Men in White Suits

by Simon Hughes

  ‘The clubs don’t allow the players to express themselves, and when they do the media often exaggerate it. The players get their fingers burnt and decide from then on to be neutral. That’s why Wimbledon was so great and unique. Wimbledon did not even have a sponsor. It did not care about public image. Sam Hammam and Stanley Reed encouraged people to express their individual personalities. It would cause chaos but there were no skeletons in the closet. Nobody was really surprised by the comments about Vinnie in The Sun. It meant there were no great revelations and in turn it fostered the right environment for the club to thrive.’

  Fashanu was the son of a nurse from British Guyana and a Nigerian barrister. When his parents separated, he was sent together with his older brother, Justin, to a Barnardo’s home. The Fashanu brothers were soon fostered by a white family and brought up in rural Norfolk. Whilst at Wimbledon, Fashanu would present television programmes like Gladiators in his spare time.

  ‘More than anyone else in the squad, I had a love–hate relationship with Fash,’ Scales says. ‘He’s got an unbelievable presence. When he walks in the room, everybody stops what they are doing. He’s got arrogance, which is his strength. We all knew it was due to insecurity from his childhood. I know he had a tough upbringing. Physically, he was incredible – a very powerful and intimidating figure.’

  Yet Fashanu’s reputation counted for nothing when it came to pranks.

  ‘Fash was always wanting to impress people. He wasn’t just a footballer but a businessman and a man about London. He claimed to know everybody. There were connections supposedly in Africa, the Far East and the US. He tried to elevate himself above everybody else. He had a chauffeur that drove him around in a Rolls Royce. One day at the training ground, he stepped out of the car with a fur coat and a briefcase. He looked immaculate. He had a pair of Concorde tickets and he made sure everyone saw them, claiming he’d just flown in from New York. Before training, he’d always wander off for a massage. Roger Joseph was one of his best mates and he told everyone that rather than being in New York Fash had been out in Maida Vale with a couple of mates in a restaurant. “It’s a complete lie,” Roger told us. At that point, Wally Downes got Fash’s expensive pair of shoes and nailed them to the floor with a hammer. Fash’s fancy Ralph Lauren tie got cut up as well. We rubbed Deep Heat into his boxer shorts and Vaseline inside his coat. After training, we made sure that everyone was present when he returned to the dressing room. Fash emerged from the shower, dried off then tried to pick up his shoes. He went ape shit. Boy, he had a temper. It was like a tornado.’

  Scales was on the receiving end of a Fashanu reprisal after a ‘loose’ comment about another player’s sexuality made in an attempt to escape the digs about his own.

  ‘Little did we know at the time but Fash’s brother Justin, God rest his soul, was gay. I could sense that Fash wasn’t happy that I’d broached the subject of homosexuality. It touched a nerve and ten minutes later he reacted by forearm-smashing me in training, knocking me straight out. I couldn’t breathe. Fash stood over me, glaring, not saying anything. It was clear why he’d done it.’

  Wimbledon’s image was based on confrontation.

  ‘Immediately after a game, each player would chip in with comments. We’d challenge each other. You had to be strong to listen to the truth. If you were good, you’d get praise but if not they’d dig a grave and throw you in. Every Monday morning, we’d get called into a video meeting by Gouldy or Joe Kinnear when he became manager. Everyone dreaded this. We’d huddle in the manager’s office and, once again, you’d get picked out. “That’s not good enough, you’ve let your teammates down here …”

  ‘On more than one occasion, Gouldy reached into the wardrobe in his office and pulled out a pair of boxing gloves. He offered to fight people who dared to contradict him. Dennis Wise went too far once, so we all piled outside and they had a fight while we stood around in a circle. They knocked shit out of each other and Wisey ended up breaking Gouldy’s rib. Nobody called for an ambulance. Gouldy had to take himself to the nearest Accident and Emergency.’

  This was the way Wimbledon solved problems. The next day, Gould and Wise had moved on. Resentment was rarely harboured for long.

  ‘It was all about getting negative feelings out of the system. It was medieval. Got a problem? OK, let’s fight. I wouldn’t say there were no grudges, because Sanch [Lawrie Sanchez] and Fash had a simmering feud for years. Somehow, on a pitch we’d come together on a Saturday and look after one another. It was a dysfunctional family that worked.’

