Peter Anthony O’Sullivan, born 4 March 1951, Colwyn Bay, Wales.
PART ONE
Coming from Colwyn Bay, Peter O’Sullivan signed with Manchester United in 1968, arriving at a time when the club still basked, uneasily, in the afterglow of the 1968 European Cup triumph. Bobby Charlton, only a few years removed from Wembley glory, was still very much United’s talisman, and the young O’Sullivan trained in his shadow, soaking up whatever could be gleaned from being around a man of that stature. But United’s first-team squad in those years was stacked with attacking talent, and however hard he worked, there was simply no route through for a slender winger still finding his feet. Two years came and went without a single senior appearance, and in 1970 the inevitable happened: United released him on a free transfer.
It could have been the end of the story before it had properly begun. Instead, it turned into one of those quirks of fate that football seems to specialise in. O’Sullivan travelled down to Bristol for a trial with Bristol City, uncertain of exactly where his next contract might come from, and while he was there he found himself training on a pitch next to the England squad, who were putting the finishing touches to their preparations for the 1970 World Cup in Mexico. Charlton, spotting his former Old Trafford colleague, wandered over for a chat, the kind of throwaway conversation that ends up rewriting a life. O’Sullivan mentioned the clubs who had shown interest, and when Brighton’s name came up, Charlton’s ears pricked. Freddie Goodwin, another old Busby Babe and by then the manager at the Goldstone Ground, was managing the Seagulls, and Charlton urged his former teammate to go and link up with him.
What neither man knew was that Goodwin’s own time on the south coast was almost at an end. No sooner had O’Sullivan arrived at Brighton on that free transfer in April 1970 than Goodwin was on his way out of the door, bound for Birmingham City, where he would take charge that summer and go on to build the side that gave a young Trevor Francis his debut. It left the newly signed winger in an odd position, a player recruited by a manager who then promptly vanished before a ball had been kicked in anger. But where Goodwin’s departure might have derailed a lesser prospect, it instead opened the door. Pat Saward, the former Republic of Ireland international and Aston Villa captain, took over in the autumn of 1970 with Brighton floundering near the foot of Division Three after a wretched start, and it was under Saward that O’Sullivan finally broke into the team, appearing in the squad photographs from that first season in the number that would soon become synonymous with the club.
The Seagulls limped through 1970–71, but by the following season Saward had reshaped his side, restoring the traditional blue and white stripes after a brief and unloved experiment in all-white, and the Albion charged for promotion. O’Sullivan was a fixture in that 1971–72 campaign, playing his part in a run that began with a draw at Port Vale and gathered pace through the autumn and winter, four straight wins in late August establishing an early platform. There were setbacks, naturally, home defeats to York City and Aston Villa reminding everyone that the Third Division was no pushover, but Brighton kept finding their way back onto the front foot, five wins in six between mid-January and mid-February, including a 5–3 thriller away at Shrewsbury Town and a 5–0 demolition of Halifax Town at the Goldstone. By the time the campaign wound down in early May, with a 1–1 draw against Rochdale confirming the job was done, Brighton had finished second and won promotion to the Second Division, and O’Sullivan, still only twenty-one, had his first taste of climbing the pyramid.
He would not have to wait long for his first taste of something rather more personal. In May 1973, with Brighton now relegated back to Division Three, the winger was named among the substitutes for the Home International Championship meeting with Scotland at the Racecourse Ground in Wrexham. Wales went down 2-0, Manchester United´s George Graham scoring twice for the visitors, and with the match slipping away Brian Evans was withdrawn in the seventy-eighth minute to make way for O’Sullivan, who thereby won the first of his three caps in the country of his birth, in front of a crowd of 18,682. It was a modest beginning, eleven minutes as a substitute in a losing cause, but it was a full international cap all the same, the culmination of everything that had started on that Bristol training pitch three years earlier.
Brighton’s own fortunes, meanwhile, were less settled than O’Sullivan’s blossoming reputation might have suggested. Saward’s position grew shakier, and by October 1973 he too was gone, with Brian Clough arriving that November alongside his long-time assistant Peter Taylor, a pairing whose brief and famously uneasy stay at the Goldstone startled the football world more than it improved results. The Albion finished nineteenth in Division Three that season, having been relegated back down a tier, and Clough’s interest in the day-to-day grind of management on the south coast never seemed entirely convincing to the players who worked under him. Yet O’Sullivan endured it all, one of the constants in a squad being pulled apart and reassembled by successive regimes, his wing play too consistent to be discarded regardless of who happened to be picking the team.
PART TWO
Peter Taylor eventually left to rejoin Brian Clough at Nottingham Forest, and it was Alan Mullery, appointed in 1976, who would oversee the most spectacular period of Peter O’Sullivan’s time at the club. Mullery inherited a Third Division outfit and immediately set about reshaping it in his own combative image, and it was under him that O’Sullivan’s role began to change too, shifted from out-and-out winger into a more central attacking position where his vision and range of passing could do even more damage.
The switch coincided with the finest season of collective form the club had produced in years. Brighton opened the 1976–77 campaign with a win over Oxford United, followed it with victory at Chester, and though a draw at Preston briefly threatened to slow the momentum, they responded with a 7–2 demolition of York City at home in September that announced their intentions to the rest of the division. There were further big afternoons to come, Walsall thrashed 7–0 in October, Gillingham beaten 2–0 over Christmas, Chester put away 3–0 in January, and by May 1977, following a run that had seen off Sheffield Wednesday and closed out with a draw at Chesterfield, Brighton had finished second again and secured back-to-back promotions of the kind O’Sullivan had already tasted five years before.
