Football Reloaded

It all happened so quickly.

Joe Royle was walking his dog in the woods near his Merseyside home when his mobile phone rang.

It was Sunday, 15 March and within hours the 59-year-old was back in management after an absence of almost three years.

Royle’s last position had been with Ipswich, but he left Portman Road at the end of the 2005-06 season after almost 200 games in charge.

He felt he had done a pretty good job at the East Anglian club, taking them to the play-offs twice in his final three seasons, only narrowly missing out on automatic promotion in 2004 despite financial problems that forced Royle to slim down his squad.

After regarding his time there as a qualified success Royle expected to return to management, but as time rolled on he began to think otherwise.

“I had applied for three or four jobs recently and did not get any replies,” Royle, who has also managed Manchester City, told me.

“I thought that perhaps football had forgotten me.”

But this isn’t just an ordinary story of a last chance for an ageing manager. What gives his latest appointment added poignancy and romance is its location. Big Joe was back at Oldham Athletic, the club he managed with notable success between 1982 and 1994. It was one of football’s fairy stories.

Those of a certain age will clearly remember the exploits of 1990. Royle’s Second Division Latics pushed Manchester United all the way in their FA Cup semi-final, eventually losing the replay, which went to extra-time, 2-1 after the first game had finished 3-3. The club did reach the final of the Littlewoods Cup but were beaten 1-0 by Brian Clough’s Nottingham Forest. Scalps such as Arsenal and Everton were taken along the way.

Royle’s team, with the likes of Andy Ritchie, Earl Barrett, Roger Palmer and Nicky Henry in the side, caught the imagination not only of the residents of Oldham but the wider public. His team played with a directness and intent that was exciting and fearless. Oldham’s tale was also one of the classic British stories of the mouse that roared even if they fell short of a fairytale ending.

However, his team did go on to win promotion from the old Second Division in 1991 and remained in the top flight to become an inaugural member of the Premier League in 1992.

“They were magical times,” recalls Royle, whose first four seasons at the club had resulted in mediocre league finishes.

“We had the pinch-me season in 1990, the fans couldn’t believe it. At one stage we had three queues outside Boundary Park – one for FA Cup tickets, another for Littlewoods Cup tickets and a third for league tickets.

“Gates were up to around 17-18,000. It was a fantastic time for a club that at times struggled to get 3,500 fans.”

Eventually the financial realities of life in the Premier League caught up with the Latics, always a selling club, and Oldham were relegated at the end of the 1993-94 season.

The Oldham years, however, always remained special to Royle, who regards the Latics promotion to the top flight as he his greatest achievement in management alongside keeping Everton in the Premier League after he left Boundary Park to take over at Goodison Park in November 1994 with the Merseyside club in a perilous position.

“I have always kept in touch with the club,” said Royle, whose two sons still live in Oldham.

Most of his Saturdays over recent seasons had been taken up with media work but an occasional weekend off would see him down at Boundary Park. He had been three times this season prior to his appointment.

He accepted the offer of a return in seconds, but what about the old adage that you should never go back? Doesn’t he risk sullying some rich and cherished memories?

Howard Kendall (Everton) and Kevin Keegan (Newcastle) all tried it without success to rekindle past glories but Royle rejects such negative talk out of hand.

He prefers to point instead to Graham Taylor, who took Watford into the Premier League during his second spell at Vicarage Road.

“I am well aware of the unwritten rule but there are exceptions and there is no scientific reason why it will not work second time around,” said Royle.

Unfortunately for Oldham, results so far suggest that anyone hoping of a sensational return will be disappointed.

After his first game in charge, a 2-0 home defeat to Tranmere, Royle visited an Indian restaurant he used to frequent during his first spell in charge, taking his sons along with him. Ian Stott, the chairman at Boundary Park during the Royle years, and several former directors turned up to see the manager’s first game back. “It was just like old times – except that we lost,” Royle told me.

After the initial phone call, Royle met officials from Oldham in a hotel in Worlsey and talked about the squad and Oldham’s prospects for the remainder of the season.

Royle did not feel the need to formally sign a contract and took over with nine games left to salvage a season that had promised so much but lost its way. His position will be reviewed at the end of the campaign.

John Sheridan had been sacked amid some poor results and a night at the dogs that allegedly spiralled out of control, with one player holding the manager in a headlock.

Royle needed a good start to boost the Latics play-off prospects but after the defeat to Tranmere it took a 94th-minute equaliser at lowly Cheltenham to rescue a point in his second game.

