by Ian Holloway
4-0 after collapsing like a pack of cards. Rob Earnshaw scored a hat-trick inside 15 minutes and I’m stood there watching all this in my technical area as a woman comes up to me from the side. As she approached, I thought back to a few nights before when I’d spoken with Kim about handling any personal abuse that might come my way, and she just said, “Why don’t you just reply, ‘I’m all of that plus a bag of chips.’ It’ll diffuse any situation.” God bless her for that! It made me laugh, so I rehearsed it at home and this woman is now right up to me and she says, “You’re a fucking wanker, Holloway!” and then threw her season-ticket at me. I just looked at her and said, “I tell you what love, I’m all of that and a bag of chips.” I wasn’t worried about her reaction to me saying that, just that I got the delivery right! She told me to ”fuck off” before walking back the way she’d come and I turned to my bench who were all laughing. My physio wanted to go after her when he heard what she’d said, but she was just another frustrated QPR fan at that time. It was a horrendous experience, in all honesty because who needs that? Then we lost 3-0 at Notts County and then Iain Dowie’s Oldham beat us – it was a run from hell and I was up shit creek not only with no paddle but with no boat. Even Robert Shaw would have had trouble rescuing me at that point.
Paul Furlong continued to miss chances and he failed to put a free header home in one game and did it again a couple of games later. He said, “Don’t worry Oll, I’ll put them away, I’ve done it all my career and at least I’m getting in the right positions. I’ll finish them, don’t worry.”
But the pressure was beginning to tell after his latest miss and when he said, he’d start scoring, I said, “It’s about time you took responsibility Furs and any chance of fucking heading it in the fucking net? God isn’t gonna make it go in, you should with your focus, that’s what you used to do. If you don’t, I ain’t gonna support you anymore. You put it where it needs to go because you’re good enough.”
I’d lost it because I thought I was going to lose my job at any moment. Then quite a large section of the Rangers fans start chanting “Chelsea reject” at him and, bear in mind I was on a sticky wicket anyway, I had at go at the boo-boys in the press and said, “How dare you. You ain’t helping me and you’re slaughtering someone because he used to play for Chelsea? How childish is that? If he’s missed a couple of chances give him some stick about that – but I need you to encourage him and if anybody wants to dish out unfair stick, come round to my house in St Albans and I’ll fight you on the lawn. Any chance of you lot doing your job and supporting my team? They’re the ones we’ve got, I can’t change them, let’s get on with it.” I meant it, too and felt good for saying exactly what I’d wanted to. So after yet another soul-destroying defeat, I thought I’d be sacked any time, but the next day I met with Nick Blackburn and David Davies and they were superb to me, going over the game and saying we’d been unlucky and that we probably needed to strengthen our defence – Nick especially gave me all sorts of support and I wasn’t getting blamed by the board, despite the beast of a run we were in. We were in it together – they needed to have success so the club could move on. I reckoned if we had a decent left-winger, Furs would start knocking them in so I went with Kenny Jackett to see David Davies and ask if we could sign Lee Cook from Watford. Nick had apparently never heard of him so David said no on the strength of that. I said, “Don’t say no to me. I need a left-winger and he’s the one I want.”
He said, “Well if you two don’t sort it out, it won’t be your call.”
“Just get me the winger, will you?!” I then rang Nick and said, “What’s this you don’t know who Lee Cook is? Just let me get him. I’m telling you he’s a bloody good winger and he’s available, so just do it.”
They relented and Lee Cook signs and on his debut he waltzes down the wing, crosses it for Mark Bircham to score. We drew 1-1 and stopped the rot. Cook was just what we’d needed and he made a monumental difference to our season – plus he was a QPR fan, which fitted into the type of person I wanted at the club. We beat Wycombe 2-1 away and he set up the winner. We set off on a hell of a charge up the table after that and all because we’d been desperate for a quality wide man to supply our quality forwards. Another factor in our sudden improvement in form was Pen’s arrival as my striker coach. He took Furs for one-on-one sessions and he soon started scoring the goals he’d promised. We’d bottomed out against Vauxhall Motors – how much worse could it have got? The shit hit the fan and we all got a bit of a coating, but we showered and were looking – and smelling – half decent again.
