Always Managing: My Autobiography (17 page)

‘You’ve got to pay tax and insurance, Carl,’ I continued, as soothingly as I could. ‘Everybody does.’

He wasn’t having it. ‘When I did some painting for Leroy,’ he insisted, ‘he said he would give me a hundred quid, and he gave me a hundred quid.’

‘What about your other jobs?’ I asked. ‘You would have paid tax and insurance then.’

‘I ain’t had no other jobs,’ said Carl. ‘Just painting with Leroy.’

And it didn’t stop there. Carl had a wife and a little baby, but no house. I said he should buy one. ‘How do you do that?’ he asked. He wasn’t kidding. I told him to go to the high street and look out for one of those shops with pictures of houses in the window. I said he should try to find a home for about £35,000. The next day he came in, and said he had bought one. I was a little stunned. ‘What sort of house is it, Carl?’ I asked.

‘Oh, three bathrooms, one bedroom,’ he said.

‘You mean, three bedrooms, one bathroom?’ I queried. ‘Something like that,’ he said. He told me he had paid £38,000.

‘And how much were they asking for it,’ I wanted to know.

‘I told you,’ said Carl, ‘£38,000.’

He hadn’t made an offer, he hadn’t even seen the house. ‘I’ve
never met anyone like your Mr Richards,’ the estate agent told me. ‘He bought the first house we showed him, in the office, for the asking price.’ I managed to negotiate it down to £36,000 for him. The agent turned out to be a big Bournemouth fan. He was right about Carl, though. I have never met anyone like him either. After that poor start he became a great player for us, strong and quick, and the year we went up he murdered defenders every week. Birmingham City bought him after two seasons for £85,000. He had a season with them, another with Peterborough United and two years with Blackpool. He ended up going back to Enfield after that. I often wonder what he is up to now. A bit of painting with Leroy, probably.

When I look back, Bournemouth was probably the most fun I ever had as a manager. There wasn’t the money, or the success, obviously, and it certainly didn’t compare to working with great players like Paolo Di Canio or Gareth Bale, but there was a sense of adventure back then, taking a chance on someone like Carl or scouring the leagues for an undiscovered gem. And when a really good player did drop down the league to work at that level, you appreciated it. I can remember Luther Blissett joined us from Watford in 1988. He was one of those players that changes the attitude of a football club. He was a great trainer – he’d been to Italy, he had played for England – he had a different work ethic to the rest. He taught the players about eating right, and coming in with the proper attitude. We beat Hull City 5–1 on his debut and he scored four goals. The chairman gave a big speech in the boardroom afterwards. ‘The great thing is,’ he said. ‘We haven’t even seen the best of Luther yet.’ ‘He’s just got four goals in one game, Mr Chairman,’ I said. ‘I think we have.’

Yet those leagues have a way of keeping your feet on the ground. Even in 1984, when we knocked Manchester United out of the FA Cup, we weren’t allowed to bask in the glory for long. We were 21st in Division Three that morning, and Manchester United were second in Division One; it was probably the biggest result in the history of the club. A full house, the greatest FA Cup upset in years. The next morning they wanted me on breakfast television and all the players were doing interviews with the newspapers. It was a huge story. ‘Can we come down to your training ground?’ one TV crew asked. I told them we didn’t have a training ground. We trained in King’s Park, which was public land. People used to walk dogs there, and the first job for the apprentices each morning was to clear the mess so we could play. In winter, it would get quite boggy, so if we could we would use a red cinder all-weather surface, the sort of thing I used to play on in the East End as a kid. It had some small floodlights and the council used to hire it out to teams at night.

