Be Careful What You Wish For (14 page)

Houghton and Cockerill went out to see him as he was staggering out of the toilets. Houghton was the first to speak to him.
Linighan
snarled back, ‘You can fuck off too, you little cunt’ and then headed for the door and went out into the night.

That was it for me. I got Alan Smith out of bed and my PA on the phone and told her to book Linighan on the first flight out of Spain. Then I told Cockerill and Houghton to go into his room, pack up his stuff and wait for him.

About 5 a.m. the phone rang.

‘Chairman, it’s Andrew.’

‘Who?’ I ask.

‘Andy Linighan, why am I being sent home? I’m sorry. I love this club, chairman.’

‘I don’t care, Andrew, you don’t get to abuse me in public and apologise on the QT.’

‘I am not going, chairman,’ he said weakly.

‘Oh yes you are, if I have to physically put you in the car,’ and I hung up.

Linighan caught his flight and the rumour circulated amongst the players that there had been retribution for Linighan’s unacceptable behaviour.

I flew back from Spain to headlines in the
Sun
that there had been a fight between the player and myself. Once back I wasted little time terminating Linighan’s contract. Another bad egg gone, but I was far from impressed with Alan’s control over this trip.

As if I didn’t have enough on my plate I became embroiled in a row with Terry Venables. After Kevin Keegan had walked out on England, the press were speculating about who should be the next England manager and I was asked my view as Venables was a former Palace manager and was heavily tipped to succeed him. I don’t know what the big deal was. I just said if Venables was the only name on the list for England manager, then it was a very poor state of affairs for English football.

This provoked a furious response from Venables and his agent Leon Angel called me, demanding I make a public apology.

I told Angel where to go, as I was just saying what I thought. This was the first of a few altercations with Angel over the years.

During my first season I joined the team on Friday evenings on away games staying in the same hotel. I noticed that the players were put to bed early but the management team and other back-room staff would stay up drinking quite heavily, on expenses of course! This struck me as strange the night before a game, but looking back for some reason I stupidly accepted that this was part and parcel of the management team bonding. In fact, it was them taking liberties, and after seeing them getting on the team coach blurry-eyed and hung over one time too many, I banned them from drinking the night before an away game.

Soon we were in the papers again. This time the story was about Ruddock, the player I had personally asked to set a shining example for the rest of the team. He had taken the players out after a game (which they had lost!) to a swish London hotel for a night out and the papers claimed they were drunk, singing ‘going down going down’.

Naturally, when I confronted Alan Smith and Ruddock, they denied the story was true.

In my desire to make the players proud of their club and for us to look the part one of my not-so-bright ideas was to get all the players and management to wear club suits. Not just any suits. I wanted them to wear suits made by the celebrity tailor Ozwald Boateng. I wanted the suits to be handmade and I wanted the lining of the jackets to be red and blue, Palace’s team colours.

It turned out to be a nightmare as footballers come in all shapes and sizes and not all are suited to the designs of highfalutin Savile Row tailors, especially the kind of suits that Boateng produced,
which
were fine for lithe – OK, skinny – people like myself but not so good for strapping young footballers and slightly pot-bellied coaching staff.

Our next game was at home to Grimsby, a team we would expect to beat. The performance was dire. Looking back it was no wonder, given the leadership from Alan Smith and his team and the example they were setting. After this game I took an action which followed me for many years and shaped people’s perception of me. For the first and only time, I went into the dressing room to talk to the players about their performance. Smith was talking to them and, in the middle of his speech, Andy Morrison, a player on loan from Manchester City, stood up, bent over and farted.

That was it for me. I’d had enough and exploded with rage at the players. You have to accept the industrial language, as this was how they spoke and anyway was the only language this fucking lot understood.

‘How fucking dare you think you can behave the way you are and put out fucking performances like that? You are a fucking embarrassment. If you are under the impression you are going to get this manager the sack, you are very fucking wrong, and you will all go before he does.

