‘Malcolm taught us things we had only seen on the TV’
– Former Plymouth Argyle striker Mike Trebilcock
The road from Bath to Plymouth runs at a little under 150 miles. Even in a standard 1964 saloon, which would have set its owner back about £650 if he’d answered the advert for the new Vauxhall Victor in the Western Morning News, it was not much more than three hours given a decent run. Malcolm Allison’s life, however, rarely ran in straight lines. For him, the journey began in a London hotel on FA Cup final day, lasted more than two months and included a couple of return trips across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Cup final that year was approached by Allison with far greater anticipation than he ever could have imagined during his soul-sapping nights behind the bar of his nightclub. At that time, the thought of former West Ham colleagues like John Bond, Ken Brown and Bobby Moore lining up at Wembley would have brought remorse, regret and self-pity crashing down on him like waves. But now he was excited at the possibility of taking another big step in his football career by becoming a Football League manager. Plymouth Argyle, struggling in the Second Division, were looking for a new man to take over from Andy Beattie, moving on after a long stint as caretaker manager following the early-season resignation of previous full-time boss Ellis Stuttard. Allison, having come to their attention through the achievements of Bath City, had been summoned to meet the Argyle directors at the Savoy Hotel, after which he would watch his old pals take on Preston North End at Wembley.
The Savoy summit went well, with Allison outlining his vision of the way a club should be run. Other candidates, he was informed, were still scheduled to be interviewed, and reports in the succeeding days would name former Exeter boss Frank Broome and ex-Aston Villa manager Eric Houghton as the subjects of those interrogations. But Allison was able to watch West Ham’s 3–2 victory with a feeling of confidence in his gut.
As his former protégé, Bobby Moore, lifted the trophy, Allison left the stadium for his final engagement of a hectic day. An aeroplane seat awaited him, bearing him to a summer adventure in Canada.
The bulk of Toronto’s population had cast scarcely an uninterested glance in the direction of the Eastern Canada Professional League – even with three of the organisation’s five teams situated within the city boundaries. There was, however, a hard core of support from the city’s ethnic factions and part of Allison’s job after being approached to spend a six-week spell coaching Toronto City was to tap into, and play up, the rivalry between the British-supported City and their Italian rivals at Toronto Italia and Toronto Inter-Roma. The selling of the sport in one of football’s frontier lands fascinated Allison, and the role of showman, naturally, was well suited to his personality. He had eagerly asked Bath City’s permission to take the position when it was offered by millionaire team owner Steve Stavro.
In accordance with Stavro’s wishes, it didn’t take long before Allison had his team well-practised at winding up the opposition. In one game against Italia his team ignored the pre-game convention of waving to all sides of the stadium by pointedly ignoring the area where the rival fans were congregated. They finally indulged in an orchestrated salute of that section once they had taken the lead. Allison admitted it was a ‘crude ploy’ but knew that the tribal atmosphere it stirred up was exactly what was demanded of him.
Yet, to a fierce competitor like Allison – especially one who had arrived in Canada feeling that he was ‘on a winning streak’ – pumping up the crowd was only part of the job description. City had finished fifth and last in the competition in 1963 and Allison’s determination to bring about a dramatic improvement took some by surprise.
In his team were several Football League veterans, including former England and Crystal Palace forward Johnny Brooks, the South African ex-Sunderland striker Ted Purdon and former Aston Villa goalkeeper Nigel Sims. ‘When I left Villa and agreed to go out to Toronto I had no idea Mal was going to be the coach,’ Sims recalls. ‘It turned out to be one of the best periods I had in all my time in football.’
Sims admits that most players had been expecting an easy ride. ‘The players, including me, thought, “Let’s have a summer holiday.” But on his first day Malcolm said, “Come on, we’ll get fit and we’ll bloody enjoy it.” We did – and I became the fittest I had ever been. Mal approached the job in a very serious way. That is how he was when he was around football. Everything was business. He was completely in charge and everything was left to him. He ran it the way he would have run a Football League team. He was the best coach I ever had – he was so positive in the way we approached training and went through our routines. We had a really great time and hardly lost a game. I enjoyed it so much I went back the next couple of years.’
Also flying out to join the team a couple of weeks after Allison’s arrival was Bath captain Tony Book, beginning a pattern of loyalty to Malcolm that would extend over the next couple of decades. ‘I think Mal made up his mind out there that I might be able to do it at a higher level. He was seeing me as a full-time professional for the first time. I had never trained during the day before.’
