‘Our approach wasn’t about keeping a clean sheet and scoring one. Malcolm knew we were a good attacking side who could score more goals than the opposition’
– Former Manchester City midfielder Colin Bell
Derrick Robins picked up the morning newspaper and settled over his breakfast. He was interested to read the latest speculation about the appointment he, as chairman of Coventry City, would soon be making for his club. What he didn’t expect to see was the leading candidate for the manager’s position announcing to the world that it was already his. Malcolm Allison had just managed to talk himself out of a job.
It was two months into the 1967–68 season when developments in the world of televised sport very nearly changed the course of Allison’s career. The success of Match Of The Day, which was moved to BBC1 as the corporation looked to cash in on the surge of interest in football after the 1966 World Cup, had not gone unnoticed by the ITV network. A similar-format highlights show formed a large part of the business plan for newly formed regional stations like London Weekend Television, which, in the late summer of 1967 appointed a new head of sport in preparation for its launch a year hence. Jimmy Hill, whose promotional expertise as manager of Coventry had brought him as much recognition as his achievement in leading the Sky Blues to promotion to the First Division, was the man appointed to work on plans for the launch of The Big Match.
Allison had established enough of a reputation to be mentioned when such managerial vacancies arose and enjoyed an encouraging discussion with Robins about moving to Highfield Road. Their conversation ended with Allison stating that he would need to get permission from the City directors before accepting any formal offer. But before hearing back from Allison, Robins instead saw him crowing about having secured the position and announcing, ‘Who would turn their nose up at £100 a week?’
Robins’s response was uncompromising. ‘Malcolm Allison will not be coming to Coventry,’ he stated. ‘I asked Allison to keep the whole thing absolutely quiet and breathe not a word to anyone else. That was about five o’clock on Monday evening. By 10 p.m. I heard that the story was on the streets in print. Today Allison gave the news that he had got the job. But it takes two to make an agreement.’ Instead, Robins went for Malcolm’s old pal, Noel Cantwell, who, since leaving West Ham, had captained Manchester United to victory in the 1963 FA Cup.
Allison, meanwhile, was left to focus on a City campaign that had begun with a couple of overriding priorities. The feeling that a more attacking approach was the way forward had become well established in his mind, but he still felt that there was a gap or two to fill in the forward line in order to make such methods successful. One addition had been made in the final weeks of the previous season when Allison had again persuaded Joe Mercer to trust his instincts. Left-winger Tony Coleman had arrived at Maine Road via a circuitous route that, on more than one occasion, appeared to have sent his career down a dead end. The problem with Coleman was that he was virtually uncontrollable off the field. Stoke and Preston had both decided he was beyond all hope. Here was a man who had supposedly thrown a bed out of a third-floor window to relieve the boredom of a training course at Lilleshall. He wound up at Bangor City, where his performances had prompted Allison to attempt to talk Mercer into spending £3,000 on him. The image of the flying bed was all Mercer needed to keep his chequebook pocketed. Having moved to Doncaster, Coleman’s value had risen to £12,000, but when he struck a referee he proved that he was as much of a gamble as ever. Allison went to work on Mercer again, this time convincing him that he could tame him. If anyone could relate to the personality of a hellraiser, it was Malcolm.
The final component of one of English football’s most famed forward lines would have to wait until the new season was several weeks old, however – by which time the execution of Allison’s other objective for the season was well under way.
Allison felt that his players had to increase their fitness if they were to compete with the top teams in the First Division. As much as he was acknowledged for encouraging players to work with the ball in training, he had always valued physical preparation at all of his clubs. In the late summer of 1967, his concern was to raise levels of fitness to the point where his men were as fast as sprinters and had the stamina of milers. When he told a journalist friend Bill Fryer of his plan, he was put in touch with former top-class athlete Joe Lancaster – a man the City squad would come to curse every Monday.
Allison charged Lancaster with devising a programme that would ensure City lasted the distance in the league. At first, the players were reluctant to buy into the philosophy that an athlete could devise a strategy to see them through a 90-minute football match. Giggling and smirking, mixed with resentment, greeted Lancaster’s introduction to the squad. ‘You could almost see the contempt stretch across their smug expressions,’ Malcolm recalled.