‘If you don’t want to be here then you can all fuck off and form an orderly queue outside my office and I will get you away from this club. Have some pride.’

Surprise, surprise, there was no response. They were all looking to the floor like little boys.

I walked out, taking Alan with me, and sat in his office.

‘Get a hold of this, Alan. Whether I was right or wrong to come into the dressing room I have done it because you are not dealing with it. I want you to take a stance and put Mullins, Morrison and Jamie Smith on the transfer list tomorrow.’

This was shock tactics. Mullins and Morrison were amongst our star young players and Jamie Smith was considered to be a strong character. The next morning, much to the surprise of their teammates we transfer-listed them – ironically we received no offers, giving them a touch of reality – and Alan Smith went and did a massive interview in the papers, and the headline was, ‘Players are lazy, sloppy overpaid whingers who only care about what they look like.’ This sort of outburst was unheard of at the time in football, especially from a manager.

My mentality was to support my manager, and to build a club on a foundation of respect. I didn’t deliberately seek controversy or confrontation, I just didn’t avoid it. I wanted the players and management to behave as winners and role models, not this shambles, but because of my determination and single-mindedness and, at times, ignorance, I was building myself a reputation in the media.

My programme notes were also attracting attention. I wrote them for every game. I didn’t pull any punches and was very strident in my opinions. Within a year, segments of my column were being lifted by lazy journalists and put in match reports, which put a stop to me writing in the programme.

My attitude towards other football clubs had also not gone unnoticed. I was not overly interested in going into boardrooms: I went to games to win, not to fraternise; drinking Chardonnay with the ‘enemy’ didn’t interest me. I expressed this sentiment quite openly, which I suspect made the owners of other teams think ‘Who is that cocky arrogant bastard?’ But frankly I didn’t care about their opinion.

I had walked out of a couple of boardrooms as they would not allow my guests in, preferring to go in the public bar instead; I had been refused admission in one boardroom as I was not wearing a tie. The trend of not going into the boardroom was to continue
over
the years. I much preferred eating a hot dog in the car park outside away grounds than eating prawn sandwiches in the boardroom, although my outlook softened as time went by.

As if a light had been turned on, the team suddenly clicked.

It started with an away game at Leicester in the League Cup. They were the cup holders. The Premier League outfit put out a full-strength side to defend their trophy and were expected to win with relative ease. The team performance was outstanding and we trounced them 3–0.

Around this time I allowed Alan to supplement the squad even further and we took Steve Staunton on loan from Aston Villa and attempted to sign James Beattie from Southampton. Glenn Hoddle, the ex-England manager now at Southampton, accepted an offer for £1.5 million, but then the Southampton chairman Rupert Lowe got involved. He wanted £2 million. I told him that we had already agreed a price with Hoddle and Lowe told me that Glenn had changed his mind.

‘Well, that’s not very Christian of him,’ I remarked, referring to his much publicised religious beliefs.

So I offered £2 million, but then Lowe wanted £2.5 million so I made that offer. He hiked it up to £3 million, and once again I offered what he asked for and then he came back with £3.5 million.

That was it as far as I was concerned. Alan still wanted another striker and I suggested Dougie Freeman, an old favourite. I bought him back from Nottingham Forest for £750,000, little realising that it would prove to be some of the best money I would spend at the club.

After the cup win the team went on a great run, winning a succession of games that fired us up the league. Our cup run continued and we beat Sunderland again from the Premier League
to
reach the semi-finals, where we faced Merseyside giants Liverpool.

After six months of turmoil we seemed to be in a period of harmony. The only exception was Ruddock, whose performances and conduct at the club had been far from exemplary. Alan was fed up with him. He had been sent off twice, had been at the heart of off-the-field nonsense and was fined eight times for being overweight.

