The Second Half (22 page)

No – the lesson was that I had to focus on my staff, to make sure that they were okay. The staff need to feel wanted.

The sports psychology is useful, but in moderation. The lad who went to the World Cup with the England team, Dr Steve Peters, has written a book called
The Chimp Paradox
, about the chimp in your head. The chimp is running the show. I tried to read it – I’m open-minded – but my chimp wouldn’t let me.

Everton came to the Stadium of Light. We were poor, and they beat us, 1–0. We had Chelsea the week after – the same result.

The disappointments are remembered more than the highs. They’re what spur you on, because they hurt. I enjoyed the victories, but took them with a pinch of salt. Especially in the Premiership, you’re always going, ‘God, look who we’ve got next week.’

Then it changed.

The stats were telling us we were going down.

But we went to Villa Park, and won – our first away win. West Ham came to us – we beat them. Andy Reid’s goal, a volley in the ninety-fifth minute, made it 2–1. In front of 46,000 people – it was unbelievable. It was the sixth goal we’d scored in stoppage time.

We went away to Spain for three or four days just after that win and got a bit of sun on our backs. Imagine if we’d gone after being beaten? The weather up in the North East is bleak. On a good day the wind is sixty miles an hour. Away for a few days we could mix training up a bit, the lads could get the sun, they could sit out in the evenings. At this stage of the season you’re looking around at the other teams struggling – you’re playing with your minds, recharging the batteries. It’s the same training – same boots, same balls, same bibs, same kit man – but you’re changing the scenery. The justification comes if you come back and get a few results.

We came back, went to Fulham and beat them, 3–1. It was a comfortable victory. We played well.

As a manager I was enjoying the chats with other managers after the games. Not so much enjoying what was being said, but picking up on their vibes and listening out for a little snippet of wisdom. I’d be thinking, ‘What makes this club work?’, or ‘What are the staff like?’ So I went up to see Roy Hodgson, the Fulham manager, and his assistant, Ray Lewington. It was like the scene in Steve Cotterill’s office at Burnley the year before, but without the humour. Steve had turned his disappointment into a joke, but this was different. They were all going, ‘We’re fucked, we’re fucked.’

It was embarrassing. I had my Diet Coke and one of those little sausages, and we left. I remember thinking, ‘My goodness, they
are
fucked.’

But they stayed up. Roy got the Liverpool job, and now he’s managing England.

We’d got nine points from three games. We’d identified these games as ones to bring up our points average. Chops and Kenwyne scored two each in those three games, and they came at the right time. Those couple of weeks, late March into early April, kept us up.

Manchester City came and beat us. They fluked it in the last minute. I got stick after the Newcastle game, away; they beat us 2–0. I think it was the only time that season when the fans got on my back a little bit. I’d played three in midfield, although it wasn’t with a sitting midfielder. It was more an attacking formation. I played Andy Reid off the front, but I didn’t play two out-and-out strikers. I know what derbies mean to the fans, and I think they felt the formation was negative. It wasn’t, but every time you lose a football match you’ve got your tactics wrong. And we were a goal down after four minutes – a Michael Owen header. There were mind games going on before the match. The police got us there three hours before kick-off – players get bored, testosterone levels are high; it’s too long to wait. Jonny and Phil Bardsley were injured, so didn’t play. They were a big loss.

The next game was the other derby, Middlesbrough, at home. It was a brilliant game. We went behind after four minutes, Danny Higginbotham equalised two minutes later, Chops put us ahead just before half-time; Craig made some great saves, but they equalised; I put Daryl Murphy on as a sub and he scored the winner in the last minute – another late goal – a header from Grant Leadbitter’s corner. This time our attitude – ‘Let’s go for it’ – got us the result. That win kept us up. We were staying in the Premiership, with two games to spare. That win summed up our season, in a sense – it was hard going, we scraped through, the lads stuck at it, we got a late goal. We survived.

I wanted to beat Bolton in the next game, and help get them
relegated. I was thinking ahead to the next season. I didn’t want to be playing Bolton again. I thought they had the strengths to cause us more problems than some of the other clubs around us. They beat us, and stayed up.

Arsenal came to us for the last game of the season. We’d a bucket of chances but they beat us.

