Red Machine

by Simon Hughes

  ‘That experience helped me to evolve into the job I’m in now. Essentially, it’s a scouting role. I go to youth tournaments and it’s my job to identify players and make a decision quickly. The pressure for me is to say, “Yes, this is the boy we should sign.” After that, I negotiate with the player’s current club and his family, then the funding group places an investment in that individual.’

  Players that have come under Hodgson’s radar include Bolivian midfielder Samuel Galindo, now of Arsenal, ‘Everton had a look at him but dithered for too long’, and Juan Manuel Iturbe, a winger regarded as Paraguay’s answer to Lionel Messi.

  ‘We signed all of the agreements and he [Iturbe] was offered to an English club. Unfortunately, he was then asked to play for Argentina [Iturbe was born in Buenos Aires to Paraguayan parents] and this complicated his contract. Originally, we paid $50,000 for his signature, but he’s since moved on to Porto for around £4.2 million.’

  There have been others that Hodgson has missed out on. He liked the look of Fluminense’s Wellington before understanding that the player had already signed for Arsenal. Then there was Ángelo Henríquez, a then 16 year old from Universidad de Chile who had already agreed a deal with Manchester United.

  ‘I think I’m as good as anyone out there – despite the relatively short time I’ve been doing this kind of thing. I had to make quick decisions in the transfer market when I was in management, and I thought I did particularly well. I signed players for nothing and made the club millions.’

  Hodgson cites Jason de Vos, a Canadian defender who had been rejected by three other English clubs before signing for Darlington. ‘We made £450,000 on him,’ Hodgson beams. ‘Others were David Preece, a goalkeeper who was sold for £100,000 to Aberdeen a year after his release from Sunderland, and Neil Heaney – another released by Manchester City before being moved on to Dundee United at a considerable profit.’

  Such talk makes him realise how much he misses management.

  ‘I think about a return most days,’ he sighs. ‘I have a strong moral conscience, and if somebody is wrong and I know they’re wrong, I won’t work for them. That’s the reason why I have resigned on three previous occasions from Darlington. The only thing that is right in football is what is right for the football club itself. Egos shouldn’t come into it, and unfortunately there are a lot of people involved in the game that believe they are bigger than the football club. It’s remarkable how selfish people can be.’

  Hodgson hints towards the present Liverpool as an example.

  ‘It’s sad that, gradually, it seems like the club’s traditions are being eroded. Sacking Kenny Dalglish did not help.’

  Dalglish was the first person to ring Hodgson when he first became Darlington manager in 1995.

  ‘He just said to me, “Fantastic news. I’ll just give you two pieces of advice: 1) Don’t ask the players to do what you could do, because you played at a higher standard; 2) Be lucky.”’

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ARRIVING LATE, John Wark

  THE ADDICTION REMAINED. LONG, LONG AFTER PROFESSIONAL retirement and beyond his 51st birthday, John Wark was turning out for a team in the Licensed Trades Sunday League in deepest Suffolk. The Glaswegian signed for Sophtlogic FC in 2003 after being asked to do a favour by a friend.

  ‘I was working as a personal trainer for this guy, and he had a few bob,’ Wark explains from his home near the unremarkable town of Stowmarket. ‘Part of the deal was that I coached him during the week and played for his business’s team at the weekend. I ended up as manager and took them from the Fifth Division to the Premier Division in successive seasons.’

  Liverpool’s former goalscoring midfielder retired from professional football in 1996, aged 39, while still a Premier League player at Ipswich Town. But he missed the game, the joshing and the beer – ingredients that are as much as part of a dressing-room as Deep Heat.

  ‘It’s inaccurate to say I missed the beer, because really that’s never been away,’ he jokes – adding that soon after obliging with this ‘favour’, his responsibilities on a Sunday morning also involved devising appropriate warm-up routines, physio work, washing heavily soiled kits and organising social gatherings such as Christmas parties.

