Be Careful What You Wish For (23 page)

Meanwhile, Kit had taken his first two games and got noteworthy draws but I was still in the frame of mind to shake things up. I was fed up with players taking the piss and underperforming and constantly having to sack managers and pay them off.

So I decided to offer Ternent the job and phoned Finnegan and said I was prepared to offer him the same salary as Trevor Francis, £320,000 a year, and once agreed I would approach Burnley.

Barely an hour had passed and Finnegan was back on the phone.

‘Stan says bollocks, it’s not enough money.’

At first I thought he was joking but quickly it became apparent he was not. That pissed me off as Ternent had specifically told me it was not about money, it was about opportunity, and he believed Palace offered him that.

Suddenly it was all about money. I had offered him top dollar, but he still wanted more. So I pulled out and said to Finnegan, ‘If it’s all about money let’s just leave it.’

I barely had time to put the phone down when Ternent came on the line.

‘Chairman, you are making a big fucking mistake. I know more about football than you will ever know. This is a huge opportunity you are missing out on. You’re going to regret this.’

He sounded like he was half-cut.

‘OK, Stan, interesting way to resign from a job you haven’t got, but let’s leave it, shall we?’ and I put the phone down.

I had quite fancied having him, but he had just turned out to be a bit of a clown.

But it was to get worse. I was going to meet Theo Paphitis at Millwall’s ground to go out for dinner and on the way there Ternent left me a series of messages, each one worse than the last. When I got to Millwall I played them from my voicemail to Theo, who was incredulous and we all burst out laughing.

Clearly Ternent was drinking, the last message, left in a broad Lancashire accent, was ‘Chairman, I am fooking great and you are fooking shit. I have got a fooking Bentley and a fooking Mercedes. You have made a big mistake. You haven’t got the bollocks to answer my calls so fook your job.’

I phoned him back. He didn’t answer so I left a message. ‘Stan, thanks for your insightful commentary. The next time you apply for a job you might want to stay out of the pub whilst talking to your potential new chairman. Anyway, well done. Enjoy your next port and lemon, you buffoon.’

I also interviewed Neil Warnock at that time and had grown to like him a lot. We had a little bit of handbags in my first year when Neil had floated a mischievous rumour that we were selling Clinton Morrison and taking Marcus Bent in exchange, and giving them a million on top, a rumour that was designed to unsettle young Morrison and had annoyed me.

He had all the characteristics I wanted and we had become friends during my early tenure at Palace. He came to London and I interviewed him in my penthouse flat on Chelsea Bridge. We got on very well and he liked our squad but decided he wanted to try and finish what he had started at his beloved Sheffield United. We kept in touch over the years and were to have our time later.

Kit had got the team into some semblance of order with three draws and a win in his first four games.

But I was still looking to bring in a manager. I decided to bring
Terry
Bullivant back into the fold as a special football adviser to me with the brief to go and find me a manager. Terry knew me very well and knew what I wanted and expected. We were inundated with applicants and Bullivant was interviewing around the country.

Two people phoned me direct who I didn’t want to see, Steve Cotterill and Iain Dowie. Cotterill just annoyed me because he was so persistent and I am sorry to admit that I couldn’t take his West Country accent seriously.

Dowie left me his résumé on my voicemail and I thought people who do that are convincing themselves, rather than me, of their capabilities.

Kit hit the buffers a little, losing three games in a row. At a social function I made an observation about how poorly Dougie Freedman was playing and perhaps Kit should consider dropping him. It was an observation, not an order.

But later that evening he was quite off with me, saying he was not going to be told who to pick.

Phil Alexander told me that he had overheard the assistant Stuart Gray saying you can’t have a chairman telling you what to do and Kit had listened to this bad, out-of-context advice and acted upon it. In that moment Kit Symons ruled himself out of any serious consideration for the job, not because he took exception to my advice but because he took an antiquated attitude towards an owner’s ability to make comments.

