TALBOT’S LITTLE SPARKLERS WERE JEWELS IN THE CROWN
IT was Friday February 28, 1997 when the phone rang at Brian Talbot’s north London home. His wife answered. On the other end of the line was Max Griggs, the owner of Dr. Martens shoe company and chairman of Rushden & Diamonds Football Club. It was a call which would change the lives of both men – and the landscape of Non-League football.
Five years earlier, Griggs had merged Rushden Town and Irthlingborough Diamonds – two humble and unremarkable Northamptonshire clubs – with grand plans to reach the Football League.
The ball was soon rolling. Rushden won the Southern League Midland Division in their second season and were soon writing cheques big enough to make them a force in the Premier.
Dagenham midfielder Garry Butterworth and Enfield striker Darren Collins joined in the summer of 1994, with Griggs paying £25,000 for each.
Collins said: “You speak to chairmen sometimes and they tell you they’re going to do this or that but Max did it straight away. It was amazing.
“Enfield were a big club but Rushden was a step up because of what was expected. The club was run like a Premiership outfit and we had to get results on the pitch.
“The pressure was on because they were spending big money and looking to win leagues.
“We were always under pressure to win at home but the support was excellent. That helped us a lot in the early days.”
Ambition
Collins scored 68 goals in his first two seasons, including 40 as they clinched the 1995-96 championship after a thrilling title race with Halesowen. Rushden held on to beat Merthyr 3-2 on the final day with almost 5,000 crammed into Nene Park – the ground that Max built.
“You could see how much it meant to him,” said Collins. “He absolutely loved it. He loved seeing the lads happy, he loved making people happy and I was so happy for him.
“He used to sit with us after training, he was always about. He was an amazing man. It was great playing for a chairman like that – you don’t get many of them.”
But Rushden had only taken two steps along the journey Griggs had mapped out for them and a poor start to their first season in the Conference threatened to derail everything.
Roger Ashby’s side were seven points adrift at the bottom when Griggs decided to bring in Talbot. The former Ipswich and Arsenal player had just spent three years coaching Maltese side Hibernians and was now delivering FA coaching courses.
Talbot said: “I didn’t know Mr Griggs but I thought what a lovely, down-to-earth man he was. He loved his football club, he was putting something back into the community and without Mr Griggs, there was no club.
“They were trying to do fantastic things there. The stadium was being built, they were doing the training ground and they had so much ambition to do things properly.”
Talbot was brought in to assist Ashby but when he resigned just days later, the Diamonds had a new manager.
“It went from a parttime, Non-League set-up to full-time professional,” recalled Collins, who finished with a record 152 goals for the club. “Brian was spot-on in everything he did. Everything he’d done in the game, he brought it to Rushden.”
Eight wins from the last 13 games meant the Diamonds were comfortably safe but fundamental changes were coming.
Talbot went full-time and so did the team, with Griggs upping his funding again. Collins said: “Good players wanted to play at Rushden so you had to be on your toes. You were under pressure. “We had so many good players that even looking at the bench, you knew you had to perform. The demand on each of you was massive.”
The arrival of Paul Underwood and Adrian Foster helped Rushden climb to fourth the following season but the transition wasn’t without its challenges. Talbot said: “Paul was a difficult character when he first came in. He’d never been professional so I had to work with him to (help him) be a professional footballer. “Garry Butterworth was a difficult boy. He wasn’t always professional off the pitch and some mornings he wasn’t in a good state so I had to manage that. I told him ‘you’d better be ready for Saturday.’”
“But people saw me doing professional things and they copied.
“The standards I introduced were the same as Arsenal. We travelled well, dressed properly, conducted ourselves properly and everybody had discipline.
Pedestal
“I used to say to my wife ‘I’m going to a five-star hotel to work. I was fortunate to play in good teams at Ipswich and Arsenal but that (Rushden) was as good as anything I had as a player.”
But results on the pitch were paramount and promotion remained elusive. Cheltenham won the Conference in 1998-99, Kidderminster 12 months later. Rushden came in fourth and second.
“There was so much expectation because Max had spent so much money,” said winger Andy Burgess, a product of the club’s youth system. “When I got into the first team, Brian still hadn’t found the right formula so pressure was growing on him.”
Talbot admitted: “There was pressure on getting promotion. People thought three years was too long but not once did Mr Griggs say ‘you’ve got to win the league or you’re not going to be here.’ When we came second , he said ‘Brian, never mind, we’ll l do it next year.’”
