Play-off defeat still hurts, even after all these years
IT’S 24 years since Stoke ended one of my favourite seasons as a coach, even if it did end in play-off heartbreak.
It was 1995/96 and Lou Macari had asked me in the September to come in and do some coaching.
It had been a difficult start and we’d lost four of the opening six games to put us second-from-bottom.
What happened over the next few months to get to the cusp of the then Premiership was brilliant and I really enjoyed my time with Lou. He’s a oneoff.
He had his little ways and means of getting the best out of players.
I’m into psychology and fascinated by the human being so I used to laugh quite a lot about the mind games he’d play. He’d walk over to me at training and say, ‘Just finish what you’re doing and I’ll take a session.’ Then he’d go hell for leather to get players wound up and angry, get them mumbling and grumbling.
He’d done the hard work when he brought players in. He’d nip off to watch three games in a day and he’d ring around everywhere to get opinions on anyone. So he knew his players inside out and he knew what made them tick.
Kevin Keen and Lee Sandford were opinionated, Nigel Gleghorn was very opinionated! But you want players with their own minds and you want players who are fired up. It’s then about getting the whole team working together, which is what happened.
I just stuck to coaching, I didn’t interfere too much in anything else, and with a manager I could trust and players who were keen to get the best out of themselves, it was a great time.
So much work was put in. You don’t just get there automatically; it wasn’t luck.
You start piecing your back line together, they get that understanding with your keeper, then the defence with midfield and midfield with attack. We finally got there and we were on a steamrollering expedition. Confidence was high and we were absolutely buzzing.
Lou still doesn’t like to talk about tactics and systems, but he had a clear vision of what he wanted from his team. He didn’t want defenders to pass it across or backwards or square – certainly not at that level – and he wanted to get the ball early into the attacking third.
He wanted wide players to get crosses in, he wanted dribblers in forward areas, he wanted players in midfield to make runs off the ball to support the front players.
That’s where I came in, with all the principles of creating space, passing, supporting, movement and applying pressure as quickly as you can when you lose the ball.
We had players like Mike Sheron, Simon Sturridge and Paul Peschisolido who were clever enough to create space for themselves to finish or create for others as well. We had big John Gayle or quick Martin Carruthers who could come on to change games.
Sheron was a joy. He arrived a month after me and he’d been mis-managed. Lou dealt with him brilliantly, got him to the fittest he’d ever been and got his rewards from one of the most instinctive finishers I’ve coached.
He had sharp thinking around the penalty area and he was eager to get that yard ahead of defenders by making runs without the ball. He was clever at pulling players out of position and he wasn’t frightened to receive the ball when he was tightly marked then turn and get a snap shot.
He would work on his movement every day after training. I had to play thousands of passes into that area outside the six-yard box so he could practise getting half a yard on a centreback.
We got the best out of Ray Wallace and Gleghorn. Wallace would work to get possession back and could pass it five yards to Gleghorn, who was a good passer and could control the play. The ball would stick with him and he knew the right pass to make.
Ian Cranson and Vince Overson were two commanding centre-backs and, what Lou wanted, Lou got: it was defence first for them. They’d win tackles and headers, hold people off then not take any more than was required to get it out of the back.
To mix with experience we had youth like Pottsy, Graham Potter, and Larus Sigurdsson and in goal we had Mark
Prudhoe, who improved so much, in competition with Carl Muggleton.
Everyone was working together, from the lads on the pitch to Neil Baldwin, Winnie Hudson the kit lady and Bernard Paintin the chief scout.
We were up against a strong Leicester team in the play-off semi-final and both legs were close. We got a good result with a 0-0 draw at Filbert Street and I expected to win at home.
We were playing with so much confidence and rightly so because we’d had excellent results against the top six – but we couldn’t make a breakthrough. I wanted to keep a man sitting in midfield but we kept going forward… and were hit on the break. We had chances but they took theirs.
It just wasn’t our night. It hurt and even to this day it hurts. We should have been in the Premiership.