‘I’m like Red Adair. People only call me when they are on fire and out of control’
– Malcolm Allison
By the time Malcolm Allison was appearing in the witness box at his industrial tribunal, a chance game of golf had led to his return to management, albeit in modest surroundings at Northern League Division Two side Willington. The club began the season under the guidance of Alan Durban, who had just been fired by Sunderland. Current chairman, and then secretary, Bob Nichols, explains, ‘One of our committee members played golf at the same club as Alan, who said that, as he had some spare time, he didn’t mind taking on the manager’s job until something else came along. Late in September, he was offered the position at Cardiff and shortly after that we were contacted by Malcolm’s agent asking if he could carry on where Alan left off.’
Willington were not one of those non-League clubs with a rich benefactor ready to buy his way up the football pyramid. ‘Northern League football at that time wasn’t as lucrative as it is now,’ says Nichols. ‘The general pattern, which we followed, was that the manager was given a fixed amount per week and he could take out of that what he wanted and use the rest on players.’
Money clearly wasn’t Allison’s motivation for approaching Willington. He simply wanted to remain involved in the game. During four months under his leadership, Willington continued the improvement instigated by Durban and maintained a position in the top half of the table, a satisfactory achievement after their struggles of a year earlier, especially when added to the higher profile Malcolm gave them.
Nichols continues, ‘Everybody was amazed at the situation and happy to have him at the club. He generated a lot of publicity and the squad was always competitive. He mixed well and was quite genial, with no airs and graces – although we basically only saw him twice a week, at Wednesday training sessions and at matches on Saturdays.’
This brief and happily unremarkable managerial stint was ended by Allison’s own volition, a welcome change after the dismissals that had ushered him out of so many clubs since the beginning of the decade. Remarkably, given his legendary love of a drink, it was the opportunity to work in the alcohol-free state of Kuwait that prompted him to bid farewell to the Northern League. Offered the job of national team coach, he set out for the Middle East in the spring of 1985. Once again, the winning instinct that had proved so elusive in England for almost a decade and a half would be rediscovered.
Kuwait had come to international football prominence by qualifying for the finals of the 1982 World Cup in Spain and achieved notoriety in their match against France in Valladolid. With the game heading towards an inevitable French victory, the Kuwaiti defenders stopped as Alain Giresse bore down on their goal, believing they had heard the referee’s whistle. The sound, though, had come from the crowd and the resulting goal was allowed to stand. From his seat in the stand, the president of the Kuwaiti Football Association, who also happened to be a prince of the country, made gestures that appeared to be ordering his players from the field. Yet as they prepared to obey instructions, he arrived on the touchline and instructed them to stay, at which point the Russian referee disallowed the goal.
Kuwait would not be travelling to Mexico four years later, however. Defeat in Syria in the critical game of their first-phase group in the Asian qualifying rounds early in 1985 condemned them to an early exit from the competition. The qualifying campaign had been led unsuccessfully by Brazilian Antonio Lopes dos Santos, successor to fellow-countryman Carlos Alberto Parreira, who had steered the team to Spain and would guide his own country to victory in the United States 12 years later.
Allison was next in line. Asked to select a staff to travel with him to the Middle East, he chose Spry, to take care of the conditioning and fitness, and former Arsenal winger George Armstrong, another with whom he had worked at Boro, to help with the coaching. Commitment to the cause was a prerequisite. The coaches would be living in Kuwait full-time, with no commuting back and forth from England. It was in the desert that Spry got to know Malcolm well enough to eventually ask him to be godfather to his daughter Alexandra and saw a side of him that few appreciated. ‘Malcolm is a paradox,’ he explains. ‘He is very studious, a real bookworm. Every time you saw him away from the field he would be reading a book, one or two every week.’
Mike Doyle had made a similar observation about his manager some years earlier. ‘Most people outside the club haven’t got a clue what he’s really like. Mal’s very quiet off the field, studious if you like. He reads books about the revolution and books by Russian authors. He’s a very intelligent man.’
Spry explains that Malcolm was never tempted – or certainly not able – to break the country’s strict rules of temperance. ‘It was virtually impossible to sneak a drink in. You couldn’t get it anywhere. But after a short while, I don’t think Malcolm even thought about it. The only thing to do was focus on the football, try different things and experiment. He loved it.’
