‘If you behave “badly” in terms of what is traditionally good behaviour, nobody minds it when you are doing well. But as soon as you are not doing well they point the finger and say, “That’s the reason.”’
– 1976 Formula 1 champion James Hunt
If the years from 1968 to 1970 represented the pinnacle of Malcolm Allison’s professional achievements in England then 1975–76 was the season that did most to inscribe the legend of Big Mal permanently into the lore of the game. It began with Terry Venables being formally installed as Crystal Palace’s chief coach and Allison turning down an ambitious offer from Stockport County to become manager at Edgeley Park. Palace rewarded him with their best-ever start to a season, reeling off five wins and establishing themselves as early pace-setters in Division Three.
By the time they began their FA Cup campaign in November, Palace had lost only one of 18 games, so it was some surprise that they needed a solitary goal by newly arrived forward David Kemp to edge past Walton and Hersham of the Isthmian League. It was the only time they would be drawn at home in a Cup run that was to become one of the stories of the season and would keep Allison in his favoured place in the sporting spotlight. David Swindlehurst’s goal helped Palace take Millwall back to Selhurst Park for a replay that they won 2–1 with another Kemp goal and a penalty by Peter Taylor.
Before facing non-League Scarborough in the third round, Allison failed in his attempt to bring his most infamous former signing back to London. Rodney Marsh had fallen out of love in a very public way with Manchester City and was preparing to throw in his lot with the North American Soccer League. Allison made a request to the Football League to take Marsh on loan from the Tampa Bay Rowdies until their summer season started, but the governing body blocked the kind of arrangement that would soon see players flitting between teams on either side of the Atlantic like businessmen building up their frequent-flyer points.
It was on a train station platform that Allison revealed the headwear that was to become the symbol of Palace’s Cup run and would be identified with Big Mal for the rest of his days. Waiting to change trains at Crewe on their way to Yorkshire, Allison, standing a few yards from his players, unzipped his holdall and plonked a wide-brimmed fedora on his head. ‘Serena bought it as a Christmas present for me,’ he would explain. ‘I always liked that sort of hat, always loved to wear them.’
Allison’s intention was to ‘have a laugh’ and as the players responded with a mixture of delight and derision, he piped up, ‘We are going to win the Cup with this hat.’ Allison had remembered Portsmouth manager Jack Tinn leading his team to a Wembley victory wearing ‘lucky spats’, while Dave Sexton had continued to sport the same overcoat during Chelsea’s successful FA Cup run and Don Revie favoured a lucky suit. None of those sartorial statements were quite as photogenic as Allison’s fedora, though, and when he took his seat in the stand, the photographers ran from their positions behind the goal to gather below him. ‘What do you think of that cunt,’ one Scarborough player was heard to say. ‘The only chance we’ll ever get of getting some publicity and he wears that fucking hat!’ The home team were also denied any giant-killing headlines when goals by Taylor and Evans beat them 2–1.
The draw for the fourth round was made while the Palace party were stuck on a train and when Allison saw his messenger approaching he sensed from his gloomy facial expression that it must be bad news – possibly a First Division team, probably away from home. He quickly whispered instructions to Terry Venables, ‘When he tells us which team it is, get very excited, say what a lucky ground it is for you, and really give it some hype.’ When the words ‘Leeds away’ pierced the carriage, Allison punched the air and Venables announced what great success he’d enjoyed at Elland Road. Players looked at the pair as if they had gone mad. Leeds, although no longer under the iron grip of Don Revie, were second in the table and had been unlucky to lose the European Cup final against Bayern Munich a few months earlier.
As the game approached, Palace’s players feared that Allison’s traditional pre-match prognostications of success could be like prodding a bear with a sharp stick. Taylor says, ‘Leeds were such a good team that we said to Mal, “Let’s not give it the big ’un. We believe we can beat them, but let’s keep it low key.” We woke up in Leeds on the morning of the game, picked up the paper and there’s Malcolm saying we will win 3–0! And actually, it could have been.’
