The Smell of Football

by Mick 'Baz' Rathbone

  On the Friday before the trip down to Gillingham, I should be spending the afternoon doing a clinical placement at Burnley Hospital. They have gone to the considerable trouble of arranging special patients for me to see, but when the club find the resources for us to go down to Kent on Friday morning, I have to let them down. I don’t turn up. How can I? I feel terrible, letting all those people down, but I have to travel to Gillingham with the team. It is as simple as that. The hospital are understandably furious, and who can blame them? I will be marked down severely for not turning up. I am now in grave danger of completing a horrific personal double – taking a team out of the Football League and flunking my course.

  Saturday is a lovely warm spring day in Gillingham. Roughly 1,000 Halifax fans have travelled to the south-east. We completely outplay them, going close to scoring on many occasions. However, we lose 2-0 to two speculative long shots. The thousands of home fans packed into the compact and atmospheric Priestfield Stadium go crazy. They are mathematically safe now.

  Glenn Roeder, the Gillingham manager, comes into our dressing room after the game, congratulates us on our gutsy performance and sympathises with our plight. He is emotional – and mightily relieved. He knows the luck has been with him. They are safe; we are anything but.

  Many times over the ensuing years, I would see Glenn with England, Watford, West Ham and Newcastle, always behaving like the perfect gentleman, and I would think: what if? What if our shots had gone in on that warm spring day and theirs hadn’t? We would have been safe and they might have gone out of the Football League. Would I have gone on to greater managerial things than him? But that’s all pie in the sky. The fact remains: we lost again.

  Worst news follows. Torquay have won 1-0 at Carlisle. We can’t catch them now either.

  We will go into the final game of the season against Hereford United next Saturday at The Shay, needing to win to survive while also praying Northampton do not win at Shrewsbury.

  I am about to enter the most turbulent and emotional week of my life.

  Chapter Nine

  THE FINAL RECKONING

  Match 24

  Halifax Town v Hereford United

  8/5/93

  Andy Warhol said, “Everyone will be famous for 15 minutes.”

  Well, this is my 15 minutes. For once the cameras of the football world are pointing in the same direction – Halifax. Well done me. What an achievement.

  This small working-class town, nestling in the foothills of the Pennines, is about to be the focus of seven days of intensive media interest. Everybody likes a good tragedy and this is a classic in the making – famous, proud old club on the verge of Football League extinction after an almost constant struggle since its formation in 1911.

  The ghouls are out in force. The club has received hundreds – maybe even thousands – of requests for the match programme from collectors from, literally, all over the world. The ground is only able to accommodate 7,500 spectators due to safety laws, and these tickets have gone like hotcakes. Our average home gate of less than 2,000 will be nearly quadrupled for this game.

  To my horror, early in the week I notice a scaffold is being erected by the main stand. I am mightily relieved to discover it is for the TV cameras, and not my lynching.

  Just how do you prepare a set of young players for a game of such importance? How can you try to diffuse the pressure of such an occasion? How can you possibly get the lads to relax and treat it as just another game in such difficult circumstances? All we can do is train and prepare and go home and come back the next day, and train and prepare again and keep looking anxiously at the clock as the hours tick by to our collective date with destiny.

  The mindset of the players during this final week of training? Shitting themselves. And the manager? Shitting himself too. What do you expect? I think I am hiding it well. I believe I am exuding a calm, confident persona, despite my shaking hands.

  Finally, after a relentless round of interviews and photo opportunities, the day of destiny is almost here. The day that will decide the future of little Halifax Town. Needless to say, I don’t sleep at all on the Friday night – not a single minute. The last time I managed that was on a foam party night back in the early ’80s in Magaluf. I lie awake, hardly daring to contemplate the two alternatives – carried off shoulder-high, the hero and saviour, or booed off as the man who had taken Halifax Town out of the Football League. What a stark contrast.

  On the way to The Shay on the day of the match, I very nearly stop at a church to pray. Pathetic really, as I’m not even remotely religious and, even if I was, I doubt the Lord would have any great interest in Halifax Town’s plight with so much other shit going on in the world. (To this day, though, I do wonder if the outcome would have been different had I stopped).

  When I arrive at The Shay, it is so unlike a usual home game – there are lots of people there, for a start. There are also a host of TV vans from Yorkshire TV, BBC and Sky.

  There is a carnival atmosphere. It is quite nice really and I start to relax and get carried along by the whole thing. Of course, many of the 7,500 people are only here to witness the end of an era, to be able to say they were there when Halifax Town played their last home game in the Football League. All we need now is a couple of old hags knitting and the picture of impending doom will be complete.

  The lads arrive one by one, looking pretty ashen-faced. For any professional, to play in a team that gets relegated from the Football League is the ultimate embarrassment, the ultimate shame. But somebody has to finish bottom, don’t they?

  I have thought long and hard about my team talk, but decide to keep it simple. I tell the players I am proud of them, thank them for their efforts, and urge them to go out there and do their best. I reassure them that the situation they find themselves in is not their fault, but the inevitable consequence of being at a club with the lowest financial resources, year in year out.