Overall, it had been stressful and tough going; there’d been a bit of violence, and wheeling and dealing, but we achieved what we’d set out to do. In the two years, we’d got promoted and we’d stayed up.

Job done.

I wanted to leave my mark at Sunderland, but I don’t think I quite did. I did okay but it wasn’t good enough for me. We were promoted, and we averaged a point per game in the Premiership, which – on paper – a lot of managers would take. But I wanted more. We – I – could have done better.

NINE

I have my days when I still analyse those results. But that’s the manager’s life.

We’d survived and I should have been thinking about surviving the next season, just a bit better. That was my big mistake: I decided we’d make it into the top eight. It was mad. We’d just finished three points, and three places, above the bottom three. Our next challenge should have been to finish six or seven places off the bottom. But I thought, because we’d survived, we’d be a lot better and a lot wiser – and we’d shoot up the table.

It takes four or five years to establish yourself in the Premiership. Teams that have a brilliant first season often drop in the second. Don’t overextend yourself. Let your players and fans know: staying up for the next couple of years is the achievement; we’re creating something.

We’d survived, but I ended up thinking about the games we’d let go. I started adding points to our total. ‘Well, they’ll be a gimme next year. We’ll get those points and we’ll be in the top half of the table.’ I forgot about the games we’d nicked in the last minute, and mightn’t win next year. No – we’d beat the same teams again and get closer to the teams we hadn’t beaten.

I wasn’t shouting it from the rooftops. But I was thinking it.
And it was fuckin’ madness. I should have been reminding myself that, a couple of years earlier, we’d been heading to League One.

We’d buy players. There was a new owner coming in, to take us to a new level. The jargon’s there – ‘a new level’; we’d seen it happen at other clubs. More money would get me better players.

I got Pascal Chimbonda, Teemu Tainio, and Steed Malbranque – all from Spurs. I brought in El Hadji Diouf, from Bolton; Djibril Cissé, on loan from Marseille; David Healy, from Fulham; Anton Ferdinand, from West Ham; and George McCartney – we signed him back from West Ham.

When I started at Sunderland the recruitment of players had been frantic, because we’d only a few days. And, really, every one of them had done well. But the group of players I brought in at the start of the ’08–’09 season didn’t work out. I’d brought in David Meyler earlier, and he did well, and Cissé was decent, but he was on loan. None of the others gave us real value for money.

For a club like Sunderland you need certain characters. Players I’d brought in previously – Danny Higginbotham, Paul McShane – mightn’t have had the talents of the new recruits. But they had better attitudes. I wouldn’t go as far as to say that the new players had bad attitudes, but they just weren’t right for Sunderland. They didn’t plug into what we were about, the training, the area, the conditions, the demands.

George Graham made the point: if you’re signing a player he has to see it as a step up. Or else he’ll feel that he’s doing you a favour. The lads from Spurs, in particular, left me with the impression that they thought they were doing me a favour. Previously, I’d been signing players who saw coming to Sunderland as a challenge. But the new signings – they weren’t a disaster, but they weren’t the hungriest group of players. And maybe that had an effect on the group we already had.

In their defence, I brought too many in, too soon. Previously,
I’d already known most of the players I’d brought in. Now, with the new lads, I expected much more, and that was unfair on them, and unrealistic. I thought, ‘Well, you’re better than what I’ve got, so we’ll be finishing in the top ten.’

What had been good enough last year wasn’t going to be good enough this year. Instead of eight or nine new players, I should have concentrated on bringing in two or three really good-quality players – two or three good characters. But the problem there was, the
real
quality players still weren’t available to Sunderland.

We tried to buy Jonny Evans. We offered United twelve million for him, and David Gill, their chief executive, was laughing at me.

‘You’re wasting your time.’

He’d got fed up with Niall increasing the offer – eight, nine, ten, up to twelve. We weren’t going to get Jonny. He’d have been worth every penny.

But bringing in so many players – it was too much. I can see that now, and I’m annoyed with myself for seeing it now. We already had some decent players, so it should have been about more quality, not quantity.

I’d always have doubts about the players I’m signing. If I was signing Messi today, I’d be going, ‘I hope he settles into the area. I hope he likes Sunderland and the dark nights.’ Because you just don’t know – there’s never a guarantee. You might sign a player and think, ‘He’s the deal’, but there’s always a chance that he can get injured. Every club has signed a striker who hasn’t delivered the goals.

