Mr Gig: One Man’s Search for the Soul of Live Music
Three Weeks, Eight Seconds: The Epic Tour de France of 1989
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Epub ISBN: 9781473546189
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Yellow Jersey Press, an imprint of Vintage
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Yellow Jersey Press is part of the Penguin Random House group of companies whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
Copyright © Nige Tassell 2016
Cover photograph © David Bauckham
Nige Tassell has asserted his right to be identified as the author of this Work in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988
First published by Yellow Jersey Press in trade paperback in 2016
First published by Yellow Jersey Press in paperback in 2017
penguin.co.uk/vintage
A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library
ISBN 9780224100595
To Jane,
the first name on the team sheet
WITH EXPERT FINGERS, Steve Laker delicately pulls a wad of football cards from their cellophane sheath. The cards date from the early 1970s and, in their original plastic wrapping, would have been accompanied by a hard, yellow strip of bubble gum. The gum, tasteless and inedible, would have been discarded as soon as the packet was opened. The cards were the real treasure, the faces of footballing icons gazing straight back into the eyes of the beholder.
Laker flicks through the pile with the dexterity of a Monte Carlo croupier, a new player revealed on each turn of a card. These are faces familiar to any student of FA Cup football who’s of a certain age. Here’s Charlie Cooke, the Chelsea winger whose chip supplied Peter Osgood’s equaliser in the 1970 final replay. There’s Allan ‘Sniffer’ Clarke, scorer of the only goal in 1972 when Leeds prevented Arsenal leaving Wembley with the trophy for a second successive season. And here’s a young Peter Mellor, a shot taken of the Fulham goalkeeper two or three years before he gifted West Ham both goals in the ’75 final.
Laker is hoping that some of this FA Cup magic will rub off on his fingertips. On this particular Friday afternoon, he’s at work in his day job as a cigarette-card dealer; downstairs from his office is a warehouse packed with five million such cards. But tomorrow he’ll be donning his tracksuit as the manager of Bishop Sutton, a team from a one-shop Somerset village embarking on their latest FA Cup adventure. It may be mid-August, but for those clubs at levels nine and ten of English football’s pyramid, tomorrow is a red-letter day – the Extra Preliminary Round of the world’s oldest cup competition.
There is every indication that Bishop Sutton’s FA Cup adventure this year will be a short one – say, ninety minutes plus stoppages. Despite winning the Toolstation Western League Premier Division just a couple of years back, they finished last season on a nineteen-match losing streak. Along with a lorryload of 5-0 and 6-0 thumpings, their porous defence conceded double figures on three occasions, 13-0, 11-0, 11-1 – the stuff of mismatched schoolboy football. Relegation became a nailed-on certainty as early as Christmas. After seventeen consecutive seasons in the same division, they slipped down to the tenth tier, finishing fourteen points adrift of the nearest team and desperately hoping that no one noticed a goal difference of -109.
Despite the drop down a division, those poor performances have continued into the new season. Two matches, two home defeats. They haven’t won a competitive game since last November; they haven’t even scored in one since March. In the top ten tiers of English club football, no other team is as out of form as them. Bishop Sutton occupy the bottom corner. Yet Steve Laker isn’t a manager nervously looking over his shoulder, expecting his chairman’s patience to have finally evaporated, a metaphorical P45 close to hand. While some might suggest the cold hard facts are inescapable, impossible to argue against, there are extenuating circumstances.
After winning the league title in 2013, Bishop Sutton’s modest ground needed upgrading to meet the requirements of the Southern League. Without the funds to enact these, the club was denied promotion. Once the news came through, the make-up of the club changed overnight. ‘There was a mass exodus of players and management staff all at once,’ Laker explains, ‘leaving the club in the situation where they had to bring in a squad from Bath University, along with two members of staff from there as managers. They did well and kept the club in the Premier Division. The following season, one of the managers got a job with Southampton’s academy and the other said he couldn’t fully give his time to Bishop Sutton because of university commitments, so he stepped down. As soon as those two went, players started drifting away.’
At that point, Laker – who as a youngster was attached to one of Plymouth Argyle’s satellite academies before playing several years at county league level – was persuaded to leave his position as assistant manager at Bridgwater Town and head inland to the Chew Valley. ‘When I came on board, I was left with just two players mid-season. The university players were great, but they weren’t regular enough. University students aren’t back until September and then they disappear for Christmas. It could be as many as ten games that they miss.
‘I needed a squad of players who were going to be there week in, week out. I tried to bring in any Tom, Dick and Harry just to finish the season. We had to sign people at the absolute last minute just to get a team out. I’ll put my hands up – some of them simply weren’t good enough. But you get heavily fined if you can’t fulfil a fixture. I think it’s close to £1,000. I had ten games left, so potentially that’s up to £10,000. That would have crippled the club. My personal goal for the rest of that season wasn’t results. It was to fulfil our fixtures. We managed to do that, but unfortunately it was at the cost of a place in the Premier Division.’
