‘When I came up to North Yorkshire I thought I would find peace and contentment. Then the roof fell in’
– Malcolm Allison, 1984
By the summer of 1981, evidence of Malcolm Allison’s ability to create winning football teams appeared to exist only in the pages of football’s history books and the memories of older Manchester City fans. But then, in June, he accepted the job of managing Portuguese side Sporting Clube de Portugal and for a while at least, the old magic returned. Sporting Lisbon, as they are more commonly known, had been champions of Portugal four times in the 1950s and winners of the European Cup-Winners’ Cup in 1964. They had turned to several English coaches as they spent the ’70s trying to fight their way back to the top. But where Ronnie Allen and Jimmy Hagan had failed, Allison succeeded spectacularly.
Following his dismissal by Palace, Allison had accepted a short-term temporary posting at Yeovil, holding the reins for four games while the club searched for a successor to the sacked Barry Lloyd. The appointment offered more curiosity value than anything else, with his first game, an FA Trophy replay at Hastings, attracting five times the home team’s usual attendance. Yeovil were beaten in that match and failed to win any of the three Alliance Premier League games for which Allison was in charge.
In the meantime, he had been sounded out by the Portuguese club and was duly confirmed as manager in time to lead them on pre-season visits to Venezuela and Bulgaria and strengthen the squad with the signing of Hungary’s national team goalkeeper Ferenc Meszaros. When the 1981–82 season began in earnest, it was a story of almost unbroken success. Sporting went unbeaten in the league until the mid-point of the season and would lose only three games, scoring the most goals of any team and boasting the Portuguese Liga’s top scorer in the veteran Rui Jordao, who finished with 26 goals. At one point their march to the title appeared to be threatened by claims of rival club Porto that Allison had fielded an ineligible player, but no action was taken and Sporting clinched the league title with a 3–0 victory against Estoril, finishing two points ahead of Benfica. They completed their version of the Double when they beat Sporting Braga 4–0 in a one-sided Cup of Portugal final.
‘It was the best team performance I was ever in charge of,’ Allison would say of his triumphant season. ‘They won the double but then again, that was the first time I ever went to a team that was in the first three or four the year before. Usually you get a job when a team is at the bottom.’
As well as discovering how much he enjoyed coaching with the sun on his back, it is no coincidence that Allison finally rediscovered his winning touch when placed in an environment that allowed him to focus more narrowly on his area of expertise. ‘I enjoy the Continental style of a coach doing what he does best – coaching,’ he explained. ‘To me, it is the most important part of the game, and the chance to concentrate exclusively on that aspect is far better. I have a financial adviser and an accountant who look after the financial aspect.’ It was what his players at Manchester City had known all along, what the Crystal Palace players came to discover when he failed to live up to the reputation with which he arrived. Malcolm was a coach. One of the best.
When, early in Sporting’s season, he returned to England to lead his team against Southampton in the second round of the UEFA Cup, he had taken the opportunity to point out the deficiencies of coaches in his native country and suggested that the administrative duties expected of English managers offered a sanctuary to lesser minds. He also predicted the arrival of the Premier League-era system in British football where the chief executive would relieve the manager of those non-football responsibilities.
‘It is a far more sensible system, and it will come in here,’ he said. ‘It is the hardest time ever in the history of the game for managers. To ask them to handle the financial aspect is absurd. When you coach abroad, you have to prove you’re a good coach otherwise the players won’t respond to you. You can’t get away with it, like people do in England by concentrating on the physical side. Of course some are not capable of concentrating on the game and the coaching aspect, so it’s a good excuse for them to say they have too much else to do. But the demands of two jobs make it imperative two men are involved.’
Speaking from the soapbox of a 4–2 victory at The Dell, Southampton’s first home defeat for a year, Allison continued his attack on the British system. ‘There are not enough good teachers in England. It is all about teaching the game right through from the youth teams. When I look at some of the people working at top class clubs in this country it’s a joke. When I see some youth-team coaches, some second-team and even some first-team coaches, it’s a joke because they are pathetic. Several have no qualifications whatsoever. I have found one obvious advantage in working abroad to working in England. The average foreign player is much more willing to work than the average British player. Maybe it’s because conditions are better but foreign players seem to enjoy training a lot more than English players. They are very receptive to ideas too and that is a major difference.’
