Chapeau: lost in France with Lee Chapman
'Lee Chapman Niort' has been a regular search term over the years.
We all have different ways for dealing with a hangover on an international weekend, when going to watch Leeds United while drinking again isn't an option. Mine often comes down to typing the names of old Leeds players into Google and seeing what obscure stuff has been added by obscure people to the internet.
Freud would be delighted to hear me trace the origins of this habit to my childhood — the googling rather than the drinking, although if we were to really get into it, probably that too. As a young Leeds fan exiled from Elland Road, with only a regular charity shop supply of old football annuals to educate me in the art of the beautiful game, I became fascinated by ephemera surrounding our players. In particular the notion, difficult for a young lad to work out, that our players had played for other teams. Mel Sterland in the blue and white stripes of Sheffield Wednesday? And then you tell me he played in Scotland?
On a page of my old scrapbooks is a squad collage of our team put together with pictures of players clipped from squad photos at their previous clubs. Steve Hodge in a Nottingham Forest shirt is next to Chris Fairclough in a Nottingham Forest shirt from an earlier season, who is next to Chris Fairclough in a Tottenham Hotspur shirt, who is on a row behind Steve Hodge in the same Tottenham Hotspur shirt. How could all this be? Then there was the moral quandary of what to do with the abundant photos of Gordon Strachan wearing the sharp electronic red of our fiercest rivals. Include in the collage, or include in the bin?
The internet is nothing if not a home for ephemera, where the range and scope for new discoveries drives my hungover compulsion to expand the collage way beyond the time I might have grown out of it. I can click through the careers of Chris Fairclough and Steve Hodge to my heart's content, while hoping to stumble across something new. Or, I can stumble into one of the internet resistant gaps that, in this age of omnipresent information, remind us that even some recent stories are still unknowable.
'Lee Chapman Niort' has been a regular search term over the years, although not for the Freudian reasons that might suggest themselves, given we share a surname, and that at school I encouraged a rumour that he was my dad. Back then, my favourite player was Carl Shutt anyway, a rejection of Chapman that probably has plenty of Oedipus in it. But anyway. My fascination stems from a different source. I've said before that Leslie Ash and Lee Chapman were the prototype Posh 'n' Becks, and that April '92, when Men Behaving Badly aired for the first time and Chappy won the title, was the start of Cool Britannia, the official start of the 1990s. And I'm right, obviously. I just need to prove it.
Chapman's time in France in 1988 is key to this idea. That Chapman, Charles Hughes' vision of the tall, ball-winning, immobile percentages striker made human, had played in continental, sophisticated, cheese-and-wine France, gave him an urbane and cosmopolitan image on his return that had northern newsreaders introducing him as "a fashion guru", and got him the gig as Eric Cantona's translator when the actual Frenchman joined globetrotting Chapman at Leeds. In an era when English clubs were banned from European football, only a select few players had distinguished themselves by going 'continental', and Chapman was one.
France wasn't the only nation bidding for Chapman's services when, at the end of the 1987/88 season, he was disillusioned with life at Sheffield Wednesday. The first foreign inquiry came from the general manager of Bayern Munich, Uli Hoeness. His club were interested; their loan striker Mark Hughes was due to leave, and they needed a replacement to support Roland Wohlfarth and Jürgen Wegmann up front. Hoeness planned to watch Wednesday play at Wimbledon, and he called Chapman to invite him to the Savoy Grill afterwards. Chapman scored in a 1-1 draw, attended the meeting, and discovered Hoeness wanted to take him on a trial. Chapman demurred, but Hoeness remained interested; the team's coach, Jupp Heynckes, would watch Chapman in his final game of the season, and make the final decision.
Heynckes didn't have much of a decision to make. Champions Liverpool went to Hillsborough and demolished Wednesday 5-1, "one of their finest ever performances" Chapman wrote in his autobiography. "It came as no surprise to me when all contact with the Germans ceased." Instead, they spent a million on Johnny Ekström from Empoli, who scored seven times in twelve starts and eleven substitute appearances as Bayern won their tenth Bundesliga.