Be Careful What You Wish For (25 page)

I had agreed a deal in principle for £15 million, which would help the hugely under-pressure finances of Palace and me personally, given pursuit of my ambition was very costly and we had forecasted losing £9.5 million this year alone.

Having run the club for four years with significant personal investment – from rebuilding the playing squad and the academy to buying the training ground to improving the stadium – this deal was the light at the end of the bleak tunnel we had been traipsing through since the collapse of ITV Digital.

As well as all this I was still pushing on The Specials front and had now spoken to all the members of the band. Pretty much five out of the original seven were on side with the idea of re-forming, although I suspect there was still a degree of scepticism amongst them.

I spent a lot of time with Terry and Steve Blackwell. Terry was concerned that nobody wanted to see them and they had long since been forgotten. I told him in no uncertain terms how wrong he was.

Jerry, though, was still very resistant so when I was invited to do
Soccer A.M.
with Tim Lovejoy, who I knew to be a huge Specials fan, I took Terry along with me to talk about them and make it public knowledge that there was a will within certain members of the group.

I took Terry with me by helicopter to the FA Cup Final, as he was a huge Manchester United fan. Manchester United ran out 3–0 winners but I was disappointed for Theo. I felt that this Cup Final was as much about his achievement as a chairman, taking Millwall from the brink of the abyss to a new stadium, play-offs for the Premier League and now an FA Cup Final, and he never really got the recognition he deserved. No wonder Theo became so disillusioned in the end and got out.

We had drawn Sunderland in the play-offs by virtue of the fact we had finished sixth and they had finished third.

The excitement leading up to the game was enormous and we sold out very quickly.

I was not nervous going into the game as I believed I had solved the financial problems, and the play-offs and potential promotion to the Premier League were all upsides for me.

The only thing that had infuriated me was that Birmingham got to do it to me again: they said they wouldn’t extend Nico Vaesen, the goalkeeper we had on loan from them, unless we paid them £50,000 if we won the play-off semi-final and a further £200,000 if we got promoted to the Premier League.

Talk about victims of our own success. I had no real choice, so through gritted teeth I agreed to the legitimised blackmail.

On the evening of the game I called my directors into my office, wanting to have a drink with them as this had been a very difficult season. We had all worked hard on a number of financial
and
logistical initiatives and were on the cusp of something really special.

As we were having this drink together my phone rang. Lisa my PA put through the MD of Investec. He was phoning from the States, seemingly unaware of his timing, to tell me that the £15-million deal we had agreed – the deal I had considered of significant importance for the club – was off.

I couldn’t believe it. Without letting on that something had troubled me, I asked the directors to excuse me for a minute.

I tried to establish the reason why, but the MD could only apologise. The deal had fallen through minutes before the biggest game in my four years of ownership of the club.

I had spent six months working on this deal and had exhausted all other avenues for finance. Outside the Premier League the only game in town had been Investec and now that was gone.

For some reason despite this dire news I was philosophical. I literally sighed and thought, ‘Let’s hope we win tonight.’

I always stood at home games and this habit never changed during all my years of ownership. I was very reactionary, and when something I didn’t like happened in the game I would disappear down the stairs and out of the view of the crowd to express my frustrations. Poor Stephanie, the boardroom hostess, would be greeted with me coming into the boardroom effing and jeffing.

As I was waiting for the teams to come out, Alan Smith, my first manager, walked past me to take his seat and said, ‘I bet you are shitting yourself.’

‘Nice,’ I thought.

It was a great game in which we ran out 3–2 winners. After we had gone behind, as was the norm for the season, Andrew Johnson scored, taking his total to thirty-two goals for the season and somewhere in the region of £150,000 in goal bonuses alone.

We had played Sunderland a few times over the last few years and their chairman Bob Murray and board of directors were not the friendliest and most welcoming people.

When they had been in the Premier League and drawn us in the Cup they had been downright inhospitable and rude.