Malcolm’s partner, Lynn Salten, adds, ‘His mum died while he was in Kuwait and that affected him, but he was quite content there. I went to spend Christmas with him and he would just read his books and have a cigar and sit by the pool.’
The culmination of Allison’s year in Kuwait was the country’s participation in the Gulf Cup, the tournament held every two years among the region’s nations. Staged in Bahrain in the spring of 1986, the event was a triumphant march for Malcolm and his team. They began by beating Saudi Arabia 3–1, followed two days later by a 2–0 win against Oman. A 1–0 victory against the United Arab Emirates proved to be the most important of their schedule and after a 2–1 victory against Qatar, success by the same score against World Cup-bound Iraq ensured Kuwait’s place at the top of the seven-team table. A 1–1 draw in the last game, against the host country, left Allison’s team four points ahead of second-place UAE, while Kuwait’s Moayad Al-Haddad was named as the tournament’s best player.
‘To win the Gulf Cup was a big, big thing for the country,’ says Spry. But not enough to keep Allison in a job. ‘With most of the Arab countries, there is a flavour of the month in terms of the nationalities of the coaches,’ Spry continues. ‘For a while it was all British. Then at the end of a certain period they decide they want another country and it is all change.’
As has been seen, Allison was not frightened of an encore. He might have fallen foul of the Sporting Lisbon ownership, but in Portugal his reputation as a coach was an elevated one and it was back to that country that his wanderings now took him. Relegated to the second tier of the Portuguese Liga, Vitoria Setubal were in severe danger of going bankrupt if their return to the top flight was not immediate. They knew a saviour when one became available and the call went out for Allison. Once again Spry was taken along. ‘He came everywhere with me,’ Allison explained, touching his friend with his insistence that he should be part of the set-up at Setubal. ‘Mal was a legend in Portugal. The first day I went there with him we got off the plane in Lisbon and he was stopping the traffic and being hugged and kissed by people he didn’t even know.
‘I was unknown but Malcolm introduced me as the best fitness and conditioning coach in the world. The club hadn’t wanted me because they already had the guy who took care of the national team but Mal insisted and said that without me he would not take the job. That kind of loyalty was one of the great things about Malcolm. I have worked for a lot of coaches and they tend to look after themselves, but he put himself on the line for me.’
Allison turned to his old Sporting Lisbon players when he enlisted help for his new team – including goalscorer Jordao, former Sporting captain Manuel Fernandez, centre-back Eurico, midfielders Ademar and Zezinho and goalkeeper Ferenc Meszaros. He watched his team romp away with the championship of their division. ‘Malcolm was a great teacher and wouldn’t just tell you what to do,’ says Spry. ‘He could show you and explain why he was doing it. There were never any communication issues, regardless of nationality.’
Allison might have won nothing in England since his days as coach at Manchester City, but now three consecutive appointments with overseas teams had achieved success. In none of those positions had Malcolm’s role involved any administrative functions. Spry says, ‘None of the top coaches in England today are managers in the old sense. They are coaches and that is how it always was on the Continent. It was crazy to ever expect Malcolm to get involved in finances.’
It was at Setubal that Allison and Spry encountered a man who was to go on to become one of the world’s highest-profile coaches, and to whom many have compared Allison during preparation of this book. Felix Mourinho was one of Vitoria’s goalkeeping coaches and his son José, future manager of FC Porto and Chelsea, was often an interested observer. ‘José came and watched training a lot,’ Spry recalls. ‘He was a young guy at university studying physical education and he became very close to me and Malcolm. He has a lot of Malcolm’s mannerisms.
‘They are both men who have a strong belief in their own capabilities and in what they are doing. Every player would share that same belief because Malcolm could make every player believe they were the best in the world at their position. José is the same. I don’t like the word “arrogant” being applied to them – that gives the impression of someone pretending to be something that he isn’t. That wasn’t the case with Malcolm. He was just supremely confident, in the way that José is.’
As well as achieving victory on the field, Malcolm was finding personal contentment. ‘He seemed very happy at that point,’ is James Lawton’s recollection of visiting him in Portugal. Jeff Powell has similarly happy memories of a trip to Portugal. ‘We went to a fish restaurant and had a serious day’s drinking. They had a load of live lobsters in the tank and Malcolm got quite emotional about them. “Poor bastards, waiting to die,” he said. “The least we can do is give them a drink.” So he started ordering vodka and tonics and pouring them on to the leaves in the tank. The old antennae were going out and eventually the bottom of the tank was all vodka. Suddenly these lobsters started getting frisky, climbing out of tanks and scuttling around the restaurant. It was chaos. Malcolm shouts out, “Leave it to us. We’ll get them back in.” He is organising the whole restaurant. It was mad.’