Pre-season, we were playing in a mini-tournament in Portugal and we conceded a goal in a match, in Faro. I was disappointed. It was a free-kick from thirty yards. I questioned why Craig Gordon had needed a wall.

The next day, I challenged a few players to beat me from thirty
yards. I put the gloves on and I said that if they could get the ball past me I’d give them a thousand pounds each but, if they missed, they’d have to give me a hundred. Eight or nine players lined up, and I knew that Craig and the other goalkeepers were pissed off with it. They didn’t even look at my goalkeeping skills. They just did their stretches. I tipped a few on to the bar, on to the post, and I kept a clean sheet. I won eight hundred quid off the players – I could have lost eight grand. I was trying to generate a bit of banter, but I’d embarrassed, and maybe belittled, the goalkeepers. I hadn’t meant to. But I didn’t think the keeper should be beaten from twenty-five or thirty yards. I think I lost Craig for a few weeks, and maybe longer, because of that.

We lost the first game to Liverpool – always a tough one. Then we’d a brilliant win at Tottenham. Kieran Richardson and Cissé scored for us.

We were going for a walk the morning of the game, in London. It was about eleven o’clock. We were all waiting – no sign of Chimbonda.

He turned up a quarter of an hour late.

I told him, ‘You’re a fuckin’ joke. Late for a walk.’

He was all, ‘What’s up, man’, very relaxed about it, not apologetic. It seemed his time was more important than ours. He was new to the club and he was sending messages, the wrong ones, straightaway. It was eleven o’clock; it wasn’t six in the morning. If he’d been a bit apologetic, my response would have been different.

I’d had him in the team for the afternoon, but I dropped him. He wasn’t even on the bench. We won, 2–1. After the match, everyone’s buzzing in the dressing room, and Chimbonda’s right in the middle of them, jumping around. And I’m looking at him, going, ‘You fucker, you can’t even let me enjoy the win.’

Instead of sitting there, going, ‘I can’t believe I was late. One
of our first games – I could’ve cost the team’, he was jumping around with everybody. That irritated me as much as the fact that he’d been late earlier. It was a sign of things to come.

Manchester City beat us 3–0, at home – a bad result. We drew away to Wigan. But we should have won. We had great chances. Four games, four points. We’d lost our first two home matches, and done well away from home. It was almost the opposite of the season before.

But then we beat Middlesbrough at home – always a big win. Seven points, from five. Then we lost at Villa. They scored from a free-kick. Two players in our wall – they didn’t jump out of the way, but they didn’t stand their ground either. Diouf and Chimbonda.

Michael Chopra came to see me and told me he had issues with gambling. He told me how much he’d lost – and I knew it would have been a lot more than the amount he mentioned. I made a phone call for him to Sporting Chance, and I spoke to Peter Kay, who’d founded the clinic with Tony Adams. Peter had been up to the club before, to talk to the players about the pitfalls – alcohol, gambling, drugs. And we made an arrangement, between Chops, Peter and myself, that Chops would go down to the clinic in Hampshire for a week or so. He was an important player for us, so his absence would have been noticed. Maybe our attitude was wrong, or naïve; we’d send him away for a week and he’d be fixed.

We’d had to start the season without Kenwyne Jones. He got injured in June, in a friendly in Trinidad, against England. He picked up a bad knee injury in an unnecessary collision with bloody David James. So we started the season without our main striker, because of an injury he picked up in a poxy friendly – not at the end of the season, but halfway through the summer. For politics. The FA thought that Jack Warner, the FIFA vice-president,
would give them his vote in their World Cup bid if they agreed to the game. We lost Kenwyne and Warner didn’t even give the FA the vote. He rang me the next season to tell me that Kenwyne was in the Trinidad squad. Kenwyne was still injured, nowhere near ready to play. Warner didn’t know, and he didn’t care. He told me how important he was, and that he objected to my tone. That was when I called him a clown. And more than a clown.

Dwight Yorke was probably my best signing. He was a big character, and good on the training pitch. At the end of our first season in the Premiership his contract was up. He’d got us promoted and he’d helped keep us up. But I released him.

I said, ‘Yorkie – you know— There’s no deal for you.’