In rebuilding the team, Laker – at the age of just thirty-one – is rebuilding the club. This is an outfit from a small village, where the bare bones of the first team are, through his signings, slowly gaining flesh. There’s no set-up stretching through the age groups here, no reserve teams; just an under-18s side that one of the first-teamers looks after. The progress – or otherwise – of the first team determines the fate of the whole club. And, extenuating circumstances or not, the pressure will surely build on Laker over the next month or two if there’s no tangible improvement on the pitch. A Premier League or Championship manager might be under the round-the-clock scrutiny of fans and media, but, with his well-upholstered current account able to cushion any downturn in his professional fortunes, he can flick the switch to ‘off’ whenever he chooses, able to skip gaily off the merry-go-round and escape into an extended sabbatical or early retirement. The actual survival of a football club is not weighing heavy on his shoulders. It is on Steve Laker’s. Real pressure.
Tomorrow, the FA Cup will provide a distraction from the league form, a chance for Bishop Sutton to undertake a piece of giant-killing, however modest. Their opponents are Street, from one division above. But a small slice of glory isn’t what’s really on offer. Laker takes a sip of his lukewarm coffee and offers an earnest appraisal. ‘The FA Cup is potentially a bloodline for a lot of clubs. I think it’s something like eighteen hundred quid if you get through the Extra Preliminary Round. It’s vital for immediate income.
‘At Toolstation level, especially in the Premier Division, a lot of clubs pay their players. And some of them pay decent money – anything up to £100 per match. But, quite frankly, we’re not in a position to pay players. I’d love to be able to, but I worked out that, to pay sixteen lads just ten pounds a game, it’d cost six and a half grand a season.’ This frustration at not even being able to cover his players’ petrol money comes in the same month in which Cristiano Ronaldo not only bought his agent an entire Greek island as a wedding gift, but also reportedly installed a £20,000 waxwork of himself in his Madrid home. ‘We ask players to play for the love of the club and the love of football. We don’t ask them to pay subs, but they get the referee, they get the linesmen, they play under floodlights during the week … And they’re playing in the FA Cup.’
With no budget to pay players, bolstering his squad with talent that can cope at this level of football becomes a tough ask. Laker’s priority is to stabilise the club, end this season mid-table and entice more players come next summer. ‘Everybody around the league knows that we are a team that’s crumbled. Also, there’s such a large volume of teams in and around the Bristol area playing Western League or Southern League football. We’re all fighting over the same players.’
Despite promising his wife that, after a draining season, he’d take a couple of months away from football during the summer, Laker spent June and July on the prowl for new players. ‘I haven’t stopped. It’s gone right through from last season to this one.’ And not only has his summer been written off, each week during the season is entirely dominated by football matters, whether it’s talking several times a day to his chairman, filing player registrations, checking on his players’ availability for the weekend, taking training sessions, writing match reports for the programme or undertaking admin for the website. ‘Officially, it’s training twice a week and a Saturday match. Unofficially, I’m probably doing as much as a Conference manager does.’ As if to prove a point, his phone explodes into life. A glance at the caller’s name. ‘Yup, that’s a football call.’
Laker’s frank words about the realpolitik of non-league football finances and the real worth of the FA Cup to teams at this level have been refreshing, but his keen, sharp, brown eyes can’t hide a sense of excitement about tomorrow’s game, especially as he never played in the competition himself. ‘On the surface I’m calm, but only because I can’t show the excitement that’s underneath.’ He definitely thinks his young charges have a chance against Street come three o’clock tomorrow. ‘Last season we drew with them and lost to them. We know them well and we know they’ve got some quality players.’ He deftly slides the football cards back into their protective sleeve. ‘But it’s all down to the ninety minutes. It’s eleven versus eleven.’
When the third goal goes in, Steve Laker spins 180 degrees to slam his palm into the roof of the dugout, before theatrically extending his arms to an unspecified deity in the sky. We’re ten minutes into the second half, but Street are effectively already into the next round. Bishop Sutton’s modest dreams – of on-the-pitch FA Cup glory and of an injection into the club’s coffers – have been dashed for another twelve months.
It all started promisingly enough this afternoon with the sunshine – after two grey days of downpours – flavouring the air with optimism here at Lakeview, Bishop Sutton’s home ground. The weather makes everything even more idyllic, the view across to the hills on the other side of the Chew Valley equalled by very few football stadia. Hedge trimmers buzz in adjacent gardens, accompanied by shrieks and splashes from trampolines and paddling pools. Oohs and aahs drift across from the cricket pitch on the other side of the hedge as either a dropped catch or a failed stumping uses up one of the batsman’s lives. Dragonflies dance on the air, while a pair of swallows bank and weave, taking impossibly sharp turns as if tracing the pitch’s white lines. Afternoons like this were surely the inspiration for the title of Joni Mitchell’s 1975 album The Hissing Of Summer Lawns.