Allison restored Alan Whittle to the Elland Road line-up in place of Kemp, and made another important tactical decision, explaining, ‘We decided to play a sweeper at the back with four markers, and to break whenever we could. So it became a competition between our defenders and their strikers and we outplayed them.’ The only goal of the game was headed in by Swindlehurst, meeting Taylor’s first-half free-kick with a late run to the far post. Swindlehurst stung David Harvey’s palms with a long-range free-kick after half-time and the Scottish keeper did well to keep out an Evans header. Palace were so comfortable that at one point Stewart Jump turned toward the bench and mimed smoking a cigar, as if to indicate the ease of the victory. ‘That is a special memory,’ Jump recalls. ‘With a few minutes to go I shouted to the bench to find out how long to go and I just wanted to portray to them how very, very easy it was for us. They didn’t even come close to scoring.’
Jump puts that down to Palace’s preparation. ‘It was a very intense week. Every day we played against the reserves and they were pretending to be Leeds. We developed a great confidence in the system we were playing and believed we were going to play well.’
The bandwagon was up and running. The fifth-round draw sent Palace to Stamford Bridge to face Chelsea, and the resulting hype reflected the exciting prospect of Big Mal back on a major London stage in front of 50,000, rather than the thought of a contest between a mid-table Second Division team and one a division below. Cheap replica fedoras flew off the traders’ stalls in and around Selhurst Park and the players even went into the recording studio. The match lived up to its build-up, the stadium crackling with more excitement than it had experienced in the previous two or three years of Chelsea decline. ‘It is the game I always remember in that Cup run,’ says Taylor. ‘Every game was away from home but at least at Stamford Bridge we had a lot of our fans there. It was an incredible day and I still look at the tape every now and again. It was a great atmosphere.’
Palace silenced the home fans in the first half, with Taylor showing too much close control for the big, blond centre-back Steve Wicks. He teased and tormented him on the right edge of the box before firing against the underside of the bar, giving Nicky Chatterton the easy task of turning in the rebound. Taylor dragged Wicks wide again but instead of turning outside him he played the ball square to Chatterton and met the return pass with a low left-foot shot into the corner of the net. Up in the stand, Allison waved his hat in celebration before jamming it shapelessly back on his head.
After the teams changed ends, Chelsea mounted a comeback. Ray Wilkins – still hirsute and known as ‘Butch’ in those days – fired in from just inside the area and an ecstatic Wicks headed home a corner. With the crowd in the kind of frenzy that is absent from most grounds in the new all-seater era, especially for devalued FA Cup games, Palace were awarded a free-kick 25 yards out in a central position. Taylor stepped up to curl the ball round and over the wall to clinch a thrilling Palace victory.
Sunderland, a team who knew all about the romance and magic of the Cup, stood between Palace and a place in the last four. Having soaked up 45 minutes of pressure from the home team, who were playing with a strong wind at their backs, Palace left Roker Park with a 1–0 win after Taylor set up a goal for Whittle. The sense that perhaps fate was on Palace’s side grew when they avoided Manchester United and Derby in the semi-finals and instead, drew Second Division Southampton. ‘We were very confident,’ Jump remembers.
Allison recognised the great opportunity that now lay ahead of him. The tough times he had endured since the end of his partnership with Joe Mercer had, on occasions, borne down heavily. The sleepless nights, the near-outburst at the Footballer of the Year dinner, were evidence that, for all his bluster, Allison had a need for approval. His bravado, his outrageous behaviour, was often no more than a clumsily constructed shield for the hurt and self-doubt that failure had planted within him. To the Palace fans, such humanity and vulnerability assured their loyalty. Chants of ‘Allison out’ had been scarce during Palace’s free-fall through the divisions. And looking back, players such as Taylor appreciate the way Allison internalised his anxieties. ‘Where he was so good was, even when we were under pressure, that he never let it get to us. He took it all on his own shoulders.’
Now Malcolm had his men on the threshold of Wembley, exactly the kind of performance to which he had alluded when, a few months earlier, he’d said in his autobiography, Colours of My Life:
I have at the back of my mind an achievement which will really knock some people sideways. I want people to acknowledge that I have gone into a tight situation, fought it, and then say, ‘He’s a man among boys; he knows what he is doing and where he is going.’
