Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  ‘The celebrity thing was developing and people were becoming more precious and egotistical as a result. In the eighties, if you wanted a celeb to turn up at an event, you’d ask someone from Brookside. That changed in the mid nineties. You’d ask a footballer instead.

  ‘Although we weren’t the best team in the country by then, some of our players were among the bigger football names. The world was moving that way. People wanted to take a picture of footballers walking into a restaurant. There was never any call for that before, when we were winning things. We were only really media-worthy when we played football.’

  In his management career, Mølby reached the old Fourth Division play-off final before winning promotion to the Football League with Kidderminster Harriers. He now lives comfortably with Mandy, his wife of nearly twenty-five years.

  ‘The manager I learnt most from was probably Graeme,’ Mølby says. ‘He made me realize I did not want to be a shock-treatment manager. I never went in anywhere and attempted to make it oh, so much better in the first month. Everything takes time. It was a slow burner. I explained this whenever I went for an interview with a chairman.

  ‘I really enjoyed being a coach and seeing the players improve, more than the results-orientated business of being a manager. I did Ajax pre-seasons and the lads hated it: out running at quarter past seven in the morning. The boys would curse my name under their breaths. But I didn’t set out to be liked. Being from Kolding, I didn’t set out to be anything.’

  CHAPTER TWO

  WHOOSH!

  Nick Tanner, 1988–94

  BY THE SUMMER of 1988, Nick Tanner had built up quite a reputation and it was unclear whether it would send him spinning to the top or the bottom of the professional game.

  ‘Bristol Rovers offered me a year’s contract on the same money, but I felt I didn’t really get on with the manager, Gerry Francis, so decided to look elsewhere,’ he explains. ‘Torquay United made an offer of £10,000 and the club accepted it. I spoke to Torquay’s manager, Cyril Knowles, who was straight and to the point. I was a single lad in those days. “Come and live down on the English Riviera,” he told me. “There are lots of young female students here. They’ll be right up your street.” I have to admit, it was very tempting, even though Torquay were in the old Fourth Division and it would have meant dropping a league.’

  Tanner was still living with his parents in Bristol. His father, Dennis, who worked as a fireman at British Aerospace, did not have any interest in football at the time.

  The family home phone rang. ‘My dad answered it and he shouted, “Nick, there’s a chap called Kenny who wants to speak to you.” He passed me the phone. “Kenny Dalglish here. I want to sign you for Liverpool.” I thought one of the Rovers lads was winding me up, as I knew Liverpool were watching Gary Penrice.’

  Tanner was on £220 a week at Rovers.

  ‘Kenny asked how much I wanted. Being daft, I wondered if he’d stretch to £300. “Of course, Nick … of course.” I told my dad the good news but the significance of Liverpool didn’t really mean too much to him. His first question was “What are they paying you, son?” Being a hard worker himself, he always knew the value of every pound. When I said that I was moving away from home for an extra £80, he was furious. “Ring that Kenny fella back and tell him you need more!” So I did and ended up getting £330 instead.’

  Tanner had taken five years to jump ten leagues after starting out with non-league Mangotsfield. He spent the same amount of time at Liverpool before a back injury – which he believes may have been the consequence of the ‘thousands’ of sit-ups he’d do every day to maintain his fitness – forced him to retire aged just twenty-eight.

  Tanner thinks he is the only Liverpool player since 1990 to have appeared in more than fifty games without earning enough money to retire on. His last contract – agreed in 1992 – would have tied him down for the next three seasons and at £1,500 a week was the most lucrative deal he’d ever sign.

  ‘After retirement, I’d earned just enough to buy a three bedroomed house down ’ere,’ he says in a Bristolian accent so enthusiastic and croaky it sounds like it has swiftly been passed through a cheese grater. ‘I’m not bitter about that, though. Money never motivated me. I’m happy-go-lucky, me; always have been. I was never a saver of money. I’ve always spent what I’ve got because you could be dead tomorrow. Live every day as if it’s your last.’

  It was this attitude that helped him reintegrate into a ‘normal’ life. Within six months, he’d taken an office job in accident management and personal-injury claims. Tanner maintains that he did not suffer from the type of ‘meltdown’ that many footballers experience when their careers are cut short in unfortunate circumstances because he had worked in industry before football.

