Action Replay: “Bobby Gould Must Go!”
Believe it or not, Wales used to be a bit crap – no more so than under Gould in the late ’90s. But from arguing with the Manics to wrestling with players and training in a prison, his reign was never dull...
Naturally, Bobby Gould had Vinnie Jones to thank. Seven years after he helped Gould’s Wimbledon win the 1988 FA Cup Final, and 27 minutes into Wales’ home match against Georgia, Jones earned his ninth career red card by not so much leaving his foot in as stapling it to Mikheil Kavelashvili’s crotch. Jones’ adopted nation lost the Euro 96 qualifier 1-0, Mike Smith was fired and Wales needed a new coach. Step forward, the Gouldfather.
Gould was a pundit then, out of management for nearly two years. But if Welsh supporters thought his appointment was odd, they could not predict what would follow. Wrestling with John Hartson, training in a prison, bashing the Manic Street Preachers, bringing himself on as a substitute – Gould did it all, and more.
The end of the millennium brought the four most surreal years in Welsh football history. Two decades later, some scars are still healing.
“IF I’M INTERVIEWED, I GET THE JOB”
Gould’s charm offensive began in earnest, starting with attempts to persuade Matt Le Tissier and a young Michael Owen to represent Wales, as well as paying attention to the oft-forgotten domestic game.
“You’d see him at League of Wales games,” recalls Phil Stead, author of Red Dragons: The Story of Welsh Football. “It’s not all about the national side. Gould saw his role as developing the game.” Veteran Wales fan Gary Pritchard adds: “He did travel the length and breadth of the country with ‘Learn Welsh’ tapes in his car.” Welsh isn’t the easiest language to wrap your tongue around, so the new man’s commitment was never in doubt – even from his application.
“If I’m interviewed, I get the job,” Gould tells FFT matter-of-factly. “I’ve got passion, honesty – everything they want. I told them: ‘I have a dream’.” Gould: the man who would be King.
King, or Joker? Gould produced a leek from his desk drawer during an early interview and, when asked what he’d learned from his first match as Wales beat Moldova 1-0, quipped: “Our socks are too long.” (In fact, he’d stayed up all night taking notes.) Fans weren’t party to his sense of mischief, however.
“You never get a second chance to make a first impression,” says supporter Mark Ainsbury, recalling Gould’s first away match, against Albania in 1995. “When he walked into our hotel in downtown Tirana, we serenaded him with a loving rendition of ‘Gould’ to Spandau Ballet’s Gold. He bounded over and said: ‘Hey lads, no singing in the
hotel, eh?’ We made it quite clear to him what he could do with his advice.”
If that response seems disproportionate, remember where they were. “We’d spent two days getting to Europe’s most closed country, via ferry from Italy,” explains Ainsbury, a home-and-away fan since 1981. “For years we’ve made friends across the continent, and here was a buffoon from Coventry telling us how to behave.”
The tie ended 1-1. In Gould’s first dozen matches, the opening win over Moldova and a San Marino double were Wales’ only victories. In truth, that wasn’t surprising. “The rot had set in before him,” sighs Russell Todd of Podcast Pel-droed, which focuses on Welsh football. “We’d already lost to Moldova and been shellacked 5-0 in Georgia. Then after Euro 96 England fans were euphoric, but it got worse and worse for Wales. After a while, even the piss-taking stopped being fun for my non-welsh friends.”
They weren’t exactly lacking material. Gould’s eccentricities were on show from the start. Some 48 hours before Wales faced Germany in his second fixture, Gould arranged a match against a press XI and fielded a full-strength side captained by Ryan Giggs, then changed his line-up to face the Germans based on the performance.
The bizarre fixtures didn’t end there. In 1996 Wales played Leyton Orient, who’d just finished 21st in the fourth tier (one place above Cardiff), and lost 2-1 to a goal scored by trialist Peter Garland. Gould left at full-time to watch his son in Bradford’s play-off final at Wembley, leaving Neville Southall to tell journalists: “We’re quite happy. It wouldn’t have mattered if we’d lost 10-1.” The Mirror gleefully proclaimed: ‘Os stuff the tragic dragon’. Then Wales beat Cwmbran Town 6-1 with 50-year-old Gould scoring a header after bringing himself on for Gary Speed. “It was a lovely feeling,” he tells
FFT. “Giggsy crossed the ball and I got in the six-yard box. I tried to play it cool.”