Allison’s quest to prove himself once more had even led him to express interest in managing ‘Team America’, the NASL representative side that would take on England, Brazil and Italy in the Bicentennial Tournament in the United States in the summer. In March he vowed, ‘In a month coaching the best players in America, I could teach them more than they have learned in the history of the game there.’ He wouldn’t get the chance to make good on that promise, the job being given to New York Cosmos head coach Ken Furphy, the former Watford and Sheffield United manager.
Of course, the feat of becoming the first manager to lead a Third Division team to the FA Cup final would do more to restore his credentials than leading the likes of Bobby Moore and Pelé in a summer sideshow. ‘How one ached for him to get to that final,’ recalls James Lawton. On the strength of their impressive list of scalps, Palace were considered by many as favourites to beat Southampton at Stamford Bridge. Allison predicted a Palace–Derby final and expressed his excitement about returning to the European Cup-Winners’ Cup. The only negative note he sounded in the build-up was his anger at Millwall manager Gordon Jago for refusing to postpone the clubs’ Division Three meeting four days before the semi-final.
Yet Palace’s hopes on their big day were hit when Taylor was unable to display the form that had recently earned his first full England cap as a substitute against Wales. ‘Everyone expected Peter to do more against Southampton,’ says Whittle. ‘But he was tied up by Peter Rodrigues and it didn’t happen. Malcolm probably put too much on the boy.’ The rest of the team appeared nervous without their talisman producing the goods. Taylor adds, ‘We played hopeless in the semi, and Southampton played just as badly.’
It was hard to see where a Palace goal would come from and Southampton were comfortable 2–0 winners, through Paul Gilchrist and a David Peach penalty. It turned out that the Saints were the team of destiny all along, beating Manchester United 1–0 in the final.
The downside of all this Cup excitement was that Palace lived up to the old truism of teams being distracted from their primary objective of winning League games. In December, after their second-round win, they lost four successive games. They still retained top spot at that point, but slipped to third during a run of seven games without victory. They went almost four months without a Selhurst Park victory and failed to regain momentum after their Cup exit, winning only one of their final eight games to finish fifth. The fans might have retained their patience and affection, but that of the Palace board had run out.
In sport, winning can buy you the licence to behave in any way you wish. Tales of high jinks during a run of success are indulged and celebrated; the same stories during a fallow period frowned upon and condemned. Even in the good times, Allison tiptoed precariously close to what constituted the boundary of acceptability. But with the FA Cup run in full swing, he had plunged headlong down the waterfall of poor taste.
With training drawing to a close one day, a Rolls-Royce pulled up. Who should emerge but a tracksuited Allison, accompanied by ‘actress’ Fiona Richmond, resplendent in a fur coat. Fiona was the shining star of the early-’70s phenomenon that was the British soft-porn film industry. A household name and face even to those who were not aficionados of her work, her credits in films with such titles as Exposé, Barry McKenzie Holds His Own and Not Tonight, Darling sum up her career quite neatly. The players completed their exertions, retreated to the changing-rooms and flopped wearily into the communal bath. Barely a step behind them, however, with a photographer in tow, came Malcolm and Fiona. Before you could say ‘no sex please, we’re British’, the pair of them had stripped off and joined the players in the tub. Allison would explain, ‘She said, “Do you mind if I get in the bath?” So I said, “Yeah, why not?”’
Others could have answered that question rather easily. Venables recorded, ‘I was out of the bath like lightning when I saw the photographer lurking around. Malcolm later told me he had never seen me move as fast on the football field.’
Stewart Jump says, ‘Malcolm had announced that somebody was coming to training, a model or somebody. We didn’t think anything of it. But when we came in after practice things started happening and the next thing she is in the bath and Malcolm jumps in after her. It was quite a spectacle and a typical Malcolm thing. Anything to get in the papers.’
Alan Whittle remembers that he and Peter Taylor were responsible for Fiona ending up in such hot water. ‘Mal had said earlier that she was getting in the bath with us. After training she was in the physio’s room and Peter picked her up and threw her in the bath and took her shoes off.’
Taylor claims no such part in the events, saying, ‘Malcolm and I got on well and he had told me in advance what was going to happen so I was nowhere.’
