Peter Swan talks about the game's most notorious corruption scandal

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Tears well in his eyes and you fight to keep them from yours.

Not enough in modern, cynical football moves you but the sight of one of the English game's great defenders and hard men beset by such deep sadness as he sits in his pub overlooking the Chesterfield Canal, recalling the events of one of the most poignant of lives and careers, would surely melt the stoniest of hearts.

Peter Swan apologises. "I've got this Alzheimer"s and it makes me worse," he says. "I want to cry because it's bringing so many memories back.I could cry every day on different things."

The recollection that has triggered the tears concerns his seven brothers, all miners, getting into fights while sticking up for him in his home village of Armthorpe, near Doncaster, in the aftermath of a betting scandal that became one of this country's most notorious sporting episodes.

Soon will come another trickle as he relives his return to a Sheffield Wednesday shirt after serving what turned out to be an eight-year ban from the game he loved playing so much.

"The comeback game was unbelievable," he said. "As I'm going down the tunnel at Hillsborough, they gave me the match-ball to carry. The players stopped and I went out on my own. I thought they were behind me. It was tremendous, a terrific welcome back. It was against Fulham. When I picked the ball up for a throw-in, a cheer would go up. The crowd cheered everything I did. Did we win, Nick?"

"Yes, 3-0," says Nick Johnson, author of Swan's belated autobiography, Setting The Record Straight.

It is a beautiful book to make children of the Sixties pine for the simplicity of a game that set them on a path from which there would be no turning back. And to make you angry at the punishment meted out to Swan, who turned 70 this month and wanted to document it all before the Alzheimer's overtakes him, as it did his father.

"Peter was a breathtaking player," writes Jimmy Greaves, Swan's England room-mate, in a touching foreword. "His perfect physique made him a handful for opponents and, for a big man and a centre-half, he possessed outstanding ball control, passing, tackling and heading ability.

He could have been one of the '66 heroes but instead Peter Swan got four months in jailover a £50 bet up in the most genial of personalities, albeit one that was too trusting of people at times.

In another month or so, Lord Stevens will report again on transfer bungs. The FA are still considering the betting coup alleged to have surrounded Harry Redknapp's return as manager of Portsmouth.

No matter the seriousness of any case, in these days of legal complexities — as shown by the Bruce Grobbelaar match-fixing trial a decade ago -it is hard to see anyone receiving the same draconian punishments that befell Swan — a four-month jail sentence for conspiracy to defraud and a life ban from football.

And, somewhere in the middle, a penalty amounting to about two weeks' wages. For betting on his own side to lose a match, at Ipswich Town on the fateful day of December 1, 1963, Swan was ordered to pay £100 towards his legal costs, the exact amount by which he had profited.

Born into a South Yorkshire mining family in 1936, Swan grew up seeing Sheffield's steelworks ablaze from the ordnance dumped by German bombers. He only ever wanted to be a footballer, being 'thick as two short planks at school'.

In Armthorpe, the kids would get a pig's bladder off the slaughterman and inflate it to play football on waste ground. Wednesday came in for him when he was 16 and he travelled to Hillsborough by bus and tram. Handsome, leggy and elegant but tough, he made the first team at 19, almost unheard of in the game then.

His trademark look was to wear the baggy shorts of the day hitched up to reveal those legs. "I got it off Albert Quixall," he says. "He told me: 'You look at athletes. They don't wear big, baggy trousers'."

So you liked to think of yourself as an athlete then? "Not really. I found that all the birds liked my legs. I was always in the sunshine in the summer and I had a good tan."

In 1960 he was called up by Walter Winterbottom for his England debut. He travelled — flu-ridden — to the World Cup of 1962 in Chile as England's first choice but dysentery confined him to bed as England lost to Brazil in the quarter-finals.

The misfortune that was to follow him around had struck. "I"ve never looked at my life like that," he says. "But it was upsetting."

Many, certainly Greaves, say Swan would have gone on to be England"s centre-half,in preference to Jack Charlton,in 1966, having won 19 caps in a row. Swan is unsure and admired Charlton greatly.

"But Alf Ramsey did tell me I would have been in his squad," he says. The cruel intrusion into Swan's life was English football's Profumo Affair, the uncovering by The People newspaper of a betting ring they described as "The Biggest Sports Scandal of the Century".

One morning after training, Swan sat down for a cup of tea with Wednesday team-mates David 'Bronco' Layne and Tony Kay. Layne had been at a match at Mansfield the previous night and run into an old mate, Jimmy Gauld, who told him about money to be made on betting.

If Wednesday were to lose at Ipswich in a forthcoming match, they could do themselves a favour. The odds were 2-1. Gauld himself had arranged with players involved in two other matches — Lincoln v Brentford and York v Oldham — to fix the games

Swan, Layne and Kay agreed that they never did well at Portman Road and stumped up £50 each for Layne to give Gauld to place the bet. They duly lost 2-0. Swan insists he was trying, cites Kay as being named man of the match, ironically in The People,

"But the game went like it always did at Ipswich." What if it had been 0-0 with five minutes to go? "I don"t know what I would have done," Swan admits, honestly. "My money was on us to lose and money is the root of all evil. It's easily done. I could have miskicked a ball into my own goal. I could have given away a penalty."

