Be Careful What You Wish For (20 page)

I was determined to get the club right and the way I wanted it. I had said I would get the club up and straight and in the Premier League in five years and I would damn well do it.

Birmingham eventually made an offer for Morrison in the summer of 2002. To my considerable disappointment, they had been promoted through the play-offs. Needless to say I was expecting the £5 million we had discussed earlier.

What I got was an offer of £2 million. The ITV Digital crisis was biting. As they left the Football League, Birmingham were seeking to take advantage of clubs with big holes in their cash flow.

I knew Bruce wanted Morrison, so I reminded Karren Brady she had agreed to pay a certain figure. She responded, ‘Times have changed.’ The Morrison deal went round and round in circles. But just as the pre-season started and the players returned to training we had got the offer up to £3.5 million. We also had factored in a player to come from them to sweeten the deal.

I spoke to Trevor about what players from Birmingham he might be interested in and he mentioned Martin Grainger and Curtis Woodhouse. As we were losing a forward, I mentioned Andrew Johnson, a young striker they had on their books. He was quick. I had seen him in the League Cup Final for Birmingham against
Liverpool
and I thought he would do well for us in the Football League.

Trevor reluctantly agreed, with a parting shot saying that Johnson ‘only goes one way’, which I thought was amusing as the same had been said of Trevor when he was a player. If Johnson was half the footballer Trevor Francis had been, he would be some player and, given that Trevor was the first million-pound player, who knows? If we ever sold Johnson we might get nearly £10 million in today’s market place!

Trevor has always liked it to be reported that he chose Andy Johnson, so there you go, Trev. With his glowing endorsement of Johnson it made me take him as part of the Morrison deal.

As it turned out I got a young man who went on to be a fabulous player for Palace. He restored your faith in players because he was such a decent young man who epitomised all the good things in sport. Hard work, decency, honesty and ability, oh yes, AJ was very special.

Unlike Ade Akinbiyi, or Akinbadbuy as he was now known.

He was injured and I sent him to America to the world’s leading knee surgeon, Richard Steadman, as he had a major problem with his knee which was to keep him out for six months whilst I was paying him £16,000 a week.

For a change, during the summer of 2003 we added some new players to the squad. We brought in Curtis Fleming from Middlesbrough at right back, Danny Butterfield from Grimsby, Darren Powell from Brentford and Shaun Derry from Portsmouth. Shaun was to become one of my favourite players during my ownership of Palace. We also signed a goalkeeper from Lens, Cédric Berthelin, as well as adding Dele Adebola to our attacking options. We looked as if we had a nicely balanced squad and again the ambition was promotion to the Premier League.

Unfortunately, we lost David Hopkin. He was suffering from a very serious ankle injury and should never have passed a medical in the first place.

I had to write off the £1.5 million I had paid sixteen months ago and pay him over a million pounds to leave. Hopkin was intransigent: despite not being fit he wanted two years’ money and I only got him to make a small concession. It was disappointing that a player the Palace fans considered a hero, who had made vast amounts of money from moves from Palace and back, would not be fair given the circumstances, but that’s the modern-day footballer for you.

Our pre-season was OK, and despite my concerns about the Francis, Kember and Bullivant triumvirate I was optimistic approaching this season.

Our first game was away to Preston, which was always a difficult fixture. Invariably we came away with nothing. The game marked the introduction of two players who were to have big parts in shaping Palace’s future.

Derry scored the winner and AJ went to hospital.

I was first at the hospital, followed by Trevor Francis after the game. Derry’s agent, Phil Graham, who was supposed to be his players’ biggest supporter, was nowhere to been seen, except hanging around Ricardo Fuller, who was just about to sign for Preston and represented his latest pay cheque.

In our second game of the season, something was to happen that would destroy our season, the players’ regard for the manager and strip away the impatient Palace fans’ last real vestiges of support for Trevor Francis.

