Be Careful What You Wish For (17 page)

So when Bassett had a go at me for the dinosaur comment I explained, ‘By dinosaur I meant majestic beast.’ He laughed it off, calling me a saucy bastard.

After turning my nose up at most applications, I interviewed Steve McMahon, ex-Liverpool player and Blackpool manager. I liked McMahon, but he was just missing something. Phil Smith,
the
agent who sold me Ruddock, approached me. For some reason that escapes me now, he still had credibility with me. He was representing Steve Bruce, the ex-Manchester United captain and former manager of numerous clubs.

Bruce was the manager of Huddersfield Town when we had played them in the third game of my first season and in my opinion he was a total disgrace. He had showed no interest in the game and his body language was awful, turning and scowling at his chairman Barry Rubery. After the game, over a drink in his boardroom, I told Rubery the best thing he could do was to ‘fire that disrespectful wanker’. Six weeks later, he did.

Having perhaps had a hand in getting Bruce dismissed, it was ironic that I had now been convinced by Smith to interview him. So Steve Bruce flew to Spain to meet with me at my house.

When interviewing someone, rather than the usual boring standard questions, I try to throw them off balance and get them to show their true selves.

‘So, Steve, tell me something. I saw you last year when we played Huddersfield and I thought you were a disgrace. I told your chairman that if a wanker like you worked for me I would fire you! Explain to me why I should now think differently.’

Bruce’s face went a bit ashen. He sucked in some air and then answered, ‘I expected a difficult interview but bloody hell!’

He then went into his reasons for his bad attitude towards his chairman – it was all around broken promises and the sale of players when they were challenging for promotion. Bruce admitted his conduct was wrong and he knew it and had learned from that.

Steve Bruce was a very difficult man to dislike. He was very personable and exuded the inner strength of someone who had captained the biggest club in the world under the best manager in history, Sir Alex Ferguson.

He shared my ambition for promotion and felt we had a strong squad and with a few additions getting into the Premier League was very possible – he especially liked the ‘Pest’ Clinton Morrison. He spoke of standards and management style. By the end of our two-hour chat, he had sold himself to me. I made up my mind to offer him the job.

Around this time I bumped into Douglas Hall, vice-chairman of Newcastle United, the biggest club, well, in Newcastle, fresh from the notorious visit to a well-known knocking shop in Marbella with chairman Freddy Shepherd where they had infamously branded ‘all girls in Newcastle dogs’ and been caught in a sting operation by the
News of the World
. It turned out that Sir John Hall, Douglas’s father, lived virtually next door to me; I was to form a good relationship with both Halls, taking advice from experienced and wily Sir John and well, getting drunk with Dougie, which he was indeed very good at.

They invited me to Gibraltar as Newcastle were over and there I met the late great Bobby Robson and took the opportunity to get his opinion on Steve Bruce, who himself by chance was a Geordie. Robson was positive although I am not sure he was 100 per cent au fait with Bruce’s track record. As is often the case in football, coincidences occur and later that year we drew Newcastle in the FA Cup.

With my belief in loyalty, it was important that Steve Bruce got on with Stevie Kember and Terry Bullivant, as I had made keeping them on a condition of his employment. I flew them over so they could all meet. They got on famously, so to celebrate my new ‘dream team’ I took them out on my boat, much to Steve Bruce’s horror as he hated boats and spent the afternoon green, and I almost lost my first-team coach, nearly drowning Bullivant on one of my jet skis.

We had dinner in the evening and a real feeling of optimism was shared, the excitement was evident and I felt at that dinner we really had something.

No expense was spared in preparing for the new season. The team trained in a fantastic training camp in Marbella, one soon used by Bayern Munich and Inter Milan. There was a different feel from the Alan Smith time, there was a feeling of togetherness within the squad, and I even joined in training! Bruce demanded absolute respect from the players and he got it too. He was organised and professional in everything he did, a throwback I suspect from his Manchester United days. I was impressed by the control he had over the team: he imposed a strict regime and certain senior highly paid players like David Hopkin, who didn’t like it at all, toed the line, knowing exactly who was the boss.

