11

DOWN WITH A BUMP

THROUGH THE SUMMER of 2005 I reflected long and hard about being relegated from the Premier League after just one season. We were the architects of our own demise. The Premier League campaign had flown by. It seemed as soon as we were playing our first game away to Norwich with optimism, exuberance and expectation that it was all over.

I was coming to the unwelcome realisation that I was unlikely to get what I really wanted – Palace to be a major force in top-flight football – and I couldn’t indefinitely fund an impossible dream.

Palace had been christened the team of the eighties, not merely through their performance on the pitch, but also because of the size of the crowds. I remember sitting with my dad as a twelve-year-old in 1979 watching them beat Ipswich 4–1 to go to the top of the First Division, which would now be the Premier League, in front of over 40,000 fans. The club had an average of nigh on 37,000 supporters then, but six years later, after Noades had bought them and sold all their assets, barely 6,000 people were watching them.

Over twenty years the lack of investment and the sale of all its best assets to fund the football club and, in my view, its owner, saw the club spurn massive opportunities and eventually work its way backwards from being a team talked about as a potential ‘Man United of the South’ to being a club that just had potential.

Like a lot of ‘potential’ big clubs Palace had a core fan base. In our case, this was around 10,000 season ticket holders. When you looked at clubs like Norwich, Sheffield Wednesday and Leeds, who were not performing as well as us, they had double the amount of season ticket holders. This realisation put things into perspective. Despite the size of our catchment area we would never really have the kind of club that was the bedrock of the community. Chelsea, Liverpool and Manchester United shirts were worn in Croydon’s high street. Damn sure Palace shirts were not worn in Liverpool or Manchester!

One of the ways, besides continual success, which marked a team as a Premier League club, was to build a brand-new stadium, but regardless of what I was prepared to do it was always going to be difficult given we were based in London, where land is at a premium and councils not overly interested in helping. Redevelopment was unfeasible given that Noades would not sell the stadium for a realistic price. The numerous obstacles surrounding Selhurst Park meant it was highly unlikely I could turn it from a 26,000 capacity all-seater stadium to a 35–40,000 capacity purpose-built stadium that could also house all the requisite facilities for ‘secondary spend’ opportunities. Thus the income streams were never really going to improve to the point where we could compete at the top end of football.

Despite all of this and a nagging feeling that I might have had my day in the sun, I decided I couldn’t leave the club or sell it as it was.

When we got promoted I had felt I owed it to myself to stay and now we were relegated I felt I had a moral obligation and a determination to right the injustices of the relegation by standing up and being committed, which is probably what I should have been literally!

At this time it probably became a bit more of a labour rather than a labour of love but I didn’t want to leave tarnished by relegation on my watch. Also, this was Palace’s centenary year, which was a big deal for the club and its fans, and I had the hope of getting back to the Premier League as a landmark for our hundredth year in existence.

With this in mind I gave Iain Dowie unwavering support in order to take us back to the Premier League at the first opportunity.

During the previous season I became very friendly with the actor Nick Moran, he of Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels fame. We met over drinks at the Grosvenor in Easter 2005 and by June he had me funding and producing the West End stage version of a major award-nominated play he had written named Telstar. This involvement led me to my next relationship, with Meg Mathews, who was a guest at the opening party of the play and someone of whom I became extremely fond.

During the summer it was the fortieth birthday of my best friend Mark Ryan, the MD of Phones4u. His wife to be and I organised a week’s partying in my house in Spain to celebrate this landmark occasion and the impending arrival of their first child and my goddaughter, Grace.

It consisted of a fabulous week of about twenty people staying at my house and twenty others in local hotels. I hired a film crew to film a documentary-style diary of the week as we ate in restaurants, went to nightclubs, raced cars on a day up in the mountains of Ronda, sailed my boat around the Med, had a fireworks display in my garden and generally had a bloody good time. Mark had all his family there and Meg joined us on a wonderful week which culminated in a dinner party held at the swish Mansion House club, which was part owned by my friends the Dalli Brothers, where we drank and ate our way through £25,000 worth of food and wine.

With a summer of distractions behind me I returned to the business of football.

In liaison with the Dowie brothers we had some decisions to make and some enforced on us. But the end result was further investment from me.