The club’s own summer lawn looks in fine fettle, even if the immaculately mown stripes on the Lakeview turf serve to emphasise the sharp slope from penalty spot to goalmouth at the nearside end (insert your own ‘level playing field’ joke here). Just beyond the touchline, a clump of exotic fungi is a reminder of the many damp days endured so far this summer. Today’s weather, though, is certainly far removed from the conditions often endured when the big boys join the competition in the Third Round in early January – the FA Cup of deep mid-winter, of sticky pitches, of clag and clod.
For those teams for whom the competition is synonymous with August (and September if they’re lucky), this afternoon is one of the highlights of the season. This weekend, 367 other clubs share Bishop Sutton’s dreams, clubs whose names are simultaneously prosaic and strangely evocative – the likes of Shepshed Dynamo, Penistone Church, Billingham Synthonia and West Allotment Celtic, with their raggle-taggle teams of factory workers and plumbers, firefighters and postmen. Come quarter to five, their dreams will either, like Bishop Sutton’s, be mourned from the bottom of a pint glass in the club bar or, like Street’s, stay alive until at least the next round, disappointment deferred for now.
This is my first-ever experience of the earliest stage of the FA Cup, an occasion also regularly ignored by the media, the obligatory Road to Wembley coverage only usually kicking into gear once the forty-eight clubs from League One and League Two enter the competition in what’s patronisingly referred to as the First Round Proper. This year is slightly different on account of Northumberland club Ashington, the boyhood team of Jack and Bobby Charlton, being currently managed by former England fast bowler Steve Harmison. He receives the kind of coverage denied all others at the same league level, extensive photo opportunities to get up close and personal with the trophy. For a man who once bowled out Australia in an Ashes Test with two runs to spare, Harmison’s team leaves it equally late against Albion Sports this afternoon, sneaking an equaliser in the fourth minute of stoppage time to earn a trip to Bradford for the replay the following Wednesday.
In the Bishop Sutton programme, among those vital paid adverts from estate agents, builders’ merchants and TV repair men, a page of player profiles introduces the squad. I read the descriptions – ‘a great communicator’, ‘a towering midfielder with lots of skill’, ‘he comfortably plays where he’s asked without hesitation’ – and try to match them to the players currently warming up. All neat haircuts and light summer tans, they look confident going through their sharp one-touch drills and set-ups while some bland, generic R&B plays tinnily from a phone tossed down on the turf.
There are other suggestions that a surprise might be on the cards. As the teams line up, nervous looks play on the faces of some of the Street team. ‘Let’s fucking put this to bed early doors,’ one of their senior players barks, possibly wary that the hosts’ summer acquisitions might have reinvented and rejuvenated them, that they are no longer the whipping boys of last season. Indeed, the ferocity with which a tight offside decision in the first thirty seconds is met by the Street dugout (‘You’re an absolute disgrace, linesman!’) suggests that such wariness extends to the visitors’ management team, too.
Bishop Sutton do have the better of the early exchanges. Hope is offered in the first few minutes by a fizzing thirty-yard effort that zips just past the Street goal, its speedy passage towards those trampolining kids only halted by the bonnet of a Honda Accord in the car park. While the ball’s being retrieved from some stinging nettles, I notice that, despite the clement weather, two spectators are watching the action from the front seats of a Vauxhall Astra parked directly behind the goal Bishop Sutton are attacking. They must be home supporters, well aware that their team’s recent scoring record (490 goal-free minutes and counting) puts their car in little danger.
Indeed, that early shot is as good as it will get this afternoon for the home side. By the interval, Street are two goals to the good; they’ve also had a couple of disallowed efforts and have hit the woodwork twice. The half-time whistle is greeted by stony silence from the home support. They’ve got used to saving their breath round here over the last few months and the game isn’t discussed in the club bar during the break. Instead the conversation, between those watching the half-time scores on the TV set in the corner, is dominated by a discussion of how much weight Garth Crooks has put on of late. Or Girth Crooks, as one wag puts it.
Garth’s certainly had his lunch today, but I’ve held off as I fancied, at my first match of the new season and after a summer of salads, gorging on some typical football fare. A hot pie or a bag of chips. Perhaps a burger nicely blackened at the edges. But here in the club bar, a former prefab school classroom with a rudimentary skittles alley along the side, there’s no smell of frying onions, no squirt of the ketchup bottle. No hot food at all. I wander out of the ground back to the main road in the hope that the village’s Indian takeaway has dispensed with commercial sense and decided to open on this quiet Saturday afternoon. Munching on a reheated onion bhaji on the touchline would do the trick. But no. The game will be long finished before they open their doors, so it’s back to the club bar to peruse its modest selection of crisps and chocolate. At least the beer’s cheap. And there’s no queue.
