by Ian Holloway
“Don’t you say that,” he said. “You’ve not got the balls to play up front. It’s alright for you, Oll. You can run around for two years and not score a goal and everybody pats you on the back and says, ‘Well done Oll.’ But if you were a striker and didn’t score for two years you’d be out of the game – you haven’t a clue about the pressure.” He was right, too and that’s what I love about Pen – he cares so much about the strikers and the lads all know it and that’s why they respond to him.
So Paul Martin called me a day or so later to say that Sylvan would be joining Plymouth, and that was a belting call to receive. Then I received another piece of news that was as surreal as it was unbelievable.
Argyle’s chief executive Michael Dunford was a little concerned about the numbers travelling to Austria. He was organising the trip and we had several places reserved for new arrivals but I had no idea who exactly they would be. The accommodation was sorted and we would play a couple of games while we were there, too. Obviously Sylvan would be one of the players but with only 10 days to go before we left, the pressure was on and the clock was ticking. Then Michael calls me up and says, “I’ve just had a strange call from Real Madrid asking if we’d move from our hotel.” I asked him what he meant. He continued: “Well, we’ve booked the castle hotel that they love because it’s always been lucky for them and they want us to move out.”
“No – who do they think they are?” I said and Michael went, “Well there’s more to it than that – I haven’t finished. If we move out, they’ll play us in a friendly while we’re out there and they’ll pay for all our accommodation while we’re in Austria, too.”
I said, “Well yeah! Of course we’ll move out!” We couldn’t fail – we were taking 36 people for 10 days and I’d say that would have cost Argyle quite a lot of money, and to have a once in a lifetime chance to play Real Madrid was just too good to turn down. Michael said he was asking out of courtesy because he thought it was a great deal.
“Great? It’s unbelievable!”
“OK, I’ll announce it, then.” I’d just been preparing to go out training with the lads, because I’d not had much of a chance up to that point and before we started I gathered everyone around. I went through what we were going to do then said, “Oh, and have a guess what else I’ve got for you then? We’re going to play Real Madrid while we’re over in Austria. They smiled and shook their heads because they thought I was joking but when they realised it wasn’t a wind-up, they were chuffed at the prospect, as was the whole city.
After the session I had to go in and do a press conference as I always did on that particular day and the Madrid game was big news for the club. I sat at a desk, still feeling the day’s events were a little unreal and the first question I’m asked is, “Can you tell us your reaction about the Real Madrid game?”
It was music to my ears – for Ian Holloway to be presented with a chance like that, I had to take it so I just fell off my chair on to the floor. Des Bulpin was chuckling away at the back and I just told the reporters, “I told you you’d have some laughs with me, didn’t I? What a bloody stupid question – what reaction do you think I’m going to have to playing Real Madrid? I was stunned and amazed.”
My first real meeting with the Plymouth fans was a few days before our first pre-season friendly. It was an ‘ask the manager’ evening at Home Park and I was gobsmacked to see about 600 Argyle fans behind the goal at one end. I had a microphone and I had a compère to help field the questions and it turned out to be a very successful evening and it was good to hear what they were thinking and for me to able to get a few points across. We then travelled to Tiverton for my first game as Plymouth manager and I quite enjoyed that, too. We played some nice stuff and it was a good exercise for us for a number of reasons. Tiverton had set a defensive stall out, and their forwards split to mark our full-backs, which is quite unusual – an idea they must have got off Trinidad & Tobago manager Leo Beenhakker, because they’d narrowly lost to England 2-0 not long before. It was bloody effective, too. I played one team in the first half and a different eleven in the second and we went in 1-0 up at the break. I changed things around tactically and we scored another three in the second half and the lads did what I’d asked them to really well and I could see they were enjoying themselves, but there were a couple of things I wasn’t happy with. There was too much bickering among the lads and instead of it being about wanting the ball, it was all about them as individuals rather than the team and one lad in particular, Bojan Djordic, got shouted at by Lilian Nalis and I didn’t think Bojan liked that. Bojan had given the ball away and Tiverton went through and nearly scored and it was only because Nalis managed to get back and clear the danger that they didn’t. Nalis then looked back to Bojan, who was still on the halfway line moaning, and had a go at him. I’d noticed one or two things about Bojan’s performance that night that I wasn’t happy with so when everyone came in at the end, I think they all thought I’d be happy with the performance and scoreline, but of course, I wasn’t. This was my first game and I needed to nail down anything I didn’t feel was right and I could see they weren’t encouraging each other and that had to change. I said, “Lil, why did you moan at Bo?” and Bo said, “Ah, he always moans at me.”