Yet, as so often in Allison’s life, it was all too good to last and again it was a mixture of off-field incidents and internal politics that led to his departure. The squad were taken, as usual, to Bulgaria for a three-week training camp before the 1982–83 season. The players attempted to add some life to their spartan hotel surroundings with a party that, according to reports, was rather more raucous than the locals were used to. Knowing that wherever a social gathering broke out Allison was unlikely to be far away, club officials held him responsible for the bad publicity. He was instantly suspended by the directors for the ‘excessive behaviour’ of the squad and, despite his assertion that he would be remaining in charge, his dismissal was confirmed when club president Joao Rocha returned from a business trip to Brazil.
Allison felt that the party in the Balkans was used as an excuse by a president who resented not being given more credit for his part in Lisbon’s achievements. ‘He was jealous of me,’ he said. ‘It was the club’s 75th anniversary and he really wanted to win the championship. We won the league and cup and he’d paid all the debts and no one took any notice of him.’
So Allison was once again looking for a job. For all his talk of enjoying the sun on his back, for all his comfort in not having to worry about anything but coaching, when a team came around asking him to return to England’s chilly north-east and to take charge of all aspects of club affairs, he was in no position to turn them down.
Middlesbrough had thought ‘Big’ before when looking for a manager. ‘Big Jack’ Charlton had led them into Division One at the end of his first season as manager at Ayresome Park in 1973–74. But when, almost a decade later, they found themselves impoverished, managerless and stuck at the bottom of the Second Division table, there was little suggestion that the club would be looking for an oversized character as their new man in charge. Newspapers speculated on the identity of the replacement for former Celtic star Bobby Murdoch, whose 16-month reign as team manager ended in September 1982, not long after Boro had finished bottom of the First Division.
The list of seven contenders presented in the Middlesbrough Evening Gazette was somewhat lacking in charisma, even if it did include familiar names like ex-Leeds striker Allan Clarke, former Huddersfield and Bolton boss Ian Greaves and Sunderland’s FA Cup-winning manager Bob Stokoe. Seven became four, with ex-Grimsby boss George Kerr thought to be the most fancied of the candidates the club intended to interview. One man had different ideas, though. Mike McCullagh, waiting to be confirmed as club chairman following the resignation of George Kitching, quickened the pulses of local journalists by telling them that a ‘mystery fifth man’ – as the Gazette put it – had entered the running.
That man was a big enough personality to claw back some of the region’s attention to Ayresome Park after a shift in the direction of St James’ Park following former England captain Kevin Keegan’s summer signing for Newcastle. That man, Malcolm Allison, was sitting in a Lisbon apartment preparing to launch a legal battle against the club that had fired him, but he put aside thoughts of the £92,000 he felt he was due from Sporting to fly to a meeting with McCullagh. The chairman then whetted the newsmen’s appetites by announcing his intention to unveil a new manager at the following day’s home game against Division Two leaders Queens Park Rangers. ‘I have been able to tie everything up sooner than I thought,’ he purred.
Saturday, 23 October was a momentous day for McCullagh, first confirmed by a board meeting as the new club chairman and then able to introduce Allison to excited media and fans. ‘I think we have got one of the finest coaches in the world, but he is coming as manager and he’ll have total control.’
Allison admitted he had not seen Boro play, adding, ‘Obviously the first thing is to stop the slide. We are always looking for the miracle and it would be nice to turn it around. I regard myself as a good coach and a good manager. The problem is always the time factor.’ Asked how appropriate a fit the industrial north-east was for his bright-lights image, Allison commented, ‘That’s not me, that’s the press. They’re always giving me cigars and taking pictures.’