From now on, the working week would start in Wythenshawe Park, a green swathe of land on the outskirts of Manchester. By the end of the first session, players were sinking to their knees and some were being sick. The vomiting confirmed to Allison that his approach was the correct one. Lancaster was given permission to turn up the intensity of the sessions. Typically, the morning would begin with a long run to get everyone warmed up, followed by a series of bursts over a quarter of a mile, 220 yards and 100 yards, with strict target times in place for all of them. After a short break, the sequence would be reversed. Then would be a session of fartlek – a Swedish word meaning, literally, ‘speed play’ – a sequence of sprints and interval running aimed at replicating the stop–start tempo of the football pitch.
Allison outlined his policy in Soccer for Thinkers, where he wrote:
A game is in bursts. Training should be in bursts. One of the biggest failures of English training is that if an hour is laid down on the schedule, then the coach will work the players for an hour. This is a mistake. Work in bursts – three minutes, four, five, six – then stop. Rest for two minutes. Ball juggling, anything. Then off again for five minutes. Players can be stretched this way. Alertness and sharpness can be injected into their game.
Such an environment would prove a culture shock to former Bolton striker Francis Lee when he joined the team early in the season. ‘Malcolm’s training methods were very scientific but very hard,’ he recalls. ‘There was no chance to ease up in training. I could see that as far as dedication and purpose were concerned I had moved into another world.’
Lancaster’s programme was designed around six weeks of slog followed by three weeks’ rest, after which other athletes like Derek Ibbotson, the former world mile record holder, and local sprinters Danny Herman and Barrie Kelly were called in to work with the team. Players like Summerbee, Oakes, Bell, Young and Book found they could beat the sprinters over certain distances up to 60 yards, although the real runners maintained the edge over 100.
Mike Summerbee remembers that it didn’t take long for Allison’s sceptics to be converted. ‘First of all we were all moaning and groaning and thought, “What are we doing this for? Athletes and footballers are not the same.” But within about six weeks you realised that this was key to it all. We could play on heavy pitches and we weren’t even out of breath. We were superfit.’
Allison’s desire to embrace knowledge from outside the boundaries of his own sport was a recurring theme during this stage of his career, when his thinking was at its sharpest and his hunger for success most acute. He would pick the brain of Dr John Books at Salford University to study the performance of the human body under physical stress and work with psychologist John Kane to help infiltrate the mind of the professional sportsman. He would even use professional dancing champion Len Heppell to replicate the balance and footwork programmes he had carried out with Newcastle United forward Bryan Robson, his future son-in-law. Allison was one of the first men in English football to take diet seriously, making sure his players ate chicken, fish and salad before games instead of the traditional red steak.
Don Howe, coach of Arsenal at the time, remembers another of Allison’s experiments. ‘We were up at City and after coming off the pitch at half-time, all of a sudden I could hear this noise coming from their changing room. I could hear running and shouting and it seemed like they must be having some kind of ding-dong. After the game I asked Malcolm what had happened and he said it was a new idea of his. He’d found that after sitting down and relaxing it was hard to get the system going for the second half, so they were training at half-time!’
Tony Book remembers, ‘He was up to a lot of things at that time, talking to the top men at universities about diet, weight and everything else. I can remember him coming to me and saying, “Look, I need you to go to Salford University. There is something there that we are going to try out and I need you to be a guinea pig.” It was a treadmill, maybe one of the first. I went down there and they wired me up, but when they started it up I flew off the back of the machine because I didn’t know what was going to happen.’
Colin Bell adds, ‘Malcolm was into eating the right things on match days, drinking the right drinks. He would bring in anyone or any little thing that improved your performance. At Salford, he would make us run around in a gas mask to make us breathe more economically. You couldn’t get the air in quick enough, the gas mask stuck to your face – you wanted more air in than the gas mask would allow. I remember running round Wythenshawe Park during a training session with a box strapped to my back. I looked like Quasimodo because I had this box under my shirt. It was all to do with reading your pulse and heart rate and measuring recovery time. Then he had somebody from the university go to one of our matches to note the distance I ran, walked, sprinted and jogged during the game. He tried to have his finger on the pulse of everything.’
For all the determination to drive his players to the outer limits of their ambition and to squeeze every drop of potential out of City’s preparation time, Allison ensured that a relaxed atmosphere prevailed at Maine Road, one in which people would look forward to going to work. According to Lee, there were ‘no hard and fast rules’ at the club. ‘Generally speaking, you decide for yourself what time you go to bed before a match,’ he said. ‘The view is taken that we are all pros and know what is best for ourselves. It is typical of the club that there are not too many rules; and because the players are treated like adults it helps to build individuality.’