  Wimbledon’s dressing room was governed in a similar way to Liverpool in the 1980s. Self-regulation ruled. Tactically, however, Wimbledon were considered as opposite to Liverpool. No other team was routinely attacked with anything like the vehemence reserved for Jones, Fashanu and the boys. The England striker Gary Lineker once commented dismissively, ‘The best way to watch Wimbledon is on Ceefax.’

  ‘We were long ball but weren’t kick and rush,’ Scales insists. ‘That’s an insult to the organization that existed at the club. It was a direct style of football built on the percentages of creating chances. To make that successful, you needed a technical execution. We didn’t lump the ball forward just for the sake of it. We were much more cultured, sophisticated and technically good than people give us credit for.

  ‘In defence, for example, I knew that Fash would be running in the channel in between the centre-half and full-back. I knew that Fash had the technical capabilities to receive a long pass on the chest and bring other players into the equation. There were times when you wouldn’t hit the target man but it was nevertheless part of a plan. The midfield would know the importance of winning the first phase after the knockdown. We worked at it, trained at it, day in, day out.

  ‘There was the right blend between coaching and strong man-management at Wimbledon. Gouldy and Joe Kinnear were the motivators. There was a method behind everything we did. Everybody accepted their limitations and the emphasis was on getting more out of what we were good at. It was sophisticated. Dennis Wise, for example, was one of the best crossers of the ball I’ve seen from set pieces. On the training ground, we spent hours practising runs from Wisey’s deliveries, getting across the defender.

  ‘In the early days, we were coached by Don Howe, who was a visionary and one of the best at his job in the country. Then there was Ray Harford, who later joined Kenny [Dalglish] as his assistant at Blackburn. When Liverpool came in for me, Blackburn did at the same time and it was really tempting to go there because I knew how good a coach Ray was and, obviously, there was the legend of Kenny.

  ‘Football is not as complicated as people make it out to be. If your strengths are playing the Liverpool way, which is pass and move, that’s what you should do. In the 1980s, Liverpool’s players passed the ball and made an angle better than any other group of players around. But it was still about understanding the sum of all the parts and making it work. Ours was a direct style of football but we did it better than anyone else, had more success with it and therefore got more criticism.’

  The long-ball tag did not bother Wimbledon’s players.

  ‘We loved it, we really loved it,’ Scales smiles mischievously. ‘It was the old process of creating a siege mentality. Everybody hated us but we treated that as a positive. Man United did the same. Nobody liked them apart from their own supporters. That only magnified their arrogance. It made them more cohesive as a group. We felt we could beat anybody. We never played with fear or were intimidated. We relished going to the big clubs. As the upstarts, we were desperate to go to places like Anfield and Highbury and start a riot on the pitch. It was all about wrecking the establishment and upsetting the status quo.’

  Scales did not play on the occasion in the early nineties when Vinnie Jones scrawled ‘Bothered’ underneath the ‘This is Anfield’ sign that informs teams they are about to walk out on to the pitch at Liverpool, a moment that made Liverpool’s manager Graeme Souness realize his players were not up fo
r the fight because of their meek reaction towards the desecration. ‘They just laughed it off,’ Souness said.

  Scales believes Wimbledon ended Liverpool’s aura of invincibility by beating them in the FA Cup final of 1988. Scales was on the bench that day.

  ‘We appreciated we were up against one of the great, great sides. But we took everything to another level. In the dressing room, the music was a lot louder. In the tunnel, Vinnie was screaming crazy stuff like, “We’re going to rip all of your heads off,” although I’m not really sure it bothered the Liverpool players. It was as if we were going to war. It concerned me that everyone was so wound up we’d forget our responsibilities. But when we got on the pitch, the intensity continued. We only worried about ourselves and tried to stamp our personality on the game rather than let Liverpool impose theirs. And that’s exactly what happened.’

  In terms of league positions, Wimbledon were catching up with Liverpool and in the 1992–93 season finished just five points behind Souness’s team in the table. A year later, Liverpool were toppled by the same margin, Wimbledon securing an all-time high of sixth with Liverpool at an all-time Premier League low of eighth.