During the pre-season, problems sparked up again with Jamie Pollock, who unfortunately had returned from Birmingham. There was a dispute over a £10,000 fee, which had been agreed if Birmingham kept him for more than a month.

Even though I had been on the conference call with Karren Brady and Trevor Francis when this had been agreed, it had been omitted from the loan document and Birmingham were refusing to pay it.

I liked Karren and respected her in many ways, but she could be a bit of a madam and in this instance she told a big, fat fib. I called David Sullivan, Birmingham’s co-owner, giving him my word that this had been agreed.

He said ‘tough’, implying that I was a liar, and he wouldn’t pay it.

This paved the way for years of bad feeling between Birmingham, its co-owners David Gold and David Sullivan and myself.

Pollock returned, having undergone an operation without prior permission from the club, as was his way. He was also a stone and a half heavier, but he refused point blank to do anything about it. I had no desire to start the new season with more confrontation but there was no way I was allowing this attitude. So to coin a phrase from
Cool Hand Luke
, ‘What we’ve got here is failure to communicate.’

On the subject of dead weight, we had taken the opportunity to rid ourselves of Neil Ruddock. It was much easier to get rid of him than the autobiography he had released earlier in the year. Piles of unsold copies were sitting on our club shop shelves gathering dust!

So after consulting with my HR Director Kevin Watts on the best way to handle this ‘problem’, we put Pollock on notice in writing: he would be weighed every week and if he failed to weigh in at the required weight he would be given an official warning. Rather than take on board a reasonable request from the club, Jamie Pollock decided to do exactly as he pleased.

At the first week’s weigh-in, his weight had gone up rather than down. We issued the first verbal warning. The second week his weight was up again, so we issued a second verbal warning and the third week there was no weight loss so he received a first and final written warning.

In the fourth week there was no weight improvement. Pollock was now heavier than the weight he had come back with, which had already been deemed unacceptable. So we did something that no other football club had done. We fired the player and removed him from our payroll.

Typically, despite the circumstances, the PFA jumped in to defend Pollock and a tribunal was convened at the Football League comprising the usual suspects of blazer wearers from the FA and
Football
League. After a farcical hearing the panel ordered us to reinstate him and put him back on the payroll. This was typical football self-regulation so we lodged an appeal.

At the appeal hearing we took a leading QC as well as the club’s physio, George Cooper. George was a lovely lad, quite young for a physio, but very competent. His problem was that he was a bit too concerned with being popular with the players, which can often be the case with physios. Even so, I liked him. He agreed with the club’s stance and considered Pollock to be overweight.

In the hearing we argued we had followed the disciplinary code to the letter. This was contentious as far as football and certainly the PFA were concerned. It would set an unwelcome precedent to uphold our right to sack a player for repeated breaches of discipline. The panel didn’t want to make a controversial decision and preferred to find a way round the problem.

George Cooper was put on the stand and explained all manner of technical jargon around weight, not really answering the questions that were being asked.

Eventually, one of the new appeal panel, Lawrie McMenemy, the ex-Southampton and England assistant manager, exploded, ‘For God’s sake, man, it’s a simple question: is he fat or not?’

George bottled it, saying technically he was not fat, which was vastly different from the discussions we had had and clearly did not help. I rolled my eyes at him, disappointed that he seemed to prefer popularity with players than with his chairman, but it seemed that he had folded under pressure.

Eventually the panel agreed that we had the right to stipulate a player’s weight, but perversely claimed we had issued one warning too few for him to be fired, which given I had an HR expert who had handled thousands of employees for me at PPS was not actually right.

So according to them we had the right to do what we had done but we hadn’t done it the right way.

We had to take Pollock back in the knowledge that the panel had made it clear we were actually within our rights to stipulate that he be at a certain weight. The internal football channels had now been exhausted, and we were stuck with this absurd cowardly verdict.