While Setubal was a somewhat ramshackle port town hit by depression, he and Lynn were settled in a picturesque house on the Arrabida hills. Late in 1987 he said, ‘The boss offered me a five-year contract and I think I may take him up on it. I really like the place. I don’t earn as much as in a big club but there are compensations. If you set up a relationship with a small town like this you get a very nice situation. The last time I came back from London I was pleased to be back. It was like coming home.’
Lynn, who had taken a teaching job in a local British school, describes the time she and Malcolm spent in Portugal as ‘a fantastic experience’. She says, ‘We had a wonderful time together and I didn’t know we were so popular. It was like running a hotel because we had so many people who came out to visit. Malcolm loved that. His family and friends came out and we could take them out and show them the nice parts of Portugal.’
It was there that Malcolm forged a stronger relationship with his older children. ‘He was very much on his own and I used to try to encourage him to contact them,’ says Lynn. ‘He was always very focused on all he did and it was me who made him send birthday cards or ring. They are all lovely children and he was very proud of all of them. He would always talk about them with great pride when he spoke to anybody about them and perhaps deep down he regretted not being there for them when they were young.’
As well as family and friends, journalists continued to be drawn to the magnetic personality of Malcolm, although Lynn soon grew tired of their one-dimensional sketches of a man in whom she had seen far greater depth. ‘The press only ever wanted to portray him in a certain way and they would come and visit him with champagne and cigars and want to take pictures of him. I remember once taking them away from him and saying, “No. That’s not who you are.”’
Even Lynn has to admit, however, that it was at least part of who he was. ‘The first time he met my mum and dad he ordered a glass of champagne and a cigar and I had to tell him, “Don’t, Malcolm. I have told them you are nothing like your image.” But he was very quiet sometimes. He was lovely when fans came up for an autograph, but he wouldn’t say anything to them. I asked him why he didn’t say something about the game or what a nice day it was and he started doing it to pacify me. They used to look at him as though he was completely mad because they weren’t expecting him to strike up a conversation.’
The great Portuguese adventure could have ended in tragedy, however, had it not been for Malcolm’s loyalty and stubbornness. Lynn explains, ‘I started having problems with my eyesight. I thought I just needed glasses but Malcolm was brilliant. He wasn’t satisfied and he really did persist with the doctors and the hospitals to find out what it was. Eventually, after lots of examinations they found out it was a tumour. When I had it removed the surgeon said it was a success, but the best way to prove it was to have a baby. I said, “Well, Malcolm has got five children that we know of so I will just take your word for it.” I was 35 and loved children but didn’t think it was right for Malcolm and me. Then, some time later, I was expecting Gina and she is the best thing that has ever happened to me.’
By that time, though, the temporarily smooth track of Malcolm’s existence had been derailed once again after Vitoria’s first year back in the top level of Portuguese football ended with an eighth-place finish. Allison, who had also managed to pick up a seven-week touchline ban for abusing referees, was out of a job. After hearing him being booed by the fans in a 2–0 home loss against Salgueiros late in the season, club president Fernando de Oliveira relieved his manager of his duties, explaining, ‘He did a good job but the rift between him and the fans grew even wider after Sunday’s defeat.’
Spry comments, ‘In places like Portugal, you have to win something to be guaranteed your job. Manuel Fernandez was close friends with the club owners and he wanted to go into coaching, so they didn’t renew Malcolm’s contract.’
Lynn adds, ‘The president wanted Malcolm to play a particular friend of his and Malcolm wouldn’t and that was the end of that. That was Malcolm. He always had a good relationship with all the players and fans, but it was usually the chairmen he would fall out with. With the exception of Robert Daniel at Plymouth, they all seemed to be a bit jealous of him. They would possibly feel threatened and would not like it if he was more popular than they were.’