Summerbee adds, ‘Training was so enjoyable. We couldn’t wait to get started. Most of us got to the ground at nine, even though we didn’t start until ten. Then a lot of us would stay behind afterwards to practise different things.’
Allison remembered that inside every professional footballer lived the young boy who had started out kicking a ball around in the park or the street, dreaming of emulating his heroes. Bell explains, ‘He said to me towards the end of my career, “As a coach, when you go out, don’t just walk out and call everyone together like a schoolteacher. See that they are enjoying themselves. Even though they are grown men, let them shoot in from ten yards, and then after a few minutes call them together.” He used to come out to the middle of the park and watch for ten minutes before he said, “Right, let’s start.”’
Bell also recalls that there was always an air of mystery around the day’s training. ‘He put a lot of thought into it on a day-to-day basis. It is like any job – if you do the same thing every day for ten months it gets boring. Other than the running on Monday, we never knew what we would be doing. We might come in one day and find a bus there and Malcolm would say we were going to Blackpool for a sauna and lunch.1 He knew it would take the edge off your game if you got bored in training. At Bury, I knew every day what we would be doing; it was always the same pattern.’
Allison was keen that nothing would take place on the training field that would not have a direct bearing on Saturday’s events. Summerbee explains, ‘Everything was set in match-type situations. It would be forwards against defenders and we would be working on specific things, like running in or checking out. Nothing was done that was meaningless.’
Allison didn’t expect his players to change their personalities during training, as Book explains: ‘We had a lot of people who wanted to be winners. Even in the five-a-sides on Friday, there were times when we went over the top. But Malcolm knew that if you were a committed player you couldn’t just switch it off. If you don’t do it in training, I don’t think you can do it in games. That is how that team was. I could only train the way I played.’
Bell has vivid memories of those games at the end of the week, when the defence would take on the attack in fierce competition. ‘When I think back, I wonder how we managed to get 11 men on the field on Saturday. We used to kick lumps out of each other. Malcolm never told us to take it easy. The forwards wanted to win and the defence wouldn’t want to concede a goal for love nor money. Summerbee and Lee would get stuck in, Alan Oakes and Doyley would give people what for.’
Pre-season results, for all their renowned unreliability as portents of the months to come, offered reasons for optimism at Maine Road, with wins on tour in Germany and Belgium being followed by a 4–1 home victory against German team Borussia Dortmund, winners of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup little more than a year earlier.
The First Division season kicked off with a 0–0 draw at home to Liverpool, a game marked by ugly scenes among a crowd of almost 50,000 and a penalty miss by Book, named as club captain following the departure of Johnny Crossan to Middlesbrough. After defeat at Southampton, the third game at Stoke was the backdrop for a disagreement between Allison and Mercer about where Summerbee should play. Having missed out the previous season in attempts to sign Wyn Davies from Bolton – before his transfer to Newcastle – and Burnley’s Andy Lochhead, Allison felt that the control, speed and toughness of Summerbee could be transferred from the wing to fill the perceived deficiency at the apex of City’s attack, where Mike Doyle was being asked to wear the number 9 shirt. Mercer, however, insisted on keeping Summerbee wide and City lost 3–0 to drop to second-bottom in the table.
For the next game, Summerbee played at centre-forward, leading the line with imagination and guile and helping Bell and Neil Young to score two goals each in a 4–2 win against Southampton. ‘I could hold the ball up and set things up for other players,’ Summerbee explains. ‘And I was a bit of a masochist. I enjoyed being kicked, it made me play better.’ By early 1968, Summerbee’s switch to centre-forward would prove so successful that Sir Alf Ramsey was following Allison’s lead and naming him to lead the England forward line.
The next three League games were won without a goal being conceded, after which Leicester were dispatched 4–0 in the League Cup, with two goals by a young forward by the name of Stan Bowles. Then Sheffield United were the victims of a sparkling City display, their 5–2 win putting them level on points with the League leaders. Bowles marked his First Division debut by scoring twice more.