We played Bradford, and despite us opening the scoring they equalised late in the game.

But Trevor did something inexplicable after they scored. He
‘appeared to’
turn around in the dugout and punch the reserve goalkeeper, the Latvian Alex Kolinko.

It was spotted by the fourth official and Trevor was sent to the stands.

No one knew what had happened as people had been watching the game but I had looked at the bench as I always did and saw Trevor punch the player.

He sat next to me in the stands and was raging, saying that he had slapped Kolinko because he was laughing when the opposition had scored.

This quite frankly was an astounding situation. No one had ever heard of a manager hitting a player in the dugout during the game.

The game finished 1–1 and very quickly it filtered through to me that the police wanted to interview Trevor.

I asked Dominic to go and stall them and went to intercept Trevor, in order to advise him what to say.

He was in the manager’s office and was just about to go and see the police with his hand wrapped in a tea towel with ice inside it, like a boxer after a fight, to take the swelling down.

‘Christ, Trevor, take the ice wrap off your hands, for God’s sake. You go down there with that on and you’re asking for trouble. You told me you slapped him; let’s go with that,’ I said. ‘In fact, go and get changed and leave it to me. I will deal with the police.’

I explained to the police that Trevor had left the stadium and the club would deal with it. The two officers were not happy but as no one had brought any charges they had to go with it.

I phoned Trevor on the way home and told him not to talk to anyone until I had it under control.

The next day the usual protagonists came on justifying their existence. The PFA demanded a meeting and got a flat no because it was club business and I would deal with it. Brendan Batson,
their
deputy chief executive, threatened to come down anyway, so I advised him that if he did I would have him arrested for trespassing. I liked that threat. I had used it successfully on the player Fullerton and was more than happy to use it on the PFA.

I had had enough of the PFA, especially Batson, who as far as I was concerned was supercilious and arrogant in his treatment of me and who had got up my nose on more than one occasion.

Then we had to deal with Phil Graham, Kolinko’s agent.

I called Dominic and Phil Alexander into the room so they could listen and put Graham on speakerphone.

‘Phil. How can I help?’

‘Well, Simon, it is more how I can help you.’ He then proceeded to tell me that if I paid him a £50,000 fee, and paid up the player’s wages for two years – around £500,000 – and gave him a free transfer, thus writing off the £650,000 I had paid for him, he thought he might be able to stop Kolinko pressing charges against Trevor Francis.

Suffice it to say that the call did not bear any fruit for this agent, and after I put the phone down, I expressed my opinions of agents such as Graham clearly, not using particularly eloquent or complimentary language.

What I did was go to the training ground on the Thursday after the Tuesday night game. I asked Trevor to come out of his office and then sent for Kolinko to come and join us.

I decided to walk them around the training ground, away from prying eyes and ears, to try and create a more relaxed atmosphere. This was the first time they had laid eyes on one another since the incident.

Trevor had time to reflect and was regretful, although it was clear that he was also concerned he could be put in the clink by Kolinko.

As we walked I talked, trying to inject some levity into the situation.

Kolinko was visibly upset and I advised him that what had gone on was wrong and Trevor knew it and deeply regretted it.

Trevor chipped in, pleading with Alex not to press charges and ruin his life.

Kolinko was in tears of rage remarking in his broken English that he would kill someone if they laid hands on him.

I had it! The solution! I told Trevor to put his hands behind his back and then told Alex to punch him so we could put this to bed.

All the blood drained out of Trevor’s face. He was not quite believing what I had just suggested as he looked at this giant goalkeeper with mortal trepidation. Kolinko just shook his head remarking again in broken English that he was ‘no happy, but I forget’ and there it was, over and forgotten. And if you believe that you will believe anything!

The issue of Kolinko was put behind us on the surface, but clearly it had affected the team’s morale as we only won one game out of the next ten and were seventeenth in the league. This was relegation form.

