by Ian Holloway
I left the meeting no further along but having made it clear I wasn’t interested in negotiating a new contract at that moment in time. Things were starting to come to a head in my personal life, too. My daughters weren’t happy with their school and living away in Exeter, Kim’s mum Wendy was seriously ill and the board’s stance was driving me mad. I never mentioned any of this to the fans, though I wish I had in some respects. It wasn’t really the way I worked because I wanted to do the best job I could for the club and worked for the chairman and I didn’t believe in slaughtering him in public – the football side of things were my problems and I was happy to have them, in a manner of speaking.
We were going well in the league but after three away games in succession, I made a comment that the lads looked a bit leggy and tired in the third match. Then we played Sheffield Wednesday at Home Park and played them off the pitch for most of the game but somehow lost 2-1. Things were coming to a head and I was becoming increasingly frustrated with the board so when I’d held my post-match press conference and walked out of the ground, there was one guy waiting for me.
“Tired again were they?”
I steamed over to him. “Pardon?”
“Were they tired again?”
I said, “Look, I never make an excuse mate. What did I say?”
“You said they were tired – they’re bloody professional footballers.”
“No I didn’t. What I said was – and it’s in the programme you’re holding which you aren’t clever enough to read my old friend – I’m asking the same players to do too much – now what does that mean to you mate?”
I suppose I was a bit aggressive and he said, “Oh, I’m not having a go at you, Ollie.”
I said he was and that he should wait outside the boardroom door and ask them why they aren’t getting some more players in. I then added, “Now did we deserve to lose today?”
“No.”
“Well there you are then. When are you going to wake up and realise who it is you need to shout at?” A bit of a crowd had gathered and with the mood I was in, I decided I best leave it at that.
Kim’s mum, Wendy, finally lost her three year battle against cancer a few days later and I felt terrible for not being with her and her mum more during those final weeks. I’d been dropping Kim off to be with her mum while I went off to work or various book signings and she had a hell of a lot on her plate. Wend always told me how she really felt, even if she didn’t tell many other people, but put on a brave face for her girls and I recall one of the last times I saw her. I said, “How’s it going then, Wend?” and she said “I’m really tired, now.” She had won numerous battles but she’d just had enough of fighting. Losing loved ones is part of life and not something you want to broadcast, but I was an emotional wreck in many ways and living an almost surreal existence for a number of weeks. I’d be out meeting all these fantastic people who queued up hours to meet me and have me sign their book, then I’d go back to Bristol to be with Kim and her mum. The signings lasted hours but I stayed until I’d met everyone who had queued. I still couldn’t understand why so many people had come out to see me and buy my book – I still can’t – but the warmth and affection they showed me maybe helped me more than I realised.
At Home Park, things finally came to a head. We drew our next game at Colchester and after beating Norwich 3-0, we moved up to seventh in the table but then had a two-week break before our next game. If you had told me I wouldn’t have been in charge for that match, I would have thought you’d have been a few cards short of a full deck. I was even asked at a press conference about an alleged link with Norwich and I said Argyle was my club and I loved the place – and I meant every word I said at that moment.
We prepared the team for the home game with Sheffield United during the first free week and then started working on specifics of the game on the Monday and Tuesday of the second week. The lads were flying in training, Lee Martin had been a great success and David Norris was back to somewhere near his best and everyone seemed relaxed and happy. Kim and I finally moved into our home near Plymouth Hoe – the first house we’d owned for three years, though I think that’s when we missed her mum even more because she’d have been there, organising the move and sorting out the bedrooms and kitchen for us – she was fantastic at all that stuff and I know she missed her mum more than ever at that time. I began a spot of decorating when the phone went. It was my chairman telling me Leicester City had asked for permission to talk to me.
“What did you say?” I asked.
“We’ve refused permission,” he said.
“Why did you tell me then?”
I’d have rather the chairman had just told Leicester no and that be the end of it. I started thinking about the direction we were headed and about the efforts I’d put into the community to try and get the people through the turnstiles. I’d gone way beyond what was asked or expected of me and given it everything because I wanted to try and generate enthusiasm in the area to give the club a chance in the long-term. The only way of doing that is getting out there among the people but it didn’t seem to make any difference to the board. I’d also expected them to look after the people who’d worked hard for me – I was alright and I had a decent contract and two years to run but my staff were having problems and when they came to me, I asked the chairman to sort them out but he wasn’t doing anything. I told Kim and she said “You’re not going to talk to Mandaric are you?” But I was seething inside.
The next day I went in to see the chairman and I said, “Look, all I’m asking you to do is to let me go and speak to them and see what they have to say.”
“No.” he said. “You’re not speaking to them.”