After an exciting match the fans had invaded the pitch and, in front of the section containing the Sunderland fans, taunted them with their celebrations. Immediately, Dominic and I went out and physically got the 200 or so exuberant fans off the pitch. I’m not sure how many other chairmen would have gone onto a pitch to send off overzealous fans.

It didn’t stop my old pals the FA fining the club £15,000. These arbitrary fines annoyed me intensely and when we appealed they simply upheld the original decision and then, to add insult to injury made the fine bigger!

The second leg was on the Monday in Sunderland.

This was a massive moment in my ownership, yet I was still very relaxed.

But at half-time we were 2–0 down after dominating the match and seemingly on our way out. Yet for some reason I still had a serene feeling of calm.

In the second half we plugged away but Julian Gray got sent off, thus reducing us to ten men, and with barely a minute left to play we were dead and buried.

Or so I thought.

From a corner and with the inevitable whistling from the Sunderland fans to put intimidating pressure on the referee to blow the final whistle, substitute Darren Powell headed home.

The goal should never have stood as Neil Shipperley committed virtual GBH on their goalkeeper.

Extra time came and went and we now faced a penalty shootout.

Yet despite the magnitude of this moment I remained composed.

Before the penalties were taken I snuck out for a cigarette with my brother and just sort of sighed with a ‘what will be, will be’ shrug.

I sat there in the Stadium of Light, watching the penalty shoot-out, which could literally change the immediate direction of my future and finances.

The order escapes me as far as penalties were concerned but it turned out that on three separate occasions we had a penalty to score that would enable us to win.

I watched the players in the centre circle and I remember young Wayne Routledge at seventeen being sent up to take a penalty, thinking how could players much older and more experienced than him put him under so much pressure.

Of course when he did, he missed. Eventually Michael Hughes, probably the most experienced player on the pitch, walked up from the centre circle like a man heading towards the gallows.

That walk seemed like a lifetime before he stepped up and scored and put Palace into the play-off final, the ‘richest game in the world’.

I remember celebrating and also trying to be magnanimous with the Sunderland directors.

My phone went red-hot and I answered call after call, then I got one from Freddy Shepherd, the Newcastle United chairman, who couldn’t stop laughing.

When he did he wanted me to pass the phone to the Sunderland chairman Bob Murray, which of course I would not do. Well, I might have if Murray had been at the game, such was the rivalry in the north-east.

As far as Shepherd was concerned I had made his year and if we were out in Newcastle our money was no good.

For the play-off final we drew the smaller end of the Millennium
Stadium
with an allocation of 34,000, which sold out in six days.

We booked the Vale of Glamorgan Hotel in Cardiff. This was the lucky hotel and no one who had stayed there had lost since the play-offs had been staged in Cardiff since 2000.

Our opponents, West Ham United, had missed a trick there, but as the twelve days leading up to the monumental game went past it appeared they were relaxed about most things. The vibe coming from their end was that they believed that the final was a foregone conclusion.

I flew to Spain, preferring to be out of the way of the media scrum leading up to the play-off final, staying in Spain until Friday 28 May, the day before the game.

On the Thursday night before the final we had a corporate event.

It was a sporting dinner, hosting 500 Palace fans who came to dine and be entertained by a variety of entertainers and after-dinner speakers.

This year the compères for the after-dinner speeches were Alan Brazil and Mike Parry, the hosts of the talkSPORT radio station.

As the play-off final was only two days away there would have been extreme optimism in the room, so what followed was doubly outrageous.

Onstage, Parry and Brazil unleashed a tirade of abuse about Crystal Palace and ridiculed the club’s chances of beating West Ham in the play-off final.

Understandably the audience became quite agitated and restless. Dominic was overseeing the event and was listening to these two idiots – who were being paid by the club – stand up and be derogatory. He was concerned that the audience were getting inflamed but it didn’t stop Parry and Brazil, who singled me out for some special attention.

