In a league above: Warnock on Boro’s ‘impossible dream’
Scarborough FC’s promotion to the Football League in 1987 was a uniquely momentous occasion for both the club and the town. PATRICK ARGENT talks to Neil Warnock, who recounts his term of office as team manager, prior to his appearance at the Spa this weekend.
“Today sees the greatest occasion in the history of this club. We have at last achieved Football League status and the goal of which we and thousands of our predecessors, both officials and fans, have dreamed of for over a century”, the late former SFC Director John Fawcett stated profoundly in his opening column for Scarborough Football Club’s new match programme of the 1987-8 Division 4 season.
At 3pm on August 15 1987 across the pitch the opponents facing the Football League's new upstarts on the day of their debut were no less than Wolverhampton Wanderers, a very familiar and renowned name in the annals of English football.
As would many other visiting teams to the Athletic Ground from higher divisions, the Wolves players found themselves unsuspectedly immersed into a noisily partisan and intimidating Northern bear-pit atmosphere of expectation.
Undaunted by the reputation of the opponents, each move of Boro’s exuberant attacking play would invariably be greeted by a loud barrage of sustained hammering on the ground’s pitch-side advertising hoardings.
This newly promoted Scarborough team would be the culmination of the exacting, forthright stewardship of Neil Warnock, the Sheffieldborn former player and at that time burgeoning team manager.
Recalling that initial Football League game, he said: “We were nervous. We knew we were going to be playing against Steve Bull and the Wolves. But we just loved the challenge.”
In collaboration with his assistant Paul Evans, Warnock had assembled a disparate
selection of players from which he forged a formidable cohesive unit that had clinically swept aside the Conference League opposition