Be Careful What You Wish For (34 page)

I liked Peter. He is a very affable man and does a very good Norman Wisdom impression. Unfortunately, I didn’t expect him to take that into our dugout when he was appointed. He spoke of his love of the club – as a player, he had been a hero there, becoming the only Third Division player ever to play for England; he felt as if it would be in some way coming home.

I confronted him with my usual barrage of difficult questions, but somehow he convinced me. He was easy-going in a determined way, had learnt a lot from his experiences at Leicester, where he had failed shockingly, and rebuilt his reputation at Hull. He was also the England under-21 coach, and I felt that would allow us to have access to perhaps a lot of loan signings of young talented players at the top Premier League clubs. Perhaps most persuasive of all was his claim that he wanted to work with his chairman, not against him. After two and a half years of Iain Dowie’s difficult attitude that was what probably sealed it. I wanted someone who I could bloody get on with.

Needless to say I had approached Adam Pearson seeking permission to open official talks with Taylor and was advised there was a £300,000 compensation fee to release him from his Hull City contract. Unlike others, I paid it. I tried to chip Adam but he wouldn’t shift. I managed to get only one caveat in the formal compensation agreement. As Adam Pearson’s dress sense was so shocking that I was embarrassed to stand next to him in Puerto Banus, I got a clause put into the agreement that 10 per cent of the compensation payable must be invested into Pearson’s wardrobe! And he actually signed it, although to date I have seen no improvement in Adam’s dress sense.

In between all the controversy of a manager leaving and writs flying about and a new manager coming in it was with immense regret that I had to make good on my promise to sell Andrew Johnson if we failed to win promotion. We had a number of interested parties with three firm bidders: Everton, Bolton and Wigan. Andrew wanted to go to Everton and after pushing Bill Kenwright the Everton chairman to breaking point – as he put it – I agreed to let my favourite player, my surrogate footballing son, go for £8.6 million. I could have got over £9 million from Wigan but I stayed true to my word, very rare in football, and let him choose his club.

Ironically Everton had bid £7 million for him when we got relegated from the Premier League and he had finished as the highest English goal scorer; now they paid £1.6 million more after a season in the Championship where he had picked up a serious injury and had his worst year as far as goals were concerned. The business of football decision-making defies logic but if a football manager wants a player, who cares? It’s not his money he’s spending.

With Taylor now secured in the managerial post the team headed off for a pre-season tour in America. Naturally we were to play our own team Crystal Palace USA, as well as LA Galaxy in the pre-Beckham days. I flew from Spain to London, picked up my
suitcase
packed by my right-hand man and driver John, and jumped straight on a flight to Washington with Bob Dowie and my brother Dominic. The two of them had been the architects of this American deal. When we landed in the capital of America it took us three hours to go twenty-five miles in rush-hour Washington traffic. I had spent eight hours on a plane, so more travel time was not exactly welcome.

When we arrived in Annapolis we stayed in the town’s best hotel, which was a marginal step up from a Travel Lodge. They had no English tea, no valet, no adaptors to charge mobile phones and, with humidity levels off the charts, the air conditioning in my room had broken. And when I opened my suitcase, virtually all I had packed for me were heavy woollen suits. I wasn’t being a precious little swine, I was absolutely exhausted and at this point my humour had completely deserted me.

Previously I never went on any pre-season tours, and the only reason I had gone on this one was because it was big news in the States that an English club had invested in US football, and a series of press conferences had been arranged. When I awoke in the morning to head off to speak to the media I was jet-lagged and in a filthy stinking mood. I had managed to dig out from my unwanted luggage one light tan Prada suit so to cap it all I now looked like the bloody man from Del Monte.

All the way to the press conference I did nothing but moan and groan. What was I doing here? What kind of godforsaken place had we landed up in? Was this really a good investment? But as soon as I was in the press conference and the lights and cameras of ESPN were up and rolling I went into a 180, extolling the virtues of this wonderful country, fantastic city, incredible opportunity and how excited I was about embarking on this project. Once the cameras had stopped I was back to full-on moaning and
groaning
. ‘Media hound’, was how my brother described my moth-to-the-light performance for the cameras.