Chapter 18: Let’s Have Coffee
The optimism was returning to Loftus Road. You could feel an expectancy from the supporters, but a positive one, rather than the negative, impatient vibe some of them had been giving out. Make no mistake, Loftus Road can be a scary place to be when things aren’t going well and it’s a stadium that can swallow you up if you allow it to. The long-term casualties, Clark Carlisle and Richard Langley were back, Lee Cook was on fire, Paul Furlong was on song and scoring and there was plenty to smile about. The impossible now seemed possible and somehow, we’d come from nowhere and were on the verge of cementing a play-off place. We’d been on an incredible run and wins over Huddersfield and Bristol City made it nine victories in the final 12 games and meant we’d finished fourth and would face Iain Dowie’s Oldham in the play-off semi-final – a little ironic considering I’d sacked him after taking what he – understandably – must have thought was his job at Rangers. Bristol City would play Cardiff in the other game and with the final at the Millennium Stadium, we knew if we made it to the final, playing Bristol City was the preferred option because playing Cardiff in Cardiff would be a nightmare.
Oldham had finished in fifth place and had already beaten us once that season so we knew it’d be a tight game up at Boundary Park, but we took thousands up to Oldham and they were loving every minute of it. They’d suffered for the past few years, as we all had, and they were going to enjoy their moment in the sun. We went 1-0 down early on but kept our shape and didn’t concede any more before half-time. I’d been on at Richard Langley to take a gamble on any far post crosses for a few months because he had a knack of doing it in training and I said to him to try it that day because the full-back looked half-asleep. I told the lads there were two games to play, so to keep calm because I felt we’d create one or two good chances before the end and, as if by magic as Mr Benn used to say, Langley ghosts in for what seemed like an over-hit cross and scores a great goal to make it 1-1 – and that’s the way it stayed, with the balance only slightly in our favour.
What an occasion the second leg was, though! The moment you walked into Loftus Road you could feel it. It was usually fairly quiet and Gerry Francis always used to say, “Don’t wait for this lot, you’ve got do something and then you’ll get the atmosphere.” Not that night, though. It was unreal and the hairs on the back of my neck stood up and the game had that extra edge because of Dowie. Nick Blackburn told me that at half-time during the first game, Iain Dowie’s wife came up to him and said, “Oh actually, you’ve signed the wrong Ian.” I didn’t really like that, but Nick just laughed it off. I think he told me to spur me on. I was pumped up for the game anyway because the prize of a final at Cardiff was at stake. It was an even tussle and it wasn’t until the last few moments of the game that we scored the winner – and who got it? Paul Furlong. He held off Fitz Hall as the ball came over the top and had enough nous to flick it past the goalie before rolling it home into the far corner. The noise as the ball crossed the line almost took the roof off Loftus Road. The atmosphere that our fans had created that night and that I walked into when I first arrived, made me very proud to be associated with the club. In the dying seconds, our keeper Chris Day made a Gordon Banks-type save, diving down low to his left to keep out a certain goal – it was a match-winning stop and our fans went mad when the final whistle went. We had our lap of honour at the end and then I went up
on a microphone and said a few things, ending with, “This is a proper football club. See you all at Cardiff.” I was especially pleased for Paul Furlong, who’d been through all sorts of things that year but kept trying his best and not allowing anything to ruin him and had now come through the other side of it.
I knew we still had a lot to do because we’d be playing Cardiff in Cardiff – the worst case scenario, but we were in with a 50-50 chance of going up.