The manager was less than thrilled with his team’s first-half showing at Whaddon Road and delivered the first serious rollocking after his return to the game.

“Some were starting to put on their shorts and get on the suntan cream but it’s a bit early for that,” said the Latics boss.

And last weekend Oldham lost 2-1 to Leyton Orient and are now eight points off the play-offs with just six games left to play.

Royle is savvy enough to know that his team are up against it and just wishes that he had taken over with five more points. Then again, if Oldham had five more points they probably wouldn’t have sacked Sheridan.

Oldham’s current standing means that Royle will probably be denied a first outing at the new Wembley when the League One play-off final takes place on 24 May.

But given the history of Royle and Oldham Athletic, don’t write off the prospect just yet.

Good list piece this, of the top ten players who don’t get enough credit

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Wenger set for a busy summer!

Ok so there you have it a rapid no frills look at the five names heavily linked with a move to the Emirates and what do you make of them?

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A few days before England coasted to victory against Slovakia in World Cup qualification, Cardiff City cruised to a 3-0 mid-season friendly against Merthyr Tydfil. But while the result may have been meaningless, the match itself wasn’t as the British Gas Business club needed every last penny from the game to ensure their survival.

The £4,500 raised from the friendly between the two Welsh clubs will come in useful but will barely make a dent in the £350,000 total debt which threatens the Martyrs’ existence and could see a football club fold in Merthyr for the second time in the last century.

The losses creep up

Merthyr’s financial problems aren’t quite the same as, say, Leigh Genesis, who wildly overspent chasing the footballing dream, or Northwich, who’ve suffered mismanagement after mismanagement. Rather the level of debt, which has always been there, has been allowed to rise unchecked and take the club to the brink. Accounts for the club haven’t been submitted until 2006.

At the start of the season the Martyrs faced a winding up order from HM Revenue and Customs over a unpaid £20,000 tax bill. This was staved off and, after a poor start to the season, Merthyr started challenging at the top of the British Gas Business Premier and, at one stage, looked like one of the favourites for promotion.

But since the scale of the financial crisis at Penydarren Park started to unravel, Merthyr have slumped off the pitch. Since their 2-1 win at home to Yate Town on January 24th, the Martyrs have won just once and have slipped from the playoffs to 11th in the table. A good run at the end of the season could see the Welsh valleys club back in the promotion frame, but this seems unlikely.

At the start of March the electricity and water were cut off from Penydarren Park as, ironically, one of Merthyr’s major creditors is league sponsors British Gas who are owed £25,000. At one point there was a very real fear that the home match against Clevedon on March 9th couldn’t go ahead because there was no power around the ground.

The fixture was saved, along with the inevitable fine and points deduction a cancellation would have brought, after the club installed a temporary generator. Should Merthyr survive to the end of the season, it’s likely that generator will continue to power their subsequent home games.

Boardroom battles

Merthyr’s current woes haven’t been helped by an ongoing boardroom battle between the club’s chairman, Wyn Holloway, and the Supporters’ Trust, Martyrs to the Cause. The Trust had been paying assorted bills for several years but decided at the start of the season that, with no real return and the financial situation not improving, that they wanted more of a return for their cash.

At the start of the season, the Trust offered to increase their shares from 25% to 51%, taking overall control of the club. Holloway rejected this and a standoff emerged. The Trust wanted Methyr to take their cue from the likes of AFC Telford, a fan-owned club formed after the original Telford United went bust. The board, however, had different ideas and what has followed has been a war of words with neither side prepared to deal with the other.

Holloway says he has put around £800,000 into the club over the past ten years but, with the debts mounting, is unable to significantly inject any more funds into the ailing club. The Trust, meanwhile, is reluctant to give the club cash while the current regime is in charge, and all the time the situation at Merthyr gets even more desperate.

At the start of the month the Trust once again repeated their August offer to take control of the club and tackle the sizeable debt, although no progress appears to have been made between the two parties.

In the meantime, the Martyrs have resorted to every measure they can to raise cash for the club. While the traditional bucket-rattling forms part of this, the friendly against Cardiff City was expected to form a significant part of the fundraising effort.

Dave Jones, the Cardiff manager, generously agreed to take a squad to Merthyr during the international break to play a fund-raising game. While the Bluebirds side didn’t include the Welsh stars on international duty, they still brought a strong line-up including club captain Darren Purse, Peter Whittingham, and Stephen McPhail along with a couple of trialists.

Yet the £10,000 target from the match always seemed optimistic, and while over 2,000 turned out to watch the game, the total fell seriously short of what the club had hoped for.