  ‘We often got changed in car parks and round the back of pubs,’ he continues in a remarkably gentle accent. ‘If we had an easy game, I’d play as a striker and terrorise the opposition defenders. If the opponents were good, I’d sit at the back and try to blag it as a hatchet man. It was just great to be a part of a group again.’

  Sunday League football had its pros and its cons.

  ‘For every person that wanted to join us, there were quite a few that wanted to get one over on us as well. In one of my first games, I was playing up front and headed home a cross to give us the lead. This centre-back comes running in from nowhere and head-butted me. He looked at me and just said, “Oh, sorry – I was a bit late there.”’

  Wark disbanded the team in the summer of 2009.

  ‘We were only getting seven or eight turning up regularly. I was spending Saturday nights calling ringers in.’

  He now considers himself in semi-retirement.

  ‘I’ve been missing it – I can’t deny it,’ he admits. ‘On Sundays, I’m itching for a game. I still look for the same buzz now that I did when I started all those years ago playing parks football in Glasgow. My friends think I’m daft.’

  In his heyday, Wark was one of the few players to achieve just as much if not more at another club as he did at Liverpool. With Bobby Robson’s Ipswich, he won the FA Cup then the UEFA Cup three years later and twice finished runner-up in the league championship. In the first of three spells at Portman Road, he became the 1980–81 PFA Player of the Year – a campaign in which he scored 36 times.

  Upon moving to Anfield for £450,000 in 1984, he immediately helped the Reds to the league title, and the following season outscored even Ian Rush with a tally of 27 goals. Many of them were a result of him arriving late onto a cross. At times, it seemed he had permanent residence on the edge of the opposition box, poised and waiting for the right opportunity to attack.

  ‘John had great timing,’ Bob Paisley observed. ‘You could set your watch by him.’

  Of all the tough men to play for Liverpool over the years, Wark’s appearance perhaps made him seem the toughest. His hedge-thick moustache was of the butch kind – not the pencil-thin lip hair that passed Derek Mountfield off as an off-duty quantity surveyor.

  ‘There were a lot of tough players at Liverpool,’ he insists. ‘When we went onto the pitch to play together, the camaraderie was such that at any given moment – if we had to – we’d die for each other. When I see some of the players now that represent the club – the ones that lack heart – it kills me. Quite a lot of them wouldn’t have even got into my Sunday League team with attitudes like that.’

  Wark admits that he followed a trend by growing a moustache. It meant that he was often mistaken on nights out.

  ‘I was in a pub in Glasgow and this old-timer came up to me. He stopped and stared in my direction before poking me, “You’re that fella off the TV, aren’t ye?” He glared at me for ages. “You were that footballer – played for Scotland and went down south, didn’t ye?” Before I could respond, he disappeared with his pint and a cigarette for a few minutes and I could see him scratching his head. About an hour later, he came back over smiling broadly, and I thought he’d figured it out. “I know you – you’re Graeme Souness.” He was hugging me, shaking my hand, and I didn’t want to disappoint him so just went with it.’

  Wark was born in Partick, Glasgow, in the summer of 1957. He spent his earliest years two streets north of the River Clyde in a four-storey tenement block that backed onto a police station.

  ‘It was really basic,’ Wark recalls. ‘My mum and dad couldn’t afford a cot, so I had to sleep in a drawer. Because the place only had two rooms, my parents slept on a bed settee in an area of the flat that doubled up as the kitc
hen. There was only one window in the place, but we had a premier view for the goings-on down at the cop shop. Quite often, you’d get all of the women from the other houses hanging out their windows trying to find out the latest husband who’d been detained on drunk and disorderly charges. Or sometimes worse.’

  Life was far from easy. While his mother worked as a part-time cleaner in a hospital, his father, like many working-class men in the area, was employed by a shipbuilding firm.

  ‘Mum was an alcoholic. She died at 57 because of it. Her disease caused a lot of heartache within the family. By the time we managed to afford a phone, we’d often receive a call. “Come and get your mum.” Really, it meant, “Your mum’s pissed.” It clearly affected my dad, and he died earlier than he should have too because of the stress.’