Next stop was the biggest radio station in Washington for another round of interviews and one in which I sat next to Hasim Rahman, the former heavyweight champion of the world who had beaten Lennox Lewis. After talking about football I quipped to Rahman live on air that I’d seen Lewis beat him up like he had stolen something, which made for an uncomfortable ten minutes as this seventeen-stone former heavyweight champ glowered at me in the studio. I have to say at this point I gave serious thought to wondering if there was something wrong with my mental state to provoke a man-mountain like Rahman.

Paul Kemsley, the Spurs vice-chairman and a personal friend, asked a favour. During a holiday in the Bahamas, he had met and taken a young player under his wing and asked if I would take him with my team to America and give him a shot as in his view he wouldn’t be good enough for Spurs. Not rising to that comment I agreed to do him a favour. We took him on a trial but Peter didn’t rate him and in his honest expert opinion didn’t feel he was good enough. The player’s name was Jay Boothroyd, who went on to play for England a few years later.

My first impression of Peter’s managerial prowess and outlook was that he was a little bit of a whiner. Nothing seemed right. As I watched the players train the atmosphere wasn’t good. Apparently some of them didn’t want to come here and a couple of disenfranchised players who had asked me for transfers and been given short shrift were now sulking and causing a negative effect. Taylor picked up on the disharmony and it concerned me that he did nothing to address it. You would have thought players would want to create a good impression with their new manager but clearly, with Taylor, for some reason they didn’t think they had to!

As a result I thought, ‘Sod it. I don’t need this self-indulgent negativity.’ I had enough on my plate and left Dominic to deal with our American partners and Peter to do his job and get his team together, and flew back home to Spain.

The players and management returned from the States amongst reports from Bob Dowie that Peter Taylor was quite a difficult character to deal with and had been quite fastidious over there. I soon saw that side of Peter. Within weeks of being back he and Dominic were dealing with the travel arrangements for the impending season. We had a preferred travel agent and coach company but Peter wanted to use a firm he had a personal relationship with and when he didn’t get his way he spat his dummy out. Out of the blue I got a phone call from him. ‘Chairman, I am going to resign,’ insisted Taylor. After ascertaining what the problem was I was incredulous that something so inconsequential could cause such a reaction and told him so in no uncertain terms. Peter went full circle and apologised for ‘acting like a baby’. I began to wonder quite what I had employed.

After selling Andrew Johnson it was not my intention to weaken the squad further but I had various situations forced on me. Fitz Hall, the club captain, had a £3 million release clause in his contract and Wigan tabled a bid of £3 million and a pound. As the player wanted to go we had to let him. Emmerson Boyce had been one of the truculent players in America and from being a model professional he became petulant and difficult to deal with as I wouldn’t let him have a transfer. He became so negative that Taylor came to me and asked me to sell him, which we duly did for £1 million, again to Wigan. And finally Mikele Leigertwood wouldn’t sign a new contract and as he was under twenty-four we got compensation of £600,000 from his move to Sheffield United.

At Peter’s request we went into the market and bought quite heavily,
bringing
in eight players and spending nearly £6 million. Whilst it may have appeared we had generated some significant cash most of it was used in either buying players or paying wages. Despite having one parachute payment left and significant transfer funds generated by the Johnson, Hall, Boyce and Leigertwood sales, I had also invested £12 million back into the team in the previous twelve months.

Hull City prospered as not only had I coughed up £300,000 for Peter’s services, we went back and paid a million for their centre half Leon Court, as well as buying another player, Stuart Green, for £100,000. I have to confess the reason why we bought Green beggars belief. Peter’s daughter was dating Green and he wanted him down in London to make his daughter happy. So, to support Peter, I did it. Back in 1999 I had spent £100,000 on a marketing campaign with Palace as a result of a date with the advertising manager and this time I spent another £100,000 so someone else could have a date!

