Be Careful What You Wish For (18 page)

Press speculation was building around the future of Trevor Francis at Birmingham as they were not doing well and he was rumoured to be for the chop. The word on the street was that Bruce was
their
preferred replacement. The rumour mill, as often was the case, picked up momentum and soon he was odds-on favourite to replace Francis if and when he got the boot, which sure enough he did.

I was extremely disappointed with Bruce because he sat on the fence, despite me urging him to be more forthright in his allegiance to Palace. He would come out with sound bites such as ‘I am Crystal Palace manager until someone tells me otherwise.’ Not helpful.

Birmingham, in an insidious way, had kept up the whispering campaign in the media for some weeks before removing Francis. How did I know it was Birmingham? Let’s just say all the press exclusives came from the
Midland Sports
reporters. It aggravated me. ‘Piss off and find your own manager like I had to’ was what I thought, and that soon spilled out of my trap in an outburst the media loved.

‘Why would Steve Bruce go to Birmingham, what was the last thing they won? Err … nothing.’

‘When were they last in the Premier League? Err … never.’

And my particular favourite: ‘What’s the best thing about Birmingham? The road out.’

I was not expecting any Christmas cards postmarked Birmingham.

Sure enough, via Karren Brady, Birmingham made a formal approach to me to speak to Bruce and, predictably, I gave them a resounding no. Madam seemed a little put out, but no was no.

Thinking it best, I spoke to Bruce about Birmingham’s approach before somebody else told him. I also decided that, despite Steve being here for only three or four months, I was going to stave off those vultures at Birmingham by giving him a much-improved package. Let’s call it a Brucey bonus.

Bruce was pleased and proceeded to tell me his heart and head
were
with me and he just wanted to tell his wife Janet about his new deal. So off I flew back to Spain, having spoken to the agent and agreed with him the terms of Bruce’s new contract.

That was the last I heard from Bruce for two days and when we finally talked his attitude had changed completely.

By that time I had it on good information that the agent Barry Silkman, an ex-Palace player and well-known ‘dancing partner’ of David Sullivan, had been seen having a chat with Bruce at a reserve team game.

So my manager who had said ‘my heart and head are with you, chairman’ was now ‘torn’ because Birmingham were a big club and looked after him when he left Manchester United. I knew then he wanted to go.

I was pretty pissed off when I flew back from Spain for a midweek game. Since arriving at Palace Bruce had been looked after, supported, bought several new players and been offered a new contract. Before the match he tried to come and see me but I was busy. We lost 1–0 and failed to set a new club record of eight consecutive wins so at the end of the game I was in an even worse mood. I thought to myself that there was no way now that Bruce was going to come in and ask me if he can speak to Birmingham, but he bloody well did.

He said he owed it to his family to go and speak to Birmingham.

‘What about what you owe me?’ I asked.

Our great relationship was in tatters within minutes, especially when I told him in no uncertain terms that he couldn’t talk to Birmingham.

He became offensive and said he hated it here.

‘Two weeks ago you told me you loved it here,’ I said.

‘The hotels we stayed in were shit.’

‘Steve, you chose the hotels you stayed in, not me.’

‘The players hate you.’

‘The players don’t hate me, Steve.’

‘You didn’t back me in the transfer market.’

‘I have bought every player you have asked me to, Steve.’

This conversation was going nowhere and there was no point in it continuing. I got up, shaking my head, and left him sitting there, stewing in his own nonsense. Later that evening, as I was driving back to the Grosvenor Hotel, which by this time was now my UK base camp, his perturbed agent Phil Smith phoned me, saying Bruce claimed I had sacked him. I advised Smith that was not at all the case and left him to mull over with his client what the next move should be.

The next day Bruce didn’t show up for work and then all hell broke loose. The press had wind of it and I spoke to them, saying Bruce was going nowhere.

Two days passed with no contact and then he phoned me on the Friday. A very terse conversation ensued. In our last meeting he had said some insulting things to bait me, so now I was going to show him my teeth. He told me he was going to resign, but due to the fact he had signed a contract with a nine-month notice period, I enjoyed telling him the facts of life: he was in fact going nowhere.

