‘Malcolm’s brilliance was as a coach. If it was to do with a ball or motivating players, that was his speciality. He wasn’t a manager because he couldn’t manage a club. He was to finance and balancing the books what Sweeney Todd was to hairdressing’
– Former Manchester City forward Francis Lee
Manchester City began the 1972–73 First Division season with five defeats in six games – four without scoring a goal. Despite his concern, Malcolm Allison did not agree with those who felt the team would, or should, break up. He felt there was still too much quality in the squad for that.
City fans had been waiting to see how Rodney Marsh would adapt to the team’s methods with the benefit of a full pre-season of integration. Allison crowed, ‘We shall use him to some extent in midfield, but his greatest value will be coming through on the left flank. This allows us to set up different points of attack and will help us to stretch defences more. He’ll find more room than he was previously used to because he is no longer the centre point of everything. Give him 20 games and you’ll see the real Rodney.’
City had been invited to contend for the FA Charity Shield against the previous season’s Division Three champions Aston Villa, winning by a single goal at Villa Park. But when they found themselves stuck in the bottom two of the table several weeks into the League season, debate began over whether Allison was losing his powers and his drive. Jimmy Hill wrote that Lee and Summerbee had commented to him, ‘Malcolm’s gone soft and has nearly become part of the establishment.’ Hill’s article in Goal magazine continued, intriguingly:
I cursed the limitations of time with the television interview when discussing Manchester City with Allison recently. At a point where I had no time left, Malcolm astonishingly said, ‘Winning is not as important as it was before.’
He was explaining why he thought he would behave in exemplary fashion on the touchline if the FA decided to lift the ban on him sitting there. The statement was so extraordinary, because one would have thought that, since he and Mercer separated, Allison would have been even more determined to make City tick.
A bad start to the season will be taken by Allison’s critics as a sign that he is losing his grip or that he never was the genius his supporters made him out to be.
He was at a loss to explain the poor start. ‘You look at players. You know what they can do and there is no way that they can make the sort of mistakes which are getting us into trouble. Yet those mistakes are there in every game. Bad passing, bad running, defensive errors. We’ve always been a confident team, but look at us now.’
Allison could bemoan the form of the players, but results were suggesting that, even if he had not quite lost his powers, the new role of manager was making it impossible for him to use them in the way he once had. Early in October, City went to Fourth Division Bury in the third round of the League Cup, but the players had seen nothing of him since their League game the previous Saturday until he showed up in the Gigg Lane dressing-room shortly before kick-off. Following a 2–0 defeat, they glimpsed him only briefly after the match, although he did appear in front of the press long enough to accuse his players of being ‘non-triers’. The comment led reporters to seek out reaction from the board. Peter Swales, whose ambition to become chairman would be realised with the imminent resignation of Eric Alexander, confirmed that Allison had said nothing to cause them concern.
The board themselves were being watched closely, with Swales, the 39-year-old millionaire businessman, already being described by one article as ‘the power behind the throne’. Asked whether there were pro- and anti-Allison camps developing, Swales commented, ‘You could say that when you have a board of eight people you have eight camps. To suggest that the harmony of Manchester City has been destroyed, and that the team has been affected, is bunkum.’
He stopped well short, however, of giving Allison’s leadership a ringing endorsement. ‘It was a unanimous decision to appoint Allison. In view of this season’s results I suppose it would be ridiculous and untrue to deny that there must be someone who has the odd doubt now.’
The most obvious explanation for Malcolm’s problems is that he was simply not cut out to be a manager. Colin Bell points out, ‘It is down to individuals to know what role you want to be. For me there was no one better as a coach and motivator than Malcolm Allison, but to shift to being a manager and to organise things is completely different. You couldn’t see him sitting behind a desk.’
Ken Barnes, who was asked by Allison to help him coach the first team, suggests in his autobiography, ‘Sometimes [Malcolm] disappeared up his own arsehole with his theories, but Joe was there to rein him in if he went a bit too far. For all his qualities, Malcolm couldn’t or wouldn’t accept that he was better in combination with Joe than he was on his own. Perhaps it was pride, or ego or both.’ Barnes’s blunt assessment of Allison as team manager is, ‘Let’s face it, he made a right balls of it.’
