Be Careful What You Wish For (24 page)

I left my first meeting with Jerry none the wiser but all the more determined.

I worked with Steve Blackwell to put together a financial plan to show the members of the band what could be available to them should they re-form.

I eventually made contact with all of them. Some were very pleased to hear from me and others, like John Bradbury, were downright rude.

I did an interview with the
Evening Standard
, announcing my passion for the band and how I wanted to re-form them, which created a lot of interest. The headline read ‘Too Much Too Young’, the title of one of the band’s most famous songs and a sly wink at my age as a football club owner.

Bit by bit things started to take shape. I had a vision of putting The Specials on at Selhurst Park and I tried to buy their back catalogue. I also put a formal contract in front of Jerry Dammers offering £1 million if the band re-formed.

* * *

I put The Specials and that dream to the back of my mind for a bit and got on with more pressing matters. Iain Dowie brought one member of staff with him, John Harbin, the fitness coach. He was a middle-aged Australian and more than just a fitness coach he was Iain’s confidant and, in some instances, mentor.

Harbin was a fantastic man with a rugby background. He had no interest in the nonsense of football and footballers. He just went about the business of changing players’ mind-sets.

He was absolutely vital to Dowie. Without Harbin there would have been no success, he was that important.

Dowie walked out in his second game away to Ipswich Town like a man who had a sense of his own destiny. Ipswich were fourth in the league and going well. I watched him, chest pumped out, striding down the side of the pitch. Palace were outstanding, winning 3–1 and looking like a side that was on the up.

In the next four and a half months I was to see the team I financed finally fulfil my expectations. The only problem was under Dowie I found the whole experience an anti-climax. He was very difficult to get on with. It was as if he was in a competition with me.

His father was a trade union leader, which came as no surprise to me.

He always went looking for an argument or was rude and disrespectful on the telephone.

Whenever that telephone conversation resulted in me suggesting he should come to see me, a completely different person would turn up, apologetic and contrite. I suspected that was the calming influence of John Harbin.

After all the campaigning for Dowie by Terry Bullivant, his reward from Dowie was to be completely marginalised and left out in the cold to such an extent that Terry decided it was best he
leave
Palace. There you are, football at its finest: loyalty and respect non-existent.

During the January transfer window Dowie made two signings: Mark Hudson, a centre back on loan from Fulham, and Mikele Leigertwood on a permanent deal from Wimbledon. We also took Birmingham’s reserve goalkeeper Nico Vaesen on a three-month loan and this time the opportunistic sods got really lucky …

Despite the growing dislike I was developing for Iain I still gave him my luxurious penthouse on Chelsea Bridge to live in.

I wanted to try and get along with him but in the end I just thought it wasn’t worth it and left him to get on with his job.

What was not open to debate was the effect he was having on the team. In his first ten games he took twenty-two points, title-winning form in any league.

We had jumped from nineteenth to ninth, two points off a play-off spot, spearheaded by the unbelievable goal scoring of Andy Johnson. There were some fabulous performances: 6–3 at home to Stoke, 5–1 away to Watford and 3–0 away to Neil Warnock’s Sheffield United.

That particular performance really meant something, not because Neil had turned us down, but because Sheffield United were a benchmark team for me. They had an indomitable spirit, but we took them to pieces and totally destroyed their resolve to the point that Sheffield virtually gave up, which was something I had never seen from a Warnock team.

At that moment I believed we could actually go and get promoted. I had said it for nigh on four years and now I could sense it coming to pass.

Football was now show business, the players were the rock stars of the noughties. Highly paid and very high profile, they had gone
from
being solely on the back page of the papers to being front-page news. Most teams had their fair share of celebrity supporters and Palace had theirs: Bill Wyman, Bill Nighy, Ronnie Corbett, Timothy Spall, Jo Brand, Neil Morrissey, Eddie Izzard, Nigel Harman to name a few. One that sticks out in my memory was a Hollywood superstar, who telephoned me out of the blue to attend a game.

I was sitting in Spain, minding my own business, when my mobile phone rang and this softly spoken Irish voice came on the line telling me who it was and asking if he could come to the game on Saturday against Norwich and would it be OK if he brought his son. Not believing who it was, I passed him off to my secretary to get some tickets and promptly put it down as a bit of a crank call and forgot all about it.

So imagine my surprise when I walked into my boardroom on Saturday and was greeted by the lead actor in
Schindler’s List
and the new
Star Wars
film. Liam Neeson was a big Palace fan. His best friend lived in Stockwell, a fellow actor who had supported Palace, and had introduced a young Liam to the club when he moved to London from Ireland. He was a charming man, who described it as an honour to be in the boardroom, looking at all the pots and pans in our trophy cupboard, I tried to reconcile in my mind who had the honour here as standing in front of me was one of the world’s best actors.

There was a more disturbing side to footballers’ fame when in late 2003, staying in my London home the Grosvenor House Hotel, I walked into the famous red bar for my customary gin and tonic and saw a group of footballers in the bar. They saw me too and promptly made themselves scarce, probably realising I was likely to know their club’s chairman. That was the last I saw of them until the next morning, when one of the doormen from the Grosvenor told me about a controversial set of allegations surrounding some
footballers
about a sexual act that had come to be known as ‘roasting’. Apparently this term had been coined by certain players.

So imagine my horror when the only person named in an article written by the
Sun
regarding these serious and somewhat distasteful allegations was myself, reporting that I had been seen in the bar when the players were there. Quite why I was mentioned I don’t know, but it was later brought to my attention that certain players who were there believed that I had talked to the press, which I most certainly had not, as I had no knowledge or interest in what those players got up to. Later on, when we tried to sign Carlton Cole on loan from Chelsea when we went up to the Premier League, he wouldn’t sign for us, apparently because the chairman had ‘grassed them up’.

