newcastle.

"Bobby was music to me ears, his enthusiasm and his knowledge were just incredible," says Porterfield, and since there's little doubt the direction of the conversation, Glenda lets it be known that she's tried to teach chess to the football fanatic she fell for.

It didn't work. Probably he wanted to know whose side the linesmen were on, or where the hell the ball was.

When they arrived in Busan, most of the city's four million inhabitants were probably far more familiar with chess, too. "Despite the impression that Korea made in the World Cup, club football still isn't very well supported," says Porterfield.

"Teams like Samsung could go out and spend £2 or £3m on a player and I had to deal in free transfers and boys we'd brought through ourselves, but I knew I could do something there.

"The job I have is very time consuming but the facilities and the quality of life are superb. We have a wonderful house overlooking the ocean, a wonderful car, all we could ever ask for.

"I was taught football by my grandfather, my father, my uncles, my cousins. It was inbred. In Korea they've been playing baseball for almost 100 years and football for 21. The standard is very very high now, Busan could hold their own in the Championship League, but there's still plenty to do.

"I set high standards. I demand certain things and I expect certain things, but most of all I want my players to want to get out of bed in the morning, to enjoy themselves."

They won the cup after extra time and penalties, the joy of Christmas no less intense than on that May day in 1973 but the celebration a little different. "I didn't just hug one player, I hugged and kissed everyone - my coaches, my doctor, my physio. It had been a real united effort."

After an hour's celebration he went home to an empty house. Glenda rang. "He just said they'd won," she recalls.

The chat lasts two and a half hours, The Porterfields, hugely personable, drink Diet Coke, the third party something stronger. The pianist plays goodnight.

Both look forward to getting home - she because of almost permanent jet lag, he because there's not just the K-League but the Asia Cup and the Supercup to which to look forward.

"No matter where your football is you can't rest on your laurels for long," says the flying Scotsman. "There's still a wee job to be done, forebye."

And finally...

The competition which Nottingham Forest won in 1899 and Spurs in 1906 (Backtrack, January 14) was the National Baseball League of Great Britain - then active in the North-East and with teams which mainly were offshoots of football clubs.

Noting that Graham Thorpe recently became the fifth Englishman to take 100 catches in test cricket, Alf Hutchinson in Darlington today invites readers to name the other four.

We return, no catch, on Friday.

Published: 18/01/2005