  ‘I’ve never smoked, don’t do the drugs,’ he continues. ‘I’ve always liked a drink, but if it wasn’t for a lager I doubt I would have played football in the first place. When I first signed for Liverpool, they put me in a hotel for five months. There’s nothing worse than sitting in a hotel room staring at four walls every night, so I sampled the many joys of Liverpool’s nightlife a bit more than I probably should. But I was always able to train as hard as ever after a night out, so didn’t see any problems with it at the time. I started playing in men’s leagues when I was sixteen and we’d go down the pub straight after games. It has been a part of my life since then and I’m not ashamed to admit it. I find it to be a relaxing agent.’

  Winter has arrived when I meet Tanner near his home in Bradley Stoke, an uninviting cluster of housing estates in the most northern end of Bristol. The area is still recovering from a nineties collapse in the property market, which forced many households into negative equity, thus earning the town the nickname ‘Sadly Broke’.

  By 10 a.m., we are nursing real ale in a pub called the Three Brooks and it is early afternoon by the time we reach the almost identically modern Bailey’s Court Inn, which is situated in a small retail park that includes a Tesco Express and a Chinese restaurant imaginatively named Beijing.

  This is Tanner’s local. He is a founder member of what he proudly informs me is called the Monday Club – a social gathering that holds liquid lunch meetings most weeks around this time. Tanner gives the impression he knows the names of all the customers within earshot, many of whom think it’s acceptable to wear Diadora tracksuit bottoms, tan-coloured leather jackets and short-sleeved polo necks as one ensemble. Once they find out I have travelled from Liverpool, there are familiar jokes about stereos and hubcaps being pinched from the car park. Tanner looks on apologetically and wanders off to order another round while sharing jokes with the buxom barmaids, who are familiar enough with him to play along.

  Tanner is the smartest person in the establishment, dressed in a navy-coloured pinstripe suit jacket, jeans and black loafers. There is a goatee beard and his hair is swept majestically behind his ears. He reminds me a bit of the housewives’ television favourite, Trevor Eve. The blond highlights from the early nineties, which made me think of Pat Sharp from Fun House every time I saw him play, are long gone. ‘That was Barry Venison’s idea,’ he smiles. ‘The women liked it, didn’t they?’

  I decided to interview Tanner for two reasons. He is the only former Liverpool player currently alive to have represented the club at Wembley and now be doing a standard nine-to-five job away from football. I initially wondered what it was like to be back where he was aged sixteen, not really in control of his own financial destiny, especially with the personal-injury market struggling.

  Principally, though, it intrigued me to find out what Tanner made of Graeme Souness – the manager that gave him and several other young players a platform to perform at Liverpool while alienating legends that had previously contributed towards a healthy collection of league and European titles.

  Tanner’s climb into the professional game was not untypical of the time, despite football not being in the family genes. ‘My brother Martyn was more into motorbikes,’ he e
xplains. ‘My dad was a grafter and worked like a Trojan to support the family. There wasn’t enough time for anything else in his life.’

  Home was in Frampton Cotterell and latterly Hambrook when he started to take football more seriously, playing on Saturdays and Sundays. And then the adult world beckoned.

  ‘My mate’s dad was nearly forty and playing centre-back for a Saturday team. I went down there and I was the youngest player in the team, so I got taught all the ropes. I think that exposure was one of the reasons why I got as far as I did. You don’t play against men in these professional academies now, do you? It’s a big jump playing against blokes. It teaches you teamwork and spirit. In kids’ football, a little superstar can win a game on his own. That’s not the case the older you get. You need everyone to stick together and pull the same way. The beers after the game made me feel like a man. They were bloody good times.’

  Mangotsfield United saw enough in Tanner to ask him to training, where he first met the late Ralph Miller, a legendary non-league manager, who was a builder by trade.

  ‘I enjoyed playing under Ralph more than Bobby Gould, Gerry Francis, Kenny Dalglish or Graeme Souness,’ Tanner beams. ‘He loved players that got stuck in, and I was one of them. He was an old-school psychologist, a bit like Bill Shankly, I suppose. The funny stories are endless.’

