TOM HOPKINSON Derby, Robert Maxwell and a contract for two Czech stars on the run... who ended up never kicking a ball for the club
FLANKING Derby chairman Robert Maxwell at the Daily Mirror’s London offices in January 1989, Czechoslovakia forwards Lubos Kubik and Ivo Knoflicek looked like they would rather be somewhere else.
Anywhere, as long as it wasn’t their homeland.
The pair had spent the previous five months trying to evade the Czech authorities through West Germany, Belgium, Holland and Spain.
Wealthy
They had absconded from Slavia Prague’s pre-season training camp ahead of the 1988-89 campaign, doing a bunk in their kits after a friendly in West Germany.
The pair survived the following months on money donated by Derby supporters and sometimes under the roofs of Maxwell’s wealthy associates.
Kubik and Knoflicek had managed to evade those seeking to return them to their homeland long enough to make it to the East Midlands.
And upon their arrival, Maxwell – originally from Czechoslovakia – was waiting with a three-year contract for each of them.
“They love
England, they love
Derby and the fact
I am the chairman of
Derby didn’t do them any harm in coming here,” he boasted at their unveiling.
For Kubik and Knoflicek, getting to Derby had been an extraordinary mission, as the club’s then managing director Stuart Webb remembers well.
He and manager Arthur Cox (above) had first met the players, a Mr Fixit and another associate at an airport hotel in Brussels, although they weren’t the only ones seeking their audience.
Representatives of the Czech Football Federation were there, too, trying to coax the players home, while Webb and Cox noticed several shady characters, some packing pistols, lurking around the lobby.
The Englishmen hot-footed it home the morning after their meeting, and Webb, on Maxwell’s insistence, went into overdrive trying to make their signings work.
However, the FA refused to sanction either deal without proof from Slavia and the Czech FA that all was above board – and Webb feared it was anything but.
In his book Clough, Maxwell and Me – Explosive, The Inside Track, Webb wrote: “I knew we were on dodgy ground with FIFA and UEFA because they were registered Czech FA internationals under contract to Slavia Prague. And there, at the back of my mind, was the fear that kidnapping might be involved – that they had not instigated the drama.
“I considered the middlemen or minders to be spies, whose interest was purely financial.
Monastry
“They were keen to clinch the deal and disappear but not before being paid off by Maxwell or the club for providing players worth a tidy sum on the open market.”
Webb next saw Kubik and Knoflicek in the 18-bedroom former monastery that belonged to the Guinness family in Cadeques, Spain.
And, eventually, the decision was made to get them to England, where the players were put up in a Derby hotel before being installed above an Italian restaurant. Kubik and Knoflicek impressed in training as they waited for the final pieces of red tape to be cut.
But Cox, like Webb, knew that was unlikely and after a few weeks in Derby they left without kicking a ball for the first team.
The whole saga consumed Webb for months.
He added: “I could see no way of getting out of it, no way for the club to benefit, no way of Maxwell being happy.
“I was running around like a blue-a***d fly, knowing in my heart of hearts that nothing would come of it.
“Their departure proved much swifter than their laboured arrival.
“I turned up for work one day to be told they had returned to Prague to face the music.”
Kubik joined Fiorentina for around £500,000 that summer, while Knoflicek was signed by West German side St Pauli.