Over the summer certain players had gone by the very nature of the deals we signed them under, or by their lack of desire to play outside the Premier League. Joonas Kolkka left on a free transfer, Vassilis Lakis returned to AEK Athens, Nicola Ventola returned to Inter Milan and Gonzalo Sorondo took the charming step of signing for Charlton, of all people.

Talking of the Italian giants Inter Milan, they were scheduled to play in a prestigious pre-season friendly. But in July 2005 terrorist bombs went off in London, killing innocent people and causing widespread panic amongst the nation. Milan immediately cancelled their trip, which was totally unacceptable as far as I was concerned. Letting terrorists win on whatever level was condoning their barbaric behaviour.

So I had a rant on television and in the papers calling them cowards and asserting that like the Italian tank operators in the Second World War all they knew was reverse gear. The media picked it up with glee and the politicians got involved, with Tessa Jowell, the Minister of Sport at the time, and Mayor Ken Livingstone roundly condemning Milan’s action. The end result? Internazionale came and won 2–0 in a damp squib of a poorly attended encounter, managed by a certain Roberto Mancini who now plies his trade at mega-rich Manchester City.

Coming to the business end of the pre-season, in terms of the squad I gave Dowie huge support and bought a variety of players to confirm that I was going to give the club more than a fighting chance to use his now famous bouncebackability phrase to full effect.

I spent £5.1 million, a significant sum, on new players. I signed centre back Darren Ward from Millwall for £1.25 million, Jobi McAnuff from Cardiff for £750,000 and Jon Macken from Manchester City for £1.1 million. Clinton Morrison came back from Birmingham for £2 million, and Marco Reich from Derby. Added to this was a raft of players who were still paid Premier League wages despite relegation. But my pièce de résistance was yet to come with mounting speculation that Andrew Johnson had played his last game for Palace.

Wayne Routledge’s departure to Tottenham Hotspur, although not entirely unexpected, was a huge disappointment to me. His mother’s timing in informing me he was leaving after we had been relegated from the Premier League was impeccable and now she made good on that threat or more to the point his God-awful agent, Paul Stretford, did. We had compensation rights, as the young England star was under twenty-four. But rather than go to the banana republic of a flawed tribunal system, we negotiated the best deal we could and settled for £1.25 million from Daniel ‘Dick Turpin’ Levy, the Spurs chairman.

Watching a young man of immense potential and part of my prized youth system disappear to Spurs did not sit comfortably with me.

I made one last attempt to talk him out of it. ‘You can be a really proper player, Wayne, stay here and learn your trade and then you will get all the things that good players deserve.

‘But if you lack confidence and believe you will never be a top player, go to Spurs, take the money and sit in their reserves.’

He went under the great guidance of his agent, who as far as I was concerned would receive a damn sight more money by engineering a move rather than a contract renewal, even though this might not necessarily be in the best interests of the player.

Routledge played the princely total of five games for Spurs before being shipped out to any Premier League or Championship club that could afford his new wages and altogether played fifty-three times in four and a half years. What a waste of talent. He will carve out a respectable career, but I believe he could have amounted to so much more.

The dust had barely settled when almost instantaneously I became embroiled in war with another agent who tried to manipulate a situation to his own advantage.

Andrew Johnson, our talismanic England striker and the highest English goal scorer in our Premier League season, was told by his agent he had been given the mandate by Palace to sell him and that he wouldn’t play for England again in World Cup year if he stayed at the club.

The agent concerned was the divisive Leon Angel who I had previous issues with over the termination of Trevor Francis’s contract in 2003. I decided this time to more than remove him from the equation; the tonic required for this particular ailment was total discredit.

Angel had the audacity to call a meeting with my management team of Dowie & Dowie. This was arranged behind my back, as if Angel thought he could go to my training ground to do a deal without my knowledge.

So I made it my business to turn up at this meeting, sitting in my training-ground lounge as Angel turned up with Andrew Johnson. It’s fair to say he was not overly thrilled to find me waiting for him. From the first word that left my mouth he was left in no doubt of my views on the situation.