The ease with which you can get a drink confirms the poor attendance today; it’s announced later that just forty-three souls have paid their way, a third down on last week’s gate. No wonder they haven’t fired up the chip fryer. If you were feeling generous, you could float the notion that this afternoon’s derby between Yeovil and Bristol Rovers has spirited fans away from Lakeview. But it’s most likely that the locals fear, just two games into the new campaign, that the rot of last season still festers.
The local population certainly hasn’t shown its support for the day the FA Cup came to the village. The bunting’s not been hung from the lamp posts. In fact, the only evidence that the match is even on is a single sign opposite the club’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it entrance down a narrow lane. You get the sense that the neighbouring cricket team, playing at a lower level than the football team and thus less in need of players of a decent calibre from outside the village limits, is more connected to the village. There’s not a single Bishop Sutton native in the starting XI on the footballing side of the hedge. All have been shipped in from outside, mostly Bristol, a dozen miles to the north. It’s a situation mildly analogous with almost all professional sides – the local area unrepresented in teams made up of have-boots-and-will-travel-to-sign-the-fattest-contract mercenaries. Except, of course, there’s no cash luring these players down to Bishop Sutton.
The supporters who are here, spaced evenly around the pitch’s perimeter, don’t form a unified mass. Indeed, the cheers that greet each Street goal this afternoon suggest that at least half of those forty-three attendees are away fans. You’d have thought that, with most of the Bishop Sutton players making their debuts in the competition, wives, girlfriends and other family members might have turned out. But they’ve largely stayed away, too.
One family showing their support is that of Josh Dakwa, Bishop Sutton’s nippy right-winger. His father Kojo – along with Josh’s sister and niece – are here from Bristol for what is only his son’s second appearance for the team. Leaning on the pitch’s perimeter fence for the second half, Kojo spies me taking notes and asks if I’m a scout, mainly out of curiosity but possibly also out of mild hope that I’m here in the service of a team a division or two further up the league ranks.
As Street maintain their superiority and calmly extend their lead, Kojo and I let ourselves be entertained by the cabaret turn that is Bishop Sutton’s goalkeeper. Undeniably an effective shot-stopper (his penalty save is but one of several fine stops during the second half), he is also the angriest goalkeeper I’ve ever watched, unleashing frequent gushes of industrial vernacular that would make even the saltiest seadog blush. Rather strangely, the twentysomething referee is ignoring the string of c-bombs the keeper’s dropping. ‘They’re making me look shit,’ he loudly complains to no one in particular about his own defence as the net ripples and bulges with another Street goal.
If I were a scout I’d certainly be scribbling some positive notes about one of those Bishop Sutton defenders, a young lad called George Thorne who, despite being just four months past his seventeenth birthday, puts in a mature, level-headed performance. Certainly his robust, immaculately timed challenges have the sparse crowd purring their approval. Circumstances might have dictated that Steve Laker be reliant on youth as he rebuilds the side, but Thorne has certainly been a wise signing, a player destined to spend his Saturday afternoons further up the pyramid, playing a better grade of football.
By the final whistle, Street have scored six without reply, their savvy centre-forward ‘Scouse’ securing his hat-trick near the end. He’s exactly the kind of experienced striker Bishop Sutton are crying out for. Blindly optimistic types might point out the result could have been worse. A combination of the woodwork, the linesman’s flag and various parts of the potty-mouthed goalie’s anatomy prevented the score from reaching the double figures that were all too familiar last season.
Those zigzagging swallows escort the players off, the birds soon to leave these shores, missing the potential humiliations yet to come for the home team through autumn and winter. The awkward silence is pierced by a successful appeal from the cricket match. In the bar afterwards, the local supporters sigh in the way they’ve grown accustomed to and again allow themselves to be distracted by the results coming through on Final Score. While the young ref gets cross-examined by the eightysomething Bishop Sutton old guard, the victorious side emerge from the changing rooms, visibly relieved that a possible banana skin has been avoided and that they’re into the hat for the next round.
Final Score has long since finished by the time the home team emerge, subjected to an autopsy in the dressing room, picking over the bones of a defeat that could easily have been heavier. A repeat episode of Pointless is halfway through as they slump at the table to receive their wages – chips and double sausage in a polystyrene tray, sustenance cruelly denied us spectators at half-time.
Ever the optimist, Steve Laker doesn’t appear too battered by the experience, his resolve as firm as it was the previous afternoon back in his office. There are heavier defeats in the cup this weekend – FC Liverpool put nine past Chadderton, while Coleshill Town went two better at home to Ellesmere Rangers. Laker’s still in his job, too, unlike Ashford United’s manager, who received his marching orders after their own cup exit.
