'He had no sense of humour, that man!': Rodney Marsh on the Sir Alf Ramsey joke that ended it all, why Jordan Henderson should NOT be in England's squad and his role in the US soccer boom

Rodney Marsh says to meet on South MacDill Avenue, out in South Tampa. He says the restaurant is called Mad Dogs & Englishmen. He says to meet at midday. He does not mention the sun or Noel Coward, but it occurs to me fleetingly it might be one of Rodney’s wind-ups.

It isn’t. Mad Dogs is real. All high ceilings, cobb salad and tuna carpaccio. And they will be showing the USA’s opening World Cup game against Paraguay on a big screen next Friday night. Marsh is sitting in the corner, sipping a soft drink, a waitress fussing around him and old friends greeting him.

‘I loved Tampa since the day I got here in 1976,’ Marsh says. ‘My upbringing in London was very hard. I was around nasty people, violent people. People here were lovely. When I signed to play here, I thought, ‘are they for real?’. They were genuinely lovely. I have kept the place here ever since.’

He is 81 now and, even if he is walking with a limp on account of the knee replacement operation he had some weeks ago, he is as sharp as a tack and full of enthusiasm and love for the game that he illuminated as one of the great maverick players of the 1960s and 70s, at QPR, Manchester City, the Tampa Bay Rowdies and Fulham. Three times a week, he hosts a popular show on Sirius XMFC called Grumpy Pundits.

Marsh was a showman to his boots. He had magic in them, too. He was a crowd-pleaser who belonged in the same category of great entertainers as Tony Currie, Frank Worthington, Peter Osgood and Stan Bowles. He was also the kind of player distrusted by an England manager like Sir Alf Ramsey. Marsh should have won way more than nine caps.

But he was in the vanguard of great players such as Pele, Franz Beckenbauer, George Best and Johan Cruyff who joined the North American Soccer League in the mid-1970s and turned it into one of the biggest shows in town. Even though it foundered later, the NASL laid the foundations for the sport’s popularity here now.

Nor has his contribution to England been forgotten, despite Ramsey’s scepticism about his worth. Marsh was presented with a legacy England cap before England’s match with New Zealand at the Raymond James Stadium on Saturday. His three grandchildren, including his eldest, Addison, a promising high school quarterback, were there to see it, which gave him particular joy.

A few people at Mad Dogs congratulated him on the honour he was about to receive, but he is already recognised as a pioneer in the USA anyway. The great extravaganza of a World Cup is about to unfold here again and Marsh was one of the first few who were instrumental in popularising football on this continent 50 years ago.

His arrival in Florida, when he was still in his prime at Maine Road, captain of the club and fresh from scoring the winner for City at Highbury in a 3-2 victory over Arsenal, was a product of an attitude he describes wryly now as ‘combative’. He and authority were not a great mix.

‘We won at Highbury but then, after the next game against Burnley, I had this enormous row with Tony Book, the manager, in the dressing room after the game,’ Marsh says. ‘He was upset because we only drew 0-0. He went ballistic, we had words and he went to the chairman, Peter Swales.

‘The chairman said I had to apologise. I said I wouldn’t because it wasn’t my fault. So he got Tony Book up to the boardroom and he asked us to shake hands and Tony said, ‘not unless he says sorry to me’. Swales asked me what I thought of Book. ‘Do you really want to know?’ I said. Swales nodded. I said: ‘He’s f***ing useless.’ They put me on the transfer list.’

Marsh was courted by West Brom, Newcastle, Aston Villa and Anderlecht. And by Elton John, who had bought an NASL franchise in Los Angeles and wanted Best and Marsh to play in the same side. Then Marsh’s move to LA was hijacked and he came to Tampa and the Rowdies instead.

He was met by hundreds of screaming fans at the airport. They called themselves the Wowdies. At his first press conference, he was introduced by Tampa Bay’s owner, George Strawbridge, as the White Pele.

‘The standard of the league was like the English Third Division,’ Marsh says, ‘but Pele played in it and Pele was the biggest thing. It was showbiz. It was like a league full of teams who were all the Harlem Globetrotters. It was tremendous. I got a lot of satisfaction from it. They were the happiest times of my life.