He was told he did not and would never have a mandate to sell any of my players, let alone my star player. Angel tried to get up on his high horse so as to look better in Johnson’s eyes but I pulled no punches. I told him that in my view he was a disgrace of an agent whose only interest in the player was money. I pointed out that he had been AJ’s agent for six months, and in that time he had done the square root of nothing for the player. Not even a boot deal, as Bob Dowie had secured that. On and on I went while Angel – who in my vivid imagination reminded me of Davros, the creator of the Daleks in Doctor Who – sat in silence and eventually slunk off the training ground.

This was all done in front of the player and although it made him feel extremely uncomfortable it was necessary so everybody knew where they stood.

After Angel left he went to the press stating that he was acting in the player’s best interest, that Johnson wanted to move and that he had been given an exclusive mandate to sell him.

I used the media to try and exterminate Davros and stop this nonsense of agents acting like flesh traders, popping up whenever they thought they could initiate a move which would get them paid money, irrespective of what was best for the player and the club. I accused him of everything from trespassing to larceny and being the arch-enemy of the Doctor. I even went as far as to say I would rather support Millwall than allow Johnson to leave on my watch, that’s how seriously I viewed it!

Angel threatened to sue me as I made my views on him very clear in every medium. I practically pleaded with him in print to sue me and reported him to everyone from FIFA, the FA, football and the Warren Commission. The upshot was I met Andrew on his own, told him he was staying, promptly gave him a new contract with a financial reward for his achievements, which he was well due. This shut up the agent and the rest of the football world, who had said to a man that Andrew Johnson was never going to stay, as he signed a new four-year deal with the club!

We did of course have offers for AJ, notably from Everton, who bid something like £7 million, to which I enquired as to whether their chairman Bill Kenwright was offering to buy one of Andrew Johnson’s trainers. And my old mates at Birmingham popped up with some imaginary offer, announcing to the press that they had made a £6.5 million bid. They must have sent it by a blind carrier pigeon, as I never received it. I’m not sure what the purpose of this announcement was as it made them look stupid. There was no bid and if there had been they would have been buying back a player they gave away for nothing and originally thought wasn’t good enough to play for them.

With this matter now dealt with I had sent out a statement of intent that I was committed to Palace getting straight back up. Everybody invariably sold their best players when they went down and I didn’t. I kept them and added a further five players. We now had a strike force of some £15 million-plus and a squad that was the strongest in the league by a country mile.

On top of the players, Dowie wanted a new assistant, deeming Kit Symons not good enough, despite Kit being in situ when we had got promoted from this division. We shuffled him sideways into coaching and managing the reserves and brought in as assistant manager Neil MacDonald, formerly Sam Allardyce’s number two at Bolton, with the remit to specifically work on our defensive unit!

With all the above in mind I said quite innocently that in my view if this manager and team performed as I knew they could, there was no reason why we could not win the league. This was roundly condemned by certain factions of the football mafia as putting undue pressure on the manager. In my view it was a statement of fact. Why should I not say in a qualified way what I thought, so the fans understood where their club owner stood? And why should Dowie not be under pressure to succeed when he had the tools, for God’s sake.

Suffice it to say he took exception to it! And some of his ‘mates’ in the media conveniently aired their views in the papers on his behalf.

But pretty soon I was to have the pen as I had just been offered a prominent column in the Observer and I was going to enjoy correcting certain perspectives. My first column was fittingly entitled: ‘Why agents should be neutered’!

The season started with this expensively assembled squad full of expectation, and with Dowie’s bouncebackability ringing in their ears.

Our first game was at home to newly promoted Luton Town. I hoped that my last words to the players in the away dressing room at Charlton about taking their feeling of dejection out on the opposition was prevalent in their minds. But we duly lost to a team widely tipped for relegation!

We followed that up with another defeat to a Wolves side that had been in the doldrums for some time. So after two games we were bottom of the league and there wasn’t a whiff of bouncebackability. In fact, it took us till the middle of October, some two and a half months into the season, before troubling the top six and as far as winning the league or getting automatic promotion, we never got anywhere near the top two for the whole season.

Finally we recorded our first win of the season at home to Plymouth. After that win and a few further decent performances we looked as if we were building a head of steam when disaster struck. We lost Andrew Johnson in the seventh game of the campaign away to Reading, a knee injury caused by his own bravery challenging a full back trying to clear a ball, which was bloody sod’s law as I fought so damn hard to keep him. We lost him for a third of the season. Somehow football appeared to have cruel twists even when you tried to do the right thing.

