Graham Edward French, born 6 April 1945, Shrewsbury, England.
PART ONE
Graham French started his playing days as an apprentice with his home town club Shrewsbury Town, and signed professionally in 1961. His selection for England at youth level confirmed that others had noticed the same qualities, although the question surrounding him was never whether he possessed sufficient talent but whether anybody could persuade him to apply it consistently. Chelsea manager Tommy Docherty considered taking him to Stamford Bridge, where the club was assembling an exciting young side, but reports about French’s temperament discouraged the former Scotland international from completing the move, and so an opportunity to join one of the country’s most fashionable clubs disappeared before it had properly formed.
French nevertheless notched up 27 Football League appearances for Shrewsbury and found the back of the net once between 1961 and 1963, showing enough in those early outings to keep other clubs interested, and when Swindon Town came for him in 1963, the move appeared to offer a fresh start and a better chance of turning obvious promise into regular first-team football. Swindon, however, saw only brief flashes of his ability, because French made five League appearances without scoring during 1963–64, and within a year he was moving again, this time to Watford, where another club hoped it might be able to draw sustained performances from a footballer whose best moments could be far above the standard of the division. Yet French´s stay at Vicarage Road was even shorter, amounting to four League appearances without a goal, and by 1965 the flank forward had fallen out of the Football League altogether and joined Wellington Town, the club later renamed Telford United, in the non-League game.
For a former England youth international who had attracted Chelsea’s attention, it was a sharp and sobering descent, but it was not proof that the judges of his football had been mistaken, for French still possessed tremendous physical strength, pace over the ground and the rare ability to attack a full-back on either side, while his low centre of gravity and determination made him extremely difficult to knock away from the ball once he had gathered speed. The trouble lay elsewhere, in his discipline and the disorder surrounding his life away from football, and although several professional clubs might understandably have considered him too large a risk, Luton Town looked beyond the warnings during 1965 and offered him another chance. That decision gave French the setting in which his football finally came fully alive, and it gave Luton one of the most exciting and unpredictable wide players their supporters had seen.
Luton were then at the lowest point in their Football League history, having been relegated to the Fourth Division at the end of 1964–65, and French arrived at a club that needed rebuilding rather than decorating, because the Hatters had dropped from the First Division to the Fourth in only five years and Kenilworth Road was carrying the frustration of a support that had watched decline follow decline. George Martin’s side improved sufficiently to finish sixth in the 1965–66 season, although French’s approach to preparation bore little resemblance to the ordered life expected of a professional sportsman, for his visits to local public houses were widely known and stories circulated of him beginning matches distinctly worse for wear.
Yet once the game started and the ball reached him on the wing, the sluggishness could disappear with astonishing speed, because French had the stamina to keep running, the strength to withstand challenges and the nerve to attempt movements that more cautious players would not even consider. He did not behave like a winger who had been given a narrow strip of grass and told to remain there, as he could cut inside, switch feet, carry the ball through crowded positions or drive forward from much deeper areas, and the uncertainty he created was as valuable as his pace. Luton struggled during the 1966–67 campaign and at one stage stood next to bottom following an 8–1 defeat against Lincoln City at Sincil Bank in December, but Allan Brown replaced Martin as manager, results improved and the club finished seventeenth, while French remained part of a side that was beginning to exchange anxiety for belief.
That improvement became a full-scale promotion charge in the 1967–68 season, when Luton collected 66 points, equalled the Fourth Division record, scored 87 League goals and won the championship, and French’s direct running supplied a dangerous outlet in a side containing captain Terry Branston, Bruce Rioch, John Moore and Ian Buxton. Promotion was secured when Rioch scored the only goal against Halifax Town at The Shay on April 20, 1968, and four days later a victory over Crewe Alexandra in front of roughly 19,000 spectators at Kenilworth Road sealed first place, giving French the first promotion of his Luton years and confirming that his return from non-League football had been fully justified.