During the following week – a week when Chelsea pinch Barcelona’s Pedro from right under Manchester United’s nose – Laker does likewise and spirits a striker away from another rival team. One step closer to where the manager wants to be. Onward and upward. Yes, there’s another goal-free defeat midweek, but hope is very close at hand. Four days later comes that rare commodity, an item as collectable as Laker’s cigarette cards: a Bishop Sutton goal.
It’s only a shame that Wincanton Town score six in return.
If you can judge a football club’s prospects by the mood of its car-park attendants, then good times are just around the corner for Tranmere Rovers. Or perhaps the joviality is because, on this battleship-grey August Bank Holiday Monday, the workers are possibly earning time and a half. Either way, there’s a palpable buzz here at Prenton Park ahead of today’s match against Kidderminster Harriers. Fanzine sellers are upbeat, while young autograph hunters in brand-new, ridiculously luminous away kits cheerily hover around the players’ entrance with clipboards at the ready.
They could certainly use some good news round here. The past two seasons, both of which ended in relegation, were the seal on years of neglect and underachievement. The ultimate humiliation came last season when Tranmere lost their Football League status after a full ninety-four years. They are now Tranmere Rovers of the Conference – or, as we should be calling it after it was rebadged over the summer, the Vanarama National League. New realities abound in Rovers’ recalibrated world, where they’re now forced to rub shoulders with the likes of Boreham Wood and Welling United and Braintree Town. With facilities that several Championship teams would envy, not to mention home attendances more than five times the size of those of some other Conference sides, Tranmere are now a seriously oversized fish in a modest pond. But they need to learn how to survive in these different waters. And quick.
As recently as two and a half years ago, Tranmere sat atop League One, looking in decent nick for a return to the familiar environs of the Championship. The second tier was their home during the most glorious years of their history. Under the avuncular guidance of Johnny King (a man immortalised in bronze by the main gate), they loudly rapped on the door of the then sparkly new Premier League during the 1990s, appearing in three consecutive play-offs but never quite making it to the top table. The managerial reins were then handed to John Aldridge, himself paid tribute to by having a supporters’ bar named after him here at Prenton Park. Aldridge turned them into a cup side of some note. As well as a Wembley appearance in the 2000 final of the then Worthington Cup, his players also claimed the scalps of a succession of Premier League sides on their way to three FA Cup quarter-finals in just five seasons.
Since the days of the two Johns, the revolving door of the manager’s office has barely stopped spinning. The club is now on its eleventh boss in fourteen seasons. One of the shortest reigns was that of John Barnes, who, having amassed all of three wins during his fourteen matches in charge, suffered the ignominy of being replaced by the team physio.
The current manager is Gary Brabin, a man with substantial experience in the fifth tier who was brought in over the summer by owner Mark Palios, himself a comparatively new presence at Tranmere. He and his wife Nicola took over the club at the end of the 2013–14 season after the first of those two relegations. At the time, the couple were buying a Football League club. Twelve months on, they’re now the owners of a non-league club. But the Palioses aren’t shirking the challenges. They’re not about to cut their losses and run.
A Birkenhead boy of Greek descent, Palios was a tigerish midfielder for Tranmere for nine seasons during two spells in the 1970s and early 1980s. Since his playing days, he’s been hugely successful in the City, running business regeneration operations for PricewaterhouseCoopers and turning around the fortunes of a range of organisations, among them the Royal Opera House and the Kirov Ballet. But he’s most famously known as the one-time chief executive of the Football Association, a tenure that showed he doesn’t hold back from making the toughest decisions, whether rescuing the grossly overspending Wembley rebuild or issuing Rio Ferdinand with an eight-month ban for a missed drugs test.
Turning around Tranmere’s fortunes is his latest project and, after years of minimal investment from previous regimes, his plans seem to have the backing of fans and officials alike. With his neat silver hair and calm, authoritative demeanour, he has the air of an airline pilot or consultant surgeon as he glides along the back corridors of Prenton Park. He receives nods of acknowledgement and approval from the club’s grandees, as well as the close attention of stewards and hospitality staff. ‘Good afternoon, Mr Palios.’ ‘Good journey here, Mr Palios?’ ‘Three points today, Mr Palios?’
Ninety minutes before kick-off, we settle into seats in the main stand, the ground currently empty aside from a stewards’ briefing to our right and a fox scuttling up and down the steps of the away end to our left. It’s here that Palios reveals his reasons for taking on what many might see as a hopeless cause.
‘I came here in April 2014 and the club was mired in scandals. The manager had been sacked for betting and players who had been associated with the club had been arrested for spot-fixing. The club hadn’t been invested in for quite some time. The owner, Peter Johnson, gave it his best years but wanted to sell. You sensed there had been a terminal decline. On the final day of the 2013–14 season, Nicky and I were driving through France, listening to the last game against Bradford. With ten minutes to go, we were safe, still in League One. Then we conceded and Notts County scored.