It was in Canada that Book was given another early insight into Allison’s willingness to employ innovative, unorthodox methods in an effort to keep the players interested. ‘Malcolm took it very seriously but would always come up with something different. I remember after I had been there a couple of weeks he took us up into the mountains for a couple of days, just to break the routine. We lived in log cabins and did a bit of fishing.’
While Toronto were setting out on a season that would see them finish top of the league with only four defeats in 24 games and win the championship play-offs, Allison journeyed back to Plymouth to enable the Argyle directors to confirm his appointment. It had not been an entirely done deal, however, having come down to a choice between him and Eric Houghton. Significantly, club chairman Ron Blindell voted against Allison’s appointment and made no comment to the press when the Pilgrims’ new manager was introduced. It was left to fellow director Doug Fletcher to act as spokesman, noting diplomatically, ‘We were very impressed with both candidates.’
Allison told reporters, ‘This club has great possibilities. There is much potential here and I’m very ambitious. I’m delighted to get the post. It will be a big battle for the first two or three months while I’m straightening things out. I’m always fair with my players but I expect them to work hard for me.’
He admitted later that only his professional ambition had wrenched him away from Bath, where he loved club president Arthur Mortimer. ‘It would be a long time before I worked for a man as straightforward and appreciative.’ Allison had admired the way Mortimer would dig into his own pocket to make sure the team had what they needed and had enjoyed the experience of working without the backdrop of petty bickering that he would soon be witnessing from close range. He described Bath as ‘the perfect place to gather up again the pieces of my career as a professional football man’.
But now he was manager of Plymouth, with a two-year contract worth £2,500 per season, plus bonuses, and a club house and car thrown in. Having quickly agreed those terms with Argyle’s board, he headed back across the water to complete what he would describe as a ‘marvellously exhilarating summer’.
Unlike some of the fledgling teams that would, in future years, join the burgeoning North American Soccer League, Toronto City were never short of money. The bankroll of Stavro, who would go on to own ice hockey’s Toronto Maple Leafs and basketball’s Toronto Raptors, made sure of that. In the team’s first season, in 1961, he had paid to put Danny Blanchflower, Stanley Matthews and Johnny Haynes in City shirts and he was happy to reward his team if they produced results.
Under Allison, the results kept coming and Sims’s memory of ‘going across the road from the stadium to the Park Royal after games for a couple of drinks’ barely hints at the high life Allison enjoyed. By his own admission he was ‘able to live extravagantly’ in his lakeside apartment, supplementing his income with a few winners at the racetrack. He even had enough cash in his pocket to outbid Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor for the attention of a waiter at the renowned Swiss Bear nightclub – a victory he celebrated by sending six bottles of champagne to the band and six more to the singer to get them to perform songs of his choice.
Yet it couldn’t last for ever. Nor would Allison have wished it to. Putting aside any end-of-vacation blues and secure in the knowledge that City were heading to the title, Allison left the lakes of Ontario and headed excitedly towards the life of a Football League manager among the cliffs and beaches of Devon.
The fact that Plymouth Argyle had needed goal average to survive relegation to the Third Division at the end of the 1963–64 season did not bother Allison one bit. He saw it as a positive situation, far less pressurised than taking over from an established and successful regime. Besides, his confidence in his ability was soaring. He had achieved encouraging results with the university students of Cambridge, the part-timers of Bath and the summer-season professionals of Toronto. He knew that he could teach, motivate and plan tactically. He was ready for the real thing.
The local constabulary were also prepared when Allison arrived in Plymouth on 6 July 1964. His first day at work very nearly ended in jail.
Walking into his office with his Canadian-produced tan and home-grown strut, Allison found two officers waiting to arrest him for £94 worth of unpaid parking tickets. Clueless about how much money he had in his account, he nervously wrote a cheque as bewildered office staff looked on. The incident might explain the somewhat disinterested look on the face of club chairman Ron Blindell and Allison’s own preoccupied expression in the picture that appeared in the next day’s Western Morning News, purporting to show the new manager being taken on a tour of the premises. To Allison’s relief, his bank cleared the funds and he was free to set about the task of rebuilding Argyle. ‘At that moment I think it dawned on Plymouth that their new manager was a bit of a lad,’ he said. ‘I think some of the board were a little perturbed that they might have introduced some sort of tearaway to the town.’
