by Ian Holloway
I was formally offered the Leicester City job two days after quitting Plymouth, though the whole thing nearly all fell through because Argyle were asking for an awful lot of compensation for me and my staff – more than £600,000, I believe. There were a number of problems Tim Breacker and Des Bulpin needed to sort out at Plymouth but they were basically being fobbed off by the chairman and it got to the point where I said to Milan, “Right, that’s it. I’ve had enough and I’m going back.” I jumped into my car and my agent got in and asked what I was doing. I told him I was serious and started the long drive down to Plymouth when I got a call from Milan who told me Argyle would accept £220,000 instead. I’d called Paul Stapleton’s bluff completely but I would have definitely gone back and then put out my side of the story and told the Argyle fans what he was really like – I didn’t care if I didn’t have a job, I’d have gone and done something else for a while – and do you know what? Part of me wishes I feckin well had done bearing in mind what I was about to walk into. I should have told Milan I wasn’t coming up because I’d been refused permission then let him sort it all out – I should have never resigned in the first place, let them agree a compensation package in advance and then nail down what I would be given to buy players with at Leicester – the whole thing was a complete farce from start to finish.
Kim had to go back to Plymouth to collect one or two things after I’d left and she had to nip to the shops to get something. While she was there a bloke came right up to her and was breathing down her neck when he said, “What’s it like being married to a LIAR!?” She calmly said. “I wouldn’t know that my friend,” and walked away, but it scared her. The supporters were obviously angry, but the flames had been stoked by the chairman who, in his propaganda spin of the situation, claimed he’d known nothing about an approach from Leicester – yet he’d known before me, told me about it and yet still made me out to be a liar! He was getting his messiah back anyway in Paul Sturrock and he could have come out and told the truth and I wouldn’t have looked half as bad, but instead I thought he handled it like a pig. Any time he started to get any stick, what did he do? He deflected it like a top pro. I once said Paul Stapleton reminded me of my dad but never in a million years could he dream of being anywhere near my old man – they are worlds apart.
Like any marriage that splits, it was great while it was lasted but we didn’t love each other anymore. I told the main people why, too and they still spun such a lot of crap before we played them in the League it was untrue. The bottom line is it’s all about players – disrespect them, mis-manage them and buy the wrong ones at your peril. Some Plymouth fans called me a liar because of the things I’d said about the place and the club and how happy I was, but in the end, I’d have been a liar if I’d have stayed, because I didn’t believe anymore. I’d become a non-believer like many of the supporters had become – the same ones who’d warned me along the way that the board wouldn’t do this or that because they didn’t have enough money. I tried to gee them along and tried to convince them that we could do it together but in the end, I had to admit defeat – they were right, I was wrong.
I couldn’t have achieved what I wanted in the time span I was going to give it. Long-term, with a new structure and new investment as well as some of the board’s ideas – not the penny-pinching ones – they can still be a hell of a force to be reckoned with, but I just couldn’t see it happening in my lifetime and the fans would have got more than fed up with me – “You promised us this, you promised us that, now we’re going backwards,” and I’d have been a liar and a cheat to put up with it. The fact is, I never want them to fail and I never will. I’m proud of some of the football we played and some of those lads will go on to bigger and better things because they deserve to, but I know every one of them is proud of what Plymouth Argyle meant to them and that’s what that club is about – the people.
So I took up the reins at Leicester and the minute I signed a contract, the transfer window closed and I was left with the previous regime’s players – I was the only signing the club made that day. I was shocked by the attitude of the fans who seemed to have accepted their lot. “Help us out, Ol, we’ve been rubbish for four years, now,” I heard more than once. Yet 30,000 kept turning up to support the team and with backing like that, I’ve no doubt they’ll be fine in the long run. That fan base justified my decision in some ways because Leicester fans weren’t getting what they wanted but their crowds were getting bigger while Plymouth were getting what they wanted but the crowds were getting smaller.
