Be Careful What You Wish For (15 page)

How embarrassing. But in fairness, he did hang it up for me.

I looked at the famous Anfield chairman’s room. It was the size of a broom cupboard with a big chandelier in the middle of it that almost touched the floor.

As Moores refused to even acknowledge me my only thought was, ‘God, I hope we beat these arseholes.’ That was another prayer that went unanswered: we were trounced 5–0.

Alan Smith had made a rousing speech before the game, telling the players they needed to hold Liverpool at bay for the first fifteen minutes and we had a chance of pulling off a major shock. That worked. Fifteen minutes into the game we were already 3–0 down.

Liverpool had moved Steven Gerrard to right back to stop Rubins and in the first five minutes he crunched him with a welcome to Anfield message. Rubins was never the same after that game.

So we were brought down to earth with a bang, and that light, which had suddenly come on for the team, was just as suddenly switched off. The team went into complete free fall and failed to win in the following twelve matches.

We dropped down the league like a stone. I went out and signed more players, including Matthew Upson on loan from Arsenal and agreed to cover his £10,000-a-week wages. I was later to find out that was one of those favours David Dein liked to do for you, as he was only earning £5,000 a week at Arsenal.

We also signed Ricardo Fuller and Gregg Berhalter, a US international, and Aki Riihilahti, who had just scored for Finland against England in the 2001 World Cup qualifier at Anfield.

Then I went and spent a further £1.5 million bringing Palace hero David Hopkin back from Bradford. Hopkin was on £16,000 a week, which was huge for the then First Division, and didn’t
even
want to come back to Selhurst Park. So I flew up to Bradford with Ray Houghton, who had played with Hopkin at Palace and went to meet the Bradford chairman Geoffrey Richmond. I always liked Geoffrey. He was a huge man and reminded me a bit of Bernard Ingham, Margaret Thatcher’s press secretary. There was quite a bit of the dour blustery northerner about him, but I warmed to him because he had a great sense of humour.

He was desperate to sell Hopkin as they needed the money and were about to be relegated from the Premier League. For some reason I had convinced myself we were desperate to sign Hopkin as our plight was now pretty perilous.

Richmond called in Hopkin and after a preamble where the player expressed his views, namely he was quite happy where he was thank you very much, an instantaneously incandescent Richmond announced, ‘I don’t like you and I have never liked you. If you want to stay then by all means stay, but I promise you I will make your life a fucking misery.’

Hopkin was stunned, and stammered, ‘But I have never met you, chairman.’

Undeterred Richmond boomed back, ‘I don’t care; I don’t like you.’ Geoffrey was a huge man and clearly used to intimidating players.

Hopkin left the room to talk to Houghton and Geoffrey winked at me. ‘Fuck me,’ I said, ‘I thought I could bang a bit.’ Within minutes Hopkin came back in and agreed to sign.

The next game we lost 2–0 to Preston, plunging us into even deeper trouble.

No sooner had we signed a midfielder, than another one fell out with the club, Alan and ultimately me. Jamie Pollock had been difficult for Alan Smith to manage all season. He was a bright lad, with a slightly inflated opinion of his own importance. He had
clashed
with Smith on a number of occasions. He had been sent off in an earlier fixture and missed the Preston game through suspension, but had taken it upon himself to go on radio and criticise Alan and his team selection. This resulted in an ugly altercation between Alan, myself and Pollock and us shipping him out the door on loan to Birmingham.

Rather than shoulder the blame for the team’s failing, Smith looked to deflect some of it on to the coaching staff he himself employed. As a result, he fired the first-team coach Glenn Cockerill, who probably was the weakest link in the chain between himself and the assistant manager Ray Houghton. Smith then brought in Terry Bullivant as first-team coach. Earlier in the year he had rehired Stevie Kember, who was a Palace legend, making him reserve team manager. Without knowing it, Smith had hired his immediate successors.

We finally reached crisis point on 28 April, losing 2–0 at home to Wolves.

