The Diary

18 October 2003: Johnny Asson - Thanks For The Memory

In early October, I phoned an old mate to check how things were in the Black Country. He filled me in on details of people I?d long lost touch with and then said ?Oh, and Johnny Asson?s in hospital. He?s not very well.? I contacted them, and was told he?d been discharged the previous day. I phoned his home but I was a few hours too late. In his early sixties, a lifelong Baggy bloke had gone to meet his maker.

A door that had been closed for many years suddenly opened, and memories from a different age came flooding back of the friendship Johnny and I shared in the l950?s when the Baggies had a team to challenge the mightiest, yet never quite scaled the summit. Football (and cricket) was the basis of our friendship and we even adopted football personas ? he was Walter Winterbottom, England team manager, I was Sir Stanley Rous, President of the F.A. Together we experienced the pleasure ? and the pain ? of supporting a team that spasmodically lived up to its billing in some quarters as the team of the century. We shared numerous triumphs, but it?s the disasters that stand out. No pleasure could have been greater than the Wembley triumph in l954, no pain more acute than losing the title - and our hopes of the double - to Wolves, and having the final nail hammered into the coffin at Villa Park two weeks earlier. Don?t ask me why, but with the real thing taking place just up the road, Johnny and I went to the Hawthorns to watch the reserves!

We arrived fifteen minutes after kick-off, and the half-time scoreboard was already showing one amazing scoreline. ?Three-nil,? Johnny said, "Who the hell?s winning three...?" He didn?t finish the sentence, and for a second it seemed that neither of us would finish another. Villa were three-nil up. By half time it was five-one and, mercifully as it turned out, only six-one at the end. How could we have conceived two hours earlier that we?d be relieved to have only lost six-one! We were also at St Andrews in l957 for the semi-final replay, and endured, perhaps, the greatest miscarriage of justice in soccer history when Ronnie Allen was stretchered off after five minutes. The Baggies still had 95% of the game, the magnificent Ray Barlow played the game of two lifetimes ? and Villa won 1-0! On our shell-shocked way home, we kept repeating the mantra that it was only a game; neither of us believed it. The following season, we were together at Old Trafford for a quarter-final replay when, again having had the better of the game, a goal two minutes from time beat us. This time we didn?t try to play down the disappointment; I think mutual suicide was mentioned.

There are other memories of John not connected with the Baggies. Hour after hour of playing keepy-uppy, football against the local garage door, and one or two broken windows, games of cricket over the Highfields, and snooker on a mini-table in his uncle?s brewhouse, And countless Saturday night sessions in his mother?s living-room as we shared pots of tea and fish and chips, and indulged in endless debate about the Baggies? personnel and prospects.

One of the happier memories was a 7-1 dismantling of the Blues at St Andrews at the end of the l959-60 season. We went home convinced, like many others, that we?d seen the team of the following season. Sadly it wasn?t to be. The Baggies didn?t rise to the challenge, and Johnny and I lost touch as I went off to University and thence overseas. We never had a chance to eulogise together over the Hope and Astle, Robson and Regis eras, nor to commiserate over the disappointment that was Don Howe, and the disaster that was Bobby Gould. We weren?t together for Wembley l968, or for Oldham l976, but neither were we for Woking, Halifax or Bristol Rovers. After l960, we celebrated - and mourned -apart.

We met up again in l995, at a reunion of about twenty people. We rolled back the years and disappeared into our own world of compressing thirty-five years into three hours and resolved, having re-established contact, to stay in touch. Like many resolutions it wasn?t kept. Now, sadly, it never can be kept. I shall never find out first hand what he thought of our promotion, of our Premiership season, of Lee Hughes and Jason Roberts, of Darren Moore, of Koumas and Sakiri, even of Gary Megson.

These thoughts, and others, flitted across my mind as, during his memorial service, the vicar asked us to spend a few minutes recalling our own private memories of John. I?m pleased that he lived long enough to see us return to the Premiership, pleased that when he died we were sitting proudly on top of division 1, sad that he didn?t survive long enough to see us cement our position in the Promised Land. The mantle has been passed to his family, and his grandson, Josh, whose first serious item of clothing was apparently a Baggy shirt!

If there is a hereafter, Johnny?s up there now, sharing memories with Joe Kennedy, Johnny Nicholls, John Osborne, Laurie Cunningham, dear old Jeff and, his personal favourite, Ronnie Allen. All I can do is offer heart-felt condolences to his family and friends, and to Johnny himself, up there in the company of many a Baggy legend, I simply echo Bob Hope, and say thanks for those distant but still cherished memories.

 - Sarky Parky

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