I needed to hit the ground running at Leicester and I was constantly trying to jumpstart the club’s heart, but it never managed to beat fast enough and for one reason or another, we never managed to get any momentum together – we should have done and there were several occasions when we should have put back-to-back wins together but it just never happened. At Plymouth we’d needed to keep our players and increase the wage bill, at Leicester we needed to get rid of most of the players and reduce the wage bill. If it had been possible to have spliced half the wages off Leicester and give them to Plymouth, it would have been just about right.
So about an hour before we were due to set off for what would be my first match in charge – at Bristol City of all places – I got everyone together and told them it was a fresh start, and that everyone would have their chance. I told them how we could expect Bristol City to play and what the team was – I’d asked the existing coaching staff to pick me a 4-4-2 line-up who’d be up for the game and then asked the lads to stand up as I read the names out so as to avoid embarrassment. The bus was waiting and then we had to go and then I got caught up in a whole load of media stuff, which I shouldn’t really have done and that was about all the preparation we had.
To be fair, everyone was on their toes and we’d picked a team that excluded the ones who really didn’t give a shit in it and that team went on to do the business for me.
I was back in Bristol playing Bristol City for my first game in charge and when I’d woken up in the team hotel on the Saturday morning I wasn’t sure where I was or who I was. It was the maddest feeling you could imagine and I was on an adrenaline rush but was concerned for the welfare of my family with what was happening, though I did know a move away would suit the girls who were desperate to get away from the school they were at in Exeter. At least St Albans wasn’t a million miles from Leicester so I was already sure Hattie, my youngest, was going to go back to the school there – a place she’d never really wanted to leave in the first place.
Going to Ashton Gate for that first game probably worked in our favour, as it turned out. The Leicester players didn’t really know me and I was greeted with a cacophony of boos from the home support as I came out but I managed to turn that around for the first time ever. I walked out of the tunnel and it began and you have to walk past their most vocal section on the way to the pitch at Ashton Gate – no way would I have been able to just skulk in unnoticed so I thought, “Ok, I’ll just blag it” – I bowled in through the front door – as my old man used to say – and if they didn’t like it, tough. I walked about three paces on to the pitch, turned to face the Bristol City fans and bowed to them, stepped back and applauded them and then saw their mascot, the Robin, so I went over and shadow-boxed him for a few seconds, with one slug in the gut and one on the beak and then he went to slap me around the chops. Then we hugged and that’s when it hit me – the City fans started to clap me – Kim, watching in the stand couldn’t believe it – and I clapped them back. In fact, the only fans that weren’t clapping were the Leicester fans! I don’t think I’ll ever forget that moment – it was something special. I screamed my way through that game, barking instructions and shouting myself hoarse, but we won 2-0 and it was the perfect start.
I knew I had my staff sorted and they’d be with me before too long but I never had the chance to say goodbye to my team and they never heard my side of it. I should have gone in and told my players that
I was going because of this, because of that, but then tell them, “Make sure you keep going and don’t lose your focus!” I spoke to Tim Breacker after the game and found out Plymouth had won after beating Sheffield United to go fourth in the table which was outstanding. I felt like I’d had two teams win on the same day – others may feel differently – but I knew I’d left Argyle as best prepared as I possibly could have done and I was proud of the lads that day.
Pen, Tim and Des Bulpin all joined me after that game and we were all excited about who we were going to target for January, but we had no guidance of how much money we had to spend – which is something I should have nailed down before I agreed to the job and a massive own-goal as far as I was concerned – let’s put it this way, I’ll never do that again. I at least needed to know what parameters I had to work within but it was all a bit cloak and dagger and I never really knew what I could or couldn’t spend. I just assumed Milan was a billionaire and money wouldn’t be a problem but with 12 games played, we’d only won a couple of times. It was like a mental block or a hoodoo – we just couldn’t string two wins together. We should have beaten Cardiff in our second game and would have but for an unbelievable save at the end from Kasper Schmeichel – that would have meant we’d won our first two games and we’d have been off and running and flying up the table – two more and we’d have been on the coattails of the play-offs.