Rodney Marsh had remained close to Allison since their time together at City. It was with Malcolm and Serena Williams that he’d lodged for a while during a difficult period in his professional and personal life in the mid-’70s, although his wife Jean – from whom he was estranged at the time – urged him to move out and get his own place. She believed that Malcolm was ‘the wrong sort of person’ for her husband to be close to. On a professional level, Marsh had carried a debt of gratitude to Allison for talking him out of turning his back on possible England selection after Sir Alf Ramsey told him he wanted him to ‘play like Geoff Hurst’. Marsh was inclined to tell Ramsey where to stick it until Allison took him for dinner and talked him round. ‘I can honestly say that if Malcolm hadn’t persuaded me, I would never have pulled on another England shirt,’ admitted Marsh, whose meagre return of nine caps was a sign of Ramsey’s reluctance to commit himself to players of Marsh’s delicate skills.
Such frustrations, coupled with his inability to get on with Tony Book as manager at Manchester City, had led to him quitting England and boarding the plane for America with his famous comment about English football being ‘a grey game, played on grey days by grey people’. Marsh found the colour of the North American Soccer League more to his liking and played for four seasons in the green and yellow of the Tampa Bay Rowdies. He remained in Florida after the collapse of the league in 1984 and had become chief executive of the club, who in 1988 found themselves playing in the more modest American Soccer League.
Marsh was looking for a coach after the departure of former Liverpool defender Mark Lawrenson. Allison happened to be looking for a job. Even though he didn’t stay long, he enjoyed the American life to the full, as he had during his brief stay in Memphis a decade earlier. After a Rowdies team meal following one game, Marsh left Allison in the restaurant with the players. At 3.30 a.m. he received a call from the local police, saying they had a man in the cells who was giving Marsh’s name as reference. It was Malcolm, of course, and he had been stopped by a patrol car while driving the wrong way down Courtney Campbell Causeway, the vast bridge spanning the water between Tampa and Clearwater. Asked if he would stand bail, Marsh replied, ‘No. Leave him there. We’ll do it in the morning.’
Despite such incidents, Marsh still cared enough about Allison to put his name forward for the position of coach with the USA national team. Rowdies co-owner Cornelia Corbett was on the national team committee, so Marsh invited Allison to outline to her over dinner how he would move America into the elite of world football. On arriving at the restaurant with Corbett, Marsh was horrified to find Allison well on his way towards inebriation. His dismay grew as Allison declared that his tactics would be based on making use of all the tall people in the country by playing an aerial game. Allison then stated his case for being given the post, punctuating his speech liberally with expletives. He didn’t get the job.
So instead of planning for a World Cup, Allison would soon be plotting to achieve success in the GM Vauxhall Conference. In the meantime, he had served a brief stint back in Portugal with SC Farense after being appointed towards the end of January 1989 for the remainder of the season. He was dismissed in March, having been unable to improve on the club’s position of 18th out of 20 clubs. In June, he was named manager of Fisher Athletic, a small team with big ambitions, whose Surrey Docks Stadium nestled in the estates off the Bermondsey ring road in south London’s docklands.
Having arrived in the top level of non-League football in 1987 as champions of the Southern League, Fisher Athletic had attracted the interest of Winners Worldwide, a trio of music and sports entrepreneurs whose Paul Crockford now admits, ‘When we walked into Fisher Athletic we left our business acumen at the door.’
He explains, ‘A guy called Paul Woolf, who was a lawyer, and I formed Winners Worldwide with Ross Hemsworth, a sales guy who came to us with a pitch to get involved with sport. He dropped a few names and it all seemed plausible. Originally we got involved with a view to managing athletes and being involved in boxing. Then we decided to try to find a small club in the Conference and do a deal where we put some money into the club, develop around it and end up owning a club with leisure facilities and other businesses. It would effectively mean the football club was costing us nothing.’
The group approached every Conference club and successfully followed up on interest expressed by Fisher. ‘We had a deal on the table to build a health club and something for the local community,’ Crockford continues. ‘It was very ambitious. The local council was cooperative but wanted three years’ worth of back rent, which blocked the deal. We argued that they should take it up with the previous owners.’
While that particular battle got under way, attention turned to installing a manager to replace Steve Bowtell, who had been holding the reins for four months since long-term manager Dogan Arif, part of a family that had achieved considerable infamy in the south London underworld, had been arrested for his part in a plot to import £8.5 million worth of cannabis. Crockford explains, ‘We needed a high-profile managerial appointment that would put Fisher straight on the map. Someone suggested we look at Malcolm and I thought, “Why on earth is he going to want to come here?” But we made contact, had a chat and he agreed to join us. We agreed to pay him £60,000 a year, which was a phenomenal amount for a Conference club. Then we discovered that he needed Roger Spry to work alongside him as well so that was more money before we even started.’