‘I don’t know whether Peter would have put cash in again, but he was going to have to do something significant. There was a structural loss of about £1 million. The first thing I did was to make sure we had enough breathing space to fix the problem. So the deal I did with Peter gave us two years to fix the profit-and-loss account.’
Although, as any chairman with a large financial stake at risk would be, Palios is clearly disappointed at slipping out of the Football League, he’s far from panicking. ‘I went on radio and TV that day, saying “It is devastating today, but not disastrous tomorrow.” You prepare for the worst but hope for the best. We’ve budgeted for not necessarily going up this year, but that doesn’t mean we don’t have the ambition to go up. That’s a totally different thing. But we wouldn’t have done anything different this close season than we would have done had we stayed up.
‘One of our advantages is that we have a large gate for the lower leagues. And there is a correlation between what you spend and where you end. My view is that if we have a top-third budget in every league we play in that I can support as break-even – and we’ve some way to go to get there – then we should be there or thereabouts in the play-offs, keeping the fans interested every season.
‘Sensible business would keep away from football clubs because it’s just too hard. One of the more frustrating things is the gap between what you do in business and what goes on on the pitch. It’s an art, not a science. In business, I can go and buy a new machine that will cost me x. I know what x is. It will cost me y to run it. I know what y is. We produce z units. I know what z is and I know what I can sell them for. You can’t do that with players. The art form conflicts with the economics. But that’s part of the beauty.’
Mark Palios, his eyes widening as he gazes around Prenton Park, clearly contemplating the potential that needs unlocking, is undeniably a dreamer. It’s just that those dreams need to be based on unstinting economic discipline. He’s at ease balancing the two – ‘I don’t have a difficulty making the transition from the boardroom to the boot room,’ he smiles. But having a chairman who’s as literate about football as he is about business might appear to put Gary Brabin on shaky ground. Palios has, after all, already seen two managers depart during his twelve months back at the club.
‘The manager here is unfortunate because I played over four hundred games in the Football League and I ran the FA. But I don’t interfere. I don’t want to influence his decisions on a micro level. Over a period of time, of course, you do get your views across and if I see things I just don’t agree with, it’s my prerogative to tell him. But I will never ever tell him who to sign. I will never ever tell him who he should play. And I will never ever tell him how to play.’
Even if he wanted to interfere in team affairs, Palios already has a long enough to-do list. He fires off a barrage of initiatives to boost the club’s solvency (‘we make a loss three hundred and forty days a year because there’s no income but you still have the overheads’), although the issue of the club’s academy remains a thorny one. If Tranmere were to remain in non-league football beyond this season, their academy funding would be dramatically cut.
Plus, the advent of the Elite Player Performance Plan – created with the intention of upping the fortunes of the national side by improving the quality of home-grown talent – allows Premier League clubs to help themselves, at genuine knock-down prices, to the prize crop of lower-league academies. Under the terms of the Premier League-authored plan, a top-flight club could sign a promising youngster for as little as £3,000 forty-eight hours after expressing an interest in that player. Several lower-league clubs have subsequently shut their academies, citing the plan as part of the reason for the closures. For Tranmere, a club that in the past has survived financially by selling its young talent at an opportune moment in their careers, it may mean being reliant on sifting through the reject bins of bigger clubs to find the stars of tomorrow rather than developing their own.
Palios confides in me details of his intentions for the stadium, plans that will lower the blood pressure of any fans who may have been concerned that, to ease the cash worries, the huge Prenton Park site might be sold for housing and a new soulless arena built out near the M53. Plenty of other clubs have gone down that route. Instead, Palios wants Tranmere to remain at the beating heart of the Birkenhead community. He’s loving being back. ‘It’s great to be with real football people,’ he smiles. ‘Sometimes, when you operate at the top end, some of the people you meet in international football have either lost the reason why they’re in it or are in it for the wrong reasons. We were at Altrincham on Saturday and they are rock-solid. Just like people were in League Two last season. We went down and everybody was very sympathetic and understood our pain. It was just a nice environment to be in. For me, it’s far more fulfilling being here than being at the top level of the game.’
Before he departs to press the flesh with sponsors and hospitality guests, Palios recounts with great affection the time he spent with the travelling support at the fateful game in Plymouth last April that confirmed Tranmere’s disappearance from the Football League. ‘I’m still humbled by that day. They were fantastic, thanking me and Nicky for being there. It was an embarrassing and very strange experience, but it also filled me with hope.’ The blackest day in the club’s history, yet the Tranmere faithful were already renewing their vows. Such is their devotion that, even though season ticket prices were increased for this first year of non-league football, sales have far eclipsed those of that single season in League Two.