The fans were in an uproar. Alan Smith had been getting a hard time from them in recent weeks but this loss looked more than likely to have guaranteed relegation.

I had spent £8.75 million – a huge sum in the First Division in 2001 – on players and quadrupled the wages bill and we were staring at relegation. A unified crowd booed Alan off the pitch. Ironically, the same crowd who three months earlier had proclaimed him a hero turned on him with absolute vilification.

I made a decision after the game. It was time for him to go.

What choice did I have? He had lost the support of the fans and the dressing room and if we were going down, I wasn’t going down without a fight.

I walked into Alan’s office and with great sadness, the only time I ever really felt it, I fired him. I think Ray Houghton was expecting to take over the team but I fired him as well.

From the fans’ point of view, it was too little, too late, but I had done it and took the monumental decision to put Steve Kember and Terry Bullivant in temporary charge for the final two away games.

Over the years my relationship with the Palace fans was very important to me. In all football clubs, fans are the lifeblood of the game. Without fans you have empty stadiums and the air football breathes is made up of the fans’ fervour. For the ten years that I owned the club, I enjoyed a very good relationship with 95 per cent of the fans. Of course, there was always a vociferous minority on websites, and for them, even if I had bought Lionel Messi, built a brand-new stadium and halved the ticket prices, they still would have said the hot dogs were shit. But I enjoyed a unique relationship with Palace fans and over the years that was to extend to fans of a lot of other clubs who liked the fact I was prepared to stand up for what I believed in.

Early in my tenure I went into the fans’ end in an away game at Norwich and was picked up and lifted in the air and thrown from the front to the back of the stand for ten minutes as their way of saying hello to their new chairman. Whilst that was fine, sitting with the fans is not usually the right thing to do. Fans want to know you are funding and running your club, not necessarily sitting next to them in the stands.

I had a particular affection for away fans as their passion and fervour was something to behold and I admired and respected them for their commitment, so much so that during my first season I refunded the entire away support their ticket money for one particularly inept performance in an away game to Barnsley. Nothing like this had ever been done before, but I felt it was the right thing to do.

* * *

Back to the last two games. We needed to win both of them and then rely on other results going our way to avoid relegation.

Steve and Terry were very calm and confident. I suspect they felt they had nothing to lose.

They changed the team around and we went to Portsmouth three days after that shocking display at home to Wolves.

Portsmouth were also in a relegation battle so this was a must win game for both sides. We destroyed them, winning 4–2.

We had given ourselves a chance. We needed to win away on the Sunday against Stockport and hope other results went our way. It appeared relegation was between Portsmouth and us. The game on Sunday was televised and we took 3,000 fans down to Stockport.

I sat up in the stand watching the game unfold with the chief scout Barry Simmonds.

Less than a year ago I had been sitting in my offices at PPS selling a business for a vast amount of money, now I was sitting at a football match watching a club I had owned for less than a year that I had pumped £20 million-odd into, and we were facing relegation, which would have huge financial ramifications.

The game was not a pleasant experience as we huffed and puffed and at half-time it was 0–0. Portsmouth were winning their game, and it looked like we were going to be relegated.

We had chance after chance in the second half. When we missed one chance I kicked the structure in front of my seat, putting my foot through it in exasperation. I had to pay for it later.

The game was coming to a close and out of the blue with three minutes to go, we scored.

David Hopkin, who ironically hadn’t wanted to play for Palace, blatantly handled the ball on the edge of our box and the referee completely missed it.

He cleared it upfield to Clinton Morrison, who put Dougie
Freedman
through on goal and he scored, catapulting himself into legend status at Palace.

Cue pandemonium from the fans who burst onto the pitch. It took two or three minutes to restore order. Portsmouth had won and appeared safe but Huddersfield, who went into the last game two points clear of the relegation zone, were losing at home to Birmingham. If we held onto the lead they would be the club to drop.

We did just hold on and waited five minutes after our game for the Huddersfield result to come through. They had lost when the Birmingham goalkeeper made a wonder save in the last minute. We had avoided relegation by one point and were celebrating narrowly avoiding failure. Said it all, really.