I told him I couldn’t understand why and he started going on about the long-term plans so I said, “Yeah, I’ve seen your long-term plans.” Then he said they were going to do this and do that and that they might be getting some foreign investors in and I said, “Paul, that’s all well and good, but how can I possibly weigh up what I want without knowing what the other option is? I’m not necessarily choosing Leicester but our relationship should mean I can go there, speak with him and I might come back here, say I want to stay at Plymouth and give you even more commitment than before.”
All I’d asked for was a meeting; he refused me the opportunity to do so, so I resigned. I was thinking “How could you do that to me when I’ve worked so hard for you?” and I never saw his side of it all. I thought he should have let me pop up to Leicester, have a chat with Mandaric and take a day or so to decide and then make a decision one way or the other, but the minute he said no, I had a bee in my bonnet and it made my mind up straight away and that’s not right, really, is it?
I hadn’t even spoken with Milan Mandaric and hadn’t been given any promises that the job was mine, but I felt that let down by my chairman that I’d just had enough. If Leicester didn’t give me the job I wouldn’t have particularly cared at that point but I wonder now if I was of sound mind, because I never work like that – at least I haven’t acted that way since I was a hot-headed kid. There was a series of logical steps that needed to be taken in a situation like this and I’d just bypassed the lot and if I did get the Leicester job, I’d be starting off on rocky ground because I’d normally want answers to a long list of questions before I even considered taking a job. But all of that went out of the window and I’d gone back to Ian Holloway aged 20 who was impetuous, aggressive and stamped his feet when he didn’t get what he wanted. By doing that, I’d taken away any explanation and thought process that I’d have liked to have given out to the people that I cared the most about – the Plymouth Argyle supporters. Of course, in reality, if you decide you want to go to another club, what are you really saying to the one you’re leaving? There’s no way of me addressing this – not now – but all I would like to say is that I loved my time in Plymouth and loved the people of Plymouth and I meant every word and beli
eved the dream while I was there. The overall point is that I’m young enough to be ambitious and I wanted the club to match my ambition – they didn’t want to lose me in the end but they could have done other things at the time that would have made me stay.
Since then, the Plymouth board has claimed the problem was about my money, which infuriates me – it wasn’t about that at all. It was about my management and the board trusting me and following my advice. It isn’t exactly how much you pay people, it’s how much you get out of them and they had almost flogged that horse to death – the horse, in other words, wanted to turn around and kick them and bite them – they never addressed the problems I flagged up time and time again and it was too late.
The day I resigned, I drove my family to Bristol so they wouldn’t have to be in the middle of the fall-out and I drove on to Leicester to meet Milan Mandaric. It had been playing at the back of my mind that someone would have a great opportunity to make things work at Leicester because the club itself, the stadium and the support is magnificent. What I do now realise is that I gave up such a position of strength at Argyle, it’s unbelievable. I believe, in my own mind, I’d painted too black a picture of the situation at Home Park and know that I could have sustained things until the summer and maybe even turned the players’ anger into performances on the pitch. I could have said to Dave Norris, “Dave, I can’t get you the contract you want but if we win the league, how much are you going to be worth then? Now come on!” I think Sylvan Ebanks-Blake would have stayed on too and when you add the nine goals he scored after joining Wolves to Plymouth’s final total, they’d have made the play-offs at least. I never wanted my time at QPR to end the way it did and I never dreamt my time at Plymouth would end the way it did, but that’s just football and it’s either love or hate with not much in between. Having said that, I didn’t want the blood of Plymouth Argyle on my hands – I felt as though if I didn’t get out when I did, I could see everything coming crashing down around my ears and I’d worked too hard to allow that to happen. I’d also been a manager for 13 years and had never been able to spend a million pounds on a player while other managers were getting the opportunities to spend money and it does get to you after a while, if I’m totally honest – you think it’s never going to come your way and that played a part in my decision, too. Yet I had something really good going at Plymouth and I jumped into a relationship that I didn’t really know anything about when I actually had something much better already.
Having the ability to be realistic and see things clearly is something good managers get right and at that particular moment in time, I wasn’t a good manager because other things were in my mind – quite rightly – but if I’d stopped to really think things through, I’d have done things differently.
It was like the time when I’d just arrived at Plymouth and we were 3-0 down at home to Cardiff and I was getting pelters from certain sections of the crowd and I just ignored it and got on with it. I didn’t ignore that bloke after the defeat to Sheffield Wednesday, though – I just wanted to throttle him which tells me I wasn’t thinking straight and the alarms bells should have been ringing.
But, rightly or wrongly, I’d made my decision and now it was all down to my meeting with Milan Mandaric. We sat down and he started talking about his players, who they were and how excited he was about them, then showed me around the club and the stadium, which looked magnificent and I couldn’t help but be impressed. He told me he’d heard a lot about me and asked me questions about how I’d do things at Leicester but I’d put myself in an awkward position because I’d already resigned at Plymouth. It must have appeared as though me accepting the job was a forgone conclusion – it was weird in many ways and I don’t think I did myself any favours at all. Nothing seemed real and looking back now over my time at the Walkers Stadium, I never really felt like the Leicester City manager. It was Gary Megson’s face that was on the wall, not mine – my picture never went up – and there was a hundred silly little things like that that just didn’t feel right during my stay.