The team’s response to having Allison sitting in the stand was encouraging, beating Rangers to climb off the bottom of the table and extend their unbeaten run to four games under the interim management of former England trainer Harold Shepherdson and his assistant, Cyril Knowles. Allison’s old pal, QPR manager Terry Venables, gave him a lift to London on the team bus and offered words of support for his former boss. ‘This place desperately needs someone like him. There’s no greater character around. It’s not just that he knows football, he works hard and gives everything.’
Boro players shared the excitement that other dressing-rooms had experienced on hearing that Allison was to be guiding their fortunes. Team captain Jim Platt, the Northern Ireland international goalkeeper, described it as ‘the best possible appointment’. He added, ‘It will give the players and the fans a big lift. When Jack Charlton was here he often referred to Malcolm as the best coach in the country.’
Allison began work the following Monday on the strength of a handshake with McCullagh, who had said, ‘As long as he is happy, we’re happy.’ Malcolm, who accepted that his departure from Portugal meant he was unlikely to get any money out of Sporting, explained that he would definitely be at the club at least until the end of the season, adding, ‘I would like to think I am going to stay here and build a really good side.’
Before taking charge of his first game, he went on a city centre ‘walkabout’ aimed at drumming up support for the team. It was the kind of commitment to the club and its fans that impressed local BBC radio reporter and Boro fan Alistair Brownlee. ‘I was very involved at the time with the club’s young supporters association, the Junior Reds,’ he explains. ‘Malcolm, who had developed the Junior Blues while he was at Manchester City, was keen to play a big part in increasing the number of youngsters joining the organisation. Malcolm came with a big reputation and was what we needed. Seeing 5,000 in Ayresome Park was soul-destroying.’
Allison’s reign officially began with a 1–1 home draw against Burnley in the Milk Cup,1 insufficient to turn around a first-leg deficit. Former Burnley striker Ray Hankin had given Boro an early lead, but after the away team scored a second-half equaliser Allison observed of his team, ‘They don’t know how to win and I didn’t do the right thing at half-time. After 15 minutes of the second half I realised they were afraid of losing it.’
Boro remained unbeaten for the first four games under Allison before a 5–1 home defeat to Blackpool and a four-goal beating at Wolves made clear the task ahead of him. Inconsistent form for the remainder of the season included enough positive results to lift the team to a finishing position of 16th and there was also the frisson of excitement provided by a 1–1 home draw against Arsenal in the fifth round of the FA Cup, followed by a battling 3–2 defeat in the replay. It was soon after the game at Highbury that Allison confirmed his intention to finally sign a two-year contract after five months at Ayresome Park. There had been speculation that once the glamour of the Cup was behind him, he would look elsewhere, but he said, ‘I am very pleased to sign the deal. Another two years is about the right time to have a team really coming to fruition.’
The biggest obstacle to achieving his ambition, however, was the club’s accounts. Boro were reportedly more than £500,000 in debt and losing a further £12,000 a week. Allison was aware of the restrictions placed on his predecessor, Murdoch, but relished being given a key role in placing the club on a more solid financial foundation, including overseeing completion of a planned leisure complex. It was a strange responsibility to be given to someone so renowned for his personal and professional financial mismanagement – and one that would, ultimately and inevitably, lead to the disintegration of his relationship with the club.
‘I am going to run the club with the directors,’ he said shortly after his appointment. ‘The most important thing, next to the team, is the financial state of the club. The understanding I have with the chairman is to sort the whole thing out. I have to know how much we have to cut back and the staff I can have. I will be looking at the books.’
He also warned, ‘We have got people working all over the place and in that respect we have a big staff – although on the playing side I have only got a first team squad of 13.’ Yet Boro winger Terry Cochrane recalls that one of Allison’s first solutions to that delicate equation was unpopular with the players. ‘He told us that he had to put the club back on a steadier footing and the first thing he did was to sack the tea man, who was on 18 quid a week. We didn’t see how that was going to affect anything, so the players put their hands in their pockets to keep him.’