The initial public relations return was a healthy one. ITV’s Saint and Greavsie pitched up to film a feature, while most national newspapers were present, and looking bemused, when Allison was introduced as manager via a helicopter landing on the pitch. ‘I didn’t want to ask them why they did it,’ he commented, although he undoubtedly appreciated the ostentatious nature of such a stunt.
Allison’s first home game, at which one thousand balloons in the club colours of black and white were released into the air, attracted a crowd of 908, double the usual Fisher attendance, but ended in a 3–1 defeat, after which Allison bemoaned the bad habits his players had picked up over the years. Spry witnessed a group of part-timers revelling in being coached by such an icon in their sport and recalls, ‘They all thought they had died and gone to heaven to be working with Mal.’
However, Crockford believes Allison made a serious error in his approach to managing Fisher. ‘Malcolm treated the players like they were professionals. I thought he over-trained them. We had only 19 or 20 players on 50 quid a week and we lost a lot of them from training injuries. We had thought Malcolm would simply wave his magic wand and turn them into a team that would get into the Football League. Then we would use the money from the development to strengthen the team. It was a disaster. Players were dropping like flies, we were having to play kids from the youth team and they were getting battered. We were plummeting down the league and crowds were down to 200.’
By mid-November, Fisher were third from bottom in the table and according to Crockford, losing £15,000 a week. The owners’ inability to move ahead with development plans because of the ongoing rent dispute meant there was no prospect of being able to recoup any of their investment in the near future. They had to tell Allison they could no longer afford him. ‘Malcolm and Roger were the most expensive items on the books,’ says Crockford. ‘If we had felt we were close to getting promoted it might have been different but we fell out with Malcolm because he couldn’t handle a club at that level. We should never have given him the job. We parted company, but it wasn’t under pleasant circumstances.’
Woolf, who was club chairman, announced to the public, ‘Malcolm is leaving for personal reasons and it has nothing to do with the performance of the club while he has been manager. He will be missed in many areas, especially in the junior and youth team activities.’
For one whose life so frequently seemed haphazard and lacking in any grand plan, there is a pleasing symmetry to the fact that, having made return trips to so many of his clubs, Malcolm Allison’s final full-time management position was exactly where his first had been almost three decades earlier, Twerton Park, Bath. And his return to professional football in November 1992 had a familiar ring about it. Club in trouble calls upon Allison to work with incumbent manager; Allison insists on doing things his way; partnership quickly dissipates. For Bert Head or Tony Book, this time read Dennis Rofe, the former Leicester and England left-back who had been in charge of Bristol Rovers for 16 months when Allison was employed as a troubleshooter – or coaching consultant, to give him his official title.
Malcolm’s return to Twerton Park, where the homeless Rovers were the tenants of Bath City, ended a two-year period during which he had lived a largely private existence in the north-east village of Yarm, becoming a father for the sixth time. There had been some ad hoc coaching engagements and he had remained good value when the media needed a lively sound bite. He explained, ‘I was doing a bit of television and radio but frankly I was bored. I wanted to be part of the game again.’
Lynn Salten continues, ‘I felt he needed to be working, both financially and because he had so much to offer. I got the impression he was disappointed that some of the people he had helped along the way didn’t help him out at the end when possibly he needed someone to believe in him and give him a chance.’
Rovers was intended to be a three-days-per-week appointment, assisting a club that found itself stuck at the bottom of Division One1 following its latest defeat, 5–1 at home to Barnsley. Back in the Football League after an absence of more than eight years, Allison wasn’t going to pass up the opportunity to give reporters a memorable quote. ‘There are two types of people who succeed in coaching,’ he said on the day of his arrival at Rovers. ‘They are conmen, confidence tricksters who teach players tricks of the trade; or intelligent men who build your confidence and belief. I’m the conman. The players here are leaking a few goals and losing faith in themselves but there might not be a lot wrong. If each of them can just improve a little bit in 10 ways, the team will improve in 100 ways.’