During this period of games we played Stan Ternent’s Burnley and I made a point of being around the dressing room area as Ternent had said some inflammatory things to me on the phone and via other people. So I made sure I was there for him to say the same to my face.

When he emerged from the dressing room, I said: ‘Nice to see you sober, Stan.’

He went for me and the stewards had to get in front of him as he tried to swing a punch at me.

I just laughed. To be fair on him, several months later after we got promoted I got a letter from Stan, saying I had got it right and apologising for his behaviour. And with that I changed my mind about Stan Ternent and whenever I saw him at games from then on we always got on well.

As the team was going into the ascendency my relations with the media reached an all-time low. For four years I had been very open and accessible but I felt that in the last year certain factions had gone from taking a professional perspective to personal attacks.
Some
of the drivel that was written about me was just unnecessary, especially that written by the local and London press.

I had gone out of my way over the years to give these guys the best access, as I believed it was good form to give preference to them, and they repaid me by being snide, commenting more on my appearance and my personal life than on the performance of my team.

In the end I tired of this. The London
Evening Standard
was the main culprit. I had enough and banned them, remarking at the time that if they wanted to write crap about my club and me then they could do it from outside the ground and not whilst they were sitting in my stadium eating my biscuits.

I also decided that I would withdraw from talking to all forms of the media as I thought Sky had said some crappy things as well, always highlighting the negative and never praising the positive. I thought I would let the team do the talking, which was quite good timing, given we were doing so well.

Rather than the
Evening Standard
sports editor calling me to see what was wrong, he had the arrogance to phone the MD of our shirt sponsor, Churchill Insurance, saying that I had banned them from covering games and suggested that they were losing coverage and should reduce the money they spent with the club.

When I found out who the editor was I phoned him and asked him what he thought he was doing. He told me that his paper made our football club and helped the team succeed and win games.

‘Are you bloody mad? You report events, you don’t influence them.’

He actually believed what he was saying. I mean, people say I know about arrogance but this guy’s behaviour was off the charts. Rather than calm things down he made things ten times worse.

Now I was incandescent and continued the ban, only relenting
towards
the end of the season. But I decided never to speak to that paper again and I never did. Whatever they wrote in the future concerning me never had one direct quote from me.

By the way, the editor was a guy called Simon Greenberg who became the communications director of football at Chelsea Football Club. After departing Stamford Bridge he then became part of England’s ‘successful’ bid team to stage the 2018 World Cup.

The next four games saw us hit a blip, taking just four points and dropping down to twelfth and nine points off the play-offs.

I went to see Millwall play Sunderland in the FA Cup semi-final at Old Trafford to support Theo Paphitis and his rabble, now managed by Dennis Wise – or Napoleon, as we called him.

Dennis had come to speak to me at Palace after leaving Leicester in, shall we say, less than auspicious circumstances.

I met him with Trevor Francis and it looked as if we were going to take him when Trevor had a dramatic change of heart and Dennis went and joined Millwall.

Sometime later I bumped into Wise and he claimed Trevor had called him and said he wanted to sign him but the chairman – i.e., me – had blocked the deal. Strange that, as I had done no such thing. This was just another case of Francis not wanting to deliver bad news, I suspect.

Talking of Leicester, around this time, Leicester City under Micky Adams were having a mid-season break in La Manga, Spain, when some of their players got themselves into a serious situation and several of them were arrested and held over alleged sexual offences. Phil Smith, the agent, phoned me. One of his players Paul Dickov was amongst them and Phil wanted some help. He knew I lived in Spain and fortunately for him and Paul, it turned out my lawyer was related to the district judge in the province they were arrested in. Phil explained it was a case of mistaken
identity
: the girls involved were prostitutes and the footballers had been set up.

The Spanish authorities were not planning to release them until they were arraigned, which could take some time. I reached out through my lawyers and got these players released from prison and allowed to return to the UK, where the matter was resolved. I liked Paul Dickov as a player and trusted what Phil Smith had told me, which was later borne out to be true, but getting them out of Spain was very important for justice to be served. Dickov’s wife Jan phoned me and thanked me, as did the player himself. Later, when I signed Paul, he never quite did it for me, despite promising me he would as he owed me a huge favour. But as is so often the case with players: they never pay their dues.

I watched Millwall reach the FA Cup Final and, as thrilled as I was for Theo, our loss of form at a critical point in the season left me thinking that I might be denied my day in the sun.

I underestimated Dowie’s resilience as we won six and drew one out of our next seven games, beating two teams, West Ham and Sunderland, who were to appear in our immediate future.

In one of those seven games I jokingly prayed for Andrew Johnson not to score a goal, as by this time his prolific goal scoring during this season had put him on £7,500 a goal.

He scored a hat trick against Crewe, giving him a £22,500 goal bonus for one game, and when we got a penalty I was actually screaming for someone else to take it. It was a bit silly, really, as winning that game was critical for our play-off ambitions. He took the penalty, and scored.

Our last game was away to Coventry. If we won we were in the play-offs; if we lost and Wigan won, we were not. Unbelievably, Coventry tore us to pieces and we were 2–0 down in the first half – and it could have been five.

In the second half we were slightly better but still lost. By then news had filtered through that Wigan were winning 1–0. Just as we thought we were out, Brian Deane headed an equaliser for West Ham in the dying minutes, thus putting Wigan out and us in the play-offs. It was a goal that was to prove fateful for West Ham, and one I had to listen about from Brian Deane every summer I bumped into him in Marbella from then on.

Personally, I couldn’t have been happier for Wigan and Whelan. After all – fancy losing a play-off spot to a crap team!

Behind the scenes, I had been working for some six months with Investec, a big financial company, on a deal to restructure Palace.