Money matters occupied much of Allison’s time, with weekly losses reportedly dropping by £2,000 per week inside two months of his arrival. He was the driving force behind the club accepting an offer to play two friendlies in Nigeria, the schedule for which called for Boro to play a League game on a Friday, fly immediately to Lagos for a Sunday morning arrival, play games on the Sunday and Tuesday evenings and get back, exhausted, to Middlesbrough late on Wednesday night. The club justified the excursion by pointing out that it would earn them as much as a home game.
January 1983 brought news that the £1.3 million, three-year leisure centre project had been delayed by a series of building regulation defects. Allison’s response was to urge local companies to effectively ‘loan’ his players from him. He explained, ‘A company can pick a player, sponsor his wages, then he would work with them in a public relations capacity.’ The expectation was to get six such deals in place, but the plan never came to full fruition.
Allison was even reduced to counting the crowd when Arsenal visited Ayresome Park. Hearing an announced attendance of 20,850, he stated his belief that at least 25,000 had been inside the ground and ordered a check to be made on the ground’s 40 turnstiles. ‘I am concerned about it,’ he said. ‘I asked for the same thing to be done at Plymouth and Manchester City and I was proved right.’
On the field, Allison’s attempts to strengthen the team without significant funds ranged from the ambitious (a failed attempt to sign Liverpool forwards David Fairclough and David Johnson on loan) to the fanciful (a doomed bid to get the San Jose Earthquakes to release George Best, for whom Boro were unable to pay the £25,000 being demanded). He even took a gamble on the fitness of former Ipswich and England defender Kevin Beattie, whose battle to overcome a series of knee injuries found him playing on a week-to-week basis at Colchester. Allison installed him as captain in place of the long-serving Platt.
Unable to bring in further reinforcements, Allison put his trust in teenagers such as Paul Ward and Stephen Bell. It left experienced men like Scotland right-back John Brownlie and Northern Ireland winger Cochrane uncertain about their place in the manager’s plans. ‘We used to call him Big Mal the Kiddie’s Pal,’ says Cochrane, who was dropped as early as Allison’s third game in charge. ‘If you were over 19 years old you wouldn’t be looked at. He got his eye in with youngsters he thought were good players. I was amazed that he thought some of them were any good, but I think he felt he could control them. He didn’t like the older lads talking back to him.
‘That’s not sour grapes. If he wanted to go with young players, that was his decision. But he never explained that he didn’t want me. He went round the houses to make it uncomfortable. Me and Jim Platt were the most experienced players he had, but he didn’t know us and we didn’t know him. He would just walk past us with his head down, or not look at us when he was announcing the team. It was infuriating and poor man-management.’
There was one significant addition to the personnel at Boro – someone who would remain Allison’s travelling companion, close friend and valued staff member for the rest of the decade. Roger Spry, a former European kick-boxing champion and karate black belt, had been making a name for himself in football with what were considered revolutionary fitness and conditioning techniques. Having worked in Brazil with leading club Fluminense, he had been given the chance to introduce his methods into English football at Arsenal, Charlton and West Ham and was encouraged by Gunners manager Don Howe to contact Allison. ‘I taught players how to disguise body feints like a fighter,’ Spry explains. ‘I showed how this kind of conditioning could be used to create space.’
Allison received plenty of letters like the one Spry sent him, particularly with specialist preparation for athletic contests becoming a growth industry. But he acknowledged the possibility that an outsider could offer a new perspective. After 15 minutes of watching him work with the first team, Allison had seen enough and Spry was on board – Sancho Panza to Malcolm’s Don Quixote as they crossed the globe from Bahrain to Bermondsey. The parlous state of Middlesbrough’s finances meant that Allison could only afford him for two days per week, but Spry insists, ‘The players responded and you could see the benefit.’
Such benefits, however, brought only modest returns on the field, which Spry puts down to the lack of money for players. ‘If you are used to racing a Ferrari and someone gives you a Mini it is going to be difficult and Malcolm would have got frustrated.’
Yet, given that Allison faced restrictions on his team-building, he does appear – not for the first time – to have refused to accept that his players needed a different kind of handling to the top-of-the-range models he had worked with in days gone by. Spry states, ‘Malcolm was always very true to himself as a coach and to people he coached. He believed in playing in a certain way, a belief in his own capabilities.’ As it had eventually been at City and Palace, that belief had perhaps become a liability.