By now I was in full flow with my fortnightly Observer columns. I had possible subjects provided by the paper but was encouraged to create my own subject matter. I wrote about agents, players, referees, clubs and the joke that is our English FA amongst other subjects. Throughout the seventeen articles I produced the FA was a regular feature as the way they operated and continue to operate is, in my view, a national embarrassment.

The columns were the first time an owner/chairman had lifted the lid on the world of football and shown it for what it really was: a murky world at times, full of self-interest. The column also opened the game up to the people who it belonged to: the fans. I tackled big issues like Sepp Blatter, technology, stadium standing, agents, players, FIFA, UEFA, G14 Clubs, racism, other chairmen and, of course, the FA.

The FA was our governing body; we were the country that gave the world football, yet it was a sham of self-interest, with chief executives appointed who in my view were not capable of the job and more focused on the perks of the title rather than the task at hand. Just look at this gallery of ‘unusual suspects’ charged with running our national game.

Adam Crozier, young and innovative, who left the FA in vast debt and then went off to spend millions rebranding the Post Office to Consignia, only for it to be changed back to the Post Office.

The amorous Mark Palios, who disappeared in the scandal of who was bonking the FA secretary Faria Alam most: the CEO or the England manager.

After heading up ITV Digital, a business that nearly ruined a huge part of English football, Brian Barwick got his reward by getting the FA’s top job and presided over the debacle of the phenomenal escalating costs of building the new Wembley and the embarrassing attempted and ultimate appointment of England managers.

And let us not forget Lord Triesman, who talked a great game and in talking opened his mouth in the most unfortunate way and was forced to resign over his allegations that certain countries were trying to bribe referees, which no doubt helped enormously in collecting votes for our bid to secure the 2018 World Cup.

In my columns I exposed the nonsense of people who made anonymous decisions in quango committees, as well as the blazer and tie brigade who latched onto FA councillorships as a means to keeping their free England tickets and travel. I named and shamed them, much to their dismay and horror.

I enjoyed writing the columns and I most certainly liked wielding the pen. I worked with great guys at the Observer who researched and qualified some of my more outrageous allegations. I had no idea at the time that these articles were to be so popular; people stopped me in the street and raved about them.

Ian Wooldridge, the revered and much missed sports writer, dedicated a column to suggesting I should be brought in to run the FA! I am sure that went down like a lead enema in Soho Square. He also went on to to say he was going to potentially nominate me as sports writer of the year. I knew the articles must have been OK as even Iain Dowie begrudgingly admitted they were good!

What these columns also did was to demonstrate something to certain parts of the football world: that I was a man of substance and understood the game. This in some way transported me from a perceived rebellious innovator and troublemaker to someone with valid and forward-thinking views who was not frightened to air them for the advancement of our national game.

Of course, writing without care of consequence and showing situations and people for what they were would inevitably land me in trouble. This came with my fourth article entitled ‘Call Time on Blatter’s Village Idiots’.

The article was about refereeing standards. Sepp Blatter, the president of FIFA, refused to bring in technology, and like all good writers I used an example: the refereeing performance of the official of the recent Palace v Reading game. The FA charged me with ‘improper conduct’, making me sound like some kind of pervert. So not only did I lose my star player in the Reading game, the FA was now charging me for having an opinion about it. Talk about double whammy, although the thought of being charged was about as troublesome to me as a cloud on a sunny day.

I was summoned to Soho Square, but as I had written about my impending FA disciplinary hearing and its location in my Observer columns, they changed the venue to a secret location for a ‘transparent’ hearing. It was not secret for long, as I immediately informed Sky Sports news.

Apparently, when you are charged by the FA they ask for your total net football wage in order to establish how much they should fine you. I advised the panel of the £32 million I had invested in the last five years, which worked out at minus £127,000 a week, and told them that I was more than happy to receive a rebate.

The hearing was a farce. They had only two options, both with serious consequences for them: do not discipline me and perhaps set a precedent; do and open a can of worms with me and be unable to control what I may or may not say and do. They decided on a halfway house solution: a fine of £10,000 suspended for twelve months, dependent on me not saying anything derogatory. With this they sent me on my way suitably admonished!