  Tick tock, tick tock, the referee looks at his linesmen and the biggest game in the history of Halifax Town kicks off.

  It is like a cup final. Who would have thought it – little old Halifax Town in a cup final?

  The players are up for it and so am I. I kick every ball for them. The atmosphere is electric. Dave Ridings nearly scores early on.

  At half time, it is 0-0. A loud cheer goes up at the interval as the score from the Shrewsbury Town v Northampton Town game trickles through. It’s 2-0 to Shrewsbury! Fantastic. All we have to do is score one solitary goal and we will be safe.

  At the start of the second half, the noise is deafening. We go close again. Bad news elsewhere, though, Northampton have pulled one back.

  The reports from Gay Meadow get progressively worse. Northampton equalise and then, incredibly, go 3-2 up. They only need a draw to be safe, regardless of our result. The Shay falls into stunned silence. It doesn’t even seem to matter when Hereford score a late goal.

  We have lost. We are out.

  When the referee blows the final whistle that signals the demise of this marvellous, homely, proud, little club, there is an almost tangible gasp of despair.

  The scenes after the game will stay with me for the rest of my life. The fans invaded the pitch – one, two, three generations of Shaymen, most in tears, singing, “There will always be a Halifax Town.” It was the most emotional thing I ever witnessed in professional football.

  And recriminations?

  Surprisingly none. They chanted for me to appear and say a few words. I muttered some rubbish about coming back stronger, that sometimes you need to take a step backward before you take a giant leap forward etc. It was hardly William Shakespeare. It turned out to be empty rhetoric.

  Back in the dressing room the players, to a man, were in tears. I felt a strange mixture of emotions – despair at what had befallen the club, of course, and terrible pity for the supporters. I felt a great deal of pride in the efforts and commitment of the lads, as well as sheer relief that the whole ordeal was over.

  But
my overriding feeling was that I had been a winner.

  A winner? A winner who had just got relegated from the Football League? Yes, I felt a winner. I saw it through, through all the pressure. I stood tall, the lads never let me down and, more importantly, I never let them down.

  Call me a loser if you want, but I knew I was a winner, especially when judged in the context of those awful experiences at Birmingham City all those years ago. I had laid that ghost well and truly to rest.

  All the excitement, passion, sorrow and emotion were suddenly gone, to be replaced by . . . lots of litter, actually. I stood alone by the dugout. Everybody had gone home. It was eerily quiet. It was over. So was my job probably. The board usually weren’t too backward in coming forward with the P45 for their managers. Surely the duster would be brandished by the chairman? I was bracing myself for the phone call.

  What did the future hold? I was light years behind with my studying, but I didn’t really give a damn. I knew those last few turbulent months, and the manner in which I had coped with everything thrown at me, had given me the strength of character, mental toughness and self-confidence to get to the top in anything I did. My self-esteem was sky-high and the whole fraught experience had proved to be a catharsis that finally vanquished any lingering demons from my past.

  Amazingly, that dreaded phone call never came. I kept my job – or should that be jobs. Maybe it was a matter of simple economics and they couldn’t afford to get rid of me and replace me with a new manager, physio, reserve team coach etc. In fact, it turned out the club’s major concern regarding my position was that with all the studying I was doing I would find it increasingly difficult to commit the time to my roles at Halifax Town.

  I had a meeting with the club and they were very fair. They were concerned about how much work I had to do and suggested they should appoint a joint manager to share the job and the workload. Somebody older, a bit more experienced, who knew the Vauxhall Conference perhaps. They felt if they retained me solely as the manager for the next season and we didn’t start well, then they would have to sack me quite quickly.

  I told the board I would prefer to take my chances on my own because I actually felt I could be a decent manager, especially the following season when we would have one of the best teams in the league. I felt confident my methods would bring success, given a level playing field and a fresh start.

  In terms of results, I held my hands up and accepted I’d failed as a manager – although for reasons previously explained, I also felt a winner. In pure footballing terms, taking a team out of the Football League doesn’t look too good on any manager’s CV. What was my managerial record? Won four, drew five, lost plenty. It was hardly going to put me on the shortlist for the next England job, was it?

  The board said they had taken my views on board and would get back to me.

  During that spell as manager, I realised just how fine a line there is between success and failure – a crucial refereeing decision, a key player getting injured, that quintessential rub of the green and run of the ball.

  How much can the manager influence things anyway? OK, he picks the team, but if he only has a paper-thin squad and no cash to buy players, what can he really do? He takes training every day, fair enough, but you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear.

  John Bird, one of many recent Halifax Town managers, was equally philosophical about the true value of the manager. He reckoned if a team had no manager then, by the law of averages, they should still win one, lose one and draw one throughout the season. If his theory was correct, then there are plenty of so-called top managers who should be looking over their shoulders. Indeed, if you follow his rationale even further, then Halifax would have been better off without either John or me. It’s a sobering thought.