A single-goal defeat followed at Arsenal, but Gunners full-back Bob McNab remembers the esteem in which City were beginning to be held around the League. ‘They were a great team. They weren’t all the best players but they were coached well. They were doing all kinds of stuff and I knew when I was playing against them that this team was oiled, well organised and well coached.’
Next up was the first Manchester derby of the season, played at Maine Road. Goalkeeper Harry Dowd was missing after breaking a finger in training, meaning a City debut for Ken Mulhearn. Having failed in his attempt to sign World Cup winner Gordon Banks, Allison headed into the biggest game of the season with a man plucked from Third Division Stockport County only two weeks earlier for £25,000. This was one of those occasions when Allison remembered his days at Charlton, the experience of being pitched untested, overawed and intimidated into a big game. He recognised Mulhearn’s nerves and took him into the treatment room to give him the opportunity to calm down away from the other players. City lost 2–1 after taking an early lead through Bell’s fierce strike, but Mulhearn ended up retaining his place for the rest of the season.
The game was a typically passionate City–United game, with referee Kevin Howley stretched to keep control. Bowles and United striker Brian Kidd had to be pulled apart by police after coming to blows in the second half. The men escaped with a booking each but Mercer insisted on Bowles playing along with the media and posing arm-in-arm with Kidd the next day. Mercer believed in the Corinthian spirit of losing with grace and dignity, while Bowles – in an approach that Allison would have identified with – thought of the ways he could spend the banknotes that the pressmen pushed in his direction in return for participating in the stunt.
In the wake of a defeat that had put City back in their place in the Manchester hierarchy, rumours were growing of an imminent bid for Bolton forward Francis Lee. After eight years at Burnden Park, Lee felt his career had ceased to progress and his unhappiness was well known in football. He had requested a transfer, but knew that his club would not simply hold the door open for his exit. ‘Many players will back me up when I say that you almost had to tunnel your way out of town to leave Bolton Wanderers,’ he said.
Bolton were persuaded, however, to allow Lee to speak to Allison and Mercer. The next day, 24 hours before City’s game at Sunderland, Lee agreed that a move to Maine Road was preferable to the offer he had received from Stoke City. But when the Football League refused to rush through his registration in time for the game at Roker Park, Mercer told a distressed Lee that the deal was off. Finally, the paperwork was completed and three days after a 1–0 loss on Wearside, Lee was a City player for a fee of £60,000.
Lee and Allison had crossed paths before. It was Lee whose goals had ended Bath City’s dreams of an FA Cup upset four years earlier, and he’d had his first personal interaction with Allison during a night out at the Empress Club in Bolton, where Malcolm was in the company of Alan Ball, Nobby Stiles and Lee’s former teammate Tommy Banks. ‘He came over to talk to me,’ Lee remembers. ‘He’d obviously had a few and he said to me, “If I get my hands on you I will turn you into a top player.” I said, “I am a top player.” He just laughed.’
Lee came away with the impression that Allison was nothing but a loudmouth – hardly the first time someone had formed that impression. Little did he know that Allison would one day have the chance to add substance to his boast. Stocky, direct and explosive with a barrel chest that seemed to reflect his self-confidence, Lee was, in fact, every inch an Allison player. ‘I loved the swagger and aggression in his play,’ Allison commented. ‘It was so much more than mere cockiness. All I had to do with him was encourage his aggression, remind him of all his natural assets.’
Allison’s method of doing that was to deliver the same message he gave to Summerbee when he first signed for City: forget about spending too much time in his own half. Allison wanted him where he could hurt the opposition. Lee explains, ‘What he did with the forwards was encourage you to play to your strengths and skills. He used to tell Mike and me to get the ball, take defenders on and beat them. Training was built around that and only when he got that going to its full potential would he work on other things, like closing people down.’
With that kind of encouragement, Lee’s direct approach on the right, from where he could cut in with devastating effect, gave Allison his desired balance in attack. Lee’s first three games in a City shirt were all won, Lee himself scoring his first goal in a 4–2 win at Fulham. Bell’s winner gave City victory against Leeds, a result that moved them into fourth place in the table and emphasised the reality of their improvement in their second season in the top flight. Two weeks later, Young and Lee scored two each in a 6–0 win against Leicester. City were fast establishing themselves as the team to watch, a 3–2 win at West Ham and a 4–2 success against Burnley leaving them one point behind leaders Manchester United going into December.