PART TWO
Although Graham French´s individual League total at the club would eventually stand at 182 appearances and 22 goals, bare figures cannot properly measure his importance because he unsettled defences before somebody else supplied the finish, and every time he received possession there was the possibility of something sudden, forceful and completely unscripted. Luton had climbed out of the Fourth Division, but French’s football did not become more restrained in the Third, and on September 18, 1968, against Mansfield Town at Kenilworth Road, he produced the run by which he would always be remembered.
With the Bedfordshire outfit winning an eventful match 4–2, French collected the ball near the edge of his own penalty area, accelerated away and carried it almost the entire length of the pitch, beating one Mansfield player after another before drawing the goalkeeper from his line, going around him and rolling his shot into the empty net. It was individual football stripped of caution, and many Luton followers still regard it as the greatest goal scored by one of their players.
French’s remarkable effort against Mansfield was not an isolated trick performed in a poor side, because Luton challenged strongly throughout 1968–69 and finished third in the Third Division, narrowly missing a second successive promotion, although Allan Brown left in December and Alec Stock subsequently took control. Stock strengthened the attack by signing Malcolm Macdonald in the summer of 1969 and converting him from a defender into a centre-forward, and with Macdonald scoring 25 League goals during 1969–70, Luton finished runners-up and secured promotion to the Second Division by defeating Southport 1–0 on the final day.
French contributed four goals from 38 League starts and one substitute appearance that campaign, and he made another eight appearances across the FA Cup and League Cup, taking his total to 47 games in all competitions, which demonstrates that he was no colourful extra standing at the edge of the side but a regular member of the team. Along with his strength and pace, his two-footed control meant that defenders could not comfortably show him in one direction, and if they stood away from him he could build speed, while if they moved close he could shift the ball and escape before the tackle arrived. Thus the footballing part of his life had reached its highest point: Luton had completed two promotions in three seasons, attendances had risen sharply, Macdonald was developing into a formidable goalscorer, and French had established himself as one of the most feared wingers outside the First Division.
Yet the disorder beyond the touchline could not be kept apart from the football indefinitely, and a shooting incident in a public house during 1970 led to French receiving a three-year prison sentence, bringing his progress with Luton to a sudden halt when he was still only twenty-five. The incident should neither be softened nor turned into a dramatic decoration around his performances, because a serious offence had serious consequences, and the years he lost could not simply be restored once his sentence had been served. Luton nevertheless allowed him to return after his release, an act of considerable loyalty towards a player who had given the club some wonderful afternoons, but prison had affected him physically and mentally, while the team had continued to develop in his absence, and he could not recover the place or the level he had previously held.
Football at that standard demanded sharpness, routine and repeated work through the week as well as inspiration on Saturday, and although the old instinct remained, the combination of pace, strength and match fitness was no longer quite the same. His Luton playing record closed in 1973 after 182 League appearances and 22 goals, and while those totals were respectable, his reputation at Kenilworth Road rested just as heavily on the manner of his play, because supporters remembered the sight of him driving at defenders, surviving tackles and turning an ordinary attack into something dangerous within a few seconds.
A loan move to Reading during 1973 offered one final attempt to revive his place in English professional football, but French appeared in only three League matches and did not score, and in 1974 he crossed the Atlantic to join the Boston Minutemen in the North American Soccer League. American football was then attracting players from many different countries, and the change of surroundings might have suited a man who had never settled comfortably inside conventional rules, but his stay amounted to only three appearances, again without a goal, before he disappeared from the senior game for two years. Then, in 1976, came a final and suitably unusual return, as French joined Southport under the assumed name Graham Lafite, although the disguise could not conceal him for long and his comeback ended after two League appearances.
By then the player who had once carried the ball from one end of the Kenilworth Road pitch to the other had reached the closing point of his footballing days, and the contrast between his natural ability and his troubled life away from the field was impossible to ignore. Across his recorded Football League spells with Shrewsbury Town, Swindon Town, Watford, Luton Town, Reading and Southport, he amassed 223 League appearances and scored 23 goals, but numbers alone leave the picture incomplete, for French was remembered most clearly at Luton as a strong, two-footed and daring winger who helped lift the club through two divisions.