  Of course, there are some truly wonderful managers in the game, some of whom such as Kendall and Ramsey I was lucky enough to work under, but undoubtedly some teams succeed in spite of their manager. Management presents the ultimate footballing paradox. If it is supposed to be the crucial all-important appointment, reserved only for the best of the best, then how is it that people whose only qualification is that they were great players or just happened to be at the club working in a lesser role (me) can become managers of top clubs?

  In what other industry would this happen? If you were an exceptionally good mechanic, joiner or plumber, and the head of the large corporation you worked for got the sack, would you have even the remotest chance of getting that top job? Of course not. But in football, this is common practice. In fact, many top ex-players who have been fast-tracked into management have proven conclusively that good players seldom make good managers. But why should they? Playing is playing; managing is completely different and encompasses such diverse factors as man-management, tactical acumen, discipline, dealing with the press, organising training, and buying and selling players. Yet still, this complex and difficult job is offered to people with virtually no experience in any facet of the job.

  Ironically, some of these guys do sometimes succeed. What does that tell us about management? That these people unearthed from within the actual club happen to be, by an incredible coincidence, the right ones for the job, or is it more likely that sometimes the best men for the job just never get a chance?

  While the Halifax board was deciding if I’d get another chance as a manager on my own, I had the opportunity to take a break from football and get a breather from the tumultuous events of the past few months.

  However, that summer following the relegation was tough. I had just been to hell and back emotionally, but even so there was no respite – two days after the season finished, I was off on a six-week work placement at Bolton General Hospital. I started at 9am and finished at 5pm before getting in my club car and driving over the Pennines to Halifax to spend a couple of hours doing club business, such as sorting out players’ contracts and organising pre-season. I would finally arrive home in Blackburn at around 9pm – knackered and smelling of old people. So there were no holidays for the Rathbones for nearly four years. In fact, there were virtually no days off for the best part of four years.

  But you know what? I wasn’t bothered. I could, and would, do it because I knew it would all be worthwhile in the end. Nothing was going to stop me.

  Over the previous two decades, I had experienced so many good and bad times that I had developed a strong and resolute character able to survive this football rollercoaster – I wouldn’t take the highs and the lows for anything other than the transient and shifting sands they were.

  Nothing phased me now. My personality was fully rounded, resilient, confident and, I hope, still humble and gentlemanly. I got my head down and kept going, day in day out.

  I was called in to another meeting with Jim Brown in early June. He reiterated the board’s preference for me to be employed as a joint manager, and introduced me to Peter Wragg, the ex-Macclesfield manager and a man whose non-league CV was second to none.

  I still told the board no, I wanted sole control. With my methods I so strongly believed in (and still do), I thought we would be successful.

  They reluctantly agreed, but reminded me that if we had a poor start to the season, they would have to act quickly.

  Several days later I had just come out of intensive care (all part of the physio course, don’t worry) when I picked up a copy of the local paper and was horrified to read the headline on the back page: Wragg and Bone. It was a fait accompli. They had appointed Peter over my head and without my agreement (to be fair, though, it was an absolutely fantastic headline).

  Although I smiled at the headline, I felt hurt, betrayed and let down. I knew I could have done it on my own. I deserved to be given the chance to do it on my own, I needed to be given the chance to do it on my own for reasons you should know by now.

  Peter was a good guy and we became great friends, but the worst ship that ever sailed is a football managers’ partnership. As I was away throughout June doing my work at the hospital,
Peter started to assume more and more control. I couldn’t blame him for that – I wasn’t there. However, he made a lot of changes I wasn’t happy with. He changed the pre-season schedule that I had organised, signed some of his own players and, most worryingly, found the hidden stick of chalk and put his name on the car park wall.

  We ended up having a no-holds-barred meeting with Jim Brown, who made it clear he saw Peter as the senior figure in the partnership and, essentially, that was it. I could like it or lump it.

  So I lumped it. I still had two years to go until I qualified and I needed that wage. Beggars can’t be choosers, can they? And to be fair to the club, they were as good as gold and allowed me to stay on, on my manager’s wage of £20,000 per annum plus club car.

  Nevertheless, going back to Halifax at the beginning of July for the first day of pre-season training, having effectively been demoted to the role of assistant manager, was a bitter pill to swallow, believe me. Talk about a loss of face; I just wanted to walk out. But I didn’t, I couldn’t.

  The players were very upset, as were the office staff (both of them). The players all felt that with me still as boss we could have achieved promotion at the first attempt. However, it was done. We had to support ‘Wraggy’ now. The club had to come first. We all had to pull in the same direction. We owed that to the fans.

  It was another knockback for me, but so what? I was invincible now. I would take it right on the chin and come back for more. It’s not the getting knocked down that matters; it’s the getting up – and I bounced right back up off the canvas.

  Chapter Ten

  AFTERMATH

  I stayed at Halifax Town for two more years. Peter Wragg came and went after nine months, while the club struggled to cope with the Vauxhall Conference. They remained fully professional, but had to let the best players go. As a result, the team became weaker but, as the only professional club in the league, they were everybody’s favourite scalp. The opposition always raised their game when they played the professionals.