The gag lasted all of three minutes as I walked out and did a live piece to Sky on the hearing’s doorstep, declaring it a kangaroo court comprised of ill-informed, self-important buffoons who had no idea of what was right and proper and that any fine would be paid in one-pound coins delivered in a wheelbarrow to Soho Square. No fine followed!

On top of that I wrote in my next column all about the hearing, under the title of ‘So who is Barry Bright?’, the chairman (or, in my mind, chairbuffoon) of that hearing. I described the whole event in detail and yet they still refused to implement the fine. I continued to bait them in my next six articles. The fine stayed, but they never enforced it, despite me ignoring every aspect of the gagging order.

On the field the season started as a disappointment and peaked and troughed much like my relationship with the manager. Halfway through we were seventh in the league, some twenty-seven points off top and eighteen points off second, so automatic promotion was out of the question. Our best-case scenario was the play-offs. We were where we were, so we had to make the best of it, and make sure we made the play-offs in the highest possible position.

The season was full of anomalies. We would thrash a respectable Coventry side 4–1 away and the very next game lose 1–0 to our arch-rivals, bottom-of-the-league Brighton, in front of a disbelieving and packed home crowd, then in the following game beat the mighty Liverpool again in the League Cup 2–1. The only consistency we had was inconsistency.

Throughout the season the uneasy truce with Iain Dowie was always at the fore. He was back to his belligerent argumentative best, always looking to be contrary and clever wherever he could and, disappointingly, Bob had got a little caught up in the world of football to the detriment of the commercial side of the business.

Dominic was running the club day to day and I wanted him to exert control over the commercial activities and I would liaise with the football management. Perversely, this involved more contact for Dominic with the football side. Certain commercial activities included the football operation which led to Dominic having to tolerate nonsense from Bob and Iain about budgetary controls.

Budgets were agreed for all aspects of the club, from medical supplies to travel and accommodation. The football operation budget was drawn up by Bob and Iain and approved by me, and then systematically ignored by them, which caused conflict with Dominic as he sought to ensure they controlled their agreed costs.

By the end of March, after beating Watford for the second time in the season, with five games to go we were fifth, and pretty much secure in the play-offs. My expectations were we would push on to get as high up that mini play-off league as possible. But what we did was to win only one of our last five games of the season, producing arguably our worst run of the campaign, taking five points out of the last five games and finishing sixth.

In between the rigours of the campaign Geoff Thomas, the former Palace captain, who had fought so bravely back from the ravages of leukaemia, had a testimonial game. It was to be a re-enactment of the 1990 Cup Final between Palace and Manchester United, a game that arguably kept Alex Ferguson in the Manchester United job as they narrowly beat Palace to give Ferguson his first trophy after nearly four years in charge.

Somehow or another I got roped into playing. As with all football chairmen it was presumed I knew nothing about football and most certainly couldn’t play! So in front of 15,000 fans I came on as a substitute and I will leave it to the local press to describe my performance.

‘Well, he’s certainly got bottle, hasn’t he? Playing alongside the Palace 1990 FA Cup Final heroes is one thing but doing it in white boots sporting highlighted blond hair was potentially a recipe for public humiliation. But to be fair to the Palace chairman he pulled it off just because he turned out to be quite good.’

As I watched the last five League games I witnessed a team coasting into the end-of-season play-offs. In our last game of the League campaign we lost 1–0 away to Sheffield United with a particularly tepid display and I took this opportunity to remark to Bob Dowie that I had grave concerns.

The fact we drew Watford in the play-offs seemed to instil even more complacency as it was universally greeted by players and management as a great draw, one we would walk through, given we had beaten them twice already during the season.

I did not share this view. I struggled to see how a team that laboured through their last five games in poor form was going to get itself up a level. I felt Watford, having finished third and been beaten twice by us, had probably learnt more from those losses than we had from the wins. Again I voiced that to Iain and Bob, who took exception to my sentiments of concern and caution.

As the play-offs approached my pals at Birmingham City in the Premier League were embroiled in a relegation battle that they were ultimately to lose. At the time their co-owner David Gold announced in an interview: ‘If there was a God then no way would Crystal Palace get promoted and Birmingham get relegated.’