  Although the family eventually moved to neighbouring Scotstoun, an area that was slightly more salubrious, Wark became used to the struggles that inner-city kids face.

  ‘We never left Scotland; the furthest I went away on holiday was Ayr and that was only for a day trip. The first time I ventured south of the border was for trials at Manchester City. I didn’t even own a passport until I travelled away with Ipswich in Europe.’

  The Wark family were Protestant, and that meant following Rangers. Later, during his time at Liverpool, he would share a wager with Kenny Dalglish – a Protestant-raised Celtic legend – on the outcome of the Old Firm game.

  ‘It was made very clear to me that Rangers were the team to support in our family,’ he continues. ‘There was no alternative. My uncles went to every single game throughout the ’60s and, more often than not, I went with them. I’d always wear the blue, red and white scarf, and for home games we’d travel across the Clyde on the Govan ferry. The queues were massive, and there must have been thousands of fans boarding the boat. It was a tight squeeze and, because I was so small, I could hardly breathe or see any light in front of me.’

  Wark waited after matches to claim players’ signatures on a tatty notepad.

  ‘John Greig was the captain of the club, and I loved him,’ he recalls. ‘He was a leader, and I tried to play like him during my career later. I also liked Willie Johnston, a nippy winger, as well as Colin Stein, a giant centre-forward who seemed to spend most of his time trying to win the physical battle with the centre-half. Willie was later banned from the Scotland squad that went to the World Cup in 1978 after testing positive for a banned drug. He was a great player, though, and he had an edge. I liked that.’

  Fortunately, Wark wasn’t at the Old Firm game in 1971 when a stairway collapsed at Ibrox, killing 66 supporters and injuring hundreds of others.

  ‘I always thought that the attendance figures given by the club were a wee bit inaccurate, because it was common for kids like me to squeeze in between the turnstile with a paying adult. When we got to the top of the terrace, the kids would get lifted over heads and down to the front where we’d watch the match. It was risky.

  ‘My brother Alex was there when the disaster happened, and we didn’t know whether he was OK because we didn’t even have a phone in our house, never mind a mobile phone. We’d been up and down that stairway hundreds of times, and there was a good chance that he’d have been in that area when it fell through. The fact that he came home unhurt was purely down to luck.’

  Wark says that the only regret in his career is that he didn’t play for Rangers. Instead, at 15, he could have signed for Celtic after being spotted playing for Drumchapel Amateurs, the famous boys’ club that also launched the careers of, amongst many others, Kenny Dalglish, Archie Gemmill, Frank McAvennie, Walter Smith and Alex Ferguson.

  ‘I was pretty thick in school but obsessed with football,’ he concedes. ‘I left education with no qualifications. A lot of the teachers said it would be my failing that I didn’t try harder academically, but because I was so determined to become a footballer I managed to make a career out of it. There were loads of boys where I grew up who were better footballers than me, but they didn’t have the discipline that I had. My brother, Alex, was a professional with St Mirren, and he inspired me to try to go all the way with it.

  ‘I was privileged to play for Drumchapel, because they were the premier boys’ club in Glasgow. You had to be on your best behaviour to play for them. They were big on sportsmanship and not swearing as well as punctuality. The only problem with them was the fact they played in green and white hoops.’

  David Moyes, the father of the current Manchester United manager, was Wark’s first coach.

  ‘Drumchapel was funded by a man called Douglas Smith. He’d become a millionaire through the shipping industry and treated the kids at the club like they were professionals. We’d go for pre-match meals at a restaurant. It made us feel like we were better than all of the other teams, and we won the league year in, year out at a canter.

  ‘David Moyes snr was heavily involved at the club. Young David was about five or six when I was a teenager, and he’d always come to games with his dad and stand on the touchline. It’s quite strange when I see him on the touchline barking orders at players these days. In my eyes, I remember him as a skinny ginger kid. But he’s become a fine manager in his own right – nobody can argue with that.’

  Wark trialled at Celtic for two months, often ‘turning up in a blue tie’, and was offered schoolboy terms, but he instead decided to try out in England before making a decision. After trialling at Man City, he signed for Ipswich after being recommended by the same scout that took George Burley to Portman Road.