Answering questions about how he would work in conjunction with the current manager, Allison insisted, ‘When Saturday comes, Dennis is the man in charge. I know my place in a football club.’ If Rofe had been reassured by the first of those comments – or even believed it – the second must have scared him. Ever since Joe Mercer had told Malcolm to ‘give me two years’ Allison saw his position at any club as that of head boy. Anyone else was just a prefect.
For Rovers’ next match, Allison suggested various selections that were resisted by Rofe. Fielding a duo of players, Andy Tillson and Gary Waddock, bought from Queens Park Rangers for £470,000, Rovers crashed to a second successive 5–1 loss at Wolves. The Rovers directors responded by relieving Rofe of major team decisions. Less than a week after welcoming Allison to the club, Rofe had resigned, leaving Allison to be elevated to ‘consultant manager’.
Rovers vice-chairman Geoff Dunford explained that ‘Dennis just wasn’t prepared to listen to advice’, while Rofe gave his version of events. ‘Basically I was asked to relinquish control of selection and tactics to Malcolm or accept the sack, so I decided to leave.’
It was a move that shocked the Rovers players. Striker John Taylor said, ‘We are all totally bewildered. We were totally behind Dennis and there were signs that we were beginning to turn the corner.’
Tillson recalls, ‘I had only just joined Rovers on the strength of thinking Dennis was a good bloke who wanted me to play. I wondered what on earth was going on. Malcolm arrived in a bit of a whirlwind – and it carried on like that.’
Allison understood that his presence had made Rofe feel insecure but showed little public compassion, commenting. ‘Managers have to take full responsibility and when you have had two 5–1 hidings there is really nowhere else to go. That’s why I wanted Dennis to listen to me. If he had, we might still have been beaten on Saturday, but it wouldn’t have been 5–1.’ And he explained that, at the age of 65, there was a limit to the commitment he could give to Rovers. ‘I only came here to do a consultancy job and I don’t want to get too deeply involved in management,’ he said. ‘Football is a young man’s game and I do not intend to give 15 hours a day, seven days a week. I am happy to do the job until someone else is appointed and then, who knows, he may not want to work with me.’
Allison’s first act in his new role was typically unorthodox, cancelling training, calling off a practice match against local opponents and taking his players to a sauna in order to get to know them better. Once they had their clothes back on, he sat them in front of a video compilation of the 44 goals Rovers had conceded in their first 16 games. ‘The players look tired out,’ was his explanation. Before long he was again bringing in the old dance master Len Heppell, failing in an attempt to sign Swedish international forward Johnny Ekstrom and even suggesting that a rugby match against Bath would improve his players’ upper body strength. ‘But I would ask the Bath lads not to play full out,’ he added.
Tillson, these days head coach of the Bath University team that has established itself near the top level of English non-League football, continues, ‘Malcolm saw the value in sports science and the value of the facilities that the university had to offer and had us training there in his first week. I was looking forward to working with him. It was clear that he was trying to change things and had a futuristic approach to the game.’
But the new Rovers manager was not universally welcomed. Allison’s first full game in charge, a home defeat against Derby, found a fans’ petition making the rounds. ‘The future for Rovers is with Rofey, not some old relic from the Seventies,’ it read. His appointment finally ratified for the rest of the season, Allison’s team went on a run of four League victories, only for a sequence of two wins in twelve games to leave them mired in twenty-third place in the table. One game, however, ensured that Allison won over some of the sceptical supporters, a 4–0 thrashing of Bristol City that was achieved by a series of spectacular goals. The game is still remembered on Rovers websites, with one fan writing, ‘Most people were predicting a close result but then Big Malcolm Allison’s shoot-on-sight training started paying off. To see Rovers score four goals like that and beat “The Shit” at the same time was one of the sweetest moments of my life.’
The draw for the third round of the FA Cup ensured headlines when Rovers were paired away to Aston Villa, managed by Ron Atkinson, who had won the competition twice as manager of Manchester United. Atkinson had managed to wrap himself in the persona of Big Ron, although where Big Mal’s props were cigars and champagne, Big Ron favoured chunky jewellery, shades and a year-round tan. Allison knew a wannabe when he saw one, dubbing him ‘Fat Ron’ and accusing his players of ‘not being able to kick a ball’.