  It was in this period that Scales decided to move on. Wimbledon had played at their original ground from 1912 until May 1991 before moving to Selhurst Park in a share agreement with Crystal Palace after the Taylor Report reduced Plough Lane’s capacity to just nine hundred. Despite the team’s rise up the table, Scales believes Wimbledon’s soul was lost in that moment and things would never be the same again. By 2004, the club had moved away not just from the borough of Merton but outside London altogether, relocating to Milton Keynes and being renamed MK Dons.

  ‘Souness made a bid for me in 1993 but Sam Hammam didn’t tell me about it,’ Scales says. ‘I really wanted to go. It was a massive compliment because no player before had moved from Wimbledon to Liverpool. Even though Wimbledon were direct, I was a ball-playing centre-half. I was an athlete and incredibly fast. I was also aggressive, because I had to be at Wimbledon. I knew how to organize a back four and Don Howe had helped me with being assertive and more communicative with the other defenders. I felt mentally strong enough to play for Liverpool. So I put a transfer request in and missed Wimbledon’s pre-season trip to Hong Kong with a mysterious flu bug, which in reality had everything to do with my frustrations. Sam and I had a verbal agreement that if a big club came in for me he wouldn’t stand in my way, but he sent me a message that read: “No way, Jose.” He put a silly smiley face as his signature. That really irritated me. Liverpool ran out of patience, so I had to stay at Wimbledon.’

  Scales believed that his only way out was to play well the following season and encourage a bid that Hammam could not afford to reject.

  ‘I got my head down and won player of the year. When Graeme left in the winter and was replaced by Roy Evans, I figured I’d probably end up elsewhere. But I found out that Roy was behind the original offer and he came back in with a better package. This time, Wimbledon accepted. Sam owed me a loyalty bonus of around £15,000, which was a significant amount of money but not huge in the grand scheme of things. I was really angry with the way Sam had handled the situation a year earlier and we hadn’t spoken much since, so I ended up taking the matter to a tribunal at Lancaster Gate. I sat opposite Sam and Joe Kinnear, and Sam told me I was ripping his family apart. “You’re my son, look what I’ve done for you.” I love Sam to this day and we’re fine now but it was bullshit and more bullshit. Sam’s argument was based on the fact I’d put a transfer request in. But he’d turned that down. I produced the note that he’d sent me and when the panel saw this they burst out laughing and sided with me. Jim Smith, Derby’s manager, was chairing the case. Begrudgingly, Sam paid me the money in hundreds of bags of coins. It was typical of him.’

  Scales joined Liverpool twenty-four hours after Roy Evans broke the British transfer record for a defender by signing Phil Babb. Together, the pair cost £7.1 million. Financially, Liverpool were moving into a new stratosphere of spending. Scales says his wages increased tenfold.

  ‘The price didn’t bother me. The pressure came from within: always wanting to succeed; never taking anything for granted; mixing with a group of players who were incredibly talented and had huge reputations. John Barnes, Ian Rush and Jan Mølby were there – great players from the previous generation. Could I meet their expectations? Then there was Robbie Fowler, Steve McManaman, Jamie Redknapp – youngsters with immense ability. Would I fit in?’

  As he admits, Scales ‘went with the flow’. Having struggled initially upon moving from Leeds to Bristol Rovers to Wimbledon, he did not want to jeopardize his future by taking a lot of time to settle. At Liverpool, he appreciated any new player was not afforded such a luxury.

  ‘I jumped in the deep end,’ Scales says. ‘The lads were out and enjoying themselves. We’d go out in Manchester and bump into the United boys all the time. Roy Keane was there, celebrating United’s victories. He was always play-fighting with Jason McAteer and Babbsy, because the three of them knew each other from Ireland. There was this weird, macho, passive-aggressive thing going on.’

  Scales’s closest friends soon became McAteer, Babb and Jamie Redknapp.