The impact was no less dramatic when Allison was introduced to the players. Mike Trebilcock, a promising 19-year-old striker from Cornwall, remembers being star-struck. ‘I wasn’t aware of Malcolm Allison before he came to Plymouth. He was just there one day. But I loved the man from the start. He was fantastic. The way he stood, the way he dressed, the size of the man – he was unbelievable. I was very impressionable and he was everything you’d want to be. Previously as manager, I’d had a cigarette-smoking Yorkshireman with wide lapels who just went, “Come on, lads. Let’s get stuck in.” And then came this classy guy. I adored him.’
Allison explained to reporters his plan to play a series of pre-season games in Holland and refused to be drawn on the question of new players. ‘In these pre-season games I will weigh up the players, assess their abilities and see if I need to buy,’ he said.
Instead, following the pattern that would become a trademark, Allison’s first priority was to bring his existing players to an increased level of fitness – by using methods that would engage, rather than browbeat, them. The coastal landscape offered a natural training ground and Allison identified Plymouth Hoe and the local seafront as perfect sites, forcing his men to clamber down cliffs with their training gear to gain access to the beach. Training was followed by lunch on the sand and then afternoon swimming sessions. But Graham Little, who would become Argyle club secretary the following year, recalls, ‘Plymouth Hoe was hallowed ground, with its war memorial, so when they started kicking the ball around someone sent for the park superintendent. Malcolm told him where to go and it was all over the local paper.’
Club captain John Newman remembers the favourable impression created by Allison’s methods. ‘I knew a couple of the Bath players, who always spoke highly of Malcolm as a coach. He was the sort of man who, when he walked in the room, your head went back and you paid attention. He earned respect immediately. After the pre-season we had with him at Plymouth, it was pretty obvious he knew what he was doing. He modernised things, presented new ideas and it made it very interesting. We’d been used to doing a lot of heavy running, but he had a way of getting us fit without a lot of that being done. He introduced weight training, which we hadn’t done before, and had us running on the beaches, which wasn’t easy. He revolutionised the whole thing. His training sessions were condensed. Whereas before you would go for three hours, he would keep it to an hour and a half. He believed in having a break and a bit of lunch and then another session in the afternoon. It wasn’t a soft touch, believe me, but it was a modern idea of getting people fitter. Then, when we had a session working on tactical or technical things, it could go on for two hours or more. It was not heavy, physical stuff, but you had to work at it.’
Allison brought a thoroughness to his preparation that was uncommon for English teams of that time, especially those outside the top flight. Once the weather began to turn in the late autumn, he would ensure that training remained as productive as possible by introducing indoor sessions at a local naval gymnasium. He explained, ‘I’m sure this skill practice indoors will improve many players in the winter months. There is nothing more demoralising than having to train on a wet, heavy pitch when it’s cold and raining, so I think we can keep the lads in good spirit.’
As the summer wore on, Allison turned his attention more closely to the need he had now identified to strengthen his squad. A popular game among the local press was to speculate about which of his old colleagues would find their way to Home Park. Former West Ham teammate Jimmy Andrews, coaching at Queens Park Rangers, was said to be poised to join Allison’s staff, while his great friend Noel Cantwell was suggested to be on his way from Manchester United. Another member of the Cassettari clan, winger Malcolm Musgrove, then at Orient, was touted as a possible player-coach.
On the field Allison turned to Tony Book, a man with no Football League experience but whose defensive versatility, he felt, could offer him valuable options in the tough world of the Second Division. After more than 400 games for Bath, Book was given the opportunity to play professionally when his old boss offered a transfer fee of £1,500. Bath’s first reaction was to turn it down but after Book pleaded with the directors not to deny him his dream, a deal was struck and Allison noted the disbelief in the eyes of the Bath director who gratefully accepted Plymouth’s cheque.
Book’s belated entry to professional football was, he says, down to ‘somebody recognising that I wanted to be a player’. He continues, ‘I had been striving all my life to be a full-time pro. I had been knocked back and all of a sudden this fellow takes an interest. Through that interest he made me want it again because I thought it was all over at nearly 30. I don’t think anyone else would have taken a chance, but he had seen something there. He knew I could cope with the fitness.’