Bullivant was interviewing numerous candidates and bringing back dossiers on each applicant. After three weeks of interviews we had a number of candidates but Bullivant was absolutely adamant that the stand-out person was Iain Dowie and despite my reservations I agreed to see him.

Dowie apparently had a degree in rocket science and interviewed
well
for a football manager. He was professional, articulate and prepared. He had done his homework and had hunger and desire; he also had produced a report on the club, one at the time I thought was very impressive and unique. The ability to write such a report helped him get the job with me, but was to prove very unhelpful to him later on in a very different environment.

It didn’t take me long to decide that he was right for the job. He was on his way out of Oldham as they were struggling in administration so he was free and clear to join Palace.

When it came to the terms I only offered him a short-term contract of eighteen months. I didn’t want to get caught out with another substantial pay-out to a manager who failed to deliver.

I also set down a salary much lower than Messrs Bruce and Francis had enjoyed.

Iain wanted to discuss his salary and I refused to negotiate. My offer was take it or leave it. Dowie was taken aback by this but agreed. This impressed me, as he was backing himself on what he had said, which few managers do. I now believe that in actual fact he harboured resentment towards the offer, which would manifest itself at a later stage.

We were scheduled to play Reading away live on Sky TV on Saturday evening. I finalised the deal with Dowie on the Wednesday and decided not to announce the appointment until the following Monday. After weighing it up, I also decided to tell Kit after the Reading game.

My primary concern was that we needed to get a result at Reading. The papers were speculating that Dowie had the job so when I arrived at the Reading ground the busy Phil Alexander had spoken to Kit, who was aware of the rumours and was very down.

Alexander suggested that I should speak to Kit before the match, and I made a decision against my gut feeling, one that attracted infamy.

I went to see Symons and suggested we had a chat. Given the dressing room was busy we had to go outside as there was nowhere else to go. No one was in the tunnel area so I decided to have a conversation with Kit at the bottom of the step below the line of the pitch, and out of eye and earshot – or so I thought.

To this day people like Chris Kamara who covered the game for Sky maintain they heard the conversation. I accept they may have been unbeknownst to me able to see as the cameras were below the line of the pitch. But there was no way they could have heard what was said; otherwise their condemnation of my actions wouldn’t have been so definitive.

The Symons conversation went like this:

‘Clearly I can’t legislate for rumours and press speculation but I have made a decision and I will be bringing in Iain Dowie.’

Kit was not surprised but was disappointed. ‘Fucking hell, chairman, that’s great. I thought you were going to tell me and give me the courtesy, I am fucking well owed that.’

I interrupted him. ‘Hold on, Kit, I gave you an opportunity to gain some invaluable experience, experience you can’t buy and it will probably be good for you in the future.

‘I said that I would tell you when I had made a decision and only on Wednesday did I agree with Dowie and only yesterday did I tie up his contract.

‘So the first opportunity I would have had to have told you was last night and up until walking in the stadium it was my intention to tell you at the first practical moment, which would have been after the game.’

Kit snapped. ‘That’s fucking great, chairman. I get you out of the cart and you show me no respect.’

‘You got me out of the cart? Let’s not forget, Kit, you were one of the fucking players that put me in the cart, as you put it, in the first place.

‘I gave you an opportunity and am grateful for your help. I have made a decision to go with Dowie.’

Kit started to protest a little more but I stopped him in mid-sentence as I could sense he was going to say something that would be very damaging for him.

‘Kit, do yourself a favour. Let’s leave it there and not say anything else, because you never know what may happen next.’

I walked away, as I had earmarked Kit Symons to be Dowie’s number two, and Kit calling me all kind of names would have made it difficult for me to make that appointment.

On getting back to the boardroom I saw that Chris Kamara and his Sky colleagues were replaying the footage that had been shot without my knowledge. I was coming in for some very heavy criticism, which would continue the next morning on
Goals on Sunday
, the programme hosted by Chris Kamara, with one of the guests, Chris Coleman, a Welsh teammate and close friend of Kit Symons, going on about how out of order I was.

