Always Managing: My Autobiography (20 page)

Yet, despite all this, what a player. With a better temperament he would have won fifty caps for England, easy. His hero was Mark Dennis, another nutcase left-back, and Julian reminded me a lot of Mark. Dennis could have been a real rival to Kenny Sansom, as Julian would have been to Pearce, but he was always getting into scrapes or getting sent off. But they were both good players. Fantastic, but hard work. We’d come into training, have a row, have a ruck, and then Julian would go out with the hump and start volleying balls from forty yards. Perfect, every time. No stretching, no warm-up, just take a loose ball and – bang – volley it straight on to the chest of a player across the other side of the pitch. It didn’t matter if it was freezing cold, pouring with rain – he just had it, that natural ability that the best footballers possess. Drop the shoulder, put a cross in, always on the mark. You could have put your life on that left foot. He’d bend it, curl it, he could do anything with the ball. If we practised headers, he was the best at the club. The hardest tackler too, of course. Everyone hated playing against Julian – no wonder the fans loved him. He would have been the one of the finest footballers of his generation in England, if it wasn’t for the flaws in his character.

In some ways the supporters brought the worst out of him. They loved his aggressive side and, even when he let us down badly, they could see no wrong in him. The season we won promotion, Julian was sent off three times, and Billy became so frustrated with his constant suspensions that he took the captaincy away from him. On one occasion he lasted fifteen minutes against Derby County before committing an absolute horror-show of a challenge on Ted
McMinn. I was seething about his irresponsibility, but the fans sung his name for the rest of the match. What they didn’t understand was that if Julian hadn’t been absent for so many games we might not have had to scramble over the line for promotion. The players had a good relationship with the fans after we went up, but for a while Julian was the only one they liked. The rest of the lads would be getting scary abuse, but they were always on side with Julian. We saw the high-maintenance cost, they saw the fantastic, committed player. Selling him was going to make us very unpopular.

So he was good, but he wasn’t Messi. And when the next season began, and we won a single league game in our first seven, it was plain that we needed greater strength in depth rather than one talented but troublesome individual. Looking back, I still think if we hadn’t done the deal for Julian, taking three Liverpool players in his place, we’d have gone back down again. I know I later bought Julian back to West Ham as a player – but at the time selling him was exactly the right thing to do.

We lost our first two matches – at home to Wimbledon and away to Leeds United – and the next day I went to see Jamie play for Liverpool at Queens Park Rangers. Graeme Souness was Liverpool’s manager, and he could already sense we were in trouble. ‘It’s bad,’ I told him. ‘We’re going to have to sell our best player to try to get a few in.’

‘Who’s your best player?’ he asked.

‘Julian Dicks,’ I said. ‘He’s the only one who’s worth good money.’

‘What, the little fat left-back?’ Graeme queried.

I could tell he respected my judgement. ‘He’s different class, Graeme,’ I insisted, seriously. ‘You’d love him. He’s got the best left foot I’ve seen, he’s great in the air, and as hard as fucking nails.’

Suddenly, he was listening. Then I clinched the deal. ‘I’ll tell you this,’ I said, ‘he’d kick fuck out of you in training.’

It was as if Graeme was up for the challenge. ‘That good, is he?’ he said. ‘When are you playing next?’ Coventry City, next Saturday, I told him. ‘That’ll do, we’re playing Sunday,’ said Graeme. ‘I’ll come and have a look.’

So along came Graeme and all was going well. We were leading 1–0 with five minutes to go before half-time and Julian was on top of his game. He took the ball, very smoothly, off their little winger Sean Flynn and began advancing up the left flank. Flynn, working admirably hard to recover, caught level with Julian and had a little tug at him. Instantly, we knew what was going to happen next. It was a like a trigger reaction, out came the arm and, wallop, right in the kisser. He laid Flynn out cold and carried on as if nothing had happened. ‘That’s it,’ I thought. ‘That’s the Liverpool option off the table.’ There was no way Souness hadn’t seen it. In fact, luckily for Julian, I think the only person inside Highfield Road who didn’t see it was the referee. The crowd went beserk, as did their players and the bench. The referee stopped the game for the injured player, but didn’t have a clue what had happened. Meanwhile, the crowd were chanting ‘off, off, off’ and I was working out how we were going to reorganise to cope with ten men. Finally, after a two-minute conversation with the linesman, the referee showed Julian a yellow. Then it was half-time. Billy went mad at Julian in the dressing room and told him he could have cost us the game. Julian picked up his boots and threw them across the floor. We ended up drawing 1–1. And when I went to watch Liverpool again the next day, I was expecting to get no joy from Souness over our best player.