The fact is, if I’d have had the chance to bring two players in before the window closed, I wouldn’t have had to give some of the ones I wasn’t happy with another chance. I could have said, “Sorry, you’re not for me,” and have them train at different times and so on. But typical Ollie, I thought I’d have a look at them to see if I could get more out of them because my chairman was telling me they were good. I even played one or two of them and they were rubbish, but all I got from my chairman was “Why can’t you coach these players to be better?” The main reason was because I had no idea they were crap! They were players he’d brought in in the summer so of course he wanted them to do well – but sometimes, you can’t polish a rabbit dropping, no matter how hard you try.
You’re better off with a big gaping hole in your squad and a whole lot of cash to bring someone in rather than signing any old player – or in this case three or four – because once you’ve got them, if they’re no good, they are in your way and just standing in a young kid’s path. There were blockages like you wouldn’t believe at Leicester – it was like the kids had been into the toilet and put two loo rolls down the pan – no matter how hard you flushed, it wasn’t going to go away – just overflow on to the floor. That old saying of my dad’s had come true – I’d fallen in a barrel full of boobs only I’d come out sucking my toe rather than my thumb. Every single thing that could go wrong at Leicester did go wrong. We had sendings off that should have never been, penalties given and converted from poor decisions, goals disallowed that were fine, our keeper Marton Fulop got recalled on loan by Sunderland and I swear that if he’d have stayed and carried on playing the way he had been doing, we’d have been alright.
I think that might have had something to do with the Milan Mandaric factor, because his money walks before him wherever he goes and I think that’s a problem for him. People have a perception that he’s got bottomless pockets of cash and so a player’s price escalates – Manchester City will find the same thing now they’ve been taken over. Agents look at him like a cash register and then players aren’t quite as hungry as they ought to be. We had four meetings lasting five hours each about who we were going to bring in and at one point we thought we were going to spend about £6m, but in the end we only signed Steve Howard and Matt Oakley. Milan had set me a target of reaching 30 points by the 23rd match of the season in order to re-invest in the team – I argued we’d probably need a few less that season – but he said if I managed to get an additional 30 points before the transfer window opened, he’d invest big because we’d have a chance of making the play-offs. I thought the points needed for the play – offs would be less and said I thought we’d still have a chance by the time we got to January anyway.
“Oh you think so?” he said.
I said, “Yeah, but we need to get rid of some of the players we
have now.”
He wanted me to grind out results. “Gary Megson played five at the back,” he’d say and I told him I didn’t want to play five at the back. He then added he’d never tell his manager who to play and to be fair, he didn’t, but he was frustrated, I believe, that I wasn’t playing Bruno N’Gotty because he felt he was better than whoever I’d selected in central defence. The amount of times he came in and said, “I’m so disappointed in you, Ollie,” was scary. I was strong and wanted to prove him wrong. We played Charlton in the last game before the January window opened and they equalised in the last minute. Had we won, we’d have had 29 points – one short of Milan’s target – and I said to him afterwards, “That’s close enough.” Pen was telling Milan that nobody wanted his players because they were – with the greatest respect – no good, but he’d invested a lot of money in them and I don’t think he wanted to hear that.
In fairness to Milan, he’s been in the game a long, long time and he knows players and people all around the world and lives and breathes football. He loves the game and has such wonderful enthusiasm, but he’s very nervous about some of his investments. There’s a very generous and supportive side to Milan that you’ll see if you win three or four in a row, but I just never managed to see it because of the results we had and I can’t blame him for that – I was the manager and I was there to get results.