However Fiona came to be naked alongside the Palace players, and however many of the players either saw the funny side or claim to have been nowhere in the vicinity, the truth was that there were few smiling wives – or club directors – when pictorial evidence of the escapade emerged. Allison had yet to meet a photo opportunity he didn’t like and he pointed to the exposure, so to speak, that he achieved for his club as justification for the stunt. Yet friend Bob McNab states, ‘That sort of behaviour was idiotic. I remember saying to myself, “Malcolm, what the hell are you doing? That is not the publicity you want.”’
The escapade was typical of Allison’s ability to speak or act on occasions without giving full thought to the consequences, a trait that, in some ways, had a charming innocence about it. James Lawton says, ‘Don Revie once described him as an embarrassment to the game but I don’t go along with that. No one could ever claim on his behalf that he was modest but he wouldn’t be self-serving in the way of José Mourinho. He could say something unguarded, and the incident with Fiona wasn’t particularly well calculated.’
The real problem at Palace was that the daft headlines and the tabloid tales of his private life were starting to outweigh the victories. As bizarre as his behaviour with Fiona Richmond had been, if he’d given Palace three seasons of success instead of underachievement, the directors would probably have been lining up to soap her back. Instead, as he would recount, ‘I had a good young team coming through, maybe the second-best I ever had after City, but then Fiona Richmond got in the bath and the FA said I brought the game into disrepute.’ And in what became a well-rehearsed line, he added, ‘It was a real disappointment to me because when she got in the bath I realised she had plastic tits. It wasn’t worth getting the sack for.’
Allison was dismissed in mid-May, two weeks after a meeting with chairman Ray Bloye appeared to have determined that he would be staying at the club. Fiona had been the last straw. As well as disappointing results, Allison had angered the board by refusing to consider a £300,000 offer for Taylor from Leeds – funds the club needed badly1 – and disappearing to the Cannes film festival with Serena Williams instead of staying at home to discuss the matter. He had also sailed close to the wind of the FA’s disciplinary committee when, in defiance of his continuing ban, he had appeared on the touch-line to shout at his players during a loss at Rotherham.
As usual, the official statement released to explain Allison’s departure spoke of him leaving the club ‘by mutual consent’. Yet the directors had, quite simply, reached an unavoidable verdict: Malcolm had lost it. He could no longer inspire and innovate in the manner that had shaped Manchester City’s great run of achievement. His increasingly extreme lifestyle appeared incompatible with that of a successful manager.
His old friend and protégé, Bobby Moore, commented to his biographer Jeff Powell in the mid-’70s, ‘Malcolm’s had a great life but he has left some question marks behind him en route. As a manager I would still want to be part of my players. But only up to a point. I wouldn’t even think about taking them out to night clubs. How else could I hope to discipline people? I would have told Mike Summerbee he had it in him to be the greatest winger in the world and to go out and prove it to me every game. If he failed, he would have to get in the reserves and prove he was still in good physical condition. I don’t know if Malcolm leaves himself the right to do that.’
It seems sad that, in the space of a few months, Fiona and the fedora had helped to create a legacy for Allison that would overshadow his football achievements in the consciousness of the public in decades to come.
Taylor suggests that, just as Allison would have thrived in the environment of the modern English football club, where the manager is free to focus on coaching duties, so the contemporary lifestyle of the game could have shielded him from his own inclination to overindulge. ‘Malcolm was a little bit unlucky. If he was managing now, when players take things so professionally and don’t drink a lot, he wouldn’t be out there so much with the champagne and cigars and people would take him more seriously.’
The flip side of that, of course, is that had Allison followed the same pattern of off-field behaviour in the modern celebrity-driven age the tabloids would never have left his doorstep. In 2004, with Sven-Göran Eriksson’s latest fling being plastered across the front pages, he told James Lawton, ‘Nothing changes in men chasing women. What’s different is the way people are judged. In my time performance was everything. The trick was to do your work as well as you could in public and your pleasure in private – and try not to hurt anyone.’