“Shut up, I haven’t asked you a question yet,” I told him. I asked Lilian again and I said, “Tell him why you moaned at him because I don’t quite think he understands.”
Bo said, “That’s easy, he moaned at me because I gave the ball away.”
“No, hang on, why did you moan at him, Lil?”
Lil said, “No, I didn’t moan at you because you gave the ball away, I moaned because you didn’t run back and try and tackle the fella – you let me do that.”
I turned to Bo and said, “When you play for me you’re allowed to give the ball away, but you are not allowed not to chase back and correct your error because that’s what we all have to do, here. Lil, will you moan at him if he chases back?”
Lil said, “Well, no, I won’t.”
I turned back to Bo and said, “OK, Bo, make sure you understand why people are having a go at you. We want you to express yourself and pass the ball but we don’t want you to stand still when you’ve not got it and then expect someone else to win it back for you!”
I’d been able to nail down one of my most important points in my first game in charge and it was perfect.
Then I turned my attention to Barry Hayles at Millwall and having spoken to Peter De Savary when I was interviewed for the Millwall job I knew that he didn’t rate Barry, so I tested the water and was proved right. Their manager didn’t want to sell him but I knew their board would and I was determined to bring him to Home Park. I agreed a fee for him but what I still had to do was talk him into taking quite a hefty cut in his pay. I knew Barry was a winner and would have hated the season he’d just had at Millwall and while it might have been good to be back with his family in London, it hadn’t been happening for him on the pitch. I felt he was with Millwall for the wrong reasons and the person I knew he was, meant that I had to ask him some honest and straight questions. If he gave me the answers I thought the old Barry would, I knew he’d want to come and play for me and prove me right. I said to him, “You have to care about what you’re doing – I’ve got some winners at my club, what the hell’s happened to you? What the hell are you doing? You’ve never just taken money, your heart’s got to be in things so why don’t you come here and help me with this lot because I think I’ve got a bunch of winners, here.”
Barry just smiled and said, “Yeah, I’ll do that.”
You have to know the essence of the man to talk like that and though he cost me £100,000, I told the chairman, “Look, you might not get your money back, but you will on the pitch.” I added that we couldn’t go into the Championship with inexperienced strikers and even if Nick Chadwick had been fully fit, he’d only scored six goals the previous season and I needed a pr
oven goalscorer. The chairman said, “Well Hayles only scored four last year.”
I said, “Yeah, but his heart wasn’t in it.” I managed to talk him into it and he signed a two-year deal. It wasn’t in time for our next friendly, away to Grays, which would be the last match before we set off for Austria the following day. I took a squad of 24 and had both Sylvan and Nick Chadwick available for that match. Things were going along nicely and we were 3-0 up against Grays at half-time and Nick scored all three. I think he thought that because Sylvan had arrived, he’d begin on the bench but I decided to play him in the first half and he responded accordingly. The pressure was now on Sylvan and though there were no more goals after the break, I was pleased with the way the lads played and I liked their calmness on the ball and because we’d not had much time to work on any formations as such, they were just playing for me.
I managed to get Des Bulpin who I’d been considering for the position of head of the youth set-up before I’d actually got the job. Des had trained me at Bristol Rovers and had gone everywhere Gerry
had been, including QPR and Tottenham, and I trusted him and respected him.