The seemingly carefree nature of City’s victories was the manifestation of Allison’s approach to matches, where as little time as possible was spent worrying about the opposition. In fact, it mirrored his approach to life. The old gambler was never far from the surface. However many the opponents scored, Allison believed his team could get one more. ‘Ninety per cent of the preparation and team talk was about us,’ says Bell. ‘If we performed then we could get a result against anyone. In the team talks he would go through a few of their players and some of their set pieces. But just one or two things, he didn’t want to baffle you. He wanted you to play your own game. Malcolm wouldn’t accept going somewhere to pinch a draw. To him it was about planning about how you could win a game and more often than not, it worked. We would entertain and score goals. I can’t remember him ever rapping too many knuckles for conceding goals – maybe the odd bad one here and there – but if we conceded four and scored five, that was the name of the game.’
City’s forward line that season rarely failed to deliver. Summerbee and Lee would interchange positions effortlessly; Coleman could be mercurial on the left; Young’s free role and powerful left foot provided any number of crucial goals; while Bell’s renowned dynamic running, while providing the pulse of the team, often served to overshadow his own qualities as a thoughtful, skilful player. Behind the front five, City fielded a versatile and adaptable group of players who could contribute all over the field. It might not quite have been what the Dutch would develop into ‘Total Football’, but the influence of Continental teams and coaching on Allison’s football philosophy was evident in his team’s fluid defensive formation. In the number 4 shirt, Mike Doyle would play as the more attacking wing-half, mostly occupying a midfield position, while Alan Oakes, at 6, filled in alongside centre-back George Heslop. But with Oakes and full-backs Book and Pardoe given rein to get forward whenever possible, Doyle was flexible and aware enough to drop deep to provide cover.
Allison wrote, ‘Wing-halves must obviously be more defensively minded [than inside-forwards] with clear cut responsibilities and less freedom. Fluidity, however, is the heart of good attacking football and in a good team these players will interchange cover and run for each other.’ No way was he going to slavishly follow what he saw as the safety-first methods that Alf Ramsey had used to win the World Cup and which more coaches were looking to as the way forward. ‘We played the system which suited us and did not conform to the “new age”,’ he would say many years later.
Summerbee asserts, ‘The Dutch learned from us. We attacked quickly and could be shooting at goal in three passes. Our forwards were never in the same place, we could switch positions, and we played simple football at a fast pace. Teams were afraid of us. We never passed the ball square; the intention was to get the ball and run at people. We had Doyle and Oakes coming forward and Bell making his 40 yard runs. People ended up talking about Lee, Bell and Summerbee because we were the forwards, but we had good players throughout the team. It was guys like Alan Oakes and Glyn Pardoe who were the mainstay – men who created those situations. Manchester United might have had better players individually in those days, but collectively no team was as good as us.’
Book continues, ‘We went out and passed the ball around and tried to get into wide areas because people like TC, Mike and Franny could deliver quality into the box. We used to get the ball down and pass it as quick as we could and from the two full-backs and centre-half, we used to go forward and play. We just defended when we had to. Because we knew that we could win the games by the odd goal or two by going forward, we would give the odd goal away.’
Bell remembers that ‘pass and move’ was the instruction drilled into them by their coach. ‘It was all one-touch or two-touch. That’s what we worked on in training and it all became natural, with people moving players all over the field. The beauty of that side was that we didn’t have any individuals. Nobody would keep the ball and do his own thing to be eye-catching. Nobody was better than anyone else.’
The pieces might all have been in place for a successful team, but Allison knew that nothing could be achieved if individuals did not perform to their full potential. Having the pitch watered on the morning of the game to ensure a slick surface for City’s passing game could only go so far towards ensuring victory.
Lee explains, ‘We realised that we had got the making of a good team and Malcolm recognised that we were a very good attacking side and he worked on it all the time. The players responded – none of them had ever won anything so we were hungry for success. It doesn’t matter what coach you are, it is down to the players eventually because it is a spontaneous game to play. When we were on the pitch on Saturday afternoon, players took no notice of Malcolm shouting from the touchline. You played your own game. But one of Malcolm’s great attributes was getting players to be ultra-confident in themselves and their game. He would work with them on their own and tell them, “You are a fucking good player. You can do this, you can do that. Let’s see it a bit more.” He was a great motivator that way.’