There is talk of a second friendly against Swansea but, for the time being, Methyr, it seems, will continue to live a hand-to-mouth existence, assuming they manage to survive the season. Liquidation could bring a new set of problems, given that the Martyrs are a Welsh club playing in the English pyramid.

And if Merthyr Tydfil FC do fold, it won’t be the first time the town has lost its football club. Merthyr Town FC spent ten years in the Football League between 1920 and 1930 before being voted out in favour of Thames. Four seasons later the club folded. It would be a shame if the current club goes the same way.

“Merthyr Tydfil: Footballing Martyrs living on the brink of extinction” was originally published at Soccerlens.com – Football News.

I was reading a respected journalist recently, who was praising the virtues of Fulham manager Roy Hodgson. Indeed, the author in question even went as far as to suggest that if and when Senor Capello decides that the England job is not for him, either when Old Trafford comes calling, he is sacked after losing in a penalty shootout in the quarter-finals of the World Cup, or the most implausible of the three, England lift the Jules Rimet Trophy, that the 61 year-old well travelled and respected boss would be a good option to replace him.

However the thing that hit me the most from the article, was the fickle fate of football management as it seems you could be dubbed the best thing since the new designer England shirt one day, and only have the delights of reporting on Dagenham v Accrington for Sky Sports News the next. For Hodgson, the defeat of Manchester United after a number of their players acted like a bunch of three-year-olds after being told that there was no ice cream left, saw his reputation rise to new heights. However, defeat against Liverpool this weekend would no doubt see it fall again as the press bring up his Blackburn experience and warn Fulham fans not to get too excited about renewing their passports for a bash at the inaugural Europa League next season.

In giving the matter further thought, the manager who sprung immediately to mind is Alan Pardew. It was not so long ago, of course, that Pardew was dubbed the new saviour of English Football – i.e. an English manager who could one day be the national coach. Considering the former Reading, West Ham and Charlton boss is now out of work, I’m sure most fans would forgive him if it was discovered he was keeping a voodoo doll of Steven Gerrard, Javier Maschareno, and Carlos Tevez as he cries himself to sleep over what may have been.

Pardew was, of course, just 60 seconds away from winning the FA Cup in 2006 with West Ham until Gerrard’s typically dramatic intervention. He then followed that up with the ill fated signing of the Argentinean duo who had excelled in the World Cup just weeks before in what was seen as a managerial masterstroke. Rightly, the press were quick to praise Pardew and links to bigger clubs were mooted. But, how the mighty fall and after leaving the happy Hammers just months later. The failure to keep Charlton up and the perception of ruining a club tagged as the model way to run a club financially has seen his star far at a dramatic rate. Add to the charge sheet an ill advised comment on Match of the Day 2, which has saw him removed from the show shortly after.

I’m positive Pardew won’t be the last of so-called “manager genius” to fall on his face in spectacular fashion; just look at Paul Jewell, another linked with the England job that has seen a promising career fall away. More recently, Tony Adams status in the game and managerial hype has taken a battering, and he too may never reach the levels of his playing career unless he rebuilds his reputation fast.

What should give Pardew, Jewell and Adams comfort is the fact that managerial reputations can be rebuilt. Continuing the England theme, Steve McLaren is receiving rave reviews since taking over at Dutch side FC Twente and a second successive appearance in the Champions League is highly possible.

Closer to home, a minor revolution is taking place down on the South East Coast at little known Dover Athletic, under former Gillingham boss Andy Hessenthaler. It was Hessenthaler that did a stellar job taking Kent’s only football league side to their highest ever place, a 11th place finish in the Championship, on a shoestring budget. Inevitably, links to numerous higher profile posts followed, including West Ham before Pardew got the nod back in 2003.

A move away never materialised and Hessenthaler saw his reputation fall after a poor run of results that led to his sacking. A route back into the league was blocked despite numerous interviews. His only option was to relearn his trade in non-league with Dover Athletic, which he has done with great effect and is once again being touted as one of the best young managers in the game.

Those that follow the non-league game will know that Nigel Clough has taken the opposite path, with a decade in the non-league game before taking the route into the league – making his move when his star was at his highest and Derby County came calling. Derby, who surely can’t go any lower reputation-wise, have Clough pegged as the man to halt the pitiful decline; the next great hope. His sensible and measured approach should see him have a long and successful career. But if he’s smart, I’m sure he’ll take a look at managers from the past and remember that things can change in the blink of an eye.

“The Joys of Football Management” was originally published at Soccerlens.com – Football News.