Unsurprisingly, perhaps, Gould wasn’t getting on with senior players. The important word, though, is ‘senior’. Wales were at the end of a generation: Ian Rush was 34 and Southall 37, with Mark Hughes, Dean Saunders, Barry Horne and David Phillips all the wrong side of 30 as well. “Bobby Gould had to end some careers,” concedes Elis James, comedian and Welsh football obsessive. “But he did it in an unfortunate way. He picked arguments with sacred cows. He didn’t understand there are some fights you don’t pick, especially in a small footballing community.”
“The worst thing is the way Rush retired,” says Pritchard. “A legend like Rush didn’t deserve his international career ending in that fashion.” Substituted with Wales trailing 3-0 in Italy, Rush stormed off the pitch and never played for his country again.
At least Rush avoided what was to come. That infamous match: Netherlands 7, Wales 1.
“IF BIG NEV HADN’T PLAYED LIKE SOME SORT OF SUPERHUMAN, WE’D HAVE CONCEDED 15”
Wales’ preparations weren’t ideal. Their under-21s had won in Breda the previous night, but in Eindhoven, Gould couldn’t settle on a team, or even a captain. A players’ secret ballot revealed his former Wimbledon charge Vinnie Jones as the surprise choice as skipper – doubly surprising, in fact, as seemingly nobody had voted for the Londoner.
“In the tunnel before the game, Vinnie was screaming in the faces of Clarence Seedorf and Marc Overmars, trying to psych them out,” recalls Manchester City U16s coach Gareth Taylor, a young striker back then. “The Dutch players looked at him as if to say: ‘Who’s this?’ Then we went out and got smashed.”
The Oranje had just lost 4-1 to England but still had a fine team, featuring six of Ajax’s Champions League winners from 18 months previously, as well as Seedorf, Dennis Bergkamp, Phillip Cocu and Jaap Stam. But nine of Wales’ own XI played in the Premier League, so they’d be competitive... right?
Wrong. The enduring image is Neville Southall, in an extraordinary goalkeeper kit, throwing up his hands in despair at 2-0, having parried two shots only for the third to fly in. Bergkamp bagged a hat-trick in a 7-1 rout. Yet it could have been even worse.
“Neville Southall put in probably the best goalkeeping display I’ve ever seen in my life,” reflects Taylor. “Southall had a stormer,” confirms Pritchard. “If Big Nev hadn’t played like some sort of superhuman, we’d have conceded 15,” says Elis James. “Jesus Christ.”
“The Dutch fans were passing us glasses of wine,” Pritchard continues. “They took pity on us before 15 minutes were up. It was still 0-0.”
Wales actually scored the game’s best goal, John Hartson turning Frank de Boer with Saunders converting his sumptuous cross, but even now fans unite over one crumb of comfort: the stadium’s overhead heaters. “That was the best part of the night,” Pritchard enthuses. “Everyone was in their shirt sleeves.”
Also keeping warm in the stands were Welsh music royalty: the Manic Street Preachers, whose album Everything Must Go had just charted at No.2, and supporting them on tour, the Super Furry Animals. “There’s this great footage of the Furries sat in the away end with their heads in their hands,” says James.
It wouldn’t be Gould’s last run-in with the Manics. In 1998, they sung “Bobby Gould Must Go” during a Cardiff Castle performance of Everything Must Go. “That remains a high water mark in Welsh history of popular culture reflecting popular opinion,” says Ainsbury. “Margaret Thatcher had more friends in Wales than he did.” Gould responded by calling the Manics’ Richey Edwards a bad role model. Edwards, a troubled man, had been missing for three years by that point – he’s never been found – and Gould’s comments prompted his bandmate and friend Nicky Wire to say: “I don’t think it’s very laudable to have a go at somebody who can’t defend themselves.”
