“He turned, Clements was now ten yards away, so this was the moment when Marsh knelt down and gestured, inviting Clements to come and fetch the object he desired but had no chance of obtaining. “Eventually, Dave Clements (another Northern Irelander) half-tackled him, but Marsh still managed to retain the ball as he ran back towards his own goal, now inside his own half,” he writes. In the middle of a virtuouso performance when the ball often appeared glued to his feet, Marsh offered the type of cameo that the sport, then and now, needs more of. The Cosmos had Pele and Giorgio Chinaglia, an Italian icon by way of Wales, but they were led a merry dance by Rodney Marsh. As a for instance, take the day the Tampa Bay Rowdies trounced the New York Cosmos in 1976. That it was a subject long overdue the book treatment can be deduced by the quality of the anecdotes and the marquee names in the dramatis personae. An Englishman long since exiled near Washington DC, Plenderleith has pieced together a hugely entertaining narrative tracing the brief, action-packed and star-studded history of this extraordinary league. Lemon’s story and a whole host of other fascinating yarns are contained in “Rock ‘n’ Roll Soccer: The Short Life and Fast Times of the North American Soccer League”, a brilliant, new book by Ian Plenderleith. “Give me another two years and we’ll have them all.” “We’ve only been in the league two and a half years and already half the teams hate us,” said Lemon. That Oklahoma outfit lived up to their name so often they very quickly developed a reputation, one that their boss was quite proud of. Not bad going for a fellow from East Belfast who originally came to the US to play semi-professional soccer and ended up as general manger of the Tulsa Roughnecks in the old North American Soccer League.
That his good friend Pele called him “The Chief” says something about the contribution Lemon made. In many ways, his company laid the foundation for all the big European club tours that seem to happen here every summer now. When Noel Lemon died a couple of years back, obituaries on both sides of the Atlantic mentioned the sterling work the Irishman did as a promoter of international soccer in America in the 1980s and 1990s.
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