So I made Pollock train with our new academy director, an ex-army instructor, who ran him and ran him until two weeks later he weighed in at an acceptable weight level. No sooner had he reached the required weight than he got signed off with stress and returned to his hometown in the north-east.

For this disappearing act I removed him from the payroll and waited for his return, which never came. Curious to see where this Scarlet Pimpernel of a player had disappeared to, I hired a private detective to find out what he was doing. The detective told me he had seen some funny goings-on, which, for legal reasons, I am reluctantly prohibited from telling you about. Eventually, Pollock did come back, driving all the way to the training ground in London and, with his newly strange behaviour, refused to come in, saying he couldn’t face it. Pollock’s agent phoned on his behalf and a deal was done to release him from his contract. Despite the aggravation it was a pity about Pollock, as in fact he was not a bad player, but I was paying him to leave and I had to write off the £750,000 I had paid Manchester City for his services.

This may seem harsh but this player was disruptive in the dressing room, disrespectful towards management and had no regard for the club. If he had been allowed to ignore our reasonable wishes it would have opened the doors even wider than they already were in the liberty-taking football culture.

* * *

No sooner had the Pollock issue been resolved than the season was upon us.

Our first game of the new Bruce era was away to Rotherham, who without doubt had the worst facilities in the league. The changing rooms were dire, with so little room the players had to change on the bus, and the boardroom was not much better, not that I had much to compare it to as I never went into many boardrooms.

Their chairman was about eighty years of age and hard of hearing. So when I arrived in their boardroom, cocky and full of myself, I tried to talk to him but he couldn’t hear me.

I lit up a cigar and was told I couldn’t smoke. ‘No smoking!’ he bellowed.

‘That’s OK, I have one, thank you.’

I asked him what business he was in and he said, ‘Scrap.’

‘Crap?’ I said, trying to hide my laughter.

Another member of the Jordan fan club successfully signed up!

We ran out 3–2 winners after a very unimpressive first half where we fell behind twice.

After the match, Bruce decided he was unhappy with the goalkeeper Kolinko, so I went and bought Matt Clarke from Bradford for £1.25 million. We also took Steve Vickers on loan from Middlesbrough, joining the other new additions of Tony Popovic, the Australian international centre half, and Jovan Kirovski from Sporting Lisbon.

We had started off the season very well, winning our first three games. Then, after losing a couple of matches, we recorded seven straight victories, taking us to the top of the table.

The only disappointment was losing to bloody Millwall. It was the first time we had played them in a competitive game for years and I was anxious to redeem the humiliating 6–0 defeat in the
pre
-season friendly the previous year. A win would be a big deal for the Palace supporters, not to mention bragging rights with my mate Theo Paphitis.

Millwall fans had a habit of ripping the toilet seats out of other people’s stadiums, so as a joke I removed the seat allocated for Theo and replaced it with a toilet for him to sit on during the game. Given his Greek origins I had all the guys in the boardroom dressed in togas and we had kebabs in the corner; my ignorance was pointed out to me by Paphitis: kebabs come from Cyprus and togas are Roman. My joke monumentally backfired as Millwall beat us 3–1. To add insult to injury my close personal friend banged the lid on the toilet seat relentlessly after every Millwall goal and had a whale of a time … Did I want chilli sauce with that?

After the game Steve was choked as he knew how much this match was likely to have meant to me and the fans and swore blind that as long as he was managing the club I would never witness another gutless performance like the one I had just seen, which turned out to be the case, given how long he stayed.

I really liked Steve Bruce, he was my kind of man. There were no excuses when things went badly and he was humble when things went well. He led by example and I thoroughly enjoyed his company.

One evening we went for dinner. Bryan Robson, the former England captain, joined us. He had recently parted company with Middlesbrough and was very bitter about the club’s chairman Steve Gibson. Robson disappointed me, as ultimately he had lost his job for not doing well and he was extremely disparaging about a chairman who backed his managers to the hilt. I hoped that his outlook was not one my guy shared.