The journey home was riotous as myself and Dominic travelled back on the team bus and celebrated with the team. At the time, the avoidance of failure felt like winning. God, I was so bloody naïve.

The next night I took the players out for an end-of-season dinner at Quaglino’s and then to the lap-dancing venue Spearmint Rhino’s in London. I gave the players £5,000 and told them to have some fun – not something I suspect most chairmen would do. Well, I suppose that’s what happens when your chairman is aged thirty-two. The next morning my phone rang. It was one of the red-top newspapers, alerting me to the fact that my players had been out last night en masse and had been in a lap-dancing bar. I said, ‘I know, I was with them.’ That stopped them in their tracks.

I had learnt so much during that season. I never meant to have all this aggravation, it just followed me because I wouldn’t accept things as they were. I was a proud man and wanted a club to be proud of and I would stop at nothing to get it. The narrow escape at the end of the season convinced me that fortune favours the brave and I was golden. But I was to learn that life affords you both good luck and bad, and I had just used up a large slice of my good luck.

7

ITV DIGITAL: THE FOOTBALL LEAGUE ARMAGEDDON

THE IRONY OF
the launch of ONdigital in a blaze of publicity at Crystal Palace in November 1998 will never be lost on me.

The omens weren’t exactly great when ONdigital decided to use Ulrika Jonsson to host their lavish launch party. After all, this was the same Ulrika Jonsson who failed to meet her financial obligations to me when I owned PPS, so – although at the time I was looking at it all from an outsider’s perspective – I should have suspected that there was a good chance the company she was representing wouldn’t deliver either.

From the outset ONdigital’s business plan was doomed.

The first chief executive, Stephen Grabiner, declared war on BSkyB with aggressive bids for movie and football rights, while principal shareholders Carlton and Granada decided to withhold the ITV service from BSkyB subscribers in an attempt to lure them to ONdigital.

But they had a formidable enemy in Rupert Murdoch. They just didn’t have the wherewithal to take him on. And of course, they crashed and burned – everyone could see it coming. ITV Digital –
which
had been rebranded from ONdigital in a failed attempt to reinvigorate the company – held the broadcasting rights outside of the Premier League, so their collapse would see the Football League face the biggest crisis in its history.

And this crisis would bring me very much to the fore in the game as I wasn’t prepared to sit back and say nothing. It would lead to me being categorised as a dangerous commodity by football’s powers-that-be. I unnerved them as I was determined to bring into the public domain those that were culpable for perpetuating the wrongdoings, hypocrisy and bad practices in football.

In the summer of 2000 the Football League had signed a new broadcasting deal with the newly rebranded ITV Digital. It was a three-year deal for £315 million, representing a phenomenal increase in money for the League and its clubs.

Since its inception in 1992, the Premier League had a broadcasting partner in Sky, which proved massively lucrative for them. In comparison, the broadcasting revenues available to Divisions One, Two and Three were pitiful. These leagues watched powerlessly as the Premier League got richer and richer.

As a result of the massive increase in rights monies from Sky, the players’ salaries were hugely increased in the Premier League. This had a trickle-down effect on clubs in the Football League, where salaries went up without the associated TV income. The new deal with ITV Digital was an attempt to redress the financial imbalance between the Football League and the Premier League.

The deal was negotiated by a team that included David Sheepshanks, former chairman of the Football League and also chairman of Ipswich, which – fortunately for them – had just got promoted to the Premier League in 2000. He disappeared into the
Premier
League, patting himself on the back for brokering this supposed ground-breaking deal.

ITV Digital and Sky were in direct competition for the satellite and digital market. But one of ITV Digital’s major problems, and they had many, was that they would need to use Sky’s broadcasting platform. Understandably, BSkyB were not overly keen to help them with this. Added to this, ITV Digital had made a vast investment in order to secure the Football League rights, which made the commerciality of this deal difficult to understand as ITV Digital were going to need a hell of a lot of subscribers to make this work. And Sky’s TV packages were just more tempting to the consumer.