Now I thought at the time that was particularly uncalled for and it really hurt my feelings! It had slipped my mind that I had written a big article recently in the Observer about owners of clubs, mentioning Birmingham and David Gold specifically, which had clearly provoked his untimely outburst. I had said that if I had to read another article about an East End boy made good I would impale myself on one of the dildos he sold.

The play-offs were greeted with their usual media frenzy and the first leg was at home. Strangely given the magnitude of the game and the fact it was a virtual London derby it was not a complete sell-out. Only 22,000 fans turned up. Perhaps they knew something.

After an even and uninspiring first half we fell apart in the second and were 2–0 down after sixty-five minutes. My worst fears had been confirmed and when Watford scored their third goal in the eighty-fifth minute, I looked across the directors’ box to where Bob Dowie sat and said: ‘I told you so.’

I had sensed what was going to happen. I hoped my gut feeling would be wrong, but I was proved to be right in the worst possible way. We now faced the never-achieved task of overturning a first leg loss in the second game and winning by four clear goals.

After the manner of the defeat morale in and around the club was very low and despite the feelings I had voiced prior and during the game I still felt it was important to maintain a positive outlook.

If they could score three then so could we. I knew this was a bloody long shot but a leader has to lead even in the face of adversity. Iain was still bullish despite the heavy defeat but as football clubs are like sieves with information it emanated quickly that certain players had completely given up the ghost.

It was a non-event of a game. It is difficult to put into words how one feels watching an opportunity slip away like that. Can you imagine going on Deal Or No Deal and you have two boxes left. One has £50 million and the other has 50p. And one of the conditions is that someone else chooses the box – and they pick the 50p. That is what it is like losing in the play-offs. You could of course lose in the play-off final, which would be pretty bad, but losing in the manner we did was far worse for me. Some teams go out all guns blazing, whereas we just failed to turn up.

The game ended in a 0–0 draw and we never even looked like scoring. The only example of any passion was when a brawl broke out on the touchline because Aidy Boothroyd, the Watford manager at the time, refused to return the ball after it went out of play. I thought at the time, ‘Typical. We can manage to be brave off the pitch but not on it.’

To add insult to injury the FA saw fit to fine us for it.

I congratulated the Watford board and left, not really wanting to be around the place whilst they were rejoicing at our expense. Unfortunately for me I got stuck in the damn Watford car park, as we were unable to get out, and was subjected to twenty minutes of joyous home fans giving me barrel loads of abuse. I have to say it takes remarkable restraint not to get an Uzi out when you are gutted and celebrating fans are taking the piss out of you. There is no such thing as football fans showing humility in winning, they just stick it to you.

And that was that. The lights went down for another season, a year almost to the day of relegation from the Premier League at the hands of Charlton. Another juddering disappointment, a year wasted, an opportunity spurned and we were looking forward to another twelve months trawling round the second tier of English football.

I can bear most things but I hate waste and this was a wasted opportunity.

I never spoke to Iain before the game or straight afterwards, but that was how he appeared to want it. He was a law unto himself and as long as he was successful I tolerated it. He never wanted comradeship, he didn’t have an ‘all for one and one for all’ mentality. He wanted to do things in a certain way.

Dowie could manage down but had no ability to manage up and that was to prove his undoing, and, I have since heard, was his undoing with future employers.

After a couple of days I returned to Spain and, seeing as my manager had made no effort to contact me, called Dowie on the way to the airport and left a voicemail message.

It could be concluded from the events I have described that I would be in an unhappy mood, but once I have adjusted to something and then accepted it, which on the whole I do pretty quickly, I become philosophical about things and this was how I approached the phone call with Dowie.

Of course I was disappointed but to some extent it was over. Like any normal employer I wanted to know what had gone wrong and why. That proved to be fatal – how dare I ask such invasive questions!

The conversation that was to have far-reaching consequences for us both started at about 8 p.m. as I sat in my garden in Spain. After a brief exchange I had the audacity to ask him why he hadn’t called me after the game. That was the high point in the conversation.

Very quickly the conversation turned into a pissing competition, which I allowed myself to be dragged into. Dowie seemed intent on baiting me and achieved his aim. After listening to him tell me he didn’t want to discuss our failure in the play-offs as it was over, he promptly moved on to tell me that if I had supported him in the Premier League we would have stayed up and how I had created pressure and unrealistic expectations on the team at the beginning of the season.