But back in the Wales camp, John Hartson could defend himself – and Gould knew it. That’s why, hearing after the Dutch debacle that Hartson was angry with him, Gould challenged the burly young Arsenal striker to a fight... sort of.
“It’s called a circle,” Gould explains. “If there is a problem, players form a circle and you get in the middle and sort it out, then everybody shakes hands. I took it everywhere I went.
“I said: ‘You want me, Hartson? You can have me. No punching, no biting – just a good old grapple’. All of a sudden, I found myself on my back with him on top of me!”
What happened next is, like Hartson, hard to pin down. Gould says that after the 21-year-old wrestled him to the floor, they “shook hands and walked away” to much laughter. Hartson’s account is of an awkward, “undignified” scrap. Southall thought Gould cracked a rib; Craig Bellamy, who was 17 and at his first Wales training camp, said Hartson “flung him across the circle onto the floor”, giving Gould a bloody nose. And Taylor tells FFT: “I always remember Bob, his face turning purple, slamming the
floor and saying: ‘I submit! I submit!’ The lads had a joke. That was Bob’s way.” Whatever the autopsy, this wasn’t a one-off squabble. During his reign, Gould tussled with future Wales managers Mark Hughes, Gary Speed and Chris Coleman, alienated Nathan Blake with alleged racially insensitive comments (something denied by Gould) and failed to convince Ryan Giggs to make regular commitments, even as captain. Gould was hardly alone in that, of course: Giggs’ first friendly appearance came eight and a half years after his Wales debut, and in total he played in just 64 of 119 Wales matches before his international retirement in 2007, seven years before he hung up his boots for good.
Most famously, a young Robbie Savage was humiliated for attempting a joke, an event that surely helped to make him the man he is today.
Wales were due to face Italy in their first Euro 2000 qualifier. Spirits were low, and to make matters worse they’d be playing at Anfield: the Millennium Stadium was under construction and despite players voting for Cardiff City’s Ninian Park when Gould, to his credit, asked for their opinion, the FAW sought the financial security of playing in a bigger stadium. Looking to lighten the mood and play down the Azzurri’s threat, Savage crumpled up a Paolo Maldini shirt on camera and tossed it away.
Gould didn’t find it amusing. He called Savage at 5am and told him to leave the team hotel before the police were called. In the chaos that followed, Savage was dropped, reinstated, put on the bench and booed in Wales’ 2-0 loss. His champion was Speed, who’d told his manager: “Go and get him back.” That night, Gould woke a BBC executive to make him alter a Ceefax report that called his team “lacklustre”.
Wales were a laughing stock.
“PICKING A BARRY TOWN PLAYER DREW ATTENTION TO THE LEAGUE OF WALES”
Gould’s side had already been the butt of many a joke on the pitch. They’d lost 6-4 in Turkey and, shortly before that Italy encounter, 4-0 in Tunisia. To add insult to injury, Tunisia manager Henryk Kasperczak complained it wasn’t even useful to them as a warm-up for France 98, lamenting: “I regret that the match turned out easier than we expected. The Welsh should have provided
“After just 15 minutes the Dutch fans took pity on us and passed us some wine”
a good rehearsal for facing England, but they were far worse than we had hoped.”
Wales’ trip to Tunis was a farce from the moment they landed in Africa. Former striker Simon Haworth recalls: “We moved hotels as the first one was a total shambles, and had to train without balls. That kind of thing happened on Wales trips back then.” Ryan Green, who at 17 years of age had just become Wales’ youngest ever player, tells FFT: “Tunisia tried to disturb our preparation and it worked. They gave us a hiding.”
Wales were quite capable of disturbing their own preparation. When Gould announced he’d pick the same side that had beaten Malta two days earlier, the unused Savage complained that he had sacrificed a holiday only to watch from the bench. Gould changed his mind and the team, accommodating Savage awkwardly at wing-back.
It all came to a head at full-time. Speed went postal, accusing Gould of setting the team back years. Wales had been agonisingly close to reaching Euro 92 and USA 94, but by France 98 they’d slipped to 103rd in the FIFA rankings. “Speedo was totally right: it was about standards,” says Haworth. “Words were exchanged between senior pros and Gould. Sat there as a young lad, I was shocked and embarrassed at it all.
