Be Careful What You Wish For (39 page)

During that period we had played newly relegated Charlton Athletic for the first time since the fateful day in May 2005. The bad blood had increased with the Dowie court case and an article I wrote in the
Observer
in August of the same year about the conga-dancing celebrations of their fans at our relegation! I remarked that I felt they behaved like morons. A spokesman for a Charlton’s fans’ group said: ‘They were astounding comments from an ex-Premier League chairman.’ He demanded an apology he never got. He did add the rather perceptive comment: ‘There were 24,000 Charlton supporters at the Valley that day, including myself. That’s an awful lot of morons.’

My response was: ‘In retrospect, of course I regret calling them morons, imbeciles would have been more appropriate.’ This of course fuelled the flames and the bad blood so the atmosphere for this game, which was always explosive, had more of an edge. Their buffoon of a chairman, Richard Murray, was notable by his absence in a game we lost, much to the joy of the Charlton fans.

Unfortunately there was trouble after the game. The spectre of football violence hasn’t disappeared, it just doesn’t get as much coverage as it once did. Many a time I sat in the police control room at Selhurst Park watching the CCTV cameras on the away supporters, horrified by the threat of imminent violence, most notably with Millwall fans.

It appeared that some Charlton fans, including young supporters, were attacked on their train journey home by a mindless element of Palace fans. This was reported by Kelvin MacKenzie in his column for the
Sun
. I had had no time for MacKenzie’s opinions when he was editor of the paper and I had even less time now he was a columnist. His piece condemned the cowardly Palace fans, which was difficult to disagree with, but then went full tilt into blaming me for the attack, suggesting comments I had made two years ago were the catalyst. I took this very seriously and considered legal action against the
Sun
.

The only other match we won in the first eleven games of the season was against Sheffield United and given the events that followed there was a significant amount of irony in that win.

Coming into October we played Plymouth away and quite frankly I made more effort getting to the game, by train, plane and automobile than the team put into the match. The performance was horrible, one of the worst I had seen, and I knew then that Taylor was a dead man walking.

The last match Taylor took charge of was against the team I had taken him from sixteen months earlier, Hull City. Frankly I had no interest in the result. In fact, for the first time I wanted us to lose as, come rain or shine, I had no further requirement for Peter Taylor’s services. As it was we played quite well and actually should have won but drew 1–1. I left the ground immediately after the game not wishing to speak to Peter. What I did do was phone the
one
manager I had coveted for a long time and tell him in no uncertain terms that his services were required!

On Monday 8 October I went down to the training ground to see Peter. He was having his annual meeting with the League Managers Association. He was sitting in with Ray Graydon, the former Walsall manager, when I cut short that interview. I asked Peter for two minutes and told him that with immediate effect I was relieving him of his duties and advised him that Kevin Watts would take it from here. Taylor took it with good grace and even made a joke as he walked back into Graydon about the irony of having his annual managerial chat and getting fired!

I think part of Peter was relieved. For me, there had been a tinge of regret or reflection with virtually every manager I had fired or parted company with. I felt neither with Peter and it was certainly not because I disliked him. I had always felt in my gut that he was a coach, not a manager, and he had proved to me that that was all he was – if that. Frankly I was agitated after wasting sixteen months, significant monies and allowing a general downturn in the morale of the supporters.

Without delay I made the move for the man I had wanted for some time. It was to prove to be my best football decision. I brought in a manager who finally showed me what owning a football club could and should mean. An all for one and one for all mentality. A togetherness and support and a complete respect for others’ acumen. My new manager would not give me two and a half years of total success but the most enjoyable rewarding time. How ironic it was to be my last appointment that brought me that!

I appointed Neil Warnock as my eighth and final full-time Crystal Palace manager on 11 October 2007. Prior to the appointment we had a little haggle over money. Neil wanted more than I wanted to pay. I had to pay off another manager in Peter Taylor and wanted
to
keep managerial costs in perspective yet at the same time pay Neil what I thought was right. I convinced Neil to come for the right reasons, telling him that he and I could fly together and if we did, money would be the last of our issues. The only concern raised was by his lovely wife Sharon, given we were friends. If it didn’t work out then she didn’t want us to lose our friendship. My only comment to Neil on that was: ‘Are you going to ever lie and cheat me?’

‘No, of course not,’ he replied.

‘Then whatever happens we will always be friends.’

The press conference on 11 October was one of the most relaxed I had done. I was genuinely delighted to have Neil with me. Certain segments of the media couldn’t get their head round it, describing it as a ‘a marriage made in hell’ and ‘the two most combustible men in English football sitting side by side’. What they failed to take into account was that our relationship had been forged over years of friendship. Neil and his family stayed on my yacht in Marbella for holidays and we were very close confidants. All in all we knew one another well and wanted to work together.

I never really went to the training ground after the first season and a half of my ownership, as there was little point. My relationship was with the manager and his with the players. The training ground was the manager’s domain, and my view was that the chairman coming on to it undermined his authority. If I felt the need to check up on my manager on the training ground then I should not have him in the job in the first place! When I did go down, more often than not, it was to fire the manager!

Often it is the case when a new manager comes in that he will automatically make stock comments about the players not being fit enough and this and that being wrong and laying the blame on his predecessor by inference. But in this instance I took it upon myself to look at the training ground after Taylor’s departure and
it
was a diabolical mess. Players’ standards were low, medical records that were a must hadn’t been maintained, the scouting network and reporting was scandalously bad and the fitness records of the players, key indicators to how successful fitness coaches were, were all over the place. I was horrified at the state of that department. My mind flashed back to the conversation with Dougie Freedman in the summer, but the results on Saturday had indeed told me everything I needed to know.

Unlike previous managers, the first thing Neil did was to find a house and a school for his children and move his whole family down to south London. It showed me everything I needed to know about how committed he was to the job.

