Authors: Michael Calvin
‘I’ve had experiences that you wouldn’t believe. People don’t understand. Imagine yourself in this position: a man in his prime at twenty-seven years old gets told by a surgeon that it’s all over, finished. I was at the height of my career at Tottenham, well I should have been, but because of the injuries I was struggling. The surgeon says he is prepared to perform an operation, but it’s never been done on a professional sportsman before. He doesn’t know if it’s going to work. People like him helped save me from the depths of despair.
‘It was 1997. My contract at Spurs was coming to the end. My agent was trying to negotiate a new contract with Alan Sugar, who is never the easiest person to deal with, and we couldn’t agree a deal. I had a couple of clubs abroad interested in seeing me, but I went back to Spurs at the beginning of pre-season believing we’d get the contract sorted. After a week we go to Norway. In the first game I sustained this horrific knee injury. My foot basically got stuck in the ground and my cartilage severed in three.
‘The surgeon said to me, “we either whip the whole thing out and you’ll be done in eighteen months to two years, or I take one part of it out and staple the other bits back together and save a vast chunk of your cartilage. I know it’ll work on an everyday person, but I ain’t sure it will work on a sportsman. It could be all over anyway.” Imagine being confronted by that. You can see why players get depressed. I was in a dark place, I’ve got to say. I was in a very, very dark place.’
Austin learned that, in football, even the bad times are good. He sustained his playing career at Palace, where his natural leadership qualities came to the fore as club captain. When the club entered administration in 1999, he liaised with corporate recovery specialists and acted as a spokesman for a dressing room which contained fretful family men. Lives were put on hold; players were up for sale, contracts could not be fulfilled and 46 staff were sacked. Austin survived to see the funny side of one of the most bizarre missionary exercises undertaken by any British football club, a two-week trip to provincial China:
‘Anyone who earned over sixty grand a year had to take a sixty per cent wage deferral. Eight of us did so. We all had kids, the club had no dough, and then they told us we were off to China. Virgin sponsored the trip, and they upgraded the eight players who took the hit on their money. Fourteen hours to Shanghai, and the boys are lording it. We’ve got the old beds out. The champagne is coming round and the sleep suits are on. It was absolutely the bees’ knees, but when we got there, oh my. Shanghai was unbelievably humid, playing in the Olympic stadium in Beijing was weird, but the last place we went to, Daqing, was unreal. It was about a hundred and eighty miles from Siberia, and to get there we got on this internal flight that was simply horrendous.
‘I’m sitting there, next to the window, and this old woman just cleared her throat and spat on the floor. It was just like, oh my God! Did I just see what I thought I saw? There are chickens in the aisle and a kid in front of me with no nappy, and a huge hole in the back of his trousers. I’m praying he doesn’t have the problems some of the boys are having, because the food is kicking in. The only one of us who didn’t mind it was Lee Bradbury. That was because he had been in the army and he was used to eating anything and everything to survive. Everyone else was like, no.
‘We got this minibus from the airport. It took about two hours to get to the hotel, and you know you’re in trouble when your itinerary says “local best”. Basically, it was the Chinese Table Tennis Institute. The rooms stank. There were fag burns on the bed, stains on the carpet, all sorts. When we walked down the corridor we saw this guy, obviously a coach, with a kid who couldn’t have been more than five or six. He looked like a little Buddha, with that little skinhead haircut. I’ve never seen a table tennis ball fly like it did over this table. The boys stood there, three or four of us. We were just in awe of this kid. The young lads were coming out of their rooms, and going “Skip, this is unbelievable.”
‘They told us tea would be at four. Well, we went down, and they brought out this part-cooked chicken still with the head on it. I said, “fuck this, this is enough.” I went over to Steve Coppell and the administrator and said, “gaffer, we cannot stay here. This is below human standards and the boys ain’t having it. We ain’t staying here, I’ll tell you now.” Steve’s telling me to calm down and I’m like, “No gaffer, there’s trips and there’s trips. This is a fucking hole. We ain’t staying here so you’d best find out where we can stay.” About two hours later he came to me and offered a deal.
‘The stadium was just across the way. We’d play the game against this select Chinese eleven the following day, but no one would play for more than a half. It was like a hundred and twenty-five degrees on the pitch, silly humidity, no wind, nothing. Then we all piled on the minibus and got out of Dodge. It was unbelievable. I’d met my wife about six months before I went out there. When I was away, she went to Ayia Napa with her mates. I was away fifteen days and she was away fourteen days. I got on the scales and I’d lost sixteen pounds. She got on the scales and she’d put on fifteen!’