On a personal level, the home game in February against Plymouth was horrendous and the build-up in the media should never have been allowed to happen, but the Argyle fans didn’t know any better – they may well have still reacted the way they did had they actually heard my side, but would they have been so venomous? I’ll never know. The game itself was a joke because we scored a perfectly good goal against Argyle which was disallowed and murdered them in the first 15 minutes, but eventually we went behind and we just panicked for some reason. The players did exactly the opposite of what we’d told them and resorted to pumping the long ball up to Steve Howard’s head when the plan was to play the ball around at pace. I don’t think the Plymouth fans stopped singing “There’s only one lying bastard,” from start to finish and it had a terrible effect on my team. Whatever we’d gained as a team on the first day when the Bristol City fans showed me such respect was taken away that night by the Argyle fans in the far corner of the Walkers Stadium. Maybe it affected me too much, but the timing of Paul Stapleton’s comments about me and the things he said absolutely disgusted me. He was interviewed on the Argyle website prior to the game and it was billed as the chairman ‘finally’ saying what he felt about me and what I’d done – and it was picked up by every form of media you could imagine.
The first thing he said was that I didn’t want to re-negotiate Sylvan Ebanks-Blake’s contract because – apparently – I thought he had a questionable attitude. He also claimed that the deal for Dan Gosling had been set up by me long before Paul Sturrock okayed his move to Everton. He said I’d promised David Norris a move in January without the knowledge of the board. It was a shocking statement and a tissue of lies and I should have come out and said, “That’s rubbish, that’s a lie and by the way, go and cry all the way to the bank when you’re collecting the cash from the sale of the players I brought to the club.” I can only think he did it because of the pressure he was under because Plymouth hadn’t won a game for five or six games and he needed to deflect any criticism on to me. I’m afraid there was only one liar in all of this and it wasn’t feckin me and the damage and detrimental effect it had on me and a lot of people’s perception of me was immense. What he can’t take away from me is the quality of the players I left behind and the way my team played. Maybe it’s time the Plymouth fans had their say and if they don’t like what’s going on, the
y should do what the Newcastle fans did after Kevin Keegan stood his ground.
At Leicester, I’d discovered I’d inherited a group of people who I thought I could rub off on them and it just didn’t happen. I don’t believe a points target where Milan would or wouldn’t invest was fair however and I should have said, “Hang on – do you realise we might go down?” but I never wanted to let that come into my head and right to the very last day at Stoke, to the last minute of the game, I never allowed relegation to come into my head. I didn’t think it was possible and what people saw was a man who’d been floored. Rocky Balboa was floored by Clubber Lang and he got up, but I didn’t think I was going to be able to get up again after we’d gone down.
To have beaten Barnsley away and then have Sheffield Wednesday at home where we were 1-0 up and going hell-for-leather for a second, leaving four of our defenders on three attackers and they break and score – and we lose 3-1 – is incredible – but it happened. All we needed was to keep Wednesday out, hold on to what we had and wait to catch them on the break – a point would have been enough – but it was a disaster. The common-sense and decision-making we had among our team was the worst I’d ever seen and we had some senior pros out there, too. It must have been hard for the players in front of a crowd that size, under the pressure they were under because they’d never been down to the third tier before – the strain was immense. Everything was unreal and to try and sum up my time at Leicester is hard. I didn’t go into the job saying I loved the club and loved the area because the reaction of the Plymouth fans hurt me – and still does – but I hope the Leicester fans realise what I gave up to go there and what I was trying to achieve – and how devastated I was for them. I think they are in a better place now, because they needed to bottom out and clear out the rubbish. In that division, they’ll grow and blossom and come back stronger than ever – sometimes you have to chop off a Clematis at root level and it’ll be even more beautiful the following year and that’s what I think Nigel Pearson will have the opportunity of doing under Milan. I wanted it to be a longer relationship with Leicester but it always looked risky and I paid the price and I failed. I’d thought I could rub off on every player but if a player isn’t interested, you’ve got no chance. One of the best manager’s there has ever been, Brian Clough, once said of his time at Leeds United that if the players don’t go with you, you’re on your own. I had a few of them with me, but not enough and I think if you asked the Leicester fans, they would say they saw a slight improvement, particularly in somebody like Richard Stearman, who grasped the nettle and did what I asked of him but he was in the minority.