On the Monday after we beat Manchester United, the gates to the ochre pitch had been left open, so in we went. The players were buzzing, as you’d expect, and we had a really good session. When we came to leave, though, there was a giant padlock on the gate. The park keeper had come round on his bike and locked us in without saying a word. He was another Cheyenne, a nightmare to us at the best of times, but this was really special. We had to scale a twenty-foot fence to get out. I had one leg over and couldn’t get the other one across, and the frame was swaying in the wind. All the lads were laughing. And that’s what it was like: Bournemouth always had a way of bringing you down to earth. We had a dozen footballs at the start of the year and when one got lost, we would
have the kids searching for it for hours. Now players boot balls over the fence and don’t give a monkey’s. They forget where we all came from. I remember Sol Campbell at Portsmouth telling me the training-ground pitch was crap, which it was. It was in a disgusting state, really. But you can’t let players use that as an excuse. I remember watching Sol play for an east London boys’ team called Senrab – they came from Barnes Street in Stepney originally, and Senrab is Barnes reversed – and they would play on Wanstead Flats or Hackney Marshes. I reminded him of those days and he got my point. That’s where we grew up. ‘You’ve played on worse than this and loved every minute, Sol,’ I told him. Nowadays, it’s a different world. Modern players, certainly those who have come through elite clubs in the top division, don’t realise how lucky they are. All they have ever played on is billiard-table surfaces.

Life at Bournemouth made you appreciate the good times more. One of my chairmen, Jim Nolan – I had about nine in my time there but he was one of the best – came over the park one day and announced he wanted to take me somewhere after training. We pulled up at a Mercedes garage and he presented me with a little 190E for getting promoted. I was still driving a Morris Marina at the time. The 190E was a £17,000 car, and it felt like I had won the pools. It was different for ex-players in those days. We hadn’t made fortunes out of the game. I’ll never forget Jim for what he did. He didn’t have to do that. I felt so proud of my little black Merc.

Almost all of my chairmen did their best for me and the club. Another time we were going to play York City away on a Wednesday and Darlington the following Saturday, so I asked the chairman if there was any chance of staying in the north for three nights. He said we didn’t have the money, but I knew that by the time we’d
paid for the coach there and back twice it would come to roughly the same. So I rang around until I found two guest houses next to each other that could take us, two in a room, three in a room, and if we did the journey in two hired minibuses we could make it pay. You had to see these mini-buses. They were the worst. Old and green, they looked like they’d carried troops in the war. We took the smallest squad we could cope with to keep the costs down, and Keith Williams, my assistant, drove the second vehicle. When we arrived at Darlington they wouldn’t let us in. I said I was the manager of Bournemouth and this was our team, and the bloke on the gate fell about laughing. It was only when one of his mates recognised me that we got through the door at all. But we won both matches. The two nights in the guest house really helped with team spirit, too.

It worked so well that, later, when we were going for promotion, I tried the same tactic on the north-west coast. We won at Port Vale on the Wednesday and stayed in Blackpool waiting for our Saturday match, which was at Carlisle United. The hotel accommodation was a little more upmarket this time, and the temptations of Blackpool very different to Darlington. The night before the game, I called a team meeting. I kept it simple. Massive game tomorrow, nobody goes out tonight, early to bed, prepare right, we’re going great, don’t spoil it, don’t take liberties – they all listened, all agreed. Lovely. Sam Ellis, who was the manager of Blackpool at the time and a good friend, came over to see me in our hotel. We had a cup of tea and a chat and by 10 p.m. all the players were tucked up in bed. I had another half hour with Sam, said see you later, and got in the lift to go up to my room. Before I had the chance to press a button the doors closed and the lift
started going down to the basement. I got out – where was I? With that, the lift doors closed behind me and up it went. Now I was stranded, in what I realised was the underground car park. Terrific. I was pressing the button to call the lift when the doors opened again, and who was there but John Williams, my captain, done up like John Travolta. Behind him, five other players, all ready to hit the town. Flowered shirts, plenty of aftershave, the lads were well for up for it. Unfortunately, the doors had opened to reveal their manager, who was not best pleased. John walked straight into me. ‘Oh my God,’ he said.

I looked him up and down. ‘What do you think this is, fucking
Saturday Night Fever
?’ I asked him. ‘See you – you’re going fucking home in the morning.’

‘It’s a fair cop, boss,’ he said. ‘What can I say?’

I was livid. ‘Fuck off, that’s what I’m saying,’ I told him. ‘I don’t care what you want to say.’