One small detail remained to be taken care of before Book’s transfer went through. In order to get the Argyle board to sanction the transfer, Allison asked him to alter his birth certificate to take two years off his real age of 29. ‘He was a bit concerned about the age I was, 30 the next month. He said, “I don’t think they will stand for that.” So I rubbed the year out in the crease where it was folded, so it looked like 1936 instead of 1934.’
There was another raid on his former Bath City team on the eve of the new season, a move that gave further evidence of Allison’s willingness to remain loyal to those players in whom he had faith. Inside-forward Keith Sanderson had played for Allison at Cambridge University and Bath and his move to Argyle less than 48 hours before the new campaign kicked off upset Bath manager Ivor Powell, who had already named Sanderson in his team for the opening game. Allison, who cared little for such niceties, then invested £6,500 on another of his former charges, ex-Bristol Rovers centre-half Norman Sykes, who had played in Toronto as a rehabilitation exercise after being told his career was in jeopardy because of an arthritic hip.
Plymouth approached their opening game in high spirits, particularly Trebilcock, whose nine goals in four pre-season matches included hat-tricks against Exeter and Torquay and owed much to Allison’s tuition. ‘He taught us things that we had only seen on the TV and had wondered how it was done. Suddenly we could do it. Before he came, I remember [former manager] Ellis Stuttard walking out on the pitch with a cigarette in the corner of his mouth and his hands in his pockets. If you hit the ball at him he would chest it off this nice white shirt of his and say, “That’s how you do it, lad.” That was all he said to you. Then Malcolm came and explained exactly how things were done. He changed everything – even down to the way we looked and the tracksuits we wore.’
Trebilcock credits Allison with giving him knowledge that would not only benefit Plymouth, but would be crucial when, as an Everton player, he scored twice to help his team come from two goals behind to beat Sheffield Wednesday in the 1966 FA Cup final. ‘I marvelled at him and he made me a better player, without a doubt. As a striker the first thing he taught me, which I had never heard before, was that when you are in the box you have more time than you think. I had never thought about that before. Looking back there were times when I snatched at shots when I could have taken another second and set myself. Everton won the FA Cup because of the things Malcolm taught me. For the first goal, when the ball dropped in front of me I remembered what he said. I just took my time. I didn’t overreach and I put it in. The second one was also down to Malcolm. He always used to say to me, “Trebs, when you go in the box, go as quick as you can because if someone touches you and you go down, even if it is not a penalty it looks like one.” So, for the second goal, I went into the box as quickly as I could and the ball dropped right in front of me. Nobody else was moving. I’d had the advantage of getting in there quick and early – that is how I got the chance for the second goal. So both goals were due to Malcolm’s contribution.
‘I hung on to every word he said because I admired the man that much. When I got to Wembley there was a telegram from Mal saying, “Trebs, it’s just another game.” He believed that if you have the fundamental skills they come back at the time you need them and for me, twice they came back when I needed them on that day and that was because of Malcolm.’
As a man who was to become a symbol of football’s new television age, it was appropriate that Allison’s first game as a Football League manager should be on the day that the BBC launched Match of the Day, the show that was to hasten football’s development into a branch of the showbiz and entertainment industry. Until the BBC brought highlights of one of the day’s most compelling games into the living room every Saturday evening, the public had relied upon the spoken and written word of radio and newspapers to provide their mental pictures of most professional footballers.
Television coverage had been reserved for Cup finals and major internationals, but the BBC’s weekly offering – placed initially on BBC2 and replicated a few years later by the ITV network’s regional Sunday afternoon programmes – would turn even journeyman players into familiar faces. Glossy youth-orientated magazines like Goal and Shoot! and collections of Soccer Stars stickers helped take the game colourfully into the playgrounds. As the media appetite for football increased, so did the need for big personalities to fill the space that the sport now commanded in all sections of the newspapers. Allison would prove more than equal to the task.
All that was still some way off, however, when Allison’s Football League career got off to an inauspicious start with a 2–0 defeat at Coventry, where his team worked hard but lacked inspiration. There followed a goalless home draw against Huddersfield, after which the Western Morning News reporter, Tamar, wrote, ‘There is still a long way to go but manager Malcolm Allison can hardly be happy.’ Going into the third game against Cardiff, Allison promised, ‘We want goals and I’m going to work on this problem until I’ve got it right.’ It took Frank Lord, a physical centre-forward, only 45 seconds to put Argyle on the way to a 3–1 victory. Victory by the same score at Preston saw Tamar showing his support for the new regime by writing, ‘Clearly manager Allison has created a roaring enthusiasm in the dressing-room that has to be seen to be believed.’