Tony Book, who had seen Allison falling foul of directors during his management days at Plymouth, adds, ‘He was at his best when he was a free spirit. All of a sudden you take on a manager’s job and you have to be on your best behaviour. Malcolm loved a good time. That didn’t go down well in some people’s eyes as a manager. You have to behave yourself, be cleaner than clean and be disciplined. If there is a board meeting at a certain time you have to be there. That wasn’t Malcolm. He would roll up an hour late and they wouldn’t stand for that. I had a feeling it wouldn’t work. Knowing him over the years, he was an out and out coach.’
Allison might not have been showing up for board meetings on time, but neither was he always on the practice field when he should have been. Players recall that loyal club servant Johnny Hart was frequently left in charge of training sessions and that when their manager did eventually return there was no explanation about where he had been.
The disaffection Allison was feeling was further compounded in September 1972 when the FA turned down an appeal to have his lifetime ban from the touchline rescinded. He claimed that it was impossible to properly discharge the duties of team manager without being close to the action, but it would not be until 1979 that he was allowed back into the dugout on English grounds.
In later years, Allison would admit to the pressure he felt during this time. ‘The most frightening period of my life did not occur when I was out of work or even when I was in a sanatorium suffering from tuberculosis. It came at the height of my success at Manchester City. I had given them years of extremely hard work and the strain was affecting me more than I realised. I withdrew into myself and began doing the job from memory.’
Meanwhile, one of the immutable laws of football began to take hold: that when a team is doing well, everyone gets along famously – but when things go wrong, cliques, resentment and accusations of manager’s favourites begin to fester. Mike Doyle claimed that players began to question Allison’s relationship with certain players, noting that he socialised with internationals like Mike Summerbee and Francis Lee to an extent that disturbed troopers like Alan Oakes, Glyn Pardoe and himself. ‘Mal, Mike and Franny were the champagne set; we were the black-and-tan brigade,’ he said.
The view of Doyle, whose support of Allison was tested by his being left out of the odd game, is refuted by Bell, who states, ‘Malcolm had no favourites. His best eleven were his favourites and that eleven could change depending who was playing well.’
Bell argues that there was a difference between playing favourites and picking a settled side, something that had been a feature of the championship side but was now missing – 20 players having been used in the first three months of the season. Recalling the successes, Bell says, ‘It was happy families. If everybody was fit everyone knew who would be playing and even the subs didn’t mind because they knew we were a good side. They accepted it without aggravation or nastiness and they knew that Malcolm would stick them in if somebody wasn’t playing well.’
Yet Doyle insisted in his 1977 book, Manchester City: My Team:
I believe that if Malcolm had restricted his relationships with individual players in the team . . . he might still have been the manager. His involvement with a section of the players, rather than with the whole, didn’t show on the park but we talked about it among ourselves.
Two players had fallen out of favour with Allison sufficiently to have been transferred to Preston at the beginning of 1972: Neil Young, whose important goals had contributed so much to City’s big-game victories, and David Connor, the unsung man-marking expert. Young felt he had been sacrificed to raise cash for Marsh at a time when he was going through personal trauma, having suffered the loss of his brother to cancer, and had shed tears after leaving the club. Both men claim that Allison had promised testimonial games in return for accepting the move, but no such games were ever forthcoming.
Once again, it was the FA Cup that offered City their final opportunity of salvaging the season as they struggled to force their way into the top half of the table. Hopes were high after a fourth-round triumph against a Liverpool side on their way to winning the title in their penultimate season under Bill Shankly. Allison claimed to have ‘psyched out’ Liverpool by writing in his Daily Express column, ‘We will bury the myth of Liverpool.’
Ghostwriter James Lawton explains, ‘Everyone was saying it was a bad draw for City, but Malcolm said, “I fancy that. Let’s face it, Liverpool are just trial horses these days. When was the last time they won anything?” It was the back page lead in the Express and at about 7 a.m. the next day I was woken up by a call from Bill Shankly. It was like a pneumatic drill on the other end of the phone. “That fucking man is a lunatic and you are a disgrace for printing it.” He had got under Bill’s skin and they got a well-played draw and then turned Liverpool over at Maine Road. Game, set and match to Malcolm.’
Allison had suggested that the Liverpool side – being refashioned into the team that would dominate the next decade and a half of English and European football – had an inflated reputation and that City would expose their limitations. Allison, never slow to point out his own genius, recalled: ‘[Bill] may have recognised an element of truth in what I said. That was a piece of the old psychological warfare.’
After a niggardly 0–0 draw at Anfield, Allison responded to suggestions that his team had been too physical by suggesting that Durham referee Pat Partridge had been intimidated by the home crowd. Partridge felt that Allison was merely laying down a marker for some favours in the replay and even Lee disagreed with his manager’s comment. ‘The referee kept a firm grip and if he hadn’t this game could have ended in a brawl.’