On the seemingly endless conveyor belt of players I had to buy year on year was the highly rated Scott Flinders, who was the England under-20 keeper from Barnsley, who we bought for £600,000. His inept performances were to earn him the unwanted nickname of ‘Flapper Flinders’. We bought Carl Fletcher from West Ham for £600,000, Tony Craig from Millwall for £200,000, the ex-Liverpool player Mark Kennedy arrived on a free transfer from Wolves and our marquee signing was Shefki Kuqi for £2.5 million from Blackburn!

We also signed Jamie Scowcroft from Coventry for another £800,000 as another striker to partner Kuqi. The fact that these two had scored 198 goals in 771 games between them appeared lost on Taylor and more fool me for allowing these signings. If they continued the way they were, I worked out that our strike force would only contribute eleven goals per season. In fact, they did even worse than that, scoring thirty-one goals in 161 games between
them
, an average of nine goals per season. So we hardly had a strike force to put the fear of God into the opposition. Although we did have Clinton the ‘Pest’ Morrison to back them up.

Despite all that the season started impressively under Peter Taylor as we won our first three games and went top of the Championship. But that was where it began and ended and like Forrest Gump: ‘That’s all I have to say about that.’

In September I had a change in my personal life and started dating the model Sophie Anderton, which inevitably drew the attention of the media. It was a short-lived liaison and as much as she was fun she did have a short circuit somewhere. One night we were dining out in the London restaurant Zuma and bumped into Paul Gascoigne. I liked Paul and he was charming although I have to say a little worse for wear that evening. Sophie had just done a TV show with his stepdaughter and certain unproven allegations had been made by her concerning Paul. When he joined us for a drink Sophie said she didn’t want to speak to him as she believed what Bianca Gascoigne was alleging. This greatly upset Paul and it also enraged me and I forcibly dragged Ms Anderton over to apologise, and that with a host of other eventful excursions was soon to bring the curtain down on my relationship with her.

No sooner had I ended my relationship with Sophie, I became involved with a beautiful lady called Suzanne Walker. Ironically Suzanne was the soon-to-be-ex-wife of former England goalkeeper Ian Walker, who Dowie had wanted me to sign at the beginning of the 2005–06 season but we had been unable to agree personal terms. Fate has a funny way of intervening in people’s lives. Suzanne was soon to give me the greatest gift in the world, something money couldn’t buy.

By October 2006 the team’s performances were pretty diabolical. After the heady heights of being top for two games we had now
slumped
to eighteenth and had been knocked out of the first round of the League Cup by Notts County.

But I had a bigger fish to fry. Ron Noades was selling the stadium to a property speculator, David Pearl. When I met Pearl I asked why he was buying it, why he hadn’t come to talk to me as the anchor tenant and what his plans were. What I heard didn’t make for good listening. Pearl controlled a property investment fund and they were not overly concerned if Palace stayed there. In fact, they preferred we didn’t, as they quite fancied the idea of building houses on the site and unlocking the real estate value!

We had four years left on our lease with the mistaken belief that Noades would never find anyone else to buy the stadium besides the owner of the football club. The ground had severe planning restrictions designed to ensure that the use of that land was only for football. Noades, being the individual he was, and seemingly without the slightest regard for the club he regularly professed to care about, had found a property speculator willing to pay £12 million for it. David Pearl couldn’t care less about restrictive covenants on the land and would simply wait for them to lapse after he had booted the club out when our lease expired. By taking a ten-year lease when I purchased the club, which had been designed to put us in the best position to take advantage of a raft of possibilities, including locating a new stadium in the borough, or getting Noades to become realistic and give us a fair price, especially as time pressed on, I had inadvertently got myself into a bit of a conundrum. Clearly I needed to do something pretty sharpish.

The solution I came up with looked great at the time but caused me some significant difficulties, embarrassment and damaged my credibility. It appeared to some people that I had misrepresented certain things and was ultimately to be for me like jumping ‘out of the frying pan and into the fire’ at huge personal cost!

My pal Paul Kemsley, the Tottenham vice-chairman and owner of a massive property company, Rock Investments, was my solution. The valuation of the stadium was only £6 million, which meant that I couldn’t get funding for a £12 million purchase without using a big fat slug of cash. Kemsley, however, could get the funding as he had a vast line of credit with HBOS.