Atkinson was affronted enough to refuse to shake Allison’s hand after a 1–1 draw, offering more ammunition to Malcolm, who accused him of ‘running away’. He added mischievously, ‘The only time I saw Big Ron was in the dug-out. He was shrinking by the minute. I felt having a dig at him would be quite amusing. He has criticised enough people in his time and I am surprised he has not been big enough to take it. I’m certainly not bothered about the way he has reacted.’
Atkinson, who pointed out that ‘half my lads are under 25 and don’t know who he is’, had the last laugh with a 3–0 victory in the replay. And once the dust of the contest had settled, he also made sure he had the final word. ‘I feel nothing but contempt for [Allison]. I would have been quite happy to have a bit of fun with him but when he called my managerial ability into question it was all off. He has obviously forgotten who got him and his friends tickets for matches when he was skint. As far as I am concerned he does not exist.’
Within a month of arriving at Rovers, Allison’s wages at the club had become the subject of much interest when he appeared at Epsom County Court to face legal action from his estranged wife, Sally, over £6,000 worth of unpaid child maintenance. Rovers were reported to be paying him only £330 a week, placing him among the lowest paid bosses in English football. It meant, Allison claimed glibly, that he could afford only one cigar a week – and only then if Lynn paid for it. The presiding judge, Simon Page, imposed a January deadline for Allison to start paying the money he owed.
Sally, meanwhile, was interviewed in the Sunday People, warning, ‘If he doesn’t honour this arrangement, then I have the right to have the money docked out of his wages.’ She claimed that she and daughter Alexis, who was then thirteen, had suffered nine years of financial difficulties since the break-up of her marriage. She said she had spent the previous nine months trying to get Allison to answer her questions about the state of his finances and claimed that she was forced to scour the second-hand shops in East Molesey, Surrey. ‘If you listened to Malcolm’s stories since he returned to football at Bristol, you’d think Alexis and I didn’t exist,’ she said.
‘Since Mal and I split, it has been one long struggle to get him to pay for his child and her upkeep. There have been many court appearances and many promises. But Malcolm seems incapable of keeping them. This latest court hearing was no different. Malcolm tried to explain why he hadn’t paid a bean for more than a year and asked to have the maintenance payments reduced. He even brought a payslip from Bristol Rovers showing his earnings. I can’t believe a man of his experience is getting only £330 a week. He has forgotten more about soccer than many current top managers know. So he must be worth more than £330. He was paying £400 a month but that stopped without explanation in November last year. I’ve had to scrape and borrow just to keep Alexis and me fed and clothed.’
Sally explained that her daughter’s promise as a tennis player and athlete was going unfulfilled because of lack of money and accused Malcolm of having ‘not responded to her pleas for help’. She added, ‘I found it very hard to face him in court knowing the way he has treated his child.’ With Christmas approaching, Sally added poignantly, ‘Alexis is hoping she can get some running shoes from her dad. If she doesn’t receive them, a little sparkle will go out of her life as well. I don’t want her to grow up hating her father.’
Allison subsequently asked the court to lower his payments, claiming to have been a victim of the crash of the Bank of Credit and Commerce International, which had collapsed owing £5.6 billion in 1991 following investigations by the Serious Fraud Office into years of false accounting and financial wrongdoing. The bank, set up in the early 1970s, had operations in 69 countries. Malcolm was never one for long-term financial planning and it appears entirely in character that, while not revealing how much he had invested and lost, he should select such an organisation rather than a safe-as-houses high street building society. ‘Somebody advised me it was a good bank,’ he said some years later. ‘Of course it was a blow when I lost the money but there’s nothing you can do so there’s no point worrying about it.’
What should have been a worry come February 1994 was Allison’s tenure at Bristol Rovers. Vice-chairman Dunford issued a public warning about the need for improvement, while indiscreet comments from players to reporters hinted at dissatisfaction over the manager’s emphasis on fitness over ball skills. Tillson prefers to remember the day Allison brought out his favoured ‘wheel’ theory. ‘He sat down at Bath University and threw all sorts of different things at us. We had never heard of this system, never dreamed of it. But you look now and it is basically what happens at teams like Arsenal. Players take up different positions, with wingers going inside, the centre-forward drifting in. You can’t really put a position on anyone. In his way, Malcolm saw that ahead of everyone else. It came a little late for him and it was difficult for us to take on board.’