“Gould was good with me, but he lacked the correct manner to get the best out of big players. He wanted that Wimbledon siege mentality but he had some of the best Welsh players of their generation. He named set-pieces after Wimbledon players and asked Speed and Saunders if they could do what Lawrie Sanchez or Vinnie Jones could.”
“There was a stark contrast,” says Podcast Pel-droed’s Leon Barton, “between Bobby Gould and the professionalism that was coming into play in the English Premier League. We were heading towards the millennium with a 1980s relic in charge. We were in the dark ages.”
Yet several players spoke well of Gould years later – even Southall, whose record-breaking Wales career ended at half-time in that 6-4 defeat to Turkey with, he claims, Gould telling him: “We’ve got a f**king problem here and it’s f**king you.” Giggs conceded he “liked Bobby personally”; Savage said he “loved him”.
Furthermore, Gould did some good for Welsh football. He worked tirelessly to promote the domestic game, even calling up Barry Town’s Gary Lloyd to the national squad. “He gets ridiculed for that but I respected him for it,” says Gary Pritchard. “He understood,” adds Phil Stead, “that calling up Lloyd would draw attention to the League of Wales.”
Gould promoted youth, making Ryan Green the youngest Welsh international in history. Asked if he agrees with Giggs’ opinion that Green’s call-up was “a typical Gould stunt” (it broke Giggs’ age record), Stead says it probably was, “but with good intentions”. Even Green agrees. “I hadn’t played a game at the time, so you could say it was a stunt,” muses the defender, now at Hereford. “I hadn’t played for Wolves; I’d only played once for Wales U21s.
“My dad rang me. He’d read there was a chance I’d be called up. I couldn’t wait for the squad to be announced, because nobody rang to tell me. I don’t think I ever did get a call; just a letter saying where to meet.”
Green won his second and final Wales cap in that fateful Tunisia game. Exactly a year later, Gould would have his last involvement, too.
“YOU DON’T WANT YOUR MANAGER TO BE A QUIRKY CHARACTER WHEN YOU’RE LOSING 4-0 TO TUNISIA”
The end came quickly – though there was still time for Gould to get his players locked up. Just visiting, of course. “We were having difficulties with training grounds,” Gould explains to FFT, “and somebody said there was a prison with fantastic facilities. They were brilliant, so we trained there.” And, yes, the inmates were present. “We were crapping ourselves!” says Gareth Taylor. “I don’t think we had Vinnie, either, which didn’t help.”
In 1999 Wales travelled to Switzerland. An unexpected 2-1 win in Denmark, which prompted Saunders to tell Bellamy: “You do realise you’ve saved this guy’s job” when the teenager had just scored his first international goal, presented an outside chance of reaching Euro 2000. But it didn’t last. Goalkeeper Paul Jones (above) slipped a disc in the warm-up but Wales were refused a line-up change. Instead of substituting Jones for Mark Crossley from the first whistle, Gould persisted with the Southampton man and the crocked keeper conceded a goal after four minutes, went off after 26, and left the stadium in a wheelchair.
Italy provided the final curtain. By this point Gould’s position was untenable; he even let the players pick the starting XI. Bellamy recalls that in his team talk, Gould listed each of the Italian players and everything they had won, saying: “Fabio Cannavaro can jump as high as this ceiling” and “Paolo Maldini: need I say more?” Wales lost 4-0 in Bologna.
Gould quit – which was handy, as the FAW reportedly couldn’t afford a payoff – and said, generously, he’d take a different flight home. In fact, there were no other flights and he was reunited with his former players at the airport.
It summed up Gould’s reign: well-intentioned bungling. “His heart was in the right place,” says Stead. “He was like a little boy.”
Few Welsh fans share that view. “Now that 20 years have passed and we’ve qualified, I’ve come to peace with it, but I absolutely detested him at the time,” says Elis James. “You don’t want your manager to be a quirky character when you’re losing 4-0 to f**king Tunisia.
“I think it’s fair to say he had a personality clash with an entire country.”
Gould did promote youth and the domestic game – he even learned Welsh