Our poor form in the League wasn’t replicated in the League Cup, where we beat Plymouth 2–1, Cheltenham 7–0 and Coventry 3–0, and it appeared to give us some impetus again, very similar to the 2000 season.

We then beat our arch-rivals Brighton 5–0, which sent the Palace fans into euphoria and revived their faith in Trevor. Andy Johnson also set out his stall with a stunning hat trick, with another during the following game against Walsall as we registered four wins out of four.

But the financial climate was biting and the club was haemorrhaging money.

We had lost substantial amounts of money in the first two years, but these had been controlled losses as I had invested heavily into the playing squad and the academy, as well as the stadium and training ground.

But now attendances were down and we had lost £5 million from the ITV Digital deal. This resulted in significant cash calls on me. This was not to advance the club but to stand still.

I decided that we had to get control of our cost base and looked very closely at all areas of expenditure and cost. The investment in our academy proved to be bearing fruit. Where once it had been a disparate environment detached from the first team producing nothing but jugglers, it was now becoming what I had set out for it to be some two and a half years earlier: a disciplined, methodical, inspirational environment producing players that were now legitimate contenders for the first team. Gary Borrowdale, Ben Watson and Wayne Routledge were the first of a crop of players that over the next six years were to see Palace’s academy revered as one of the best in the country.

And we fought relentlessly to keep the academy despite the Premier League wanting academies to be the preserve of their clubs only.

I spent a lot of energy in this area, as I saw it as the saving of my sanity, and worked the oracle to get a sixty by forty indoor surface on metropolitan open land. This required planning permission, which was perceived as impossible to get.

After two years of endless lobbying I got permissions for a temporary indoor surface. Then, after endless meetings and calls to action, we invested in an inflatable dome to fulfil the FA’s ridiculous requirements, one of them being an indoor surface for training in ‘inclement weather’, i.e. rain.

The FA didn’t like it and it is my belief that they were actively
seeking
to remove our academy licence and saw our innovative indoor facility as an opportunity to try and revoke it. Our academy licence had been under threat prior to my purchase of the club. We only had a temporary licence subject to adherence to the final FA requirements, a provision of the indoor environment. I had done it and the rules were silent on the structure and I advised the FA that failure to license us fully would result in the mother of all lawsuits. We got it and I suppose it was one of the few benefits of having a reputation for being forthright.

As I went through the operation, I saw we were carrying costs we didn’t need, and by costs unfortunately I meant staff. I made a number of redundancies and the only area spared was the academy.

I laid off the reserve team manager, Dave Swindlehurst. While the reserves were doing well, we had more than enough personnel to cover that role without needing to employ a specific individual. But as a favour to Steve Kember, who was an old teammate of Swindlehurst’s, I had second thoughts and told him I would bring him back in a different guise with more responsibilities. The one proviso was that he had to keep quiet about it. So what did the idiot do? He told the press he was going to be brought back, which resulted in me following through on my original plan to lay him off.

This was typical of a lot of football people. They had far too much free time on their hands and loved to talk. After money, one of the biggest commodities in football is gossip and they could not keep their mouths shut. By announcing that I was bringing him back it meant it compromised the validity of other redundancies I was being forced financially to make.

So I had no choice. I called him in and told him the news face to face. He reacted very angrily and got almost physical, shouting and screaming at me. He was a big man but sod this, he was in my office so he got it back with both barrels.

He told me I was not a proper Palace man, whatever that is, and that he was Palace through and through.

‘Bullshit,’ I replied. ‘When Palace was in turmoil in 1980, you pissed off to Derby as soon as you could.’

Swindlehurst went muttering and spluttering and I continued to make the savings because I had to apply business sense to running a football club that was financially crippled without my money holding it up.

In December 2002 we played Millwall and for the first time since I bought Palace we beat them 1–0 at home.

I had endured two years of endless ribbing from Paphitis and didn’t even get to gloat after the game because I had to attend a fortieth birthday party in Manchester.