To a man, City’s players recall that their confidence provided the edge that would make them so successful. For example, Joe Mercer always believed that Young, the slim hotshot who had come through City’s youth team, could be even better than all the imported stars if he had more self-belief. Allison made it one of his projects to build him up, constantly pointing out how well he played against established international defenders, urging him to go looking for the ball all over the field and encouraging him to shoot more often. ‘Malcolm goads you, persuades you, using any means possible to simply get it through that you are the best player in the Football League,’ Young explained. ‘His psychology is simple; it gives you confidence.’
When Allison looked at Bell he saw a player he felt could be among the best in the world if he set his sights higher, made the most of his talent and ‘freakish strength’ and went out to grab greatness. ‘Colin Bell was the best player I ever worked with,’ said Allison, whose message to him was, ‘Every time you walk off the pitch unable to say you were streets ahead of the other 21 players you have failed.’ Malcolm also sensed that Bell could fret if he believed he wasn’t 100 per cent healthy, so would cajole him through fitness tests with comments like, ‘You’re flying.’
During a game against Sunderland, Allison charted players’ passes and pointed out to Bell that, while the Scotland and former Rangers hero Jim Baxter gave the ball away six times in about forty passes, he had relinquished possession only twice in the same number of attempts. ‘At this stage Bell’s confidence was low and evidence that he was more reliable than Baxter could hardly be anything but flattering,’ said Allison.
Bell, who went on to win the first of his 48 England caps at the end of the season, raves about Allison’s man-management abilities, saying, ‘As well as motivating as a team, he would treat people as individuals. We had a room at the top of the Maine Road tunnel and he would pull individuals in to chat to you. He’d give you a load of spiel about how you were the best player in the world, but you appreciated it because he knew the game inside out and you took it all in. And you walked out feeling ten feet tall. It is all about reading the player’s personality. You don’t get anything out of some people if you give them a good talking to. But if you gave Mike Summerbee a bit of stick he would bite at it, and go, “Right, I’ll show you.” If you said that to somebody else they might go into their shell. Malcolm knew the personalities of the players and how to get the best out of them.’
Summerbee recalls Allison’s method of helping him rediscover his lost form. ‘I had a very volatile relationship with Malcolm,’ he admits. ‘He would slag me off and have a right go at me. I remember when we played Leeds in the Charity Shield after we won the FA Cup. I was fit but my way of life had changed. I was married and I was getting regular meals, living in a comfortable heated house. My metabolism changed. I didn’t play very well and at half-time Malcolm said to me, “They are carrying you.” After the game he said, “You are finished, you can train with the reserves.”’
Summerbee’s mother, Dulcie, happened to be visiting and she marched to Allison’s house the next day to confront him, informing him that he was ‘a bugger’. Summerbee barely saw the first-team players in the following week but on Friday was told by Allison that he was getting ‘one more chance’. Summerbee went out and gave Sheffield Wednesday the runaround, saying, ‘Psychologically, Malcolm had got the best of me. He could belittle me, abuse me, say hurtful things, but he knew it would make me perform.’
Book also recalls an example of Allison resorting to tricks when he thought a player needed to be geed up: ‘We were sitting in the communal bath and I’d been struggling a little bit. All of a sudden he said to the reserve-team right-back, “I hear you are playing out of your skin at the moment.” He did it to get into my mind; a reminder that if you weren’t doing it, someone else could.’
Meanwhile, Lee quickly discovered that the brash figure he’d met in the nightclub was ‘very soft-hearted’. Lee recounts that when he experienced a downturn in form for a few weeks during that first season at City, Allison recognised that his striker was feeling troubled and offered to take him for extra training sessions. ‘I know everybody thinks he is bombastic but he was like a mother hen, willing me to get over the bad spell. This was the man I had been doubtful about, and when you have had two or three years of the press image of Allison rammed down your throat I suppose it is difficult to change your opinion overnight.’
According to Mike Doyle, ‘[Malcolm] wanted to prove that if he hadn’t been an international star, he could turn other players into world-class material. Certainly more than one of the footballers at Maine Road owed part of their rise to international stature to the tuition and guidance of Malcolm Allison.’
Summerbee is not about to disagree with that comment. ‘Malcolm could make the people who had a limited amount of ability play beyond their potential. He made me into a player who could really play, and look at Tony Book: he was playing like a 16-year-old. Malcolm was the best coach in the country and still would be in the modern game.’