  Tanner recalls one.

  ‘There was a player that he desperately wanted to sign for Mangotsfield. Problem was, the fella lived in South Wales. So he drove over the bridge in his van with a bicycle in the back. He pleaded with the fella at his front door. “Look, I’ve cycled all the way over here from Bristol to sign you.” The lad looked at his bike. “Jesus Christ,” he said. “You must really want me.” So he signed the forms there and then. Ralph rode around the corner and chucked his bike in the back of the van before driving home.

  ‘When I was about eighteen, we decided to go on our first lads’ holiday to Magaluf. To prepare for the holiday I decided to get myself fit, so I went out running every day – did sit-ups, press-ups, the lot. It was the fittest I’ve ever been. After our first pre-season session back at Mangotsfield, I got out of the shower looking all bronzed. “Fuck me,” Ralph went. “You’ve got a body like Tarzan and a prick like Jane!”’

  In the mid-eighties, Bristol Rovers were, as Tanner puts it, ‘in financial shit’ and needing players that would play for practically nothing, so manager Bobby Gould scoured the Gloucestershire and Somerset county leagues for undiscovered talent.

  ‘Rovers signed Gary Penrice, Phil Purnell, Gary Smart and myself from Mangotsfield, all for the princely sum of two floodlight bulbs. I can still remember Ralph turning up at Eastville Stadium while all of us were playing in a reserve game, shouting at the top of his voice, “Where’s my money, Gouldy?” That was Ralph all over. In later years he came to Anfield to watch me play and said how proud he was of me, which touched me, coming from such a hard man.’

  Tanner continues: ‘When I signed for Rovers I could have earned more money staying at British Aerospace working on the planes and playing for Mangotsfield than I did going pro. There was a woman who supported Rovers. I could hear her most games, “Tanner! Earn your money!” There was a dog track at Eastville and one day I spotted her while warming up. I jumped over the fence to have a word with her. “Excuse me,” I said. “How much money do you think I earn?” She looked at me blankly. “I’m not on thousands of pounds, you know? I could have earned more money working.” From then on, she was as good as gold, giving me a sweet every game.’

  After being part-time at Mangotsfield where he was paid £7 a week, Tanner earned £5 plus fuel expenses while playing non-contract for Bristol Rovers reserves. He made his first team debut against local rivals Bristol City in the Gloucestershire Cup and emerged from the bench in extra time to help the team to a 3–1 victory.

  ‘Rovers was an extension of playing non-league football to me. We were rag-ass, Rovers. There wasn’t a huge jump in standard, but the fact that I didn’t have to go to work from six in the morning then train in the evenings meant I found the step up quite easy.

  ‘My nickname became “Whoosh”, because, in training, I got in the habit of knocking fifty yards passes down the line towards big Devon White or in the channel for Gary Penrice. As a left-back, that was my simple job: win it and get it forward as quick as possible to the forwards. The biggest difference was the levels of organization and discipline. Gouldy let everyone know what he expected. Bobby had signed Stuart Pearce from Wealdstone as Coventry manager, so he knew how to get the best out of non-league players like me.’

  It frustrated Tanner that he was not always given the credit he thought he deserved for his efforts. When deployed in midfield, one of his partners was an ageing ex-England Captain, Gerry Francis, then on his last legs having made his name at Queens Park Rangers. Tanner claims he took a lot of Francis’s buffeting, particularly when facing warlocks such as Brentford’s Terry Hurlock, who was once described by the Guardian as ‘An incredible bulk of a man’, someone whose reputation promted opponents to hire Sherpa guides to circumnavigate him in order to ‘maintain a full set of limbs’.

  ‘I’m not being funny but Gerry would get man of the match and I would think to myself, “He’s only passed the ball from side to side for ninety minutes – while I was running all over the place crashing into fellas like Hurlock.” Hurlock was from the travelling community and you know what gypsies are like as fighters. I left the pitch after one encounter with Hurlock with my laces ripped and socks soaking in blood after one of his tackles. All I wanted was a pat on the back from the fans now and again. A lot of footballers are like that.’

  After Gould left for Wimbledon, Francis was appointed as his replacement.