My patience finally snapped and I summoned him to Selhurst Park. Sheepishly, Ruddock came into my office and I proceeded to give him a tongue-lashing. I told him he was a disgrace, calling him a fat slob and to my amazement he broke down. Ruddock was sat in my office whining about his weight and moaning about his personal life. This cut no ice with me. I warned him that if he wasn’t under the weight level in forty-eight hours I would find some way to fire him.

He weighed in underweight for the first time for two months and stood on the scales celebrating like a boxer, in his case a bloody heavyweight. The point was made but it was the beginning of the end for him at Palace.

Players seemed to think they lived on an island on their own where the normal rules of society or employment didn’t apply to them. I did an interview around this time, cryptically saying that ‘I cared about players as much as they cared about me.’ Daniel Sugar, Lord Sugar’s son, phoned me to say that my comment had greatly amused his father as he knew exactly what I had meant when I said it. The culture of football revolved around taking liberties, and players were the biggest exponents of it.

Three examples sum up the culture of a large number of footballers. The first was the squad training kit. No sooner was it shipped to the training ground for the players to wear during the
season
than it was reported lost, as certain highly paid players were stuffing it in the boots of their cars and selling it as knock-offs. Then there was the married player on loan who was staying in a hotel on his own and complaining about not seeing his wife for weeks, but putting condoms on his expenses claim. Lastly there was the player who came into my office with his agent, clutching four match reports from the
Sun
where journalists had given him a high performance rating. This he saw as a reason for me giving him a fat new contract. Pillars of society? No. Just young boys being paid a lot of money by people like me and afforded sometimes far too much leniency in the scheme of the world.

January came around and we played Liverpool in the first leg of the League Cup semi-final at home in front of a full house; the atmosphere was electric. I had invited John Barton, a devout Liverpool fan and the MD of 121 who seven months earlier had sanctioned the purchase of PPS, giving me the money to waste – sorry, invest – on football. We pulled off a sensational 2–1 victory with goals from Rubins and Clinton Morrison. Liverpool got a goal back with ten minutes to go but the headlines were about how Morrison’s performance and Alan Smith’s management had turned Palace around.

But of course there was some controversy that had been stirred up by the papers. Morrison was asked if he had as many chances as Michael Owen would he have expected to have put them away? Clinton of course said yes, which the papers turned into Morrison considering himself better than Owen.

‘The Cocky Face of Division 1 puts the Premier League Mighty in their place’ was just one of their headlines and set up a spicy return leg at Anfield.

Alan had started believing his own press, and had become a little
bit
difficult to deal with. He loved seeing himself in the papers. I remember around this time taking him for a drink at the Fifth Floor Bar at Harvey Nichols. He was carrying around a copy of the
Evening Standard
as it had a big picture of him on the back cover.

I will always remember Alan walking down the road outside Harrods and some guy coming up to him with a magazine. Alan must have assumed he had been recognised and took the magazine and signed it. The guy just looked at him in total amazement, as he was a
Big Issue
seller and wanted Alan to buy one, not give him his bloody autograph.

The eagerly awaited Merseyside return leg arrived, and it was a media circus. I came into Anfield with the team and as we walked through, Gérard Houllier, then Liverpool manager, was waiting for us, insisting on shaking everybody’s hand and wishing them luck. This annoyed me intensely as it was clearly just a mind game, so I ignored him and walked past.

But this was nothing to what I was going to get in their boardroom.

Before going upstairs I went in and wished Alan and his staff good luck and told them how proud I was of them, irrespective of the result.

I only went into Liverpool’s boardroom because my best friend Mark Ryan was a big Liverpool fan and had brought his dad along. We were roundly ignored by their chairman David Moores, but one of the Liverpool directors handed me a plaque, saying, ‘We like to give the smaller teams a memento of their visit to Anfield.’

I responded in the only way I knew: ‘You are fucking kidding me.’

I turned away handing my coat off to one of the boardroom
attendants
to hang up. Unfortunately it wasn’t a boardroom attendant, it was Chris De Burgh the singer of ‘Lady in Red’.