So he went. But towards the end of the summer it looked like we weren’t going to get many deals done. So I phoned and asked him if he fancied another year. We agreed that he wouldn’t be playing any more internationals; he was thirty-five at this stage. He came back, having been told that he wasn’t needed any more. But he got over that. I think he knew what I’d been thinking, that I was looking for younger players, with a bit more legs and energy.

But he decided to play again for Trinidad. We disagreed about that, but it wasn’t heated – no swearing or not speaking to each other.

I said, ‘I can’t believe you’re going back playing. You’re thirty-four or five.’

He explained that there was some kind of financial incentive involved. That didn’t please me either. I just felt he wasn’t concentrating. He took his eye off the ball once or twice, and I left him on the bench, with one or two other experienced players. We played Northampton at home, in the League Cup. We were 2–0 down – this was one of the times when I was going mad. But we scored two goals in injury time and, eventually, we won on penalties.

I didn’t play Yorkie that night, and he stood at the end of the tunnel during the penalties. Normally, the players on the bench group together while the penalties are being taken, but Yorkie took no interest in it. That irritated me. I left him out for one or two games. His attitude disappointed me a little bit. My plan had been to bring him back. But I just felt he could have given us a bit more, when we were under the cosh. I suppose Yorkie’s argument would be that he’d been bombed out; he was out of the first-team plans. I’d made him train with the reserves for a week or two. He probably felt he deserved a bit better. Maybe I should have pulled him aside and said, ‘Yorkie, come on – pull your finger out.’

What you quickly learn as a manager is you need the players more than they need you.

You make your own luck. But you still need a few breaks.

Into October, we’re beating Arsenal, 1–0, at the Stadium of Light. We’re into injury time, and they equalise. Fàbregas scores with a header, from a corner.

It was a turning point in my career. We’d had a mixed start. If we’d beaten them, it would have been brilliant – the injection we needed, a big win against a big team. We went to Fulham. Kieran Richardson scored from a free-kick, but the referee disallowed it. He said it was because somebody was pushing in the wall. It was Chimbonda. He shouldn’t have been in the fuckin’ wall. It was our free-kick. Kieran had another free-kick that hit the woodwork three times. It came off the bar, hit the post, rolled across and hit the other post. If we’d won those two games, we would have been fifth or sixth in the league.

I have my days when I still analyse those results. But that’s the manager’s life.

*

Ellis Short, the man who was going to take over the club, had arrived. He came in on a horse. He hadn’t come on board when we bought the new players; he’d been in the process of becoming the major shareholder.

I was in the last year of my contract. There’d been talks in the background between Niall and Michael Kennedy, but nothing had fallen into place yet. Part of me was thinking, with the new man there, ‘We’ll see how it goes.’

Ellis Short was more hands-on. There were more phone calls than previously. I got used to that. But I don’t think he knew much about football. He’d drop me the odd text –
You’re playing the Gunners, man, you’ve gotta beat them
. And he rang me a few times at the training ground. He’d ask me about players, and why certain players weren’t playing. He asked me about dropping Chimbonda, and how I was going to handle it. This was new. I’d had casual chats with Niall, about, say, when a player was coming back from injury, and players we were after – normal football chat. But I’d been left to run the team. Previously, with the consortium, meetings had been quite informal. They were clever with it, but I never felt they were questioning me. But Ellis Short’s calls – I resented them a bit.

I was naïve, too. I’d say things like, ‘We should finish eighth.’ In reality, a great target would have been fourteenth. Maybe a key to success in the Premiership is to drop your expectations. Survival is the first goal. It’s one of the things that soured the relationship between myself and the new owner. I told him, ‘Yeah, yeah, we’re going places.’ Then, when we picked up a few injuries and results weren’t going our way, he can’t have been pleased.

After we beat Newcastle in our next game, we had twelve points from nine games. And it was the first time we’d beaten Newcastle at home in thirty-odd years. It was electric – the
tension. Cissé scored, and Kieran. The level of player we had now had gone up since I’d come to the club. We played really well. I think it was my happiest day at Sunderland.

So the loss at Stoke, midweek, was frustrating. It would have been a real sign of progress, grinding out a result, even a point, at Stoke. Could we come down from the high of Newcastle? No, we couldn’t.