Two more new arrivals showed up at Home Park. Wales winger Barrie Jones was secured for a club record £45,000 – although there had been talk of an alternative bid for Bolton’s Francis Lee when the deal seemed to be stalling. And old friend Derek Ufton, who played with Allison at Charlton and had since invited him to be best man at his wedding, accepted the job of coach, having just reached the end of his first-class cricket career with Kent. That prompted the departure of Stuttard, who had retained that position since stepping down from the top job.
Results in the first few weeks of the season were mixed, yet Allison insisted on sticking to a controlled passing game, building patiently from the back – the methods he had attempted to instil in his West Ham colleagues several years earlier. Referred to by reporters unused to seeing such methods as a ‘Continental approach’, Argyle’s style offered an easy target when things didn’t quite go right. After a 2–1 defeat at Crystal Palace, Tamar questioned whether Allison had the players to suit the system. But his comment was mild compared with the attack the Palace match programme – obviously accustomed to seeing the ball hoofed downfield at any opportunity – made on Allison’s team in its next issue.
Argyle’s tactics were tortuous. They played the ball square, or frequently backwards, in defence, dallying in possession until the way was open for an incisive thrust . . . it is a strategy we have seen many Continental teams employ in televised matches. The difference is that the better Continental teams strike with far more deadly intent than Plymouth showed on this occasion.
No one criticised an Allison team without risking a backlash. ‘If Palace want to play defensive football on their own ground then their supporters will have to suffer,’ he hit back. ‘It reduces soccer to a farce. The crowd don’t come to see eight players standing along the 18-yard box for most of the game.’
Allison got even more radical early in October. Having seen his team pick up a moderate 12 points from 11 games, he announced that he would be using Book as a sweeper behind the back four in away matches. He was perfect for the position with his speed on the ground and quickness of thought. ‘We are going to play it tighter away from home,’ said Allison. ‘These are the most important games to me. Tony can adapt. I played him in this role in Canada and he was very successful.’
Argyle winger Norman Piper, who would soon be making his professional debut under Allison, explains, ‘Malcolm was a real technician of coaching. He kept changing the system depending on the situation and the opposition – like playing five at the back, which was never heard of before. He would change the system to fit in with a particular plan.’
Book describes the instructions he was given by Allison. ‘He basically wanted me to sit in there and as long as the centre-halves had their men marked, I had enough experience at that level to read the situations. That was one of my assets. He knew I would fill in if we were caught out and he always gave me credit for having the pace and the nous to sort things out.’
Allison’s experimentation, which he had instigated at Bath City, was notable for being so uncommon in English football at the time. Despite the influence of the Hungarians more than ten years earlier, teams were still only gradually freeing themselves of the straitjacket of the old ‘WM’ formation. The revolution had gone little further than the tentative notions of a wing-half dropping back to play alongside the centre-back and one of the inside-forwards playing a withdrawn role to create English football’s standard 4-2-4 formation.
Future Manchester City and England midfielder Colin Bell recalls coming up against Argyle’s innovative methods while playing for Bury. ‘They came to Gigg Lane twice in the space of eight days and played the sweeper system. They won both games [without conceding a goal] because we hadn’t got a clue how to break them down. We weren’t as adept at tactical thinking at Bury as they were at Plymouth. Malcolm was ahead of his time.’
Ufton, who remembers Allison’s ability to ‘make players feel ten times better than they were’, believes that the strength of his tactical experimentation was never forgetting the abilities of the players at his disposal – a quality he would be accused of misplacing in the later, less successful, phase of his career. ‘It wasn’t until later that he became more theoretical in his outlook. The trouble with footballers is that if they are down a couple of divisions from what you are used to they are not always going to be good enough to do what you want.’
Allison saw his sweeper system as being well within the scope of the likes of Book and viewed it as more than just a way of bolstering his defence. He would later write:
It is a stimulating position to play. Certainly this reduces the number of forwards, but the full-backs, and to a lesser extent the half-backs, have been freed from much of their territorial restriction. Full-backs particularly can commit themselves more to attack.
