There have been few more explosive starts to a career than the one made by Cyrille Regis. Except for that of his present striking partner at Coventry City, Steve Livingstone.
Regis came to West Bromwich Albion in 1977 as a 19-year-old bright spark (yes, he was an electrician), signed for £5,000 from the non-League club Hayes, and was thrust into the first team due to injury. He scored twice in a League Cup tie at Rotherham.
Livingstone, a 20-year-old Teessider, made his first appearance in the competition this year against Sunderland at a time when Coventry were short of goals, and scored four.
It took Regis the relatively lengthy period of three matches to tally four, a total he reached for this season only last week. They have all been winning goals, though, against Liverpool, Manchester City, Norwich and Chelsea.
The pair will present a formidable threat to Nottingham Forest at the City Ground in tomorrow’s televised first leg of their Littlewoods Cup semi-final the old and the new, the experienced and the raw.
Not that Regis, whose birthday it was yesterday, will thank you for the ‘old’ bit, even though he is the First Division’s oldest striker. At Coventry ‘s training ground he was owning up to 31, not the 32 that the reference books give him. The hair, however, is thinning.
‘I still have another year at Coventry and I am enjoying it. You do when you’re in semi-finals,’ he says. ‘I want to play at the highest level for as long as I can.’ And he did win the last of his five England caps only two years ago.
He is also enjoying playing alongside Livingstone, teaching him the ropes. ‘When I started at West Brom I came in ahead of more seasoned strikers and my career took off. The same is happening to Steve.’ The pair are currently preferred to Kevin Drinkell, the £800,000 signing from Rangers, only recently fit again, and Gary Bannister.
‘Steve is strong, a good finisher, brave and has some nice touches,’ says Regis. ‘But he is still learning the game. He himself would say that he is a little bit short of pace, but he is very fit and very strong.’ Livingstone is 6ft 1in and 12st 7lb compared with Regis’s muscular 6ft and 13st 6lb.
The criticism at Highfield Road this season has been Regis’s lack of goals, although he has always been a scorer of great goals rather than a great scorer of goals one every three games for WBA, one every four for Coventry .
‘I should really be scoring more. I’ll put my hand up to that,’ he says. ‘But my game has changed from being an out-and-out goalscorer. In the main I do a little bit of scheming, holding the ball up, and I enjoy that role. When the ball comes up you don’t want it to go straight back.’
Regis has been very much central to Coventry’s recent success, quite apart from the three goals he created for Livingstone in the win over Sunderland. Many thought he was making a move equivalent to that from Foreign Office to Ag, Fish and Food when he left WBA, and indeed there was a touch of the agricultural about the way Coventry played at that time in the mid-1980s.
But John Sillett’s arrival as manager brought a rethink, Regis’s ball-holding rather than chasing talents were made more use of, and the FA Cup followed in 1987. He has always been a great athlete-footballer, once performing a 6ft 2in Fosbury Flop high jump (‘just messing about’), and could probably have been a track star like his younger cousin, John.
He has never been officially timed for 100 metres, though. ‘In my younger days I would have given Des Walker a bit of a run,’ he says, pointing up a crucial area of tomorrow’s game. ‘You have to try and be a bit more clever, don’t you, because you are not going to do him for pace.’
Without the suspended David Speedie, Coventry will be looking to Regis and Livingstone in attack to exploit Forest’s relative vulnerability in cup competition at home compared with their more incisive away form. The logic is that the longer they have the ball at one end, the less time Steve Hodge and Nigel Clough have it at the other.
Although semi-finals give a surge to ageing legs, Regis knows that with his replacement Drinkell in the wings, he will have to be sharp to remain in the team. ‘Competition for places is what drives football clubs and players on,’ he says.
But before doing those things he has promised himself over the years such as visiting his birthplace, French Guyana, for like Matthew Le Tissier he could also have chosen to play for France and learning the saxophone, it is into the breach for Wembley one mo’ time. ‘Footballers are notoriously lazy,’ he says of his good intentions yet to be fulfilled. Des Walker and Forest will learn if that applies to Regis on the pitch tomorrow.
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