I couldn’t have been more wrong. Graeme loved him, particularly the bit where he’d sploshed Sean Flynn. We were cursing Julian, but he was just Graeme’s sort of man. ‘I like him, Harry,’ he said. ‘He plays his fucking heart out. I’ll have one more look, next week against Swindon, and then I’ll make a decision.’ I thought Julian had his worst game for us against Swindon. No drama, just a poor afternoon. But on the Monday, Graeme was on the phone wanting to get a deal done. We knew it wasn’t going to be easy. We knew the truth from behind the scenes: Julian was a leader, but not in a positive way, and he had a lot of followers. Much of the misbehaviour at the club stemmed from his influence. Against that, he was only 25, but he was already a legend with the fans. They were not going to be happy. We had to make it worth our while.

Trevor Morley was our only striker and needed support, so we paid £250,000 for Lee Chapman from Portsmouth, and took Mike Marsh and David Burrows from Graeme at Liverpool. That Saturday, we won away at Blackburn Rovers – who would finish runners-up to Manchester United that season – and Chapman scored. The signings turned our season around. We only lost two games in our next eleven, rose to ninth by the halfway stage and ended up finishing a creditable 13th. And no, Burrows was not as good a left-back as Dicks, and he wouldn’t make any Greatest Ever West Ham Teams, unlike Julian. But he did a great job, and Chapman scored goals and Marsh got our midfield ticking, so the three together were worth more than one player. As for Julian, it did not work out for him at Liverpool, and I bought him back two years later a quieter and more manageable individual. By then, I was the boss of West Ham – a change of command that would cost me one of my oldest and dearest friends in football.

Billy Bonds was the most fantastic player. What would West Ham United, or any club for that matter, give to have him now? He could play central midfield, centre-back, full-back; he was fearless in the tackle, he could run all day. I’ve known Bill since I was 16, when he was a youth player with Charlton Athletic and an England trialist. We were together at the Football Association’s training centre at Lilleshall. He was one of my closest friends in football. But was Billy in love with being a football manager? I don’t think so. I can understand that. Throughout the time I knew him, Bill’s idea of a perfect day was to go down to Dorset, to Thomas Hardy country, and do a bit of bird watching. He is very frugal. He is the sort of bloke that could live on fifty quid a week and certainly wasn’t a big one for going out and spending fortunes. And there’s nothing wrong with that. I loved Bill to bits, he was a fantastic fella. But in the Premier League world of modern football, he was increasingly a man out of time.

In an era when man management was more important than ever before, with foreign internationals coming into the English
game and wages soaring so that players no longer needed their weekly pay cheque, Bill wasn’t really a people person. He loved the game, but didn’t much care for footballers or their problems. He would get the hump with the ones who weren’t as talented as him, or didn’t work as hard, or didn’t have the same attitude. That was always a problem. I think he looked at his players sometimes and they just got on his nerves. It didn’t help that at the end of our first season in the Premier League we signed a player who was everything that Bill wasn’t: Joey Beauchamp from Oxford United for £1.2 million. Billy had the hots for him because he remembered Joey giving Julian Dicks a chasing in one of the matches during our promotion season. He was a talented wide midfield player who could play on either left or right.

We had tried to get him earlier in the year, but without success. Oxford wanted to do the deal, but Joey didn’t want to come. That should have been the clue. Who wouldn’t want to leave Oxford for West Ham? Undaunted, we tried again. This time, we signed him, but the deal dragged on for ages, far longer than was normal when a player was moving from the third tier to the Premier League. What was wrong with him? We soon found out. His first day at the club, I walked in. ‘Morning Joe, you all right?’