His laughter was spontaneous, prolonged and infectious. ‘You miss stuff like that,’ he reflected, needlessly. Football’s fatal attraction might not have been enough to keep Rowley and Burton occupied for more than 70 minutes that night, but Austin gladly succumbed to it. It was a life choice, a life force. He used a coffee shop near his home as an office, nursing a phone, a laptop and a succession of skinny lattes. Leads were followed up, brains were picked, favours were granted and accepted.
He covered 23 games in August and in September it seemed his background work had paid off. A chairman called, and confided he was mindful of sacking his manager. He promised Austin a place on the shortlist for his successor, and asked for his help in sourcing a striker on loan. The manager was duly discarded, Austin’s recruit scored on his debut, and the club appointed an internal candidate to save money. It was a casual betrayal, typical of its kind, excused by the cruel conformity of an apologetic phone call. Austin sought solace from peer recognition:
‘This guy comes up to me in Warwick, at the uni, and asks who had impressed me on the course. There wasn’t anyone in particular, but I wanted to be diplomatic so I just said sometimes you don’t see people for what they are in that environment. They might be holding a bit back, or they might not be as confident in a group as they are in familiar surroundings. Take Lee Bradbury. I played with him at Palace from 1998 to 2000 and coached him at Southend in 2006. If anyone had said to me that he’d be a manager, I wouldn’t have seen it. But he’s had a go, and he’s done allright at Bournemouth.
‘Anyway, this guy says to me, “I’ve watched you, and I’ve spoken to three people on this course. I’ve asked them who out of this group of sixteen, eighteen people would go on and become a top manager. They’ve all said you. You’re a bit different. You’ve got something about you, a drive, a determination. The way you conduct yourself stands out.” They were kind words. It was a really nice thing to say, and he didn’t need to say it.
‘I actually believe that I will get an opportunity, because I believe in myself. If I allow myself to be convinced that the situation is hopeless, because the system is seriously flawed, then I’ll never get an opportunity. It only takes me to meet one person, one chairman, one potential benefactor. I may sit down with him, and discover he thinks along the same lines. We may share ideas. He may be impressed by how I talk and by what I say. That’s all you need, a little opening to persuade people to give you a chance. It’s a brutal game, absolutely brutal, but I believe good things happen to good people. You’ve got to keep going, you’ve got to keep fighting, and scrapping through.’
Austin’s hunger was insidious. He had worked at every level in football, from Watford’s Under 13s, through non-league management at Farnborough, and a range of senior coaching and recruitment roles at developmental and first team level, yet the game was being reshaped by fear, penury and expedience. His application to manage Coventry was ignored, and he was unsurprised to learn, through a friendly agent, that nearly half of 55 supposedly serious candidates seeking to return to the game had offered to work for nothing. He was back on the chain gang, and headed for Barnet.
The NextGen series was going from strength to strength in the autumn of 2012, much to the horror of UEFA who, with characteristic cynicism, hastily unveiled plans to launch a rival competition, run on near identical lines, in the 2013–14 season. Arsenal, coached by Burton, were playing the previous season’s beaten semi-finalists, Marseille. It was sufficiently intriguing to attract Wenger and Ivan Gazidis, his ascetic American chief executive, to the front row of the stand. It had been a wet evening, but as kick-off approached the rain stopped, and back-lit clouds sped across the suburban skyline.
The scouts’ seating section was delineated by yellow tape, as if it were a crime scene. The usual suspects had turned out: Austin, Allan Gemmell and I squeezed into a row containing Steve McCall, from Ipswich, Brian Talbot, from Fulham, Jason Halsey, from Brighton and Phil Chappell, from Charlton. Ted Buxton, the Duke, sat on the end, interpreting individual patterns of play in what appeared to be a schoolboy’s notebook. Mel Johnson had gone native, and sat amongst the fans, one of whom, a lady of indeterminate age, indulged in a solitary, monotone chant of ‘we love you Arsenal’.