At the training ground the lads would make a joke of how their kit man used to have to buy more initials for tracksuits than anyone else in world football, obviously in reference to the amount of managers that had come in one door and out of the other in the past year or so. You try and put your own mark and personality on things but it was as though I was branding things but the steel wasn’t hot enough – you couldn’t see the mark that was supposed to be left.
From an outside view, if you compare Plymouth and Leicester as football clubs and look at the stadiums they play in, it looks an easy choice – what I’d failed to do was compare the two sets of players. I already knew how good the set of lads were at Plymouth but I didn’t know what I was inheriting at Leicester and I didn’t know how effective I was going to be.
Still, I’d left myself with no other option than to take the job on, which I was happy to do because it was a massive opportunity at a club with massive potential – the chance I’d been waiting for, but I made a lot of mistakes in the way I’d left Plymouth. I should have made a statement in one of the Plymouth papers stating my side of the story and some of the reasons behind my departure, but I didn’t, so whatever propaganda the club wanted to put out went unopposed. I suppose the supporters wouldn’t know any different, though I would have found it hard to say exactly why I’d left. If I had, I’d have told the fans that I believe in rewarding good workers when they’ve done a good job. Sharing out the profits, saying thanks and recognising their individual effort for the team because I think that inspires people, providing you get the balance right. That just wasn’t happening and in fact it was quite the opposite – there was almost a crowing of how great the deals were we’d been involved with because we’d signed good players on the cheap – and I saw the effect of that on the training ground. The lads had had enough and were getting fed up of it and what might have initially been used as a positive was turning to resentment. We should have used the money we got from Akos and used it in a constructive way – re-sign your assets, give your car a re-spray or at least a polish – don’t let it stand there gathering rust.
I felt I had a solid understanding of what Plymouth needed but knew it was never going to happen and that was the most frustrating thing of all. Maybe the board were listening to me but didn’t want to hear it, or maybe they were doing what they could – I don’t know – but if my aims and hopes were unrealistic, I’d have said that at the beginning. I was told that the club had always improved and they were going to improve again – what wasn’t taken into consideration was the way the game was going to go, wages wise, from that time to this. I didn’t want another case of “Ian’s taken us as far as he can with us in charge,” which is what happened at Bristol Rovers. I’d already had my heart broken once at a club that I loved and now I could see exactly the same thing happening right in front of my eyes and I wouldn’t have been up for that challenge.
Plus I never really thought I’d have a relationship with the chairman like the one he had with Paul Sturrock – no matter what I did, I’d never measure up to that. The chairman would always have a chat with Sturrock to see what he thought about and this and that and check over things with him first and lo and behold, two days after I’d left, guess who was back in charge at Home Park?
I think right at the very end, when they thought they might lose me as their manager the whole thinking of the club did change. I had a long conversation with one of the directors who I always had a lot of time for, Tony Raffle. He wanted to spend his money and wanted to give it to Argyle because he and his wife were mad about the club but the others didn’t want to match him badly enough, I believe.
There is one thing that really sticks in my craw – and I wasn’t sure I wanted to reveal it in this book, but after some of the things that have been written and said about me and how I was perceived to be, I think it’s worth saying.
It was after a game at Home Park,
which we’d won and somebody came up to me in the boardroom and said, “We’ve won, we’ve won!” I smiled and said “Yeah I know, good result, eh?” But they weren’t talking about the football – apparently the chairman had won the matchday lottery – about £900 – and I was told he was going to buy a dog with the money. I just laughed it off as a joke – but they actually did buy a dog with that money. Why couldn’t that money have gone to some of the punters who’d written in saying they wanted to support Argyle and come to the club but couldn’t because they had families to feed or were out of work? The chairman could have bought three or four season tickets with that money and given them out to a family but instead he bought a little Yorkshire terrier called Winnie. I spoke to Kim about it and she thought I was joking. I asked later why he’d not put it back into the club somehow – maybe put the money behind the bar to buy all the fans in the social club a drink or something but I was told that the chairman’s money was as good as anyone else’s but if he needs £900, then there’s something very wrong in my opinion. His penny-pinching ways bothered me greatly because I’m the sort of person who gets a lot more pleasure from giving than receiving so it started to offend me. He was always on about saving money here or how much we were spending there and in the end I just told him to shut up and asked if he realised he did it all the time – and I don’t think he did! There were a lot of good things about our relationship but there had been a lot of things that had been intrinsically wrong. Now I had to see how I got on with a totally different chairman – I’d made a new bed for myself, now it was time to see if I could actually lie in it.
Chapter 29: Not Into Milan?