Yet even in the less sensationalist days of the 1970s more than one club felt they were being hurt by Allison’s antics, while undoubted self-damage was being inflicted by his apparent addiction to his celebrity status. He appeared unable any longer to rein himself in, even if he did feel it would have helped on the pitch. He certainly would never have done it just for the sake of decorum. By now some of the headlines that he was attracting were ones that even the most devoted publicity-seeker could have done without as his life away from football was played out in public like a cheap soap opera.
He lost his father, who was 65, to a heart attack in 1974, an event that hit Malcolm hard. ‘My father’s death came in the middle of a particularly hectic time at Crystal Palace,’ he said. ‘It was a shock and I deeply regretted that I had been unable to spend more time with him.’
On a seemingly happier note, he had set a date to be married to Serena, who commented, ‘We have both played the field but now we just want each other.’ She said that Malcolm had taken to wearing a pendant saying, ‘No longer me, but we.’ But the engagement lasted only a few months, the end reportedly coming soon after a row about money during a holiday in Spain, where Allison ended up getting into a fight with a barman. His face all over the news pages, he had returned to England in a depressed state.
At the end of December 1975, he was stopped by police while driving his Daimler the wrong way on the outer ring road of Regent’s Park. He was found to have twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system and was subsequently banned from driving for 12 months and fined £125, plus costs, after pleading guilty to driving while unfit and failing to provide a blood or urine sample. A reflective Allison commented at the end of the year, ‘I’m not saying I’ve lost pride in myself or my ability to do certain things, but in the last month or so certain things have happened to really make me think.’
The new year began with notification by a credit card company that it had filed a bankruptcy charge against him. Serena, now described in the press as his ‘agent and former girlfriend’, argued that the sum of money involved was ‘ridiculously small’.
In the meantime, Beth was back on the scene, with Allison said to be happily reunited with his wife and living in a house close to Selhurst Park. But their final split, after twenty-two years and four children, was just around the corner. Beth stoically acknowledged that Malcolm was simply not cut out to be the doting husband, accepting his own assertion that tuberculosis had changed him irrevocably. ‘I think that while he was recovering he decided to prove himself,’ she said. ‘I think he came to the conclusion that he only had one life and he was going to live it to the full.’
Allison himself spoke with regret and affection. ‘I cannot recall a single row between us. Not even when I disappeared one afternoon in Manchester to buy some fish for tea and didn’t get home until lunchtime the following day. She was a brilliant mother and a super girl. When I was gambling I’d have £30,000 sometimes stuffed in drawers in notes and she never took a fiver.’ Malcolm proceeded to kiss and make up with Serena, although their partnership would eventually dissolve for good late in 1977.
Lawton, who had moved from Manchester to London around the same time as Malcolm, had been a frequent companion during this period and together they had constructed Allison’s autobiography, Colours of My Life. While celebrating some of its author’s excesses, the work is much more than a laugh-a-minute romp through the bedrooms of blondes and bunny girls or a facile circuit of the playing fields of his professional triumphs. There are moments of sombre introspection, hints of regret over a life boisterously lived but lacking in deep-rooted contentment. The book – vastly different from most football memoirs of the time, or indeed the modern day – reflects not only the skill of Lawton as ghostwriter, but the dark alleys of depression that Allison was wandering in and out of at the time.
‘I used to go up to his apartment in an old Georgian house on the Cromwell Road,’ Lawton explains. ‘It seems to me in recollection he was always wearing a loose Arab gown. He would sit on the settee and we would go through stuff and he would be quite sad and sober – in terms of his mood. I think things were bad with Serena and she might have gone. I don’t know that I am in a position to judge Serena but I always thought she attracted quite a lot of publicity on the basis of her relationship with Malcolm and benefited from it. But Malcolm was a bit distraught when it was over.
‘I remember a game around that time when they were winning 1–0 but they lost in the last seconds when the other team scored twice in stoppage time. I could hardly bear to do it, but I looked around and Malcolm just had his head in his hands. It would have made a great photograph. It was a stance I remember quite well from those days. It was as if his will was imploding.’
Jeff Powell, another friend from the world of journalism, adds, ‘Malcolm was a natural depressive. So when things were bad – if he had misbehaved and was having problems in his marriage or relationships – then he would get very down about it.’