Ibrahima Sy, the Marseille goalkeeper, was rather more entertaining. He had the sangfroid of a man whose shorts were on fire, and the random movements of a mouse, attempting to evade the clutches of a tom cat. He treated his penalty area as if it were radioactive. Austin released the frustrations of a difficult journey from Warwick – the M1 roadworks in the Milton Keynes area were becoming the bane of his life – by yelling ‘Bomb scare!’ when Sy bounded out of the box on a particularly clueless rescue mission.
Gemmell permitted himself a rather more restrained ‘oh, my God’. It was a phrase with which he had become familiar during a turbulent period at Nottingham Forest, after the Al-Hasawi family had purchased the club from the estate of the late Nigel Doughty, Forest’s former benefactor and chairman. Omar Al-Hasawi, regarded as a frontman for his cousin Fawaz, set the tone by sacking Steve Cotterill, and suggesting the Kuwaiti owners would oversee recruitment policy, with a special emphasis on the Gulf.
Three Kuwaiti players were parachuted in for a month-long trial which ended when they were refused work permits. Khalid Al-Rashidi was a tolerable third string goalkeeper in the extended squad of a Championship club. Defender Hussain Fadhel and Bader Al-Mutawa, a second striker who was supposedly the best Kuwaiti player of his generation, would have struggled to make it in the Conference North. The owners’ ostentatious announcement of a ‘three-to-five-year’ strategy missed the point. Forest’s needs were immediate and acute.
‘Two weeks before the season started we had no manager and no players,’ Gemmell recalled with unconvincing insouciance. ‘The owner was persuaded to interview Sean O’Driscoll, because he knew the setup inside out. The owner asked the players about him, and away we went. We had a few deals lined up, but it was a case of having two eyeballs, two earholes, and getting out there. Everyone knows everyone’s business in football, and some of the calls have been interesting.
‘Paul Sturrock phoned from Southend, asking if we were going to take Kane Ferdinand. We were strong on him, liked him a lot, but decided to pass. They had a tax bill to pay, and needed to sell him to pay the wages. That’s what it is like in football, financially at the moment. I guarantee at least fifty per cent of Championship clubs are up for sale. Everyone’s overspent. I’m not sure where all this is going.’
Nevertheless, 14 players arrived on ‘a conveyor belt’. O’Driscoll had been employed for his acumen as a coach, and played a marginal role in the recruitment process. As Gemmell, whose protégé Jamaal Lascelles signed a new four-year contract after attracting interest from Manchester City, explained: ‘All Sean has to do is shake hands with the players, and get them out on to the training field.’
Gemmell, like many around us, was impressed by Serge Gnabry, a German clone of Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain. Arsenal won with ease, 3–0, but could easily have doubled the score, given the paucity of the French resistance. Chuba Akpom, an England Under 19 striker who would sign his first professional contract on his 17th birthday in October, scored twice. He led the line intelligently, held the ball up well, and linked play thoughtfully. Wenger praised his ‘personality and quality’. Akpom was diligent and responsive, a model student in football terms, but the noises off were worrying. The cultural problems, to which Brady referred, resurfaced when Pat Holland lasted only six weeks as coach of Arsenal’s Under 18 squad. He was popular, admired by his peers, and was quickly reintegrated into Rowley’s scouting team, but the brevity of his tenure as a coach was ominous. Holland had been disrespected by a strong-willed group of young players, who resented his disciplinarian approach. The honest pro took on the hoodie generation, and lost. Austin was not particularly close to Holland, but, like many, was appalled:
‘When you are a professional sportsman, especially at a higher level, people think money is a substitute for everything, and it’s not. The money I was on as a player wasn’t bad, but it is not like these boys now. One year and they’ll never need to work again. I’ve realised in the last eighteen months that I’m fortunate I’ve got a real good family around me. I’ve got four kids, three young ones with my current wife and my eldest boy, who is eighteen. I lost a bit of perspective on life. Because you throw yourself into this game so readily, you forget the things that are really important to you.’
Gemmell, too, had long-term plans. Scouting had changed, irreversibly, in the 37 years since his career had begun by watching Windsor and Eton play Aylesbury as a favour to his brother-in-law Peter Taylor, Dartford manager at the time. Gemmell intended to base himself in Vilamoura on the Algarve, to search for undervalued talent in Spain and Portugal. ‘It’s only a hundred and fifty kilometres from Lisbon, and a lot of Portuguese clubs don’t pay their players,’ he reasoned. ‘When they go three months without being paid, they become free agents. That’s when we can dive in.’