The tactical reappraisal had been prompted partly by a 6–1 loss at Bolton, a game Trebilcock remembers for the rollicking he received from his manager after scoring a meaningless consolation goal. ‘Malcolm wasn’t a great shouter, but he did shout at me that day. We were getting beat 6–0 and I scored at the end and just walked away as if to say, “Well, that’s no big deal.” I remember Mal getting cross and saying, “Don’t ever do that again. When you score a goal, you celebrate it.” Even though we were 6–1 down!’
Allison put the Bolton result down as ‘just one of those games’, but Newman recalls the manager’s typical response to a poor performance. ‘He didn’t go around shouting and bawling, but you knew when he was upset because he went quiet on people. I can remember him coming in after games where we hadn’t performed and he would just sit at the end of the dressing-room and look at you. The last thing you wanted to do was look him in the eye. He would sit there for a few minutes and you could hear a pin drop. Then he would walk out and would have more to say about it on Monday morning. His reaction earned him a lot of respect. He would tell you when it wasn’t right, but he very rarely bawled people out. He would leave you out of the team – and that was the worst thing. It hurt.’
Piper explains that quiet analysis of individual mistakes was more important than throwing tea cups around the dressing-room. ‘Malcolm was the kind of coach who knew that if you made a mistake it was how you reacted afterwards that was important. You are all going to make mistakes and he would say, “You are a good player right now, but if you do this and this you will be an even better player.” He had a positive way of talking to the players and wouldn’t tell people they were terrible.’
Improvement in results – the Bolton loss was followed by seven wins in nine games – meant that Plymouth were genuine promotion contenders by the time Manchester City visited Home Park late in November. A 3–2 victory saw them draw level with Newcastle in second place in the table, but Newman had shown little evidence of pressure when, with the scores level at two goals apiece, he stepped up to the penalty spot. Instead of shooting for goal he rolled the ball forward for Trebilcock to run in and thrash home, while City’s defenders remained obediently motionless on the edge of the penalty area. A move that Arsenal’s Thierry Henry and Robert Pires would mess up four decades later against the same opposition hardly seemed designed for such a crucial moment.
After the game, Allison played down the danger, saying, ‘It was common practice for Raich Carter and Peter Doherty to take penalties this way in charity games. Psychologically, it eases the tension and doesn’t throw the onus on just one player.’
However, Newman admits, ‘It was a tight game and if it hadn’t gone in there would have been ructions and that would have been the end of me. I learned it from watching the great Peter Doherty in a testimonial game and I never thought I would have the nerve to do it. But I had done it previously against Aston Villa a couple of years earlier.’
The penalty offered City striker Neil Young an introduction to the personality of the man for whom he would score some vital goals in years to come. ‘That was the signal for Malcolm to leap from his seat, turn to face the crowd with his arms stretched in the air like some great warrior acclaiming his flock and then bow low towards the directors’ box. What a showman.’
Four days after the City game, Plymouth were due to entertain Northampton in the quarter-finals of the League Cup, a competition in which they had been playing consistent football. Two goals by Lord produced victory over Sheffield United in the second round and after disposing of Bury, First Division Stoke City were brushed aside in a replay. Only a late scrambled goal had saved Stoke on their own ground, but a hat-trick by Lord reflected Plymouth’s superiority in a 3–1 win at Home Park. The local paper reported that Argyle ‘toyed with their opponents, keeping possession of the ball in Real Madrid fashion’. Stoke manager Tony Waddington was the latest to complain that Plymouth were negative, but Allison put the complaints down to the fact that few teams had ever given much thought to the problem of beating the extra defender.
The good form continued against a Northampton team that was unbeaten in 18 games and heading for promotion to the First Division. Newman scored the only goal when he ran onto a neat chip by Duncan Neale after ten minutes, setting up a two-legged semi-final against First Division Leicester. Even in the days when the elite of the First Division teams ignored the competition it was an achievement that put Allison and Plymouth on the country’s football map.
Newman recalled Allison’s desire to improve players’ individual performances: ‘Through that period we played some good stuff, tactically he was sharp and he could address the team in the way he wanted them to play. He knew that you had to lay out a system and tactics, but he knew that the most important thing was getting the players performing to the best of their ability within that system. He wanted us to be better technically – that was the biggest advance. He was very good at one-on-one talks. There was a lot of that and there was encouragement to use your ability. He made things simple to grasp, but he expected you to carry it out.’