Eventually Dominic got security to remove them from the stage fearing a riot was about to break out. They were shepherded out of the marquee and into the boardroom.

Dominic phoned me in Spain, told me what was going on and said that he had removed them from the stage before things got very ugly.

I was relaxed about it, probably because I was detached from it. I told Dom not to lose his head, and to try and control the situation. Once in the boardroom, rather than the situation being defused, Parry appeared to want to inflame it all the more. Dominic asked them what right they had to be so abusive. Why would they come into our place of business and insult the club, its supporters and its owner?

He was greeted with the response, ‘Fetch us a drink, son.’ Dominic called them a cab and had them removed.

I have never found out why they chose to behave this way, I had had no real dealings with either one of them. Perhaps it was a case of people forming opinions of you without even having met you, which is often the way in football. Unfortunately they chose not to leave it there, and on their radio show the next day they broadcasted the fact that my brother and some other goons working for me had manhandled them out of a corporate event for no reason.

Meanwhile, I was travelling back to England from Spain. It was the day before the game.

I had friends flying from all over the world to watch this game and my mood was still very good, despite the previous evening’s events.

As I boarded the flight I decided to pick up a bunch of the morning’s papers. I was looking through them in the airport lounge when I turned to an article written by a journalist called John Cross from the
Daily Mirror
.

It was a full-page spread titled something like ‘Palace Players in Bonus Crisis’. The article described how on the eve of the play-off final the Crystal Palace team were in disarray as the owner – i.e. me – had refused to pay the players their well-earned bonuses. As a result, the club was in apparent turmoil and some players were refusing to play.

This was all news to me. It was a piece of malicious reporting on the part of a journalist who I had had run-ins with before. Irrespective of whether the article was wrong or right – and believe me, it was wrong – the timing of it on the Friday before the play-off final was designed to destabilise the club before this game.

Now I was agitated. A pair of buffoons taking the piss out of the club was one thing, but it was something entirely different when a national newspaper decided to print an article full of untruths and misrepresentations. I hadn’t spoken to the media for the best part of six months and on the eve of this game I had this.

I was on the phone to my lawyers instructing them to draw up a writ, which I served on the paper as soon as I landed in the UK. The upshot was the paper had to print, of course at a later stage, a retraction and pay substantial damages. I did waive my rights to compensation and an apology if the paper sacked John Cross, the journalist who wrote the poisonous article. They declined my generous offer.

The next morning I borrowed Mohamed Al Fayed’s helicopter, which was emblazoned with the Harrods livery, and flew with an ensemble of mates to Cardiff. We landed in the hotel grounds in the full glare of the world’s media but I still had no interest in talking to them whatsoever.

From the hotel we travelled to the game, a fifteen-minute journey by minivan. The driver couldn’t get us close to the stadium as we
had
left it late so he dropped us as near as he could. But he had dropped us off at the wrong side of the stadium.

This was the side where the West Ham supporters were situated and we were required to walk right through them to get to our entrance.

It didn’t really bother me and off I set with my gang behind me. I got about hundred yards before I was hauled back by my friends, who decided this was a very bad idea. Indeed, as the volume of abuse began to rise once I was spotted, Theo Paphitis pulled me back and said, ‘Be sensible, let’s walk round.’

Reluctantly I agreed. I assumed his motivations were solely for my well-being but later he told me he was actually in fear of his life. There was only one person West Ham fans hated more than me on that day and that was the chairman of Millwall Football Club.

It was a beautiful day, momentarily ruined when I came into corporate hospitality and there, resplendent in a Crystal Palace tie, was former chairman Ron Noades. I believe he came to this game so that if Palace lost, he could wallow in my demise.

It was a sweltering day and I was wearing a suit that by now could probably have walked itself out to the directors’ box. As it had become my lucky suit and I had worn it to every game since the end of January I dared not go to the match without it.