‘Does Pele bear comparison with Messi? Oh God, yeah. He won the World Cup when he was 18 and he scored two goals in the final. That was when football was a little bit harder than it is today. That’s not to say I don’t love Messi and what he does.

‘I have watched a lot of Messi and he is a genius footballer. I tell you what he does. Messi does something all truly great footballers do. He changes his mind at the last second. He’ll be doing something and then he changes his mind and then he changes back again. Pele and Maradona did that.’

A crowd of 32,000 turned out for Marsh’s first match in the NASL when the Rowdies beat the Chicago Sting 2-1 in the first game of the season, and he led the side to a sustained period of success before the philosophy of the league and support for it began to unravel. Major League Soccer, the second coming of football in the US, has adopted a different approach.

‘There wasn’t a Plan B in the NASL,’ Marsh says. ‘It was just Plan A. When all those great players retired a few years later, there were no other players coming through and it became quite ordinary. Back then, the owners were running wild. They wanted the best in the world, they wanted new toys, more money.

‘I’ve got a lot of respect for Major League Soccer’s commissioner, Don Garber, because he keeps the owners in check. He is a clever man. MLS is taking it much slower. They are doing a lot of things right. The Rowdies play in a lower league now but they’re still alive.

‘The average attendance at the 1994 World Cup in the USA is still a record. The average crowd was 68,991. I think this World Cup is going to be even bigger. I’m not a fan of the dilution of the tournament to 48 teams and I get called “elitist” for that. That’s just my take. But the big games in the big stadiums will be absolutely massive.’

He is going to the England-Ghana game in Boston but he is sad that neither Cole Palmer nor Phil Foden are in Thomas Tuchel’s squad. He sees in their absence an echo of the reluctance to trust creative talent that curtailed the international careers of men like him and Worthington and Currie.

‘If you are going to take Jordan Henderson,’ Marsh says, ‘don’t have him in a player’s spot. Have him on the staff. I love him to death. But you are not going to bring him on with five minutes to go if you need a goal.

‘There is going to come a time in this tournament when England aren’t winning 2-0 and it’s 0-0 and we are going to get to the last 15 minutes, and who is going to come on? I love Eberechi Eze but I want the option of bringing on Cole Palmer. He can pass a ball into the goal. He has the same kind of talent for that that Martin Peters used to have.’

I ask him what the happiest memory of his nine-cap England career is and he says it is nothing to do with football. He says he has a picture of it in pride of place at his home a couple of miles away from Mad Dogs.

‘I got picked by Alf Ramsey because everyone in the country was clamouring that Rodney Marsh had to play for England,’ he says. ‘Alf hated it. I scored a load of goals in one game for QPR and my first cap was against Switzerland. He picked me but he didn’t like me. He was afraid of the things I might do.

‘I’m on the bench but before the game, we’re lining up and I am standing next to Bobby Moore. I idolised Bobby Moore. We were waiting to be presented to the Duke of York or whoever it was. Bobby Moore told me a joke and there is a photo of me laughing and Bobby telling me a joke. I can’t remember the joke. I got on with eight minutes to go.’

Before we leave, I tell him I need to know the truth about a famous exchange that is supposed to have happened between him and Ramsey before Marsh played in England’s World Cup qualifier against Wales at Wembley in January 1973.

The story goes that Ramsey said to Marsh in the dressing room: ‘If you don’t work hard, I’m going to pull you off at half-time.’ And that Marsh replied: ‘Christ, Alf, at Man City all we get is an orange and a cup of tea.’

Was the story apocryphal? Marsh shakes his head. ‘It is 100 per cent true,’ he says. ‘Over the years, people have nicked it and made it about them. Look, Peter Storey, the Arsenal player, was sitting next to me and he laughed his head off when I said it.’

So what did Ramsey say in response?

‘Well, I never played for England again,’ Marsh says. ‘No sense of humour, that man.’

Which England star has 7 GCSEs? Who has lost half of his finger? Test your knowledge of Thomas Tuchel's squad with our exclusive quiz HERE.