Allison chose the first leg of the League Cup semi-final at Leicester’s Filbert Street ground to hand a first-team debut to Glyn Nicholas. It was the third consecutive game in which he had given a teenager his first taste of professional football, having played 16-year-old forward Richard Reynolds in an FA Cup tie against Derby and introduced 17-year-old Norman Piper for the Division Two game at Ipswich.
The decision to blood Piper was in part due to the youngster’s dedication to his prescribed programme of weight training and the physical progress he had achieved. Allison would frequently become exasperated in future years at players’ reluctance to build on their strength and fitness. ‘It is a frustrating thought that thousands of players are not giving their best because they lack one quality which is well within their grasp,’ he wrote.
Meanwhile, Piper recalls Allison’s fearless attitude towards playing his young charges. ‘He evaluated players tremendously well. When I made my debut at Ipswich I had been down as twelfth man but Nicky Jennings got sick the night before the game. Malcolm said to me on Saturday morning, “Norman, you are playing – at left-back.” I had never played there before, but he knew I could do it. He knew I had a soccer brain and could play anywhere and he showed that he had confidence in me. Malcolm taught me a lot. He used to say, “Norman, you don’t have to tackle to be successful.” He taught me to always be aware of where you were when you received the ball. That is what I did. I used to be able to give up the ball as soon as I got it, play one-twos. He taught me that. His attitude on Saturday was to just go out there and play – what you have been taught will come through. He knew the game was all about doing simple things quickly.’
Newman remembers, ‘Malcolm liked technically strong players and he liked players with a lot of character. He always used to talk about winning headers, which I think is one of the biggest disciplines in the game – you have got to be brave to go and win headers. He was always on about being brave and hard against the opposition. Although he was brought up at West Ham, who were always a technically good side, he still knew that the physical side of the game was very important.’
It was the young players like Piper and Trebilcock upon whom Allison concentrated his individual coaching efforts. ‘We used to come in and train in the afternoons as well,’ says Piper. ‘It was fun coming to the training ground. If we ran we did it with a ball and at that time Malcolm was into weights. We used to do it twice a week to make the young players stronger, but when you got to 18 he cut it down because he didn’t want us to become too bulky.’
Book adds, ‘Malcolm loved finding young players – that was his forte. If a youngster showed something he would always give them a chance.’
At Leicester, Allison was unafraid of having all three rookie teenagers in the line-up for one of the biggest games in the club’s history and was rewarded by a heroic performance. Johnny Williams put Argyle ahead after 35 minutes with a 25-yard shot but Leicester levelled with an own goal by Williams shortly before the hour. Trebilcock restored the lead when he pounced after a header had been blocked – another goal that he credits to Allison. ‘He improved me 100 per cent and I saw the game in a different light. He taught me how to bend the ball and against Leicester the ball bounced right in front of me on the 12-yard spot. Gordon Banks was in goal, larger than life, so I just bent it up into the top left-hand corner. Gordon went up as far as he could and the ball went into the corner of the net. Malcolm taught me that.’
Leicester’s Bobby Roberts equalised almost immediately and with four minutes left, Dave Gibson scored the home team’s winner after referee Dick Windle allowed play to continue having appeared ready to blow for handball against Leicester. Newman recalls, ‘The League Cup run was great fun and we had some super games. We were a couple of minutes away against Leicester and should have won up there. We were the better team for a long while but couldn’t quite hold on. I can remember Malcolm getting on the coach and he was sick about the result because of how well the team had played.’
Having lost again at Leicester 5–0 in the FA Cup, Plymouth were unable to overturn the one-goal deficit in the second leg of their League Cup tie. The First Division side’s methodical defence was too strong and their first-half goal was the only one of the game. ‘I’m bitterly disappointed,’ said Allison. ‘We lacked experience but Leicester played well defensively.’
From defeat against Leicester, Argyle’s season proceeded to fizzle out. Their League form had already been dipping and a 3–1 win at Middlesbrough was their first victory in nine games. The broken leg suffered by top scorer Lord just before the New Year hit them hard after he had scored 16 goals in 28 games. ‘We just didn’t have quite enough player-wise to finish it off,’ says Newman. ‘We didn’t have the finance. You get yourself to a position where you think, “If we could just get a couple of players in now it would make a difference.” Mal tried his hardest but it didn’t quite come off.’