I wasn’t sure if I’d ever get Pen or Tim Breacker, so Des became my first addition to my coaching staff and joined me at first team level. I decided to leave the youth team as it was. Des took to the role straight away and the lads liked him from the word go, which was fantastic. In fact it was better than I’d imagined it might be. Mark O’Connor then left and handled himself with great dignity. He’d told me he wanted to go but wanted paying by Plymouth first but despite his future lying elsewhere, he worked his socks off for me, planning the training from start to finish and he was different class. David Kemp was a bit longer in the tooth and though he was very polite to me, he didn’t do much in all honesty, it had all been down to Mark, or ‘Des’ as the lads had nicknamed him after Des O’Connor. So Mark went off to Stoke and I told Kemp that I had no intention of getting involved in his dispute with the club, which was now escalating slightly. The board wanted to send him, here, there and everywhere, but I told him I just wanted him to do a bit of scouting for me and that I wasn’t taking him to Austria. I wanted to start my training regime at this training camp and I now had Des Bulpin, Maxi and Geoff Crudgington, our goalkeeper coach, along with me for the trip and our kit man Jacko, whose real name is Ian Pearce, but who is an absolute ringer for Jack Nicholson – he’s even signed autographs from people mistaking him for Jack in the past. We were ready to go and with Barry Hayles to come, I liked the way things were shaping up. It was just me, my new coaching team and my squad from here on in.
Chapter 23: Storm Clouds Gathering
I couldn’t have been any happier with the way my first few weeks at Home Park had gone and I flew out to Austria in a fantastic frame of mind. Maxi did impressions of Elvis and we had a great laugh on the plane journey. I was so excited to get back to work again and everything was going as well as I could have hoped, but perhaps I should have realised, in hindsight that they were probably going too well.
We travelled by coach from the airport and I started asking the driver “Are we there yet?” because it took me back to being a kid when dad drove us all to Cornwall and I drove him mad by asking “Are we there yet?” all the way, even when we were only at the top of our road. I continued asking until we reached the hotel, which seemed to be carved out of the side of a mountain. It was peaceful and picturesque and exactly what we needed, and the facilities were superb. We were very professional about everything, as we had to be because I was trying to impress my staff and players. I’d had six months off so I was able to reel off everything I wanted clearly and in exactly the way I needed to. The lads were positive and everything was going my way and I was a bit hyper because I was absolutely loving it.
The training facilities were the best I’d ever seen and were just 10 minutes down the road and we had two days to settle in before our first match of the tour, against FC Graz who’d beaten Stoke 2-1 recently. I’d put my footprint on the way the team were training and how we would play, which was something I had to do and the lads were responding fantastically well. I managed to get a lad who wrote for the club website to get me information on all the Graz squad as well as a head and shoulders shot of each player and we put them up on a board in the dressing room before the match. I think the lads were shocked when they saw it because it wasn’t something that was expected in a friendly overseas. I doubt anyone thought I’d know anything about the Graz side but I was doing my best Jose Mourinho impression by being so informed about the opposition.
We had a match report from their game with Stoke so along with the club doctor, we copied all the details of the Graz squad off their website and each player had his own profile, including details non-football related. Doc and I decided to embellish on those facts and we added something by each player. On one lad we put ‘Likes wearing high heels and an apron and good at Origami.’ It took us about an hour to put together and as well as the funny stuff, there was genuine information about style and tactics they used. Nobody but the doc and I knew about it so you can imagine everyone’s faces when I unveiled it before the game.
I began with the keeper, “Good on crosses, good handling and comes from a long line of ostrich farmers,” and it all went down an absolute storm. The lads were happy and relaxed and it showed, too, as we beat Graz 5-1, watched by Barry Hayles, who had flown over to join us, just prior to finally signing his contract. We’d scored 12 goals in our first three games, conceding one and while the standard of opposition might have made people think that we should have been winning by comfortable margins, things don’t always work out that way in reality. Some Argyle fans had travelled over to watch us and they were buzzing about everything and I don’t think things could have gone any better for us.