But I couldn’t stay angry at John for long. I knew he wasn’t the only one with plans that night. I went storming up to their floor and I could see the little crew from the lift scarpering back to their rooms, and a few others too. I let John stew the night and then pulled him the following morning, gave him a bollocking and let him remain with us. We got the result we needed at Carlisle and we were better off with him in the team.

I loved Bournemouth. I still do. When the club was in financial difficulty I worked without pay for four months, and I even loaned them money, interest free, to make up the shortfall in a rescue package under Trevor Watkins, one of my many chairmen. I turned down good jobs in order to stay at Bournemouth, too: Aston Villa, Stoke City and even West Ham United, the first time.

It was in February 1990. They had sacked Lou Macari after just a year at the club, which was very unusual for West Ham, and were dithering on appointing Billy Bonds as his successor. I got a call from the chairman, Len Cearns. ‘We have had a lot of applications for the job, but we didn’t have the one we wanted, which is yours,’ he told me. I couldn’t understand why, if I was their man, they didn’t just try to speak to me without waiting for a letter. I told Brian Tiler and Jim Nolan about the conversation, but they refused West Ham permission to speak to me, and I didn’t make a fuss. They had treated me very well at Bournemouth and I had signed a new three-year contract little more than twelve months earlier. I didn’t want to rock the boat.

And as for the contract, what a night that was. We were playing away at Hull City, but Brian Tiler insisted on going out to celebrate, even though it was Friday, the day when professionals are supposed to be tucked up in bed early in readiness for the match. Some Bacardi and Cokes, three bottles of red wine and two bottles of champagne later I was stumbling down the hotel corridor, back to my room. It is a good job our season was as good as over, because the next day I wasn’t much use to anybody. We were 4–0 down at half-time, but all I could think about was the pain in my head. If the players were expecting some instruction, guidance, or maybe even an informative rucking, they would have been sorely disappointed. I stuck my aching bonce around the door. ‘Come on, lads,’ I said. ‘We’ve got to do better than that.’ I could have been talking about myself. Then I staggered off in search of some aspirin.

Bournemouth was always punching above its weight in the second tier, though, and at the end of the 1989–90 season, we were relegated. We had done fantastically well to get as high as we
did, but it couldn’t last. We were a decent team, but our resources were always stretched. I remember one game at Portsmouth, on the last day in March, when we lost our entire starting back four, plus the goalkeeper. It was just injury after injury and we didn’t have the squad. From being in the top half of the table on 29 December, we only won two league games between February and the end of the season and ended up needing to beat Leeds United at home on the final day to stay up. Leeds needed to win to get promoted to the First Division and their fans just took over the town – and wrecked it.

It was a May bank holiday, blazing hot, a seaside location – a real recipe for disaster. The Leeds supporters left Bournemouth in a horrendous state. Streets and property were smashed to pieces. The police estimated there were as many as 15,000 of them. They were taking the tickets off Bournemouth fans, and every vehicle in the club car park was damaged in some way. It was horrendous behaviour: windows caved in, cars ruined. Our chairman had a Rolls-Royce, and by the time they had finished with it there wasn’t a window intact and all the doors were missing. The police tried to intervene and were chased off. There was a charge – and the next thing we knew the police had turned tail and were running the other way. The fans had been on the booze all weekend and just ran riot. It was as well we lost 1–0 because I don’t know if we’d have had a ground left had we beaten them. It was one of my worst days in football.

Looking back, I think the support of Brian Tiler was the main reason I stayed at Bournemouth so long. I could never take a liberty with Brian. I would never have threatened to walk out, or tried to back him into a corner over interest from a bigger club.
Peter Coates offered me the job at Stoke, and Villa said they wanted me too, but I loved the relationship I had with Brian and the staff at Bournemouth. He was one of those guys that always knew when to say the right thing. He knew my moods, he knew when I had the hump, and he knew his football, too. It was the perfect combination. If I was about to blow with the chairman, he would swoop in and we’d go racing, to Ascot or Sandown Park. If there was something wrong or someone was upsetting me, Brian would sort it out. He was just a man that I felt was always in my corner, fighting.