Cochrane continues, ‘I am not decrying Malcolm as a coach and I would have loved to have worked under him earlier in my career. He would have motivated me into playing better. But he was not a young man when he came to us. We thought it could be the start of the club’s revival, but he couldn’t get us out of the trouble we were in. In his glory days he had Joe Mercer there to help, but Mal had no one to talk to at Boro. He made decisions at times that we didn’t understand. We played Bishop’s Stortford in the FA Cup and he preached about how weak they were on their left. We practised all these moves down the right and come Saturday he left me out. I was the right-winger! We were 2–0 up at half-time, so it looked like he had got it right but in the end we drew 2–2.’
Cochrane is also dismissive of the unorthodox methods employed by Allison. ‘He brought in Len Heppell to teach us dance moves and posture and Roger Spry, who was a black belt. As players, we wondered what it was all costing and what it was achieving.’
It just goes to prove that in football – as in politics and war – history is shaped by results. Ask the Manchester City players of the late ’60s what they think of those same methods and you hear nothing but praise for Allison’s innovative thinking. Cochrane continues, ‘When you are with a successful team, you can try things and they are accepted. In the climate at Middlesbrough it was different. When you are doing badly you need more time to adapt to new ways.’
Having begun 1983–84 with an unbeaten run of six games, a more realistic picture of Middlesbrough’s health was presented by the loss of the next five, establishing them as a lower-table team. Allison had the opportunity to bail out in October when Portuguese Division Two team Belenenses, who had just fired their manager for poor results, placed a lucrative contract offer in front of him. He turned down a deal that, on top of his basic salary, would have given him 25 per cent of all gate receipts realised by any spectators above an initial 8,000.
By March 1984, Boro had gone seven games without a win and were in 16th position. Avoiding the drop to Division Three was not much of an ambition for a club that had been in the top flight two seasons earlier. On 21 March, the day after a goalless draw against Derby had been endured by the lowest home crowd of the season, 5,735 – not enough to cover the weekly wage bill – Allison was called to a board meeting. The club, now £650,000 in debt, had to find £350,000 within a week to meet demands by the Inland Revenue. Midfielder Mick Kennedy was reported to be interesting Brighton, while several First Division teams were said to be admirers of full-back Darren Wood. Chairman McCullagh said, ‘We have tried to hold on to our players from day one, but we are not exactly breaking any records.’ The message was clear: that the players were more valuable in the transfer market than they were proving on the field. Someone had to be sold before the next day’s transfer deadline, but it would emerge later that an enraged Allison banged his fists on the table as he argued against the kind of instruction that had helped end his first spell at Manchester City.
The next day he publicly threatened to resign if the board sold anyone before the 5 p.m. deadline and set off to London for a managers’ meeting, deliberately distancing himself from any transfer activity that might occur. Chelsea had offered £100,000 for Wood, although Allison described the same team’s reported £25,000 offer for Bell as ‘an insult’. He claimed, ‘I want to build a team for the future but the directors told me there will be no future for the club if we do not meet immediate tax demands. I can appreciate the predicament of the directors but I must stand by my principles.’
The transfer deadline came and went. No sales were made. Allison flew back to Middlesbrough for another meeting, explaining that he would not be resigning, despite the club’s attempt to offload Wood, who he claimed had turned down a £100,000 deal with Sheffield Wednesday. ‘My loyalty is with the players,’ said Allison. ‘If Darren has decided to stay here, I will stay with him.’
Urging fans to turn up in huge numbers for the next day’s game against Fulham, he continued, ‘It would break my heart to leave now. I have a great feeling for the club and the area. Whichever way you look at it I am in a dilemma. I am on an each-way loser.’
After only 5,435 – Boro’s poorest crowd since the Second World War – braved torrential rain to answer Allison’s call, he suggested that it might be ‘better for the club to die’ than allow its young players to be sold off. Alistair Brownlee says, ‘Even though you could understand Malcolm’s frustration, it was an unfortunate thing to say. Speaking as a Boro fan, obviously no one wanted to see the club disappear.’