We beat Reading emphatically 3–0, and at the end of the match Dowie phoned me and jokingly said did I still want him to come in on Monday.

Dowie did come in on Monday and Kit Symons did become his number two, thus starting another era with another manager. Iain Dowie was given the same remit as those who preceded him: promotion to the Premier League.

Despite being nineteenth in the league, in the press conference announcing Dowie’s appointment I said I still felt promotion wasn’t
beyond
us. It caused a degree of mirth amongst the journalists and the first questions were to Dowie about unrealistic expectations and pressure.

Dowie performed admirably in this press conference, upright, forthright, full of confidence, knew his challenge and was up for it.

I was heartened as his words were exactly what I wanted to hear from my new leader and if his actions matched the words there was cause for renewed optimism.

Dowie’s first game, as chance would have it, was home to Millwall, a year to the month since the last time we had played my old mate Paphitis’s rotten old rabble and beaten them.

Dowie was given a hero’s reception by the fans, but we proceeded to lose 1–0 and I found Theo had plenty of time to hang around in my boardroom relishing the victory to my ear and bar cost.

Not only that but Paphitis and I had a bet on the result. The forfeit for the losing chairman was to wear the opposing team’s mascot’s costume in the return fixture. So now I had to wear Millwall’s Zampa the Lion’s get-up and run around the New Den. Of course this was a fact my close personal friend kept to himself by referring to it in his programme notes week after week leading up to the fixture.

I had made a bet and was fully prepared to honour it, but a few weeks before the game he offered me a get out of jail card. If I matched what the Millwall fans raised for a testicular cancer charity – their long-serving centre forward Neil Harris had recently suffered from it – I wouldn’t have to wear the outfit. ‘No thanks,’ I replied, ‘a bet’s a bet.’ Theo then explained the real reason for his kind face-saving gesture: they had reliable information that certain segments of their charming fan base were really looking forward to my appearance as Zampa, so much so they intended to bring
washing
-up bottles filled with petrol to squirt at me before setting me on fire, so it was a little bit more like a death sentence. Needless to say I took up Theo’s offer. Their normally tight-fisted fans raised over £5,000, which I matched. So I sent our mascot ‘Pete the Eagle’ to present a big cheque on the pitch before one of their games, not that that stopped the ever-charming Millwall fans giving me barrel loads of abuse when we played them next.

In December 2003, as well as installing another new manager at Palace to achieve my dream of getting into the Premier League, I made the first inroads into fulfilling another one.

For a while now I had a vision of re-forming the iconic band The Specials, my favourite group.

After doing months of research I had arranged to meet my hero Terry Hall, the former lead singer of The Specials and Fun Boy Three, with his manager at the Grosvenor House Hotel.

I had tracked Terry down via Alan McGee, the founder of Creation Records, who looked after Oasis.

He put me on to Steve Blackwell, Terry’s manager. Steve was an Aston Villa fan and coincidentally we had just played them in the cup at Villa Park, where I had met ‘Deadly’ Doug Ellis, the Villa chairman, who I took a great liking to. He was a character, he even let me smoke my cigar in his boardroom, with the words, ‘You have broken every other rule in football, you may as well break another.’ So this gave myself and Steve something to talk about.

We spent two hours talking. This was a band that had barely spoken for nearly twenty-four years. Terry and I became firm friends, as we remain today. He knew that I had this massive passion and said to me, ‘We need someone like you to pull us together.’

In the early part of 2004 I left no stone unturned to re-form this band. Everybody told me it was impossible to get them back
together
. I met some of the Madness boys who told me no way.

I got every band member’s phone number and set about calling them. I tracked Jerry Dammers down and arranged to meet him.

Jerry was the founder member of The Specials, and also the founder of Two-Tone, the label. He was also a bloody nutcase. I met him in the Grosvenor. He was a hero of mine, a musical genius who by now reminded me of something from Middle Earth, all long beard and no teeth.

Jerry was very strange and very contradictory.

In one breath he stated categorically that The Specials would never re-form and in the next he was curious to understand what I might pay.