  ‘I was ordered to get on the next available train from Glasgow Central. So, with a day’s notice, I left home, my family and friends. I was crying my eyes out, because I genuinely didn’t know whether everything was going to work out.’

  Ipswich manager Bobby Robson was waiting for him at the platform in Ipswich.

  ‘He made me feel like I was his major signing rather than a thick schoolboy from Scotland,’ Wark says. ‘He was very understanding of my situation and realised that I would get homesick. The same thing had happened to him when he left the north-east to play for Fulham in the ’50s as a teenager. So he let me travel back to Glasgow at regular intervals, and gradually I got used to living in Ipswich. When my own dad passed away a few years later, Bobby became my father figure. He took care of me and made sure I wanted for nothing. He offered all kinds of advice, “Save some money, son – put it in your pension.” When I needed somebody throughout my whole life, he was there.’

  Wark’s football career, though, could have been over before it even began.

  ‘After I’d progressed through the youth teams, as a reserve we were asked to travel with the first team to their pre-season training camp. There was a routine whereby one of the senior lads would drive us youngsters, and on one occasion I was in the car with Kevin Beattie and Dale Roberts. As we went down the coastal road, Kevin had difficulty on a bend, and his Opel car spun over. It somersaulted and landed upside down. Bobby [Robson] was in one of the cars behind us, and my first memory after the crash was of him with a worried look on his face shouting for help. He later told me that he thought we’d all died. Luckily, somehow, none of us even had a scratch. The car was written off, but it affected me and it took me another ten years before I decided to learn to drive. Instead, I was always bumming lifts.’

  Having played only a few times for the reserves, Wark was surprisingly called up to the first team for an FA Cup quarter-final third replay against Leeds United in March 1975.

  ‘Kevin Beattie had an injury, and I was way down the pecking order, but everybody else in front of me also had injuries or suspensions. I’d been playing for the youth team in a Youth Cup semi-final against Huddersfield as a midfielder two days before, so the decision by Bobby to play me as a centre-back was a bit of a risk.’

  The replay was held at Leicester City’s Filbert Street.

  ‘When I arrived at the hotel, the phone rang in my room. There was a guy on the line who said he was from a newspaper and wanted t
o chat to me about the prospect of making my debut. Quite soon, I’d given him my whole life story, warts ’n’ all. I think I even told him what I’d eaten for lunch. When I got downstairs, all the lads were laughing and it turned out that the “journalist” was really Eric Gates [the Ipswich forward].’

  Ipswich won the game 3–2 and progressed to the semi-final for the first time in their history. Wark was given a hostile introduction to league football by robust opponents in Leeds, however.

  ‘I was playing against some of my heroes – Scottish internationals like Billy Bremner, Joe Jordan and Eddie Gray – and at first I was a bit starstruck by being on the pitch. Then someone whose name I won’t mention spat in my face and tried to unsettle me. It was disgusting. He realised I was a young boy and thought that he’d shit me right up. Luckily, Allan Hunter was playing centre-back alongside me and saw him do it for a second time. He ran over and threatened to break this fella’s “fucking jaw”. That quietened him down. It taught me a lesson, and years later when I was the experienced pro, I made sure that I protected all the young boys in my team.’

  Ipswich, who appointed Robson as manager in 1969, had improved gradually to the point that, in 1980–81, they won the UEFA Cup, finished runners-up in the league and reached the semi-finals of the FA Cup – all in the same season. Wark insists that Robson should take much of the credit.

  ‘He was an excellent coach and tactically aware, but the way he dealt with players was second to none. He was tough when he needed to be as well. There was a situation before I signed for Ipswich where two of the more experienced players in the dressing-room were causing problems. They were two of the club’s best players, but Bobby didn’t care. He made Mick Mills the captain, and it angered them because he was so young. Bobby came to blows with the two players, then chucked them out of the club soon after. He wouldn’t get very angry too often, but when he blew his top, we knew about it.’