McCullagh declared himself to be ‘shocked, disturbed and disappointed’ by the stance of his manager, especially one who had been appointed partly to help solve the financial crisis. On 28 March, Allison was fired. His own version of a meeting that took all of three minutes is that McCullagh informed him that he was accepting his resignation.
‘Do you mean you are sacking me?’ asked Allison.
‘Whichever way it is put, you are finished,’ was the chairman’s alleged reply.
‘It’s always the same in this business. It’s just one of those things,’ said Allison as he departed Ayresome Park to set up camp in the bar of Middlesbrough’s Baltimore Hotel, owned by new Boro board member Anthony Zivanaris.
McCullagh emerged to explain, ‘Over the weekend Malcolm reiterated his feelings and in one report said it would probably be better for the club to die. Obviously he has made it impossible for the board to work closely with him in the interests of the club. And no longer can he be relied upon to cooperate with us in trying to save the club. I have dismissed Malcolm Allison.’
He added that the directors could ‘no longer rely on him to follow instructions and conduct himself in the club’s best interests’. In that sense, Boro were merely the latest club to discover that particular truth about the man they hired. It is difficult to see what other possible resolution there could have been to a relationship that had so completely collapsed. The situation also served to highlight the danger of giving Allison fiscal responsibility when his natural instinct in all walks of life was to rail against financial constraints.
Meanwhile, Allison, still in the bar of the Baltimore, had put down his cigar and champagne long enough to sign his name to a formal statement.
The chairman of Middlesbrough Football Club fired me today. He claims my actions have irreparably harmed the club. I disagree with this. Since I have been here I have always done everything in the interest of Middlesbrough Football Club, the players and the supporters. There is much that needs to be said about the position of the club but I am too deeply disappointed to say anything else at this stage.
Irving Nattrass, the former Newcastle defender who succeeded Beattie as club captain, described the events as ‘a great shock’ and confessed that three players had cried when given the news. ‘Feelings are running very high and we are trying to calm them down,’ he said, before predicting that some might consider leaving the club at the end of the season.
Cochrane’s biggest regret about Allison’s reign at Middlesbrough is not the manner of its conclusion, but his belief that the club had not seen the best of the man they hired. ‘It was unfortunate that he turned out not to be the Malcolm Allison that we knew as a younger man,’ he says. ‘He was just running up bills for drinks at hotels that he was not even staying in and expecting the club to pay.’
Once again – just as at Plymouth, Palace and Lisbon – there was a strong feeling that Malcolm had given the club a reason beyond results and his no-sale policy to remove him from office.
Following divorce from Beth and the eventual end of his on–off relationship with Serena Williams, the next woman in his life had been Sally Anne Highly, a blonde former receptionist at the Playboy Club in London. They had met in 1978 during an open-air party on Wimbledon Common and had been skating together when the ice cracked. Having been helped out of the freezing water by the chivalrous Allison, Sally had to strip out of her wet clothes, donning his trench coat while he carried her to her flat. There, so the story goes, events took a less than romantic turn: he bedded both Sally and her friend.
It was an accident on the M1 that persuaded Malcolm that Sally was the one for him. ‘As we climbed out the wreckage I asked her to marry me just because I thought, “What a brave girl this is. I should marry her.”’ The couple were to have a daughter, Alexis, born in 1979, but motorway escapology was clearly not the basis for long-term marital bliss. ‘It was the biggest mistake of my life,’ Allison would admit.
While at Boro, schoolteacher Lynn Salten, more than 25 years his junior, entered his life – following a false start. ‘I went out for lunch with my mum and Malcolm was in,’ she recalls. ‘When I left he apparently asked in the restaurant who I was and because we only lived in a small village they gave him the rundown. A couple of weeks later I was in there on a Friday evening with girlfriends and he sent over a bottle of champagne. When he joined us I thought he was chatting to my friend’s sister, but then he asked if I would like to meet him for lunch. I think I’d had a few drinks – I haven’t drunk since then – so I said I would meet him, but I didn’t turn up. Obviously he knew where I lived and he rang and asked me why, so I said I would meet him for dinner a couple of nights later.’