City won the replay 2–0 with goals by Colin Bell and Tommy Booth and according to Partridge, ‘Allison was all sweetness and light.’ Writing several years later, Partridge used the episode to illuminate Malcolm’s personality.
That’s him. He can say things and sometimes get away with things you would strongly object to from other managers because there is so much honest emotion which bubbles over, yet so much genuine friendship under the surface. There’s no undercurrent of malice which sometimes prevails in others.
Second Division Sunderland put paid to Allison’s hopes of eventually leading his team out at Wembley, holding City to a 2–2 draw at Maine Road before beating them 3–1 in the replay at Roker Park. It was a result that was to have extreme consequences. A prolonged FA Cup run could have prompted a different response from Allison to the events of the next few weeks. Instead, he stated, ‘That, I suppose, brought the curtain down on me at Maine Road.’ It needed one final push, however, to send him through the doors.
City had remained dormant in the transfer market since the signing of Rodney Marsh a year earlier. Players like Frank Worthington, David Nish, Jeff Blockley and Ted MacDougall, twice, had all made headline-grabbing moves for huge sums. City’s most significant activity had been to send Wyn Davies across Manchester for £65,000. Swales, still not chairman but undoubted spokesman for the board, outlined the reality that buying new players needed to be balanced by selling. ‘We are a club which has spent £200,000 on one player and almost £500,000 on a new stand. If you are talking about spending another £100,000 or £200,000 we could find the money, but in the long term we would be looking towards balancing the books.’
Until 6 March, winger Ian Mellor had been as memorable for the stick-like figure that earned him the nickname ‘Spider’ than for his 30-odd appearances in City’s first team. The events of that day ensured his permanent synonymy with the end of an era.
Three days after losing the League Cup final to Tottenham, Norwich City went shopping for a new wide man. Their offer of £65,000 to City for Manchester-born Mellor, accepted by the Maine Road board, could not have been better timed. ‘Malcolm had been ill and Johnny Hart was in charge for a while,’ Mellor recalls. ‘We got battered 5–1 at Wolves and although I was one of the best players on the field I was dropped for the midweek game at Southampton. I was seething and when one of the directors asked me if I would like to talk to Norwich I said, “Of course I fucking would.” I was so naïve, I signed for Norwich the next day. I should have said no but I was frustrated at being dropped for one of the big names and probably thought I was better than I was. Malcolm was seething because they had gone behind his back. Basically, I was the straw that broke the camel’s back. I was an excuse for him to say, “Sod it.”’
Allison quickly made his feelings known. ‘My directors have gone against my wishes and my advice,’ he complained. ‘My row with the directors has gone right to the heart of football’s greatest problem. It’s been about money – the need for it, the balancing of it against such assets as young First Division-class players. My directors insisted that we sold a player of striking potential. But I will not resign.’
Despite his public statement, Allison was disillusioned with life at Maine Road and the breakdown of his relationship with the board. He felt they had ‘dragged their feet’ over a new contract and admitted that ‘the urgency and thrill had gone out of my work’.
Meanwhile, his relationship with Serena Williams had been deepening. ‘London called,’ says James Lawton. ‘There was the romance with Serena and he loved the big-time. He couldn’t have been happier in Manchester those years when the team was doing well but there had been a general disintegration. London was part of him, part of his life.’
It so happened that there was a club ready to give Allison an escape route and the final destination he craved. Three weeks after his insistence that he was staying at Maine Road, he was introduced as the new manager of Crystal Palace.
Previous Palace manager Bert Head had spent every season since the club’s arrival in the First Division four years earlier trying to keep a grip on their elevated status in the football world. His primary tactic had been to accumulate discarded big-name players like a schoolboy swapping surplus Soccer Stars stickers. The club’s spending had become as eye-catching as their kit, changed in 1971 from claret shirts with light blue pin stripes to white with a broad claret and blue band down the front.
For the 1970–71 season, he had shelled out £100,000 on midfielder Alan Birchenall, unable to get a place in Chelsea’s FA Cup-winning team. He had also added Bobby Tambling, the west London club’s record goalscorer, and Liverpool full-back Peter Wall. There appeared to be no shortage of cash at Palace and stories emerged that their players could pick up £300 a week, higher than any other club in the First Division, if win bonuses were factored in – which they weren’t very often.