I have to admit that for about three minutes I thoroughly lost my temper. Clearly I am no shrinking violet and I let him have full-on my feelings about what he had just said and the way he had acted.

No punches were pulled on either side and I make no apologies for what I said. I told him that whether he liked it or not he worked for me, not the other way round, and he should learn his place. For two and a half years I had given him the benefit of the doubt and I was tired of this constant, divisive, disrespectful crap from him.

The storm eventually passed and we both regained our composure. The conversation moved on to more constructive matters about the following season. We agreed that it was likely Andrew Johnson would now go as I had promised him that if we didn’t get promoted, he could leave. Dowie asked if he would get the funds and I said it was likely he would get a significant percentage of them for reinvestment.

Then, like a bolt out of the blue, he told me he was considering leaving Palace so he could return up north to be with his family, who had shown no wish to relocate during his two-and-a-half-year tenure at the club.

I am rarely speechless. We had moved on from the row, spent twenty minutes talking about the new season, he had asked for more money for players and more backing and got them. Then, as if I was talking to a different person entirely, he told me he wanted to leave the club. I was flabbergasted, and said if he wanted to leave to go and work up north and be near his family then that changed everything.

Dowie went on to say that he would stay until a job came up. I said, ‘How can that work? I can’t allow you to buy players knowing you want to leave. That’s absurd!’ and terminated the call.

Within half an hour Bob was on the phone. He wanted to act as mediator but I saw little point. I told him as I had told his brother that I had things to think about.

After digesting the Dowie call I came to the conclusion that if he wanted to go he could. He had failed in my eyes to keep us in the Premier League when he should have done and had most definitely failed miserably in my view to get us back with the strongest squad in the Championship.

So in the week I thought about it I came to the view perhaps he was right to want to leave. But perversely I had reservations. Yes, I was bored with his antics and outlook but then ‘better the devil you know’, as the saying goes. When all was said and done, Dowie had been the only manager to date who had given me a modicum of success.

I spoke to him a week later and he seemed in an immeasurable hurry to get this matter resolved. He was now resolute about going back up north, even rescinding the ludicrous offer to stay until we appointed his successor.

We had a £1 million compensation clause in his contract and by releasing him I was effectively waiving that. Of course, then we wouldn’t be held to paying up the remainder of his contract. But this was his agenda. Purely out of empathy to his wishes, given he was playing the family card so strongly, I agreed to waive my compensation rights and release him from his contract.

I was to fly in on Monday 22 May to hold a press conference to announce his departure. As I have said before there are very few secrets in football and soon the rumour mill began to reach my ears.

I got a phone call on Friday 19 May from Neil Ashton of the Daily Mail, a staunch Crystal Palace fan who I knew well. He asked what the press call was for and when I said ‘wait and see’, he told me it was to announce Dowie’s departure, which slightly irked me as I wanted to announce it. He then said: ‘You do realise that Dowie is nailed on for the Charlton job?’

I don’t know whether it was arrogance, naivety or just plain stupidity, but I found it difficult to believe that Dowie would have the gall to lie to me in such a barefaced way. I phoned him to just check again about his ‘going up north to be with his family’ but got no answer. So I spoke to his brother Bob, who told me that there was no way to his knowledge that he was going to Charlton. So I left it there.

I flew in and met Dowie in my office prior to the press conference to sign the compromise agreement, which nullified the contract in its entirety. When I got to Palace, Dowie’s lawyers had changed the agreement. My HR director Kevin Watts, my rock of all things employment, was on a flight to Dubai and unable to be contacted.

Dowie and his lawyers wanted a specific clause about the removal of compensation in the compromise agreement, which was totally unnecessary as the compromise agreement did precisely that. It set off alarm bells and I suggested we did the press conference and sign afterwards, as by that time Kevin would have landed in Dubai.

Dowie pleaded with me to sign, and as the press were now waiting I asked him straight out: ‘Are you going to Charlton?’ and he categorically assured me that he was not. So I relented and signed, thus releasing him and waiving our £1 million.

In nine days’ time I took a controversial action as the depths of Dowie’s treachery became evident.