I had taken Peter Taylor out during an international break and Neil had ten days to get his bearings before his first game at Blackpool. During that time he proceeded to look at the squad and facilities. Neil brought in his own team, which I sanctioned, despite the costs, in order to support him, Mick Jones as assistant manager, Keith Curle as first-team coach and Nigel Cox as physio.

I felt genuine excitement approaching the first game of Neil’s reign, away to Blackpool. I flew in from Spain and watched us play in freezing cold conditions, initially irked by the fact Blackpool came out onto the pitch to our signature tune, ‘Glad All Over’. I was far from glad all over. We were disappointing and quite poor. I’d hoped for a rousing start because of Neil. We scraped a 1–1 draw. I felt genuinely deflated as for the first time in a while I had felt energised again, but as Neil told me at the time: ‘I am a good football manager not a bloody magician.’ He might have been wrong on one of those scores. The next two games were at home to high-flying Stoke City and table-topping Watford; both games resulted in convincing defeats.

Neil looked at the squad and, believing in using young players, gave a debut against Watford to a fifteen-year-old who had been raved about in our academy. Said to have inspired interest from Barcelona, he was one of my future stars and a player who was to cause me consternation, young John Bostock. He’d been with the club since he was nine and had proclaimed himself a future Palace captain. After this game and the manner in which we were comprehensively outplayed, my mood was one of reflection. Watford were top of the league and the club had high expectations of the season; in the two years since relegation, we were nowhere, struggling, with no expectations. I contemplated sadly how it had come to this and after that game my mood was very low, strangely lower than when we had been relegated from the Premier League and lost in the play-offs so badly in 2006.

Neil decided to change the dynamics of the team after these opening three games. He was unhappy with the ethos and personnel. Paul Dickov, who had joined in the summer with the promise of repaying me for my help when he was arrested in Spain in 2003, was shipped out on loan as his performances on the pitch were poor. There was also an incident in training when he had gone over the top in a tackle and Neil decided he wanted him gone. Neil brought in a host of loan signings and also decided that he was going to use the younger players in our squad who in the previous season had been overlooked, which was music to my ears. Neil was unimpressed with some of the senior players, saying privately to me that the younger players couldn’t do any worse than the so-called senior pros. He decided that our £1.25 million centre half Leon Cort was not for him, saying at the time that he liked his centre halves to have scars and battle wounds, implying that Leon was soft!

He suggested the idea of selling Cort, which I said was his call.
I
awoke the next day to see he had sold Cort for an agreed £1 million to Stoke City, who ironically Cort had played his last Palace game against. It’s funny how two managers see the same player differently. We had taken Clint Hill, a slightly injury-prone centre half, the other way, who became a warrior for my club, on an initial loan deal to become permanent in January. The fact that Neil had gone and done it with no recourse to me whatsoever made me laugh, as in the past I would never have allowed such a thing, but such was my faith in him and his take-charge approach.

Despite these decisive actions Neil did express some reservations about achieving anything with what he had as a playing squad. I gave him the answer I gave him many times over the next two years: ‘Good job I have you!’

My enormous faith was not misplaced as I was about to discover, but even I was staggered by the transformation of this team. From my depths of depression after the Watford game, what started as a mentality that we must stop conceding goals turned into a fifteen-match unbeaten run spanning three months. After our turgid but dogged 0–0 draw on 3 November away to Scunthorpe, which left us second to bottom of the table, not even I could see this coming. It took us from twenty-second in the table to fifth, winning nine games and drawing six and taking thirty-three points. That form would have won any league in the world.

He got players who had previously been poor to really step up and play at a level I had never seen from them before. He took our young players, two of whom were Victor Moses and Sean Scannell, and put them in the first team. We also brought in a raft of loan signings and two players really pushed us into gear. Scott Sinclair, a tremendous talent, was brought in from Chelsea and, as Neil wanted a midfield player, I suggested we look at re-signing Shaun Derry from Leeds, and he was a revelation. These factors,
combined
with the particular rise of young Victor Moses, were pivotal to our success.

In amongst this was a most satisfying win for Neil away to Sheffield United on 29 December. It was his first return to the club since his departure in the summer. In my view he had been shoddily treated by the club’s owners.

In fact, every time we went to Sheffield United, the lack of empathy towards Neil as their manager from the United fans always surprised me given he was a Blades fan through and through and one of the most committed individuals you could have. But in his new incarnation as Palace manager he was given an ovation from the Sheffield United fans on his return to Bramall Lane, and I remarked to his wife Sharon, ‘Shame they didn’t give him that support when he was here.’ And she nodded knowingly. I know this win pleased Neil as he had a point to prove, but at the same time he was sad, as under Bryan Robson, the then United manager, his beloved team were in decline.

During November I had some other pressing matters. The filming on set of
Telstar
had virtually been completed and we had one piece left to do in Spain as the central character took a holiday there in the script. So I flew the lead actor Con O’Neill, another actor, Sid Mitchell, and the director Nick Moran to my house in Spain hoping to catch some sun in which to film. The weather was unpredictable but at 8 a.m. the day after they arrived in Marbella I looked out my window and into the November sky and saw sun. In a frantic rush I got the actors out of bed, and myself and Nick spray-tanned them, and dashed them off down to the nearest beach to film a scene in their swimming trunks. It was sunny, but it was still pretty cold. We had no licences or permissions yet managed to film for the duration of the day.

As we sat over dinner contemplating the ridiculousness of the above scenario, I got a phone call from my now heavily pregnant partner Suzanne, who said her heart was racing at a phenomenal rate. When I asked her what it was she told me it was beating at 170 according to her count. ‘Christ, you are seven months pregnant, call the ambulance, darling,’ was my frantic response.