Chris Whyte ⭑ From A-Z since '92
Whyte's skills had been polished in the States, and he started his Leeds career by dribbling past two Scarborough players and shimmying around the goalie to score. More important, though, was his impenetrable consistency alongside Chris Fairclough.
This is part of my (eight year long, it'll fly by) attempt to write about every Leeds United player since 1992. For more about why I'm doing this, go back to Aapo Halme, and to read all the players so far, browse the archive here.
"It was good for both us," Chris Fairclough once said about his title-winning centre-back partnership with Chris Whyte. "We complimented each other well. It was down to Howard Wilkinson who brought us together."
Bringing them together was clever, and not obvious. Signing Fairclough in March 1989 was audacious, as Wilkinson began building a team to win promotion and thrive. He had been at the top of the English game for years, a high profile First Division defender for Nottingham Forest and Spurs. Arriving two days after Gordon Strachan moved from Old Trafford, Fairclough was an expensive underline for United's big ambitions.
Chris Whyte had put considerably more miles into his route to Elland Road, from a bright beginning in north London in 1981 when he was both a late starter and an overnight sensation. Whyte was twenty when he made his First Division debut for Arsenal. Next to him was David O'Leary, who had become a first team regular at seventeen and had now amassed more than 250 appearances before turning 23. Out of the team went 29-year-old Willie Young, the imposing centre-back famous for hacking down Paul Allen of West Ham before he could score in 1980's FA Cup final, and in a little over two months he was out of the club. Whyte's impact was so immediate that, after 237 games for Arsenal, Young was sold to Nottingham Forest.
It was three years since Arsenal had signed Whyte to their youth team. They'd found him playing football locally and living round the corner from Highbury, where his mum had a post round and six kids to care for. "Arsenal didn't really want to sign him at first," his former youth coach Roger Thompson told the Sunday People in 1981. "His arms and legs were all over the place and seemed to go different ways at the same time. But there was something special there. He had this talent for shooting out his leg at the last minute like an elastic band and nicking the ball away from people."
Before anything else at Arsenal, Whyte was nicknamed 'Huggy Bear' after the Starsky & Hutch character. But he disputed that he'd ever been "lackadaisical", as Thompson said in the same interview. When Willie Young's form was faltering and rumours of a move had surfaced, Whyte said he'd been straight into head coach Don Howe's office, demanding his chance. "I have never agreed that I was too casual," Whyte said. "All I wanted was the chance to show everyone how wrong they were about me."
When he got his chance, twelve games were enough for national newspapers to put Whyte in contention for England's squad for World Cup 1982. He didn't make the list, but by the end of the following season Whyte had represented Arsenal in the FA Cup and League Cup semi-finals. He had also won four England Under-21 caps, although trips with the national team were not all they should have been. A game away to Denmark in 1982 had a slightly bizarre feel as the Under-21s had to play a delayed game in West Germany on the same night, so Howard Wilkinson took charge of a team in Copenhagen that included Whyte, Cyrille Regis, Paul Davis and John Barnes. Regis became the first Black player to captain an England side, and the quartet were jeered throughout the game by racists among the England fans.
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