I head back outside. The Kidderminster Harriers bus has taken a wrong turn into the car park – unsurprising as the teams have probably never played each other before – and is frantically reversing, all beeps and shouted directions. There’s likely to be a big Bank Holiday crowd this afternoon, but that huge car park will be far from full. And that’s the beauty of Prenton Park’s location. This is a ground in a heavily residential area, the row of houses opposite presumably the retreats of Tranmere obsessives able to emerge from their front doors at 2.54 pm and still be in their favourite stand, burger in hand, by kick-off. And if they did that, they’d avoid the delights of the ‘fanzone’ which, on this afternoon’s evidence, appears to be little more than two inflatable goals and an over-chatty DJ playing ‘Uptown Funk’ to an unpopulated corner of the car park.
I take a stroll around the block. Football grounds are made to be walked to, after all. The 100 yards from car to turnstile just doesn’t do it. I think back to my favourite season of non-league football, that of 1991–92, my final year at university, when Colchester United achieved the Conference/FA Trophy double. Even though the 4A bus could deposit me right outside the entrance to Layer Road, I perversely chose to get off in the town centre and walk the rest of the way, even in the rain. For it was in those twenty minutes that you could almost taste the expectancy, where you could ascertain the collective mindset of your fellow fans. Were they surfing on an irresistible wave of optimism or gripped by an impending, bowel-wobbling sense of doom?
It was also as part of this pedestrian caravan that I could eavesdrop on club gossip. This might be whether the ageing player-manager would – despite a series of lumpy, unproductive personal performances – continue to pick himself as centre-forward and penalty-taker as he desperately attempted to reach his target of 100 career goals. Or it might be hearing which player was last seen being poured into a taxi just thirty-six hours earlier in a state of severely advanced refreshment.
As I stroll along Borough Road back towards the ground, Tranmere’s white-shirted brigade grows in number at each road junction, the optimism shown in the length and strength of their stride. Hope has been renewed, despite recent disappointing results. Such hope, such loyalty, seems a tad curious when, at least in the view of Ryan Ferguson, columnist for the long-running fanzine Give Us An R, Tranmere remain ‘a star-crossed football club that perpetually finds new and ever more painful ways to kick its fans in the gut’.
I meet Ferguson outside the pub over the road, where he offers the diagnosis of someone inextricably tied to Tranmere since the age of six. ‘It’s been a very testing time,’ he shrugs, nursing a pint of orange juice after having overdone it after the Altrincham game two days ago. Hollow laughter shades his words. ‘You’re supposed to come to football for entertainment, not torture. There was no philosophy underlining the club until the Palioses arrived. We used more than fifty players that season, one loanee after another. There was no continuity in the side from one week until the next, no cohesive style of play.’
Amid all the comings and goings over those twelve months, Ferguson did welcome one particular departure. ‘Everyone was pleased to get rid of Peter Johnson, to be honest. He did save the club back in the 1980s when it was on the brink of extinction, but he put the club up for sale in 2002 and reduced expenditure to a bare minimum. From trying to compete for promotion, the expectations dropped to just trying to survive day to day, hence the loanees. So when the Palioses arrived, it was refreshing. They were very open with the fans and showed them their plans. They’ve got the vision and passion and wherewithal to actually go through with it, rather than just offering showcase gestures to appease the fans.’
Ferguson, like thousands of others, is adjusting to his new existence as a fan of a non-league side. ‘It still stings. But it’s still Tranmere. We’re all looking at each other going “We’ll only be here for a season.” But no team has won the Conference title in their first season after relegation since 1990. It’s a tall order, but I think we deserve it. We’ve not had a promotion or won a cup since 1991.
‘Reaching the play-offs has to be the bare minimum. But this team’s got to create a winning culture. You need in the region of eighty-five or ninety points, so how many defeats can you afford? Five? Six? We’ve already had two. We’re already eight points adrift of the leaders. Eight points at any time of the season is a lot.’ The fact that Bristol Rovers returned to the Football League at the first attempt last season, via the play-offs, certainly offers a scintilla of hope to the most jaded Tranmere fan.
And as jaded as Tranmere fans can get – understandable when analysing the brutal truth of the last few seasons – attendances at Prenton Park are, alongside those at Wrexham, easily the highest in non-league football. ‘There’s no other elite sports team representing the Wirral,’ says Ferguson. ‘It’s a working-class part of the country and a lot of people feel disillusioned with politics, so they turn to Tranmere for a sense of community, a sense of pride, a sense of identity.’
