I had to tell Cov players there was no cash left
WHEN I went down to take training at Worcester on the Tuesday after we’d beaten Bristol to reach the 5th Round of the 1997/98 Tetley’s Bitter Cup, there were people queuing for tickets around the block. We’d been drawn against Newcastle, who with the backing of Sir John Hall, had a load of megastars and were pumping everyone in the Premiership.
I couldn’t help but think back to my first match in charge of the club six years earlier and how I’d sat on a grassy bank watching us lose 9-6 to Bedworth on the second team pitch, because the first team one was waterlogged, in front of the proverbial four men and a dog thinking ‘there’s a lot to do here’.
David Hodgson was very influential in my early coaching career. He was chairman of playing of North Midlands, as well as chairman at Worcester, and he bowled into the clubhouse one day smoking a cigar and looking a million dollars, having become wealthy through his photocopying empire, saying ‘where’s this Phil Maynard I’ve been hearing a lot about?’ He asked me to do the U23s and we won a couple of Championships and that led to me getting the job at Sixways. It’s fair to say the place looked very different then!
Richard Dyde, a big lad, in the second row, said the players weren’t so sure about me in the first six months but were very sure after that. We won year after year and got to the National Leagues and a bloke called Don Everton said to David Hodgson, there’s a bloke who comes to some of the games who’d like to support us financially. He was Cecil Duckworth.
At the time we weren’t allowed to pay players but we’d caught the eye of a few people and that helped with recruitment. It all started at Peter Shillingford’s going away do – he was off to Bermuda – and a lot of good players were there as mates of his – Chris Raymond and Bruce Fenley (Gloucester) and Mark Linnett and
Neil Lyman (Moseley). I looked at Dick Cummins, the first team manager, and said, ‘imagine if we could get all of these into one team’ and I set about doing it. We got most of them.
That Bristol Cup win gave me one of my most enjoyable moments in rugby as what we planned for came to fruition. We’d looked at some of their games beforehand and David Knox, their troubled Australian fly-half, used to get upset very quickly so we set out to rattle him early. Sure enough, 15-20 minutes into the game, Bruce catches his leg late just after he’s kicked the ball and he turns around and takes a massive swing at him, and then a boot, and gets sent off. Bob Dwyer was coaching Bristol and he started pointing at me and calling me a cheat and I just put my hands out and said, ‘I don’t know what you are talking about’. The irony of this story was Kevin Maggs stepped into fly-half and proved to be a much better option and nearly cost us the game!
Once we got up to Level 2, people started coming after my job. We’d only lost one game in two years but the club felt I needed help. At first, they brought in Les Cusworth, but after a couple of seasons, they got rid of him and Geoff Cooke came in and asked me to stay. I wanted complete control over recruitment because we’d brought in mercenaries, and blokes coming in on huge money who didn’t play much didn’t sit well with me, but the club wouldn’t agree to that and I resigned.
Norman Robertson talked me into going to Stourbridge and I got them up at the first attempt. At the end of the second year, the offer I had been waiting for came up – to coach Birmingham, the club I played for, initially at hooker and then in the back-row.
Coaching Birmingham was a chance to have another crack at Moseley who consistently put in the papers that they were ‘Birmingham’s Premier Club’. We managed to put a decent squad together and won our first six games to top the table before tailing off a bit towards the end because of the extra demands of our Cup run, finishing the 2003/04 season in fourth – above both the Chiefs and Bristol, who we’d beaten along the way, including a 45-11 win down at the Memorial Stadium.
The lads were capable of playing hard and celebrating harder! One time we were playing at Fylde and we decided to stay over in Blackpool. None of the places would let us in unless you were a stag party so we chose Rob Walton as our stag. A big orange wig did the trick and we partied until the early hours.
We had Premiership-class players and ahead of the Cup quarter-final win against Wasps, I just said if everyone brings their A-game, we could trouble them. They had Trevor Leota throwing in at lineouts and we’d worked out that he couldn’t hit a cow’s backside with a banjo, so we put a lot of pressure on that area and turned over a lot of ball. Wasps became more and more defensive-minded, sitting on their lead, and as the penalties started coming, Woody (Mark Woodrow) knocked over his kicks. Woody had come to us as we needed a fly-half and Mike Davies and a few of the other lads had been on an England Counties tour with him. They said, ‘we think he’s right up your street; he doesn’t take life too seriously and loves soul music!’
I left Bees in December 2006 after being made redundant and was out of the game for a while before the muchmaligned Andrew Green asked me to come down to Coventry to have a look at what was going wrong because they were being pumped every week. I watched them play at Nottingham and it was pretty clear what the problem was – the coaching. Based on my recommendations, he replaced Murray Henderson with Dave Addleton as head coach and they won a load of games.
At the end of that season, he invited me to become Coventry DoR. At the time I didn’t really want to do it but it was another challenge, to get the club back to where they professed they should be, so I thought ‘why not?’ I thought the first thing I need to do is to meet the squad. I went through the squad alphabetically and the first bloke in was George Dixon. A nice lad with long hair who looked like a bit of a surfer and spoke well. He said, ‘Let me tell you where I am. I wish you the best of luck, but I hate this club and Andrew Green’. By mid-afternoon, I’d got through half the squad and the same message had been repeated. I thought, ‘what have I done? I’ve made a terrible mistake’.
I told Andrew Green straight what the feedback was and that the only way it might work is if he kept away from the squad. At first we did alright. But there was always that demon looming in the background and a year or so later the club went bankrupt which was a terrible time.
The true extent of the damage started to come out once he disappeared into the sunset. It was a catastrophe. We couldn’t play at the Butts because we didn’t have valid insurance but the CEO of the Ricoh offered us the ground for our game against Bedford. Quite a few people came to watch us draw 15-15 and the plan was to pay the players out of the gate money. But after the match a bloke in a dicky-bow walked up to me on the pitch and said, ‘I need to talk to you’. I didn’t have a clue who he was until he told me he was from Begbies Traynor, the administrators. When I said, ‘I’ve got to go now to pay the players’, he chipped in and said, ‘no, that’s my money, as the receiver’. So I had to go in and tell the players they wouldn’t be getting anything. It was a nightmare scenario.
We started the next season in the league below, with a 120 grand budget the first year and just 90 grand the season after. It was a tough gig. That was it really for me in a coaching role and I became DoR/general manager but you couldn’t do either role properly given the lack of funds.
A year or so later, I was given the challenge of making Bourneville RFC a sustainable rugby club. Mitch McGahan is a good young coach and we’ve bolstered his team this year with Terry Sigley (Nick Green)and Matt Price, and more recently Mark Hewitt, coming on board, and we’re all looking forward to the new season, up in the National Leagues.
“I wish you the best of luck, but I hate this club and Andrew Green”