It was in the colours of Scotland’s Second Division rivals, so to speak, that O’Sullivan won his second Welsh cap, this time starting the match rather than arriving from the bench. On 6 May 1976, Wales travelled to Hampden Park for the Home International fixture against Scotland, and O’Sullivan was named in the starting eleven, playing the full ninety minutes as the hosts ran out 3–1 winners in front of over 25,000 supporters, William Pettigrew, Bruce Rioch and Eddie Gray finding the net for Scotland either side of a consolation from Arfon Griffiths for the visitors. It meant that, remarkably, both of O’Sullivan’s first two Welsh caps had come against the same opponents, a coincidence of fixture scheduling rather than any deliberate pattern, but one that would make him a curious answer to a pub quiz question in later years.
Back at club level, Brighton’s momentum continued to build through the late 1970s, and 1977–78 brought O’Sullivan his own personal high point, voted Player of the Season by supporters even as the club narrowly missed out on a third promotion, agonisingly falling short of the top flight that year. There was no repeat of the disappointment twelve months later. The 1978–79 season saw Brighton finally push over the line, O’Sullivan missing only a handful of matches as Mullery’s side went toe to toe with the best the Second Division had to offer, beating Sunderland, thrashing Millwall 4–1 away, and putting five past Cardiff City on Boxing Day.
There were bumps along the way, defeats to Leicester City and West Ham United among them, but the consistency was extraordinary, and when Brighton beat Newcastle United 3–1 away on the final day of the season in early May 1979, it was enough to confirm second place and, with it, promotion to the old First Division for the very first time in the club’s history. For a player who had joined on a free transfer nine years earlier from a Manchester United side that had not even given him a debut, it was a remarkable staging post, one that placed O’Sullivan among the small band of men who had carried Brighton from the lower reaches of the League all the way to the summit of English football.
His third and final Welsh cap arrived that autumn, and it would prove to be the most memorable of the three by some distance. On 25 October 1978, Wales entertained Malta at the Racecourse Ground in a European Championship qualifier, and though O’Sullivan did not start the match, he was introduced from the bench around the quarter-hour mark, replacing Leslie Cartwright. Wales were rampant that evening, tearing Malta apart in front of just over eleven thousand spectators, and four minutes after coming on, O’Sullivan got himself onto the scoresheet, finding the net in the nineteenth minute as Wales cruised to what finished as a 7–0 victory, Ian Edwards helping himself to four of the goals either side of further strikes from Mickey Thomas and Brian Flynn. It meant O’Sullivan finished his brief international story with three caps and a goal to his name, a statistic made all the sweeter by the knowledge that, for most of that period, wing wizard Leighton James occupied the wide berth that might otherwise have brought him further opportunities in a Welsh shirt.
PART THREE
Life in the First Division proved no gentle stroll for Brighton, and by the spring of 1980 O’Sullivan’s own time at the Goldstone appeared, briefly, to be reaching its conclusion. He was allowed to leave for the San Diego Sockers of the North American Soccer League that April, a move that on the surface looked like a natural winding down of a long stay on the south coast. Yet Mullery, still shaping his squad for the demands of top-flight survival, was not prepared to lose him entirely, and within five months a fee in the region of £50,000 brought O’Sullivan back across the Atlantic and returned him to the Goldstone Ground fold, his brief American stint amounting to twenty-one appearances and two goals for the Sockers before the recall came through.
By the time he finally left Brighton for good, in 1981, O’Sullivan had established himself as one of the most durable and admired figures in the club’s history, a player transfer-listed at various points by three different managers yet never quite dispensable enough to actually be sold. Across league football alone he made 435 appearances for the Albion and scored 39 goals, but when cup competitions are folded into the reckoning, the true scale of his contribution stretches further still, with figures commonly put at 491 appearances and 49 goals across all competitions, a body of work bettered in the club’s history only by Ernie “Tug” Wilson. Between 1970 and 1974 he strung together 194 consecutive appearances, a club record for an outfield player matched only by a goalkeeper, and it made him, by 1981, comfortably the club’s longest-serving post-war player.
His move to Fulham that year reunited him, in a sense, with the pattern of his Brighton days, joining a club managed by a man who understood exactly what promotion football demanded. Malcolm MacDonald, the former Newcastle, Arsenal and England centre-forward known throughout the game as “Supermac”, had taken charge at Craven Cottage in 1980 and was rebuilding the Cottagers from the lower reaches of the Third Division. O’Sullivan slotted into that project and played a significant role across the 1981–82 campaign as Fulham finished third and secured promotion back into the Second Division, a tier they would go agonisingly close to escaping again the following year, before a chaotic, abandoned match at Derby County on the final day of 1982–83 denied them a second successive promotion in circumstances that still rankle with Fulham supporters to this day.
O’Sullivan’s contribution at Craven Cottage, forty-six appearances and a single goal across his time there, was followed by a scattering of loan spells as his years began to catch up with his legs, brief stints with Charlton Athletic and with Reading during the 1982–83 season adding a further fourteen appearances to a ledger that already ran into the hundreds. From there the story moved into its final, more nomadic phase. There was a short stay with Seiko SA in Hong Kong in 1983, where old teammates from his Brighton days would later recall bumping into him on the other side of the world, before a return to English football with Aldershot for the 1983–84 season brought fourteen further appearances in the old Fourth Division.
Crawley Town and Maidstone United rounded off a story that had begun, all those years before, on a training pitch beside Bobby Charlton and the 1970 World Cup squad, and by the time the boots were finally hung up for good, O’Sullivan’s aggregate figures across every club, every division and every competition ran to somewhere in the region of 530 games and more than forty goals. Football gave way, in time, to a rather more grounded existence, and O’Sullivan settled in the Brighton area, eventually finding work with a plant-hire company in the town that had given him his footballing life after Manchester United had shown him the door.