The Whitecaps Kicked Up A Storm

For the Vancouver Whitecaps, Soccer Bowl 1979 began with howls of execration raining down on them. Only a week before they had committed the sin of knocking the Cosmos out of the playoffs. And on Saturday afternoon the 50,699 fans at Giants Stadium in East Rutherford, N. J.—all but a few of them Cosmos supporters—showed that they were still choking on the fearful truth that, so sorry, no Franz, no Giorgio, no Bogie would be around when the trophy was presented.

But there it was: Vancouver against the Tampa Bay Rowdies. All right. Tampa you could live with. In four trips to the Meadowlands, the Rowdies hadn't won. In losing at last year's Soccer Bowl 3-1, they had been a punching bag for the Cosmos. But, oh, Vancouver!

And the crowd's loudest howls, its angriest bayings, were saved for the Caps' Phil (Lofty) Parkes, the league's best goalie, who had foiled the Cosmos in the final shootout. As he gained the center of the field during the player introductions, the 6'3" Parkes blew satiric kisses to the crowd. Willie Johnston, the Caps' Scottish winger, tucked his soccer ball under his shirt in a vulgar manner as he ran out. The louder the crowd howled, the less the Whitecaps cared. Quite clearly, they were full of fizz.

They had been like that for days, and it had their coach, Tony Waiters, worried. On Friday morning, at their last workout before the game, the Caps had been bursting with energy, fighting one another for the ball as if they were playing a real game, yelling and laughing as if it were celebration time already. "I have to get them down a bit," Waiters had said then. "All of them. They're too bubbly."

At game time Vancouver was the favorite, though narrowly. The Rowdies have always been a hard-fighting side, especially in the playoffs, and when they were beaten in the Bowl last year, they had played without the injured Rodney Marsh.

This time he would be there and as highly motivated as anyone on the field. For Marsh—stylish, debonair, the winner of nine international "caps" for England, the idol of Tampa—Saturday's game would be his last as far as serious competition was concerned.

Marsh intended to rise to the occasion. "I desperately want to win," he declared, as well he might. On Friday a testimonial game will be played for Marsh in Tampa. He will keep the proceeds, after the deduction of such expenses as hiring an armored car to take the money to the bank. A rough guess is that he'll end up with about $50,000. But his take will be based on the gate, and that would be substantially increased should the guest of honor come home straight from a Soccer Bowl triumph.

The other key figure in the Tampa attack was their Argentinian striker, Oscar Fabbiani, and he was a less than ebullient figure at the final practice. At mid-season he had been riding the crest of a goal-scoring wave—indeed, with 58 points he had beaten out the Cosmos' Giorgio Chinaglia as the high scorer in the regular season. Since season's end, though, Fabbiani's production had fallen off; he had scored only one goal in seven playoff games. On Friday—in Spanish, and unequivocally—he blamed his teammates for starving him of passes. Their egotism was to blame, he suggested, especially in televised games. "You have to feed your scorer," he said. "I tell them, 'Do you think I am doing this for myself? I am making goals for you.' " It wasn't the happiest way for a player to be going into Soccer Bowl.

Fabbiani also said that the Rowdies' best strategy would be to come out with guns blazing, Cosmos-style. But when the game began, it was Vancouver that had all the effervescence.

In five minutes the Caps had forced two corners, and in just over 12 they were ahead. Trevor Whymark beat the Rowdies' Steve Wegerle on the turn and then, with Defender Barry Kitchener helpless, hammered a left-foot shot past Zeljko Bilecki in goal. Whymark's great mop of curly fair hair would be in the midst of the action throughout the afternoon.