A couple of days later we set off to play Real Madrid. We had to drive about an hour to the venue but it was blue skies and sunshine all the way until we reached a long tunnel and came out into dark clouds and drizzle. It was like the tunnel from hell and I thought it didn’t bode well for the game ahead, envisaging a drubbing. We had reckoned there probably wouldn’t be too many regulars in their team due to the World Cup having ended not that long before, but to their eternal credit, there were eight first-teamers in their starting eleven including the likes of Jonathan Woodgate, Thomas Gravesen, Guti, Julio Baptista and Ivan Helguera.
I was still going to play two teams, one in each half, so I could assess all my squad and make sure all the lads had a chance to play Madrid because they might never get the chance again. Fabio Cappello had just got the manager’s job for Madrid and he’s sat a few yards away from little old me, but there were paparazzi all over him so I didn’t really get the chance to speak to him. The lads were so excited and we acquitted ourselves brilliantly and had a few chances to score in the first half, as they did but we went in 0-0 at half-time. We changed the team and our tactics round a bit at the break and held out until the 75th minute when Julio Baptista scored for Madrid from the spot to win the game 1-0. I said in the interview afterwards that I thought we had a hell of a chance of going through in the return leg at Home Park – well, you just can’t miss chances like that, can you?
The next day we had one of the best training sessions I’ve ever had as a manager and I decided to let the lads have a night out after that. And then it all went wrong. Horribly wrong.
The key to success, I believe, is team spirit, and for a few days I’d been going on about having a singing competition – players versus the staff – on our last evening in Austria. We had been looking forward to a wonderful meal and it ended the night and the tour on an incredible downer that could quite easily have ended with the death of one of the lads at the hands of another. We hadn’t had a drink, so alcohol wasn’t to blame for what happened. The cause was nothing more than teasing, and it had been building up for quite some time over the singing competition I’d suggested.
I
’d made it clear that if anyone didn’t want to join in, they wouldn’t be forced to do something they weren’t comfortable with, but one player had been bottling things up for around two years unbeknown to anyone. A few of the other lads had been winding him up, joking that they were going to force him to have to sing a solo number and they all started laughing. The player concerned had a voice that some of the lads would impersonate during the past couple of years. After the latest wind-up about his voice, he stood up, grabbed a glass jug and smashed it into face of another lad who’d been laughing a few chairs down. It was violent and awful and it shook everyone who witnessed it and for a time, we thought the lad was a goner – thank god we had a trained nurse and the club doctor on hand to administer immediate treatment.
The player was rushed to hospital to have emergency surgery on the back of his ear which had been almost hanging off. An inch either way and his artery would have been severed and we’d have been looking at something along the lines of manslaughter. It was the worst injury I’d ever seen and it sickened everyone because it had been so shocking and it goes without saying that nobody had seen it coming because we’d have made sure it hadn’t, had that been the case. I tried to help both players out as best I could but it was a huge test of my managerial skills. The positive atmosphere and energy that we had all been carried along on had gone and there was an uneasy feel about the place. It showed, too, in our next game which was a friendly at Bristol Rovers, where we played badly and lost 1-0. The shock was still reverberating amongst the team and with only a fortnight to go before the season started, I had to figure out what I could do to get things back on track, but then I had another problem to sort out.
After the Rovers game, one of the lads asked if he could get off and go with his family, which of course I said was fine, but on the coach going home I learned that he’d gone back to Plymouth with a club director because he wanted to get home quicker than the rest of us, which I was fuming about. I called the director on his mobile and asked if the lad was in his car and he said he was. I told him, “Don’t you ever do that again. Tell him he’s lied to me and I’ll see him in my office in the morning. What gives him the right to get back sooner than the rest of us? Plus we’ve just lost so what will you be talking about on your way back? He shouldn’t be party to anything like that – he’s one of us and he should be on our bus.”