Head delighted in being able to say that ‘we have bought instant footballers’ and the autumn of the following season saw another substantial turnover of players. The incoming group included John Hughes and Willie Wallace, members of Celtic’s European Cup-winning squad in 1967, Blackpool stalwart John Craven and experienced midfielder Bobby Kellard. Another quick-fire burst of spending 12 months later saw winger Don Rogers – the hero of Swindon’s 1969 League Cup upset of Arsenal – join for £150,000, while former Scotland winger Charlie Cooke and Irish full-back Paddy Mulligan became the latest players to make the short trip from Stamford Bridge. Another six-figure sum was spent on Iain Phillip, a 21-year-old defender from Dundee, and a further £65,000 outlay bought the little blond whirlwind Alan Whittle, whose late-season burst of goals had helped secure the 1970 League Championship for Everton. An additional forward arrived in the shape of Millwall’s Derek Possee.
Whittle’s debut was in a 5–0 Selhurst Park victory over Manchester United in December 1972, the most famous day of Palace’s tenure in the First Division. A rampant Rogers scored twice, but the result proved more indicative of United’s impending doom than Palace’s hopes of a revival. In fact, it was the last straw for the United directors, who responded by firing manager Frank O’Farrell as manager. Allison’s former West Ham colleague had seen his team collapse the previous season and with George Best having gone into his latest ‘retirement’, the manager’s removal was being demanded by the Old Trafford fans.
O’Farrell, incidentally, recalls fondly the show of support he received from Allison at a time when he was not exactly the local population’s favourite son. ‘Malcolm was very kind and he invited me out for lunch in public in Manchester. He was very sympathetic.’
Allison had been quick to seize upon Best’s disappearance from Old Trafford to declare an interest in bringing him back into football at Maine Road, saying ‘all my players would welcome George in the dressing-room’. There was never any real chance of such a turn of events and Eric Alexander slapped down his manager by saying he had been ‘talking out of turn’.
Meanwhile, Head was proving no more popular in the Palace boardroom than O’Farrell and Allison in theirs. Ray Bloye, a front man for the business consortium Matthews Holdings, had been installed earlier in the season as vice-chairman. Despite his insistence that ‘when I joined the club as a director, I had neither the ambition nor the intention to become chairman’, by November the old chairman, Arthur Wait, had become a ‘life vice-president’ and Bloye’s boys were running the club. On 20 March, with Palace just above the two relegation places, Bloye announced that Head was to be moved to general manager, explaining unconvincingly that he was to perform a liaison role between the team and the board. It was Joe Mercer all over again. ‘Within the next few weeks it is our intention to appoint a first-class team manager, who will set about planning for the 1973–74 season,’ Bloye declared, apparently ignoring the fact that there was still a relegation fight to be won in the current campaign.
Aware of Allison’s unrest, Bloye made known his interest in bringing him back to his native south-east London. Unsure whether it was the right move, Allison agreed to meet Bloye – and was immediately impressed. ‘I liked his approach, which seemed to me to be bigger than almost any other football director I had spoken with. I couldn’t imagine him putting the sort of petty, day-to-day restrictions on his manager that I had been suffering.’
Allison confided in Rodney Marsh and was told, ‘You’ve got to do what your heart tells you is right.’ His heart was directing him to Crystal Palace. Staying in Manchester and being a good little boy by selling players when the board told him was not his style. He despised colleagues in the profession who were happy to prolong their employment by doing just that. He also sensed that he had taken his men as far as he could. After seven years with many of the same players, familiarity was turning into complacency, on both sides. It seems ironic that such a feeling should take root in Allison so soon after he’d secured the job he wanted above all others. Or maybe that was the point: having ascended to the position of manager, his ambition was diluted.
He informed the City directors of his decision. Their reaction was to promise more money for players and suggested that his contract would be reviewed. But their magnanimity came too late and Malcolm ‘drove away from Maine Road without glancing back’.
By that time, the City players were not exactly stunned by the news. Lee claims, ‘When Malcolm ran out of enthusiasm for something, he would move on. He had the wanderlust. Towards the end of his career at City he was having too many nights out and he was knocking around nightclubs in London and the lads got the feeling that he had just lost the edge and his appetite for being at City.’
Board member Ian Niven, a staunch supporter of Allison, says, ‘It was all down to the relationship between Malcolm and Peter Swales. They just didn’t gel. Peter didn’t show any sorrow, so it must have suited him. On the morning Malcolm went, Peter said to me, “Your mate’s leaving.” I asked what the problem was and he said I’d better go and ask him, but Malcolm wasn’t in the mood for conversation. He just left.’