There is something of the outsider in the collective psyche of the Wirral. A peninsula jutting into the Irish Sea, there’s almost an island mentality about the place. Tranmere remains a proud club, one that refuses to be dazzled by the sunlight glinting off all that silverware on the other bank of the Mersey. Ferguson recalls a quote from Johnny King, one that likened Liverpool and Everton to ocean-going liners while seeing Tranmere as a deadly submarine. ‘That strikes to the heart of what the club actually is, fighting in the shadows of the giants.’
Here in the fifth tier, though, Tranmere are now seen as the giant, the glory days when Aldridge and Pat Nevin and Jason Koumas ruled Prenton Park still within living memory, still marking them out as the scalp to claim. ‘We’re not used to being the big club, even though our Kop stand alone has a larger capacity than seven entire grounds in this division. It’s a monument to the time when it was built, when the club was dreaming of the Premier League. But you don’t win games for the size of your stand, do you?’
Back over the road and now within ten minutes of kick-off, that oversized Kop end, ridiculously dwarfing the adjacent Johnny King Stand, is filling up nicely as the loyalists say their little prayers in return for three points to get the season back on track. Life in the Conference did start well for Tranmere, with two wins from two, but their form has hit the rails since; a scoreless draw at Braintree was trumped by a home defeat to newly promoted Boreham Wood, a team two divisions below them three months previously. Such patchy results are set in sharp relief by the form of the division’s runaway leaders, Forest Green Rovers, who have maximum points from their first six games.
At first, Kidderminster don’t offer much of a threat and Tranmere are two goals to the good before the half-hour mark. The ground is buzzing, the Bank Holiday crowd audibly appreciating the endeavour and industry shown by certain players. Commitment to the cause of getting out of this division at the first time of asking is an attribute strongly applauded by this discerning crowd.
Gary Brabin has made some astute signings over the summer, targeting players who don’t just have Conference experience but who have been part of teams who’ve escaped back into the Football League. As Mark Palios emphasised earlier, ‘these players won’t find it a shock in this division. But if you’ve played your whole life in the Football League, even in its lower reaches, when you’re playing in front of a gate of five hundred and a dog on a Tuesday night in January, it’s really difficult to motivate yourself.’
With the Kop in fine voice, it’s all smiles high up in the main stand, if a little more restrained. This is the territory of those who’ve forked out for hospitality packages – mostly, I’m guessing, local entrepreneurs accompanied by their wives, many of whom are dressed if not to the nines, then at least to the sevens. For their £50 a head, they get these prime seats, a three-course lunch and a fair chance of a five-minute address from the manager while the crème caramels are being served.
These seats are also the domain of those with closer connections to the club. Up here are several players currently either injured, suspended or on the fringes of the first-team squad. A few of them furtively play with their phones when they think no one can see them. This is also where the players’ relatives sit. One of them – a man in late middle age, clearly thrilled that his daughter has married into football – is the most animated person in the whole stand, offering positive appraisals of his son-in-law’s performance to everyone within earshot.
When your team is enjoying a comfortable cushion, the half-time refreshments taste better and the half-time music sounds sweeter; today’s selection makes full use of the musical heritage of their neighbours across the water. We get The La’s, Echo & The Bunnymen and Frankie Goes To Hollywood – although quite why Tranmere come on to the pitch to the theme tune from The Rockford Files remains a mystery that only Jim Rockford himself could solve.
The second half renders that two-goal cushion not quite comfortable enough. With Tranmere failing to score a game-killing third, Brabin makes a substitution in the last ten minutes, taking off his target man and replacing him with a central defender. Within sixty seconds of changing the system, a defensive lapse on the left gifts Kidderminster a goal that’s anything but a consolation. A soft stoppage-time equaliser sends the couple of hundred travelling fans into raptures, before they taunt the Koppites at the other end of the ground. ‘You aren’t going up! You aren’t going up!’
Ire and insults are aimed at Brabin who, stalking his technical area during the final minutes, is in danger of wearing a hole in the strip of astroturf in front of the dugout. There’s still enough time left for Tranmere to both hit the post and blaze a gilt-edged chance over the bar before the inevitable boo-fest on the final whistle, drowning out the DJ’s possibly ill-advised choice of the theme from Local Hero. Disgruntled supporters file out of the ground, a precious three-point haul having slipped through their team’s fingers. Among them is arguably Tranmere’s most famous supporter, Nigel Blackwell from indie satirists Half Man Half Biscuit. As a Rovers loyalist all his life (back in the mid-1980s, the band politely declined a career-enhancing invitation to appear on The Tube because it clashed with a home match against Scunthorpe), he’s perfectly qualified to place this latest surrender in the context of Tranmere’s modern history. ‘Typical bloody Rovers, that,’ he grumbles, before a hint of the gallows humour he’s had to develop in recent times at Prenton Park. ‘Still, it livened up the last ten minutes, didn’t it?’ Another fan storms past us, unable to put such a brave face on affairs. ‘Change the player, not the formation. Fucking shocking.’