There wasn’t much to cheer about at Ipswich in the late 1980s. Marooned in the second tier with memories of the Bobby Robson era still fresh in the mind but growing ever-more distant from the reality of what was being served up at Portman Road, the club seemed lost, drifting. Morale among supporters was low, disillusioned by what seemed like an inexorable decline in fortunes and the sometimes hapless management of John Duncan.
It was in 1988 when something unexpected happened. A youth team graduate, Dalian Atkinson, was introduced to a stuttering, goal-shy team. It quickly became clear that this was something we hadn’t seen for a while. A thoroughly pedestrian team was suddenly enlivened by the presence of a fearless, raw talent. Atkinson’s confidence in his own ability, his determination and enterprise, seemed entirely at odds with the team he was playing in. It was as if this youngster had looked around his more experienced team-mates and said “well, if you lot aren’t going to make this game look easy, I’ll just have to do it for you”.
I can think back to Saturday afternoons in that era when Atkinson was, if not quite the only presence that made a game worth watching, then certainly the most compelling. His hat-trick against Middlesbrough, when he tore apart a defence marshalled by Tony Mowbray and Gary Pallister, stands out in the memory, but there are others too, such as the November afternoon at the County Ground when Swindon seemed to be coasting to a 2-0 win, before an Atkinson-inspired comeback saw Ipswich come away with a 3-2 victory.
Dalian wasn’t a consistent performer in those days, but he was a very young man, and at least with him in the Ipswich team there was the possibility that something exciting might happen. As Duncan’s Ipswich continued in their dogged pursuit of mediocrity, Atkinson’s presence seemed ever-more incongruous, and he was sold to Sheffield Wednesday in 1989.
It’s tempting to suggest that he left Ipswich too soon, that if he’d stayed he might have developed his talent under Duncan’s eventual replacement, John Lyall, and been the one to score the goals that took Ipswich back into the top flight. But that’s probably not true. Atkinson deserved a bigger stage than Ipswich could offer him at the time, and while he only spent one season at Hillsborough, it was the springboard to further moves.
In 1990 Atkinson became the first black player to represent Real Sociedad, playing alongside Kevin Richardson and John Aldridge. A When Saturday Comes article of the time described Atkinson’s frustrations at being singled out for attention in the local community and media for what was perceived to be a flamboyant lifestyle. “It’s OK for John and Kev, they’re married”, he was reported to have said. Nonetheless, he was a relative success in San Sebastian, scoring 12 goals before being re-signed by his former manager at Wednesday, Ron Atkinson, by now at Aston Villa.
It was his four years at Villa that would represent the peak of Dalian’s career. A year after joining, he found himself back at Portman Road, playing in the inaugural Premier League fixture against his newly-promoted former club. Naturally, it was Atkinson who scored Villa’s late equaliser in a 1-1 draw. That season saw Villa finish second in the table and Atkinson won Match Of The Day’s Goal of the Season award for his solo effort against Wimbledon, the sort of goal that YouTube was pretty much invented for. He won a League Cup winner’s medal with Villa in 1994, scoring in the final against Manchester United.
After Villa, his career took in spells in Turkey, France, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea. After retiring in 2001 he faded from view before, tragically, resurfacing in the public eye when the shocking news of his death broke on 15th August.
The premature and dramatic nature of Atkinson’s passing may come to dominate his memory among supporters, but I prefer to recall those early days in the Ipswich team, when his pace, power, energy and ruthless finishing could lift the whole ground, the entire occasion. The emergence of such an exciting, home-grown talent gave a rare glimmer of hope in an otherwise depressing era. For that, a generation of Ipswich fans will always be grateful to Dalian Atkinson.
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