  ‘We had great fun, although it wasn’t particularly vulgar or reckless behaviour. We ate together a lot at Est Est Est on the Albert Dock, our favourite restaurant. We played golf, went shopping, went out in London, went out in Liverpool to Cream, Nation or even the Paradox [in Aintree]. We tried to keep things as normal as possible. We were like any other group of lads. We did some daft things. But there were lots of half-truths. Maybe we did spend money on a car. But it was never as much as people said. Maybe we did go out in Soho. But we never stayed out quite as late as it was made out.’

  Scales moved next door to Babb in Woolton Village. Howard Kendall was in between jobs having left his post as Everton manager in 1993 and he owned property on the same exclusive estate.

  ‘Babbsy and I took turns driving to Melwood and most mornings Howard would collar us before leaving. “Make sure the two of you pop round this afternoon,” he’d tell us. Howard always had champagne in his fridge and he’d let us raid it. We had some hilarious conversations. We’d sit there for hours, trading stories. As he’s a big Blue, you’d think Howard would be giving us plenty of stick, but he just loved being around footballers. Howard was a great character, I loved him.’

  Living in Liverpool posed new challenges for Scales.

  ‘You can lose yourself in London. There are so many football clubs and so many wealthy and high-profile people – not just footballers; you can slide into the background. That’s not the case in Liverpool. Because it’s a very close community, everyone knows everyone else’s business. The scrutiny and the attention is way more intense. Other boys were in Wirral, Southport or Cheshire. In Stan Collymore’s case, he was all the way away in Cannock. That wasn’t beneficial to himself or the team.’

  Scales had an impression of Liverpool FC that he thought was unshakable. The reality was different. His assessment of the club at his point of arrival to the point of exit has the effect of a truncheon cracking an antique into a thousand pieces.

  ‘Wimbledon were a rag-tag group of lads playing football at a high level. To me, Liverpool were a sophisticated club with an incredible organization that was underachieving but could get back to where it wanted to be. What I quickly discovered was that Liverpool was not sophisticated and the club was stuck in the 1960s. Ronnie Moran’s training had not changed since that time. The wooden target boards were still used and they were rotting away. There was no tactical or technical analysis. Diet did not come into any discussion. For away games, we’d turn up in jeans, just as all the players had done in the seventies. There were so many bad habits. Mentally, the team was underprepared at a time when football clubs were figuring out like the rest of the world that good mental health improves physical performance.’

  In terms of talent, Liverpool were way in advance of
Wimbledon. Robbie Fowler was the most naturally gifted footballer Scales played with or against. By the time Fowler was twenty-one, he’d already broken the thirty-goal barrier in three different seasons.

  ‘Robbie was lazy in training. But that’s the way strikers are. Ian Rush was the same – Liverpool’s all-time leading goalscorer. Ronnie Moran would scream at Robbie and Steve McManaman, telling them to keep up. They were as thick as thieves, those two. I saw them in Istanbul and nothing had changed. Macca didn’t need to run, because he was the fittest lad there and didn’t have an ounce of body fat. Maybe Robbie did [need to run] but he was bursting on to the scene and phenomenally gifted. The work he got through on the pitch, the closing down and chasing lost causes, making things happen – it compensated for the training, of course. His finishing ability was the greatest I’ve seen. Inside the box, outside, headers, the bravery. He had everything, Robbie.’

  Then there was David James, a goalkeeper with international-standard attributes but also a few flaws. By 1997, he was commonly known as Calamity James after the comic character from The Beano.

  ‘It didn’t help Jamo that he was Bruce Grobbelaar’s successor and Bruce had made a fair few mistakes in his time only for the quality of the team to take the edge off the negative press he got.

  ‘Jamo was incredibly imposing and a brilliant shot-stopper. He was phenomenal in his build and stature but had not yet developed the communication skills needed to organize a back five where everyone else was older than him. Coming for crosses, his handling wasn’t as good as it became later.

  ‘Jamo was a tortured creative genius. He was hyperactive and maybe that affected his decision making. When I first signed for Liverpool, nobody would room with him because he had a reputation for sleepwalking. They persuaded Stig Bjørnebye and on one away trip Stig woke up in the middle of the night to find Jamo trashing the room. Stig proceeded to run down the corridor screaming, “Jamo’s trying to kill me!”’