He just groaned. ‘I should have gone to Swindon,’ he said.

I thought he was talking about his route to work. ‘No, Joe, you don’t want to go to Swindon, that’s down the M4,’ I told him. ‘You go in the opposite direction from Oxford to Swindon. Come down the M40 towards London, round the M25. That’s the best way. If you come on the M4, follow signs to Newbury.’

‘No,’ he said. ‘I should have signed for Swindon. Swindon Town. The football club.’

‘You’re at West Ham, in the Premier League, and you’re telling me you should have gone to Swindon?’ I asked him.

Swindon had been relegated from the Premier League the previous season, rock bottom, having conceded 100 goals.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I’ve made a mistake.’

And it got worse each day from there. He didn’t like the journey, he didn’t like the club, he missed home, he missed his girlfriend; his attitude was a drain on all of us. One week we took the squad training to Eastbourne, jogging around the hills. Bill was at the front, the fittest of the lot, as ever – I was at the back, lagging behind as usual – and Joey, our new signing, was four hundred yards behind me. We played some pre-season games in Scotland and he spent all day on the phone to his girlfriend. It was pathetic for a grown man on a good salary to be so lacking in independence. He acted like an eight-year-old. He didn’t want to run, he didn’t want to play the matches. I know what I wanted to do – I wanted to slap him – but I was supposed to be the man-manager in our partnership. Stuff like that did Billy’s head in. Joey just sulked all day. He wouldn’t talk to us, wouldn’t discuss his problems. It drove Bill crazy. He had bent over backwards in the negotiations, allowing him to live in Oxford and arranging a signing-on fee of £30,000. Now Joey was saying that he was too tired and stressed to come in because he had been sitting in traffic jams. He just wanted to be back home, playing for his local team and going dog racing. He liked the dogs. That’s about all we had in common. Even when we finally decided to cut our losses and sell him to Swindon, he demanded £350,000 to leave the club. I wasn’t having that. The deal had been dragging on all night when I told their manager John Gorman to put Joey on the phone. John was tearing his hair
out because Joey was insisting he wouldn’t sign until he got his money. ‘What is fucking going on?’ I shouted. ‘Don’t think you’re coming back here. You’ve been nothing but fucking aggravation since you arrived and we don’t want you. You didn’t want to be here, you wanted to go Swindon. So stop being a greedy bastard, take what they are offering and fucking go to Swindon.’

Joey changed his mind and signed, but problems like that took a toll on Bill. He was so straight as a player, so honest, that he couldn’t stand the attitude of some in the modern game.

The drinking culture in football had not been eradicated, and there were a few at West Ham who were hard work. That definitely upset Billy. He hated being around them, and the lack of professionalism – the sport had changed beyond recognition since our own playing days – got him down. I think Bill’s love of the game began and ended with pulling on his claret and blue shirt as a player, really. He loved football but when that final whistle blew, he’d be halfway through the Blackwall Tunnel and home before some of the lads were even out of the shower. Training was the same. There would still be people ambling off the pitch when Bill’s tail-lights were disappearing out of the car park. So as a manager he was never going to be the sort of guy who was the last one out of the office at night, or away scouting five times a week. He was a home man, he loved his family, his wife – he didn’t want to hang around the football club all day, he wasn’t a great one for talking to other managers or any football people, at all. Was it the modern game that Bill disliked? It is hard to say. Even when he played he didn’t have a great rapport with the rest of the team. We used to go greyhound racing and room together, so he was fine with me, but Bill wasn’t a great mixer. One year, Ron Greenwood gave us
the opportunity to go to America at the end of the season. It was an incredible trip, because nobody went there in those days. We were going to do five weeks in Baltimore, one more in Bermuda, and then home. Play a few matches, but nothing too serious. We all thought it was the opportunity of a lifetime, but Bill wouldn’t go. Ron said that we all travelled or the trip was off, so we spent weeks pleading with Bill to change his mind. In the end, he flew out with the team, but came home early saying his aunt was ill. Bill never wanted to be too far from his garden.