In the midst of such turmoil, even football appeared no longer to offer the certainty and stability that was so lacking in other areas of Malcolm’s life. Whereas he would previously have thrown himself into training and tactical planning, those close to Allison sensed that the game had lost some of its appeal. It had needed the FA Cup run – a break from the mundane – to reinvigorate him. Terry Venables saw the phenomenon close up and felt, ‘Malcolm had become bored with winning, strange though that sounds, and was looking for a fresh challenge.’
McNab puts it this way. ‘At City, I always felt Malcolm had found the answer. Then he went looking for another one.’ The former Arsenal man saw how uninterested Allison appeared when he went to discuss a possible move to Palace after being granted a free transfer from Highbury in the summer of 1975. ‘Terry set it up for me to go and meet with Malcolm. I sat there for 45 minutes or so and he must have taken six or eight phone calls on personal matters. He was trying to get to Spain with Serena and he was on with her and the banks, and I am sitting there thinking, “The man is a disaster.” We never talked about football at all. When I came out Venners asked me how it had gone and I said, “I don’t know, he was so distracted.”’
Meanwhile, Venables had found it was pointless waiting for instructions from his boss on the training ground, explaining that he was often ‘hours late and sometimes would not turn up at all’. It is impossible to imagine the Allison who drove the likes of Colin Bell and Mike Summerbee in his early years at Maine Road being guilty of such a lack of interest. Frank Lord, assistant coach at Palace until the summer of 1975, would prepare for Allison’s non-appearance by having his own training schedule ready. But frequently Malcolm would show up halfway through the session, discard Lord’s timetable and announce, ‘I have got this great new idea.’
Whittle’s memory is of Allison being present most of the time at the training ground, but disappearing when the directors were looking for him. ‘Mal used to go missing. The chairman would come asking us if we knew where he was. It was crazy.’
His friend Derek Ufton remembers urging Allison to rethink his whole career strategy. ‘Frank Lord was coach at Palace and I’d had him for a while with me at Plymouth. He was a lovely guy but not the kind of coach the players had a feel for like they did with Malcolm. I used to plead with him and say, “You have got to go out and coach.” He would answer, “No, I am the manager. I am going to direct it all from the office.” When Terry Venables became coach they started to do better because Terry was more like Malcolm.’
Watching Venables at work, Allison admitted to recognising the same simple approach with which he himself had succeeded at City. Over the previous couple of seasons, he had witnessed his players’ look of confusion at some of his own methods. Their response to Venables reminded him how he should have approached his task at Palace, although Summerbee suggests, ‘When Malcolm was starting at City he had the right players at the right time. Guys like Alan Oakes and Glyn Pardoe had been waiting for someone like him and they responded. I don’t think he had those kinds of players at other clubs.’
The irony is that, having begun at Palace with a group of experienced big-money signings, many of whom failed to produce, the players he left behind were not unlike the young, hungry and impressionable players he had moulded at City. If Allison had stayed at Selhurst Park and reprised the methods he employed in Manchester, the latter chapters of this book might have turned out differently. Instead it was Venables who would turn Palace into the team that was dubbed, albeit mistakenly, ‘The Team of the ’80s’.
To Palace fans, however, Allison’s legend has outlived the bad results. When a young internet forum user asked recently why a man who had achieved back-to-back relegations was honoured in Selhurst Park’s gallery of Palace greats, a wave of angry responses hit him full in the face. Among such pithy comments as ‘if you weren’t the snotty oik you are, you wouldn’t need to ask’ were a welter of tributes to the style of the man and the teams he put out on the field. Other fans thanked him for ‘turning us into the glamour side of the mid-’70s’ and acknowledged the foundations he laid for Venables and the club’s return to the First Division.
Allison, meanwhile, would spend the rest of his career on the move. Over the next 17 years, there would be more than a dozen jobs, almost as many sackings and a legacy of unfulfilled talent. ‘It is such a terrible shame,’ says Derek Ufton, who describes the vicious circle in which Allison became a prisoner. ‘Having been a manager, he would never have accepted if he got offered a position as number two – which he would have been ideal at. And eventually no manager worth his salt would give him a job because he knew Malcolm would want to override him every minute of the day. But if he had gone somewhere like Lilleshall to coach he would still have a job.’