They thought no more about it until a year later. The People had got wind of a number of lower-division games being fixed and approached the ringleader, Gauld. In return for £7,240 — a fortune then — he coughed. But they wanted bigger names. He gave them Swan, Layne and Kay. The story said that Swan had admitted fixing a game.

But he says now: "It was rubbish. I can see it now. I closed the kitchen door on the reporter. A dog we had called Seth was wanting to get at him."

When it finally came to Nottingham Crown Court in January 1965, Swan was one of 10 punished. Found guilty of bribery, corruption and defrauding the bookmakers,he spent 10 weeks slopping out in high-security Lincoln Prison and gardening in the more open Thorp Arch.

The FA later banned him for life. "Prison was horrible. There's nothing more degrading, doing everything in a little pot in front of other prisoners," he says.

As for the FA hearing, he did not even attend. "I wasn't going to pay money to go down to Lancaster Gate to hear them say I was banned. I did feel cheated because the only thing I had done — and I knew I had done it and done wrong — was the bet.

I think they wanted to set an example. There was that much going on, especially in the lower leagues, and we were big names back then."

Weary of the legal process and the public vilification, he gave up the idea of appealing and got on with providing for the five boys he and wife Norma would raise. He ran a hardware shop in Doncaster.

"I could hear the crowd from Rovers when the wind was blowing that way. It always brought a lump to my throat."

After a spell in the car trade, he had pubs in Sheffield and near Chesterfield. Amid it all, he has almost blocked the 1966 World Cup from his memory.

He cannot remember where he watched the final. "Jack Charlton did a tremendous job. Was it Hurst who scored the hat-trick? Now, I always found him easy to play against."

Sad years? "They were, yes. Quite a few of the players used to come and see me to tell me what was going on at Hillsborough. Naturally when they left, I started thinking about it. It gets you sad."

He missed the game so much that he started playing for his pub — until the FA intervened. There followed games under assumed names and in charity matches.

"It was the only thing I could do. I wanted to play that much. I had been football-daft from my school days. What annoyed me was some of the things people would say on the touchline at charity matches. 'You've never been any 'effin good, Swanny' and worse. It hurt, yes, but I would never show it."

Was he ever tempted to lash out? "Oh yes. I"ve been in quite a few fights."

Finally, in 1972, the MP Joe Ashton, a Sheffield Wednesday fan, took up his case, backed by Sir Matt Busby,and the FA ended the ban. Swan enjoyed, at the age of 36, one last year at Hillsborough before helping Bury to promotion from the old Fourth Division.

He then led Matlock Town to the FA Trophy, as player-manager, also managing Buxton and Worksop Town. A Swansong as a measure of redemption, you might say.

In this business, when you have regularly interviewed people who turn out to have lied, you have to be careful about taking anyone"s word for anything.

But Nick Johnson is convinced by Swan's story on two counts. Swan's Alzheimer's means that while he can recall events of 40 years ago, he often cannot remember what happened yesterday. But Swan, according to Johnson, has told the same version of those events of 1963, day after day.

"I also said to him when we started the book that there would probably be more money in it for him if he did admit to match-fixing," says Johnson.

"But he wasn't interested in more money, only in getting the truth out."

I ask Swan why, knowing that two other games were fixed that day in 1963, he had not had an accumulator himself but had bet on just one game.

"Now that I don't know," he says. "I've never thought of that to this day. It was never even mentioned. We were a bit naive."

He swears, too, that, though liking a bet, he never gambled on Wednesday, to win or lose, on any other occasion. Those eyes, in turn tearful and twinkling, look convincing.

The sadness did not stop in 1972. A 1997 television drama about the affair portrayed Swan and Layne as corrupt and Tony Kay as misled. Kay was paid as a consultant on the programme; Swan and Layne were astonished by what they saw and heard. The pair are still friends, Layne living in Sheffield, but Kay's efforts to contact them from retirement in Southport have been rebuffed.

As for Jimmy Gauld, sentenced to four years, Swan says he only ever saw him once — in that Nottingham court room. Worse than any of that, Swan lost a son, Gary, to cancer at the age of 39.

"I've had the sadness of life with my family and sadness I brought myself but I have got on with it. Over the years, I have enjoyed my life but I think about different things now and what would have happened and it upsets me. I was brought up not to cry but now I"m crying all the time with this Alzheimer's."

You ask if there is anything he still wants. He replies that he lost his England blazer some years back and would like an FA badge to sew on a new jacket.

"I wrote to them but never had an answer," he says. After all the dishonour heaped on him, a badge is surely not too much to ask.

 

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