by One of Mark Leech’s first assignments as a sports photographer was when the agency he was working for sent him up to Ipswich Town’s training ground to take pictures of the team for the club calendar. When he arrived he was explaining to the woman behind reception who he was and that he had been told that everything was arranged.
“Then I heard this voice behind me,” he recalls. “‘Arranged by who?’ It was Bobby Robson. And he was not happy. I said: ‘arranged by my editor’. And he said ‘I’m in charge here, I’m the bloody manager and nobody arranged it with me’. Then he took me up to his office and tore me. ‘You know nothing’, he shouted at me. And he pointed to a picture on the wall behind his desk. ‘You’re not even a proper photographer. That’s a bloody picture.’ It was a demonstration of some action from a game a few weeks earlier. ‘Don’t come back here,’ he shouted at me, ‘so you can take a picture like that.’ I was only 18. I was so scared that I didn’t dare to tell him that I took him. It was my picture.”
Given that Bobby Robson was Ipswich’s manager from 1969 to 1982, Leech has obviously been photographing for some time. In fact, last October, he celebrated 50 years since a picture was first published in a national newspaper. But here’s the thing: five decades later he is still working hard on the touch, then every weekend training his lenses on the action. More to the point, he still loves his job.
“I did Luton against Burnley recently,” he says, sitting in the cafe of the north London office block where he has his studio. “And when I came back home afterwards my wife said to me: ‘Have you been drinking?’ I said no. She said: ‘so why do you have that big smile on your face?’ The truth is, I would love to be at the game. And she said: ‘I wish I could make you as happy as taking pictures of Luton against Burnley’.”
As it happens, his half century of happiness began in less than auspicious circumstances. In fact, it started in failure. He applied for a job with Hayters sports agency as a trainee football reporter. But he needed 5 O-levels, of which he managed only two. Someone mentioned having a job at a photography agency so he impressed them in the interview knowing all the players’ names in a big pile of pictures with no captions. He was accepted as a general apprentice, working in the darkroom during the week, elbow deep in developing fluid, then on match days he would stand on the touchlines of London stadiums waiting for the rolls of film to be carried from the photographers back to the darkness. room.
“I was crazy about the football, I had the best view in the house and the first time I went along, after about 20 minutes a photographer gave me film. I stood there for a minute, then he said: ‘what are you waiting for?’ The game barely progressed. And then I had to leave to go to the dark room. I tell you, you have to watch some of the oddballs that hang out in the air when games are on.”
Once he had developed the film, he would head to Fleet Street, going around the newspaper’s sports desks trying to sell the best shots. It was a tough apprenticeship, working six days a week to get back £12 a week. But then, not later than three months after he started, he decided to buy a camera, a Zenith that cost him almost two weeks’ wages.
“I remember my father saying to me: ‘why did you buy that? You will never be able to take a good picture,” he says. “I was very motivated to show him.”
And, partly to prove his father wrong, he took the camera to a game at Highbury in the spring of 1974. He was behind the goal when Brian Kidd scored. But instead of taking a shot at the goal, he followed Kidd as he went to celebrate with the fans on the North Bank. A policeman was sitting there, his helmet on his side, and Kidd gave him a standing ovation from the crowd. Leech took the picture and, not forgetting to grab the film from the official photographer, immediately went to the darkroom.
“I ran it through the papers and got four back pages. No one believed I took it. It gave me a bit of faith.”
And recently, when Manchester City came to play at the Emirates with Kidd on the City coaching staff, Leech introduced himself to the subject of his firing.
“He was happy when I told him I took him. He said it was on the wall of his house between a picture of him meeting the Pope and another meeting the Queen.”
It was a picture that launched Leech into the world of snappery. Within a month, he was sent to the European Cup final in Paris. And so began a career that took in seven World Cups and countless cup finals, glory games and triumphs of ignorance. He was an eyewitness, right there on the touchline, of the biggest, most historic occasions in the game. He was the only British photographer when Diego Maradona won the scudetto in Naples, he was alongside Gazza when he celebrated the dentist’s chair at Euro 96 and was there at the World Cup in Marseilles in 1998 when England went up to take penalties against Argentina.
“Glenn Hoddle said before the game that he had a plan for penalties, and then through my long lens I could see him in the post before the shoot-out going ‘I need another one,’ and David Batty going ‘but right enough. ‘.”
Through that he was always looking for different angles, unusual approaches.
“People often ask me what the best football picture ever taken is, perhaps expecting me to say one of Maradona at the 86 World Cup taking on the Belgian defence,” he says. “But actually, it was one of my heroes Gerry Cranham in the 1966 World Cup final. He’s just scored Geoff Hurst’s third and instead of getting a goal, Gerry turned and took one off the bench England celebrating. Amidst all the limbs, Alf Ramsey is sitting on the bench, motionless. And it perfectly captures that look on Jimmy Greaves’ face that says: ‘I should be there’.”
These days, while running his own highly successful photography agency, Leech is still in search of the perfect picture.
“The game is much faster, more skillful,” he says. “But the principles of a decent picture are still exactly the same. You still know when you have one the moment you push the button.” While the principles are still there, not much else. Take the picture he recently posed outside Tottenham Hotspur’s stadium before the game against Wolves.
“I saw this South Korean in Mac [Heung-min] shirt taking a selfie holding up some fish and chips. So I took a picture of it and even as I took it I couldn’t help myself thinking: imagine a thought that would have happened when you started 50 years ago.”