We took 30,000 to the final – they must have had about 40,000 – but the game itself proved to be a huge let-down. Neither side played well or could even string two passes together but we went in 0-0 at the break. I told the lads to relax, just as we’d done at Oldham. We came out and were the better team and though we weren’t streets ahead of Cardiff, it looked like there would be only one winner. I had a lad called Tommy Williams on the bench and he was in my ear all the time, “Go on, put me on, I’ll win you this, I’ll win you this...” In truth, it reminded me of how I would have been in his shoes so I decided to give him the chance to back his words. I’d left Andy Thomson on the bench and should have had him on from the start, so I got it all wrong, truthfully speaking. So Tommy comes on, gets the ball, beats one, two, three, four... he’s in the box and Furs is on, begging for the ball because he’s got to score, but Tommy shoots from an angle you wouldn’t believe and misses the target. Then, 10 minutes from time, Lennie Lawrence makes one of the bravest substitutions I’ve ever seen, thinking it’s heading for extra time, he takes off crowd favourite Rob Earnshaw and puts Stuart Campbell on in his place – and he scores the winner. My defence should have caught him offside or caught up with him, but it was their only mistake of the afternoon. We lost 1-0 and what still greatly bothers me is that I felt we were the better team on the day. If Tommy had squared it, it might have been us celebrating, but it wasn’t. To this day the QPR fans sing a song about Tommy Williams with the line ‘why didn’t you pass to Paul Furlong?’ It was horrific and it was more like a home game for Cardiff, but I was so proud of what we’d done, but the thought of having to do it again was hard. I wondered how long I was going to have to play the bridesmaid for, too, after losing another play-off final when I was with Rovers and we should have gone up but fell away and now it happened again with QPR. My CV wasn’t looking so good, but we’d finished fourth and had made progress again. At the end of the game, I used the words Gerry Francis had said when we’d lost a play-off semi-final at Rovers and told them to take the pain of losing against Cardiff into next season and remember it so it doesn’t happen again. I told them we were going up and to get their heads right for next season.
We’d done really well, but the mistake we made was not adding to the squad to consolidate the momentum we’d built. As ever, I needed more strikers and brought in Tony Thorpe from Luton – he’d fill in for Kevin Gallen or Paul Furlong if they were absent. I signed Jamie Cureton again and with Brett Angel coming at the end of the previous season, I felt I had a good complement of forwards at the club. We also brought Gareth Ainsworth, Richard Edgehill, Richard Johnson, Lee Camp and Stephen Kelly in on loan. The board backed me again and instead of blaming me for losing the play-off final, they asked me, “How can we make things better?” and as a manager, you really can’t ask for more than that.
We started the next season by beating Blackpool 5-0 at home – off to a flyer – but I think it raised expectation levels unrealistically high and made the rest of the division more wary of us. I wasn’t complaining, though. All the new lads I’d brought in were looking solid, and away to Rushden & Diamonds, we were 2-1 up when mad Tommy Williams – I always think of him as ‘Clunk’ from the kids’ cartoon Whacky Races – was running down the left wing and he pings a ball across to the other wing to an unmarked Gareth Ainsworth, and as I’m up saying, “What are you doing?” the ball falls over Gareth’s right shoulder and I can see he’s shaping to hit it on the volley, 35 yards out. I shout, “Gareth no...YES! Get in there!” He caught it perfectly and it flew in like a rocket. A fantastic goal but it was spoiled by conceding two late goals. And drawing 3-3.
I was having problems with Clarke Carlisle, that I’d rather not go into in this book, but he was missing training and failing to turn up for games so I disciplined him until we eventually got to the root of the problem. Meanwhile, we beat Chesterfield 3-0 and were different class in the first half – Queens Park Power Rangers, in fact – but after the break Chesterfield had four great chances, missed them all and the score stayed the same. I wasn’t happy because we’d thrown the lead away at Rushden and it could’ve happened again, so I let the lads know it because I thought they’d taken their foot off the gas. I said, “I ain’t so sure about you lot. I’ve got people not turning up, I’ve got you thinking you’ve won games when you’ve not – have you forgotten last season? Have you forgotten what it felt like losing against Cardiff?” I went upstairs, still in a bit of a mood, to talk with the press. The first 10 questions were about Clark Carlisle and why he’d been dropped, so I said it was an internal matter and I wouldn’t be answering any questions about him. I managed to bat them all off without getting angry and then one bloke said, “You must have been delighted with that – what a fantastic performance.” So, typical me, moving off without checking my rear view mirrors, I start waffling on about a bird in a taxi, not dreaming in a million years it would result in changing my life and how the vast majority of football fans viewed me. I said I was pleased with the result, but not the performance so I thought about how I could get the point across in a sentence and came out with, “It’s like when you meet a bird who’s not the best looking. You talk, things go well and she gets in a taxi with you, get her back home and lovely jubbly, let’s have coffee.” They were all sniggering away and I thought, ‘hang on, what’s going on?’ I’d said it before to my lads, but because I was a manager talking about a high-profile club and comparing it to a night out on the pull, they couldn’t believe it. The following day, I get a call from Clark Carlisle at 7pm on the Sunday evening, and I said, “Where the hell have you been?”