As a football fan herself, Lynn knew of Malcolm’s reputation, and at the age of 28, was wary of their age difference, but she admits, ‘Malcolm was such a character and such a lovely man. I remember thinking on the evening we met that he had lovely hands and he was wearing a lovely jacket. He was a man – an old-fashioned man in some ways. He would open the door and walk on the outside of the pavement. He was such a generous man and that was one of the things that attracted me to him. And he had lived such a fantastic life. I used to say to him, “Tell me a story.” He had so many of them.’
The early stages of what proved to be Malcolm’s final long-term partnership were interrupted by his continuing on–off relationship with Sally, who at one stage had been pictured in the papers with a broken nose and teeth and black eyes after a row with her husband. Malcolm claimed in response that he had needed 26 stitches after she had hurled a tea cup at him. Only a few days before Allison’s dismissal, Sally was back in the papers – taken to Northallerton Friarage Hospital with a cracked sternum after her car went off the road and hit a tree. Sally told reporters she had been on her way to confront Lynn. Even though the hacks’ attempts to dig up some dirt on Lynn came to nothing – one of them told Malcolm, ‘She must be a bleedin’ nun,’ – there was still enough material to leave Middlesbrough’s directors less than thrilled with the narrative surrounding their manager’s domestic disputes.
Asked for her reaction to Boro’s decision to fire her husband, Sally let rip. ‘I don’t feel anything at all for him now and I don’t feel sorry for him at all. He has made his bed and now he can lie in it. Mal’s women have wrecked my marriage and as far as I can see, his career. Good luck to them now.’
Allison’s immediate plans revolved around securing a £30,000 pay-off from Boro. Agent Richard Coomber, whose company had been representing Malcolm for five years, explained that there was still 13 months to run on a two-year contract and that his client would ‘expect to be paid’.
Meanwhile, Boro chairman McCullagh called Jack Charlton and talked him into reprising his first managerial position, at least on a temporary basis. Charlton and Allison had been friends for a long time but the World Cup winner was disturbed to hear that Malcolm believed he had manoeuvred him out of the job. Charlton saw Allison at the FA Cup final and delivered reassurance that it wasn’t the case. ‘I’ve always had a soft spot for Allison,’ said Charlton later. ‘He was bold, brash and bigger than life. To a large extent he was the author of his own misfortunes, but as a football man he had the respect of us all.’
Instead of preparing on-field strategy, Allison spent the early weeks of the 1984–85 season working on the case he would be taking to an industrial tribunal to claim wrongful dismissal by Middlesbrough. The hearing was eventually staged in November, his assertion being that refusal to sell players did not constitute grounds for being removed from his post. ‘Malcolm was a man of principle and I always admired him for that,’ says his partner Lynn. ‘Middlesbrough wanted him to sell players, but he had promised the fans he wouldn’t do that and he was very conscious of what he had said.’
The club’s position, which was duly upheld by the legal process, was argued forcefully by their lawyer Kevin Fletcher, who opened by telling the court that Allison had run up a £3,500 bill for champagne, cigars and brandy in the first three months of his employment. Just as damning for Allison was Fletcher’s assertion that he had arrived for a meeting with the club chairman ‘clearly suffering from the effects of drinking’. That had led to him being warned about his off-field behaviour, which included taking unauthorised days off. Addressing the non-sale of players, Fletcher said Allison had ‘stabbed Middlesbrough Football Club in the back’. And referring to Malcolm’s suggestion that the club’s demise was preferable to selling its young players, he continued, ‘The club’s claim is that a clearer case of gross misconduct, going to the very root of the employment contract, would be difficult to imagine. His brilliance was dimmed by his off-field activities to such an extent that the chairman wrote to him expressing his concern.’
Allison insisted that he would never have signed his contract had he known he would be forced to offload members of his playing staff against his will, but not even the appearance in court of Brian Clough, who described Malcolm as ‘not a man known for telling lies’, could produce a late winner.