  ‘Our relationship was never the best as players and it didn’t get any better when he became manager. He dropped me to the bench one game and I told him I’d rather go and play for the reserves than sit on my arse. He couldn’t believe it – told me he hadn’t heard someone say such a thing in his previous twenty years as a footballer. Later that afternoon, he told me to go to Tottenham the following morning with the reserves on a minibus. The reserve-team manager told all the boys he’d give us a tenner each if we kept the score below a 5–0 defeat. Somehow we won 2–0.’

  Tanner describes himself as a ‘Jack of all trades.’ Often used as a left-back, he was spotted by Liverpool running up and down the left of midfield, despite naturally being right-footed. His ability to use both feet must have alerted Liverpool’s chief scout, Ron Yeats, while watching Penrice. Years before, Yeats’s predecessor Geoff Twentyman, whose son with the same name was also playing for Rovers at the time, was renowned for recommending players with the ability to ‘go both ways,’ meaning he was two-footed. Tanner seemed a classic Liverpool signing: cheap, underrated and versatile. Similarly, nobody thought much of Northampton’s Phil Neal before, like Tanner, he moved to Anfield aged twenty-three.

  ‘Gerry decided to play Vaughan Jones at left-back and shifted me further forward. We went seven games unbeaten and narrowly missed out on promotion from the old Division Three. I couldn’t run past anyone, though. It was just a case of getting it out of my feet and whipping it in. I’d cut back inside and aim for big Dev. It was predictable but very effective.’

  Tanner admits he was not that ambitious. Had he ended up at Torquay, it would not have been a problem. ‘I’m happy-go-lucky, me,’ he reiterates. ‘Easy come, easy go.’ Suddenly, for the grand sum of £20,000, double what Torquay were asked to pay, he was a Liverpool player.

  ‘I thought I’d be at Rovers for my whole career then maybe drop back into non-league football as I got older. Being a local lad, Rovers was all right for me, you know? Within a couple of months, I was running about at Melwood with all these star players. It was a big shock. It was a tough school, lots of hard knocks. I don’t think anybody knew I’d played football to a decent standard. At Rovers, we beat Leicester City 3–1 in the FA Cup and Gary McAllister was in their
midfield. What a player he was. Alan Smith and Mark Bright were up front. We gave them a roasting that day. It was probably my best-ever performance: hunting them down, getting stuck in and causing mayhem. Maybe if some of the Liverpool lads had seen that game, they’d have realized I had something about me.’

  To play regularly for Liverpool it was not merely enough just to display energy and unhinged spirit. Tanner appreciated he needed to improve other areas of his game in order to progress.

  ‘One of the reasons I got spotted and signed by Liverpool was because I always gave a hundred per cent every game and I could run all day,’ he says. ‘In pre-season, I’d be miles ahead of everyone else, thinking it was easy. Then the balls came out, which I suppose was a great leveller.

  ‘At Rovers, we’d play five-a-side for a bit of fun on a Friday. At Liverpool, it was the routine. It was all two-touch and if you messed it up, Bugsy [Ronnie Moran] would stop the play and single you out, giving you a right bollocking. On the outside, people hear of the five-a-sides and think of what happens in your local gym. This wasn’t a load of fat blokes knocking it round. It was done with intensity.’

  Moran had filled every role imaginable at the club from player, to physio, to coach and trainer, through to caretaker manager in a career at Liverpool that lasted almost fifty years. Bruce Grobbelaar described him as the staff’s ‘barking dog.’

  ‘I’m sure Bugsy would go mental these days, with the conservative passing that takes place around the back. At Liverpool, you never passed for passing’s sake. Everything was done for a reason, a purpose. His football knowledge was frightening. After games, he’d pick up the kit off all the players. One by one, he’d get the shirts, the shorts, then the socks. If he felt it was needed, he’d have a quiet word in your ear – it was never in front of the other lads, unless you’d done something really bad. His memory for detail was unbelievable. “I saw what you did in the fourth minute there,” he’d say. “Nobody else saw it but I did.” At the beginning, I thought he was being a bastard but over time I realized he only bothered with me because he knew I was willing to learn.’