Tillson, a 26-year-old central defender, was the Rovers player to whom Allison became closest. They frequently shared a train carriage when they travelled after matches towards their respective homes in Peterborough and Yarm. ‘He would not talk too much about our team and what we should be doing,’ says Tillson. ‘He preferred to talk quietly about the time when he was a player at West Ham and all the friends he made there. He obviously had fond memories of that period of his life.’
Back in the present, Allison was losing the support of some of his Rovers players and Tillson admits, ‘Malcolm gave some of the younger lads a good chance and left out some of the senior ones, which upset them.’ But Allison had little time for insurrection, insisting, ‘My system works and it can save the club from relegation. What I can’t legislate for is the inconsistency we have displayed.’
What no one could legislate for, other than Malcolm himself, was that, removed from the day-to-day stability of home life, his alcohol intake had reached impossible levels. Tillson remembers Allison’s occasional absence from training, but Malcolm at least had the presence of mind to send for help. James Lawton recalls, ‘I got a call when he was struggling at Bristol. He was staying at some pub there. He had got pretty bad and he called me one day, basically saying that he needed evacuating. I was going to drive him home, but I talked to Lynn and they got him back to the north-east. It was a tough period for him, but so many have been.’
Reports circulated that Allison had been taken home and confined to bed suffering from a ‘mystery chest complaint’. After missing two games he declared himself ready to return but the club had already contacted York City manager John Ward about taking over. Allison did the honourable thing and handed in his resignation, although he had enough cheek to suggest that he was now interested in the vacant York job. ‘It’s only an hour from my home,’ he said.
But this time Allison’s managerial career really was over – after eight stints at five different English professional clubs, three major non-League appointments and positions in four different countries. He had won domestic club championships in two countries, three national cups, a major European club trophy, a couple of promotions and an important regional international tournament. For many that would have been a magnificent legacy. That in Allison’s case it seems an argument for underachievement and wasted talent says much for the esteem in which he was held as a coach – and continues to be by those who care to look beyond the flamboyance and flash.
In many ways, his legacy to football continues. One of his old boys, Terry Venables, enjoyed a second stint in the England set-up having previously served as manager. The list of those most closely influenced by him over the years includes the only man to have lifted the World Cup for England while many others – such as Don Howe, Dave Sexton and John Cartwright – have held important positions with the national team and earned elevated reputations in the coaching world. A family tree of those who have worked with, played for or been influenced by Allison would find numerous branches working their way throughout modern football.
That Allison himself was never invited to be more closely involved with England’s national team is down to a mixture of his own misjudgements and misdemeanours and what his supporters feel is the short-sighted attitude of those who have governed football over the years. Long-time Daily Mail journalist Jeff Powell is well placed to comment on such a phenomenon, having campaigned for many years for his and Malcolm’s great friend, Bobby Moore, to be more usefully employed in football. ‘The game never made the most of Malcolm’s tactical and technical knowledge. It saw him as one of the great entertainers and didn’t understand his influence on the game. In the same way, it never made use of Bobby Moore’s great intelligence. He should have been England’s defensive coach, not wandering off to manage Southend.
‘Malcolm should have achieved even more, but what he did achieve was in defiance of the old authoritarian views that ran football. The stand he took against long-ball football was pretty important to the game. He stood up for creativity and imagination. He was never going to take the results and money over the beauty of the game. Brazil was his team, not Wimbledon.’
Powell saw Bobby Moore die before the government could bestow upon him the knighthood millions felt he deserved and now believes that Allison’s influence on the sport should be remembered and acknowledged by a belated place on an honours list, especially in the current climate that allows David Beckham and a possible knighthood to receive serious speculation. ‘Beckham is much less deserving of being a huge personality than Malcolm Allison,’ says Powell. ‘His contribution to the game is infinitesimal compared with Malcolm’s contribution – although perhaps that should be potential contribution. Circumstances have changed where celebrity is everything, but who would have been a bigger celebrity than Malcolm Allison? He is a very important figure in the game. Manchester City would never have happened without him and they were greater than Manchester United, where everyone gets a gong. We didn’t honour Bobby Moore while he was alive so maybe we should give Malcolm something now. He deserves it.’
Even Allison’s most ardent supporters would concede, however, that he has made it possible for people to disregard such claims by pointing to a career that, certainly in the later years, appeared to fall prey to misplaced ambition and the chaotic character of his private life. That career might have been over following his departure from Bristol Rovers but, as those close to him watched in horror and hopelessness, retirement was to prove no less traumatic.