Allison duly arrived in London in the early afternoon of 30 March, spent an hour finalising details of his new deal, and was unleashed upon London’s football media. ‘I’m back home after spending eight years in the provinces,’ he announced. ‘I had some happy times in Manchester but recently my relationship with the players has soured – I couldn’t motivate them. Palace is a club with vast potential and I am looking forward to the challenge. I would not be here if I thought it was too late. I see this as a good job.’
Allison’s move had taken the football world by surprise. The Palace players were more shocked than anyone, as Don Rogers explains. ‘We were surprised when Bert got moved upstairs and then we were told we would soon be meeting our new manager. We didn’t know who it was going to be and I remember sitting in the dressing-room when Malcolm walked in the door. We were flabbergasted. Straight afterwards, everyone was saying, “I didn’t expect that.” He was the last person we would have thought. We didn’t think we would have someone so well known. I’d been quite happy with Bert because I started off with him at Swindon, but I was pleased it was Malcolm because I knew he always had good footballing sides. We knew what he’d achieved at City.’
As Alan Whittle puts it, ‘We all thought, “Hang on a minute. This is big time.”’
With a compensation payment to City of £20,000 agreed, Allison took charge for the game against Chelsea and was introduced before kick-off to a Selhurst Park crowd of 40,000. It was former manager Head who was responsible for presenting his replacement to the masses but, symbolically, the two men sat apart in the stands, chairman Bloye and England manager Sir Alf Ramsey separating them. Head, who had greeted Allison’s appointment by saying that ‘Malcolm and I will have to have a chat before I know what’s what’, would quit the club at the end of the season.
Allison spoke to his new players for half an hour before kick-off and in keeping with their manager’s instincts as a showman, they responded by scoring a goal in each half, the second via a header by young Scottish defender Jim Cannon on an impressive debut. The 2–0 win was Palace’s first success in a London derby since being promoted. Muhammad Ali might have been silenced that same weekend by having his jaw broken by Ken Norton, but one of British sport’s own most accomplished talkers was ready to fill the newspaper columns in his stead. ‘There is no danger of us going down,’ Allison bragged. ‘The potential is ten times better than when I first arrived at Manchester City.’
The financial rewards were also a lot better. Palace had reportedly offered the kind of long-term contract Allison had been unable to get the Maine Road board to finalise, five years at £13,000 a year. The money would be welcome, being – as always – in short supply. While Palace fans were still celebrating victory in Allison’s debut game, stories broke that Allison owed William Hill £1,300, the result of a gambling spree at Sandown races more than a year earlier. A spokesman for the bookmakers claimed that Allison had been warned off all racecourses until the debt was paid. Allison denied that part of the story, although not the existence of the debt. He also took the opportunity to criticise the bookmaking industry for encouraging such arrears to be accrued. ‘Nobody should be given credit. It’s like taking dope. Once you are hooked, you are hooked.’ The sound of Allison asking to be protected from his own excesses earned him little sympathy, although once Bloye had paid his debt for him Malcolm claimed to have been given ‘a sort of public reminder that a reckless streak could still lead to much self-damage’.
On the field, Allison was quickly discovering that he had not been blessed with the riches he had believed. A 4–0 defeat at Leeds left him complaining, ‘There are players in the side who don’t know how to run. They’re lacking something as basic as that and they are playing in the First Division. Incredible.’
One point and one goal in the five games after beating Chelsea meant that defeat at Norwich in the penultimate fixture would send Palace down. With the score level at 1–1, an injury-time goal by David Stringer won the match for the home team and sealed Palace’s fate. Defender Mel Blyth quickly spoke up for the new manager, saying. ‘Malcolm came too late. If he had come sooner we would have stayed up. He instils confidence in you. He’s that type of bloke.’ And Rogers still argues, ‘We should never have gone down. It was just luck. If your luck is out that year you have had it.’
Allison’s immediate reaction was to take his players to a restaurant in Norwich, arrange the tables in a long line and have a relegation banquet. Rogers explains, ‘Malcolm’s attitude was, “It’s happened, we can’t change it, let’s focus on next season.”’ But there was a sour taste to the soup and even a 3–2 win at Maine Road in the final game of the season, keeping Palace off the bottom of the table, couldn’t cleanse Malcolm’s palate.