He said, “Ollie, can I come and see you?”
I told him to come and see me at my house and I wrote everything down we spoke of because it was now a very serious club matter. The lad needed help and because he’d asked for it, I believed we could help him. What the ‘let’s have coffee’ quote had done, was diffuse a difficult situation and shifted the spotlight away from him at what was a difficult time. I knew the press would be calling me mad old Ian Holloway again, but the real reason I’d said what I had was to help a player who needed it. Tim Lovejoy off Soccer AM must have been intrigued by the quote and invited me on to the show, the first of many memorable visits. I’d laughed at myself all my life and the truth was it was usually part of a more serious scenario, but I didn’t anticipate it causing such interest and I certainly didn’t mean it to be derogatory to any young ladies because I thought they’d do the same thing. If they go out and all the best ones have gone, I think they too might go, “OK, let’s have another look at him.”
Things went barmy after that and though there were one or two ‘Ollie-isms’ already out there, this was the one that really took off, if you like. A few people called me mad after that, which is unfair and that’s something I can’t say I was overly happy with. I’d never describe myself as ‘mad’ or ‘madcap’, because I’m not. I just use humour in my life and I grew up with it – my dad had a wonderful sense of humour, my best mate is Pen – say no more – and my wife has a quirky sense of humour, too. I’ve always used that in my life and my thinking is, if you can’t laugh at yourself, what sort of person are you? I don’t laugh at people, I laugh with them and if that involves me, so what? I think that cuts through an awful lot of problems.
I want to be as reliable as a manager as I tried to be as a player, but if you don’t have empathy with your players and try and understand their feelings and try and help them out when they need it, you’ll struggle to survive. I
f I can’t personally help, I’ll find someone who will. Alleviating problems as best I can and taking the worry away is what I think being a manager is all about.
Not all the portrayals in the press about me after that were complimentary and one bloke turned everything completely around and pretty much slaughtered me, which I couldn’t understand. Nothing I’ve ever said was to draw the focus in on Ian Holloway and I don’t do it on purpose, but when I think about the way my dad was and the things he used to come out with, the old saying ‘an apple never falls very far from the tree’ springs to mind. My tree is my old man and I think like him and according to my sister, I talk like him, too. All I know is that the world is a sadder place without laughter and I’m not going to change and will keep on saying whatever comes into my head, no matter what is written about me.
But back to the important stuff. On the pitch, we were looking good going in to the run-in. I was still full of doubt about myself and angry at home and after the Chesterfield match, a lot of people seemed to be interested in me and I was being asked to do all kinds of things, one of which was a programme for the BBC called ‘Stress Test’. I was 41 and didn’t want to behave like a five-year-old when I didn’t get my own way anymore because Kim was suffering. I’d cried and whinged to my mum to get my own way as a kid and I didn’t want to do the same at 41 and I actually don’t agree with Bill Shankly’s quote, ‘Some say football is about life and death – it’s much more important than that.’ It’s not to me – I love football and all the people connected with the game but nothing is more important than your health and your family. So when the BBC asked if I’d take part, I said, “Why should I take part?” They told me there was no money, but they could make me a better person, which was good enough for me, so I agreed to do it. It was pretty invasive and they followed me around for months, but ultimately they put their finger on what was causing me to be like a bear with a sore head every day. It was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done because you have to lay yourself bare and how you believe you behave and talk to people is actually totally different to reality and you don’t always see things you like. The psychologist I’d been assigned pinpointed my problem to me believing nothing I ever did was good enough. He said, “It wouldn’t matter if you won 20 games in a row at the moment if you lost the next one, would it? Some people have a perfectionist scenario and no matter what they do, it’s never good enough. Arsène Wenger isn’t like you – you’re destructive because what it comes back to is nothing you ever do, in your eyes, is good enough. You’re two people – I’ve seen it. When someone needs your help at work, you do everything you can to help them out, but when you talk to yourself in your self-talk, you beat yourself up. If you could be just one person and look in that mirror and say ‘warts and all, I’m good enough’, you’d be fine.” Then he asked Kim, “Kim, what would you do if Ian lost his job and didn’t get promoted?”