Before employing Bruce, we had reviewed the standard manager’s contract. Given I had gone through two of them, I knew that the problem with managers was that if you fired them you had to pay up their entire contract but if they wanted to leave they just walked out leaving you high and dry. It was totally inequitable so we had changed the standard form contract, inserting a notice period, and also added a specific clause about gardening leave. It was a new phrase to football but one that was common practice in most industries.

Bruce was now caught in the new clause we had introduced.

He said he was going to fax in his resignation, so I pointed him back to his contract with a degree of relish, telling him that perhaps he should talk to his new mates at Birmingham but, oh dear, he couldn’t do that, could he? I hadn’t given him permission.

Bruce then implied I was talking to him like a dog, and I replied that couldn’t be true because a dog has loyalty and he had none.

Despite my anger at his actions I was saddened. In the few months we had been together I had believed we were really onto something.

I also realised there was no way back and enforcing the nine-month notice period was not overly viable. But I was not prepared to let Bruce just up and leave and allow Birmingham to disrupt my club and pay nothing for it, as well as probably coming back at a later stage to unsettle my back-room staff and playing squad with invitations to join them.

The football world was perplexed. They had never seen anything like this. Normally the manager would just go but here was a chairman talking about gardening leave and notice periods.

It pretty soon dawned on Bruce that I was entirely serious. He was in the unfortunate position of not being able to resign and join Birmingham as I was taking court action to enforce this notice period and had applied for an injunction. I think when he first heard the term ‘gardening leave’ he genuinely thought it was something to do with working in a garden! Segments of the media applauded this stance, as a first and long time in coming; even the copper-haired Adrian Durham from talkSPORT, the agent provocateur of football commentary, came round to my way of thinking after a debate on radio.

I put the dynamic duo of Kember and Bullivant in charge for the next game away to Walsall and left Bruce to contemplate his navel.

I flew to Las Vegas with a group of friends including my old manager Alan Smith – who says you can’t fire someone and still be friends! – to watch Lennox Lewis regain his heavyweight title against Hasim Rahman. I was a huge boxing fan and had seen many of Lewis’s fights.

As if owning a football club was not enough of a gamble I had taken to spending a lot of time and money at the casino tables. There was a variety of antics, mostly involving places like the Crazy Horse. Those that have been there will know what I am talking about. As the saying goes what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.

Meanwhile, whilst I was off enjoying life, Bruce was in limbo and, judging by the letter he wrote me, pleading me to let him go. I cruelly jibed at the time that I knew it was from him because of all the misspellings. This was a whole new world for him – he may have been the captain of Manchester United but this was my playing field.

Whilst I was away, Palace recorded a resounding 4–1 win over Crewe, keeping us in the top two and putting me in a very good mood. That night Lewis won the fight in convincing style.

We were returning on the Tuesday and I was going to go straight to a game in the evening as we were playing Gillingham away.

As we walked through LA airport, a stunning girl breezed past us, and we all remarked how beautiful she was.

When we got on the plane she was sitting opposite me in first class and I kept looking across at her.

She appeared to know one of the air hostesses, a girl called Cheryl, who as it turned out was the niece of the former Liverpool manager Roy Evans. I enquired about the girl across the cabin. Her name was Sarah, and she and Cheryl lived together in Thornton Heath, a stone’s throw from Palace’s ground.

I arranged with Cheryl that we would swap numbers and meet up later in the evening for drinks, and later that night a friend and I met the girls in the Grosvenor House Hotel at about 10.30 p.m.

Sarah and I hit it off and we all went out to the nightclub Elysium, joining her friends. All of a sudden Mandy Smith the model, Lady Victoria Hervey the socialite, Tara Palmer-Tomkinson and a host of other girls surrounded me.

Sarah and I soon started dating, yet at this point I still didn’t know her last name. So I asked her. I had spent time trying to impress her with my ownership of a football club only for her to announce her surname was Bosnich. She was the soon-to-be-ex-wife of the former Manchester United and now Chelsea keeper Mark Bosnich.

The Bruce case finally came to court and to my delight we were given an injunction, putting Bruce in the very difficult position of having to serve out a nine-month notice period in his contract. I had created a precedent in football but the reality was a solution had to be found and lo and behold, within a day or so of the verdict, the Birmingham co-owner David Sullivan telephoned me and left a message on my voicemail.

I would have loved to have kept that voicemail message and played it to Bruce.

It went something like this: ‘Simon, Dave Sullivan, well done for the verdict, brilliant stuff, you rode in like a champion, good for you. Look, I know we have expressed interest in Steve Bruce, but to be honest you want too much money and whilst the rest of the board want him, I don’t really rate him and I’m not really that keen to have him. But I am just phoning because the others do. Anyway give me a call back if you want to.’

I called Sullivan back, left a voicemail and he phoned me straight away.

‘So, David, you don’t want Bruce then, judging by your voice-mail.’

‘Well, Simon, I am not bothered really, but it’s the others, you see, they want him, but you want too much money and that’s not going to make it happen.’

‘Dave, I haven’t mentioned any money so you have no idea what I want. So I am not sure how you can say that. Your lot have never spoken about money because you wanted to nick him for nothing and now you can’t. If you want to do a deal, let’s do one. If not, let’s leave it.’

Sullivan said, ‘OK, how much do you want?’

‘Three hundred thousand,’ I said.

‘Two hundred and fifty thousand—’ he tried to respond.

‘Not finished yet, David. Three hundred thousand, plus all my legal costs covered for the injunction, which are about thirty grand, and also I want you to cover more costs, as I am being sued for unfair dismissal because Steve sacked a female masseuse, saying that there was no place for women in football. I am sure your Karren will appreciate hearing that.’

Sullivan ignored my reference to Karren Brady, mulled it over for a minute and then agreed to meet my demands.

‘I also want Bruce signing a confidentiality agreement so he keeps his mouth shut and does not make up stories to justify his actions. I also want hands-off agreements for a year regarding my staff and players, and he can’t join you until after 11 December, when we play you.’

We agreed on these things and were just about to wind up the call when a thought popped into my head.

‘David, sorry, one other thing. That £10,000 you knocked me for in the summer on Pollock? I’ll have that as well.’

I could sense in his tone that Sullivan didn’t like that, but we
agreed
and the Bruce chapter, as far as I was concerned, was over. It was a shame – Bruce had done a brilliant job while he was at Palace, and I believed he and I could have gone on to achieve big things had he stayed. I still believe that Steve Bruce is one of the country’s best managers. We have since become firm friends and on numerous occasions he has apologised and we’ve both put it down to experience.

Since Bruce’s departure, the team’s form had slumped. We were rudderless and I needed another manager. In another one of life’s ironies, at the bidding of the omnipotent Phil Smith, I interviewed Trevor Francis whose exit from Birmingham sparked the string of events that led to Bruce leaving Palace.

Trevor, as Bruce had before him, flew to meet me in Spain in mid-November 2001 and, as was my way, I threw in an opening question to get him off balance and see the real person.

‘Trevor, I have always found you in management terms to be dull, boring, uninspiring and lacking in any real charisma and passion. Why would I want someone like that in charge of my football team?’

Trevor’s response was extremely strident and full of passion, which, I remarked glibly at a later date, was the first and only time I saw that emotion from Trevor. He was on his feet and very demonstrative, assuring me that he was far from dull and desperate to succeed. He felt aggrieved with Birmingham and wanted an opportunity to prove a point. He felt that Palace would provide him with that opportunity.

I liked what I saw from Trevor and was also pleased to note that he was happy to work with Kember and Bullivant. There was that loyalty thing of mine again.

Later that evening in November as he left for the airport lightning struck a big tree in my garden. Perhaps I should have picked up on the omen.

I appointed Trevor and called my third managerial press conference in fifteen months. I was getting very adept at these press conferences. My message was simple: the reason why I had appointed Trevor Francis was to get promotion into the Premier League and my words ensured that the watching world was in no doubt about my expectations of Trevor or any other manager.