Talbot had signed a five-year contract the previous summer, Griggs having initially offered him three years. “If you do the job properly, I won’t sack you,” the chairman had told him. “But we’ve got to get in the League.”
“Is there a timescale?” Talbot asked. “No – just get us in the League,” replied Griggs. “I’ll do anything to help you.”
And he did, shelling out more than £250,000 on strikers Justin Jackson and Duane Darby.
“We were making a statement,” said Talbot. “Everybody wanted to beat Rushden. They were envious and wanted to knock us off our pedestal.
“We could afford the best players, our facilities were better than anywhere else and we paid more than anybody else. They wanted to put us in our place.”
Jackson and Darby turned the Diamonds from challengers to champions, scoring 47 goals between them as the promotion
Griggs craved was finally delivered.
Burgess said: “The relationship between Brian and Max was unrelenting. There was massive trust between them. A lot of chairmen would have let Brian go but it’s indicative of Max that he stuck with Brian. He knew Brian would get it right in the end.
Resilient
“That season, we were a team. It was always 4-4-2: Turley in goal, Mustafa and Underwood full-backs, Warburton and Peters centre-half, Carey and Butterworth in midfield, me on the left, Brady on the right, Jackson and Darby up front. People knew their jobs and we had real togetherness.
“We went to
Yeovil late on and it was like a cup final. They needed to win but we were resilient and got a 0-0 draw. It felt, after that game, that Yeovil had almost thrown the towel in. They could have still won it but the momentum was with us. “I felt winning the Conference was better than winning Division 3. It was Max’s dream to get to the Football League and that was the best season the club ever had.” The juggernaut rolled on. Rushden’s debut season in the EFL finished at the Millennium Stadium and defeat to Cheltenham in the play-off final. A year later they were toasting another championship at Nene Park having reeled in leaders Hartlepool from 12 points back.
“The chairman wanted to improve all the time,” Talbot said. “He encouraged me – and maybe I encouraged him.
“It used to concern me (the finance) but it wasn’t my department. I used to say ‘he’s going to cost this much’ and it was ‘no worries, leave that to me.’”
The higher Diamonds climbed, the bigger the names. Paul Hall and Onandi Lowe had been to the World Cup with Jamaica, Rodney Jack and Barry Hunter were internationals, Marcus Bignot arrived from QPR and Dean Holdsworth needed no introduction.
But Talbot admitted: “We moved too quickly. We should have been happy to stay in Division 3 but we wanted to go another stage.”
Burgess remembers Bignot telling Hall: “I’m definitely going to finish my career here – why would you want to go anywhere else?” He said: “Players didn’t want to leave. They wanted to work hard and be in that environment because they knew what it was like elsewhere.
“We started OK in Division 2 but Max pulled his money out. He’d built two big Dr. Martens factories next to the ground and had to lay a lot of people off. The local community were asking questions about Max pumping money into the football club 100 yards away and he felt he couldn’t continue doing that.”
Talbot quit in March and took the Oldham job.
“I didn’t want to be there if Max was leaving,” he said. “I stayed as long as I could but we couldn’t pay all the wages.”
Rushden were relegated that season and dropped back into the Conference two years later.
Burgess, after 18 months at Oxford, rejoined the Diamonds but their shine had gone.
He said: “I drove back in and it felt like it hadn’t been cleaned, like people didn’t have the respect they had when it was first built.
“There were old goals broken up by the side of one of the pitches. There were weeds coming through in the car park. Everything seemed to be 50% less. The robes had gone and not been replaced. The pool table in the canteen was ripped and there were balls missing. The table tennis table had broken bats.
“I know a lot of it was about money but the care and attention that was there under Brian, and the professionalism, wasn’t there any more. It had changed so much and it was heart-breaking.
“I understood the club didn’t have the resources it had when Max was there but sometimes, money can’t buy you love.”
The club’s financial woes were so deep they were expelled from the Conference in 2011 and denied entry to the Southern League. Nene Park stood empty, the pitch overgrown with weeds and the hospitality lounges trashed.
Finally the bulldozers moved in to flatten the site.
“It was a terrible shame,” said Talbot. “I haven’t been back. I don’t understand how it’s happened.
“When you talk to people who don’t know much about NonLeague football and the lower divisions, Rushden & Diamonds means very little to them but to the people who were involved and the local community, it was fantastic.
“Let’s be honest, we were spoilt at Rushden & Diamonds. We upped the bar for Non-League football.
“Mr Griggs had ambitions and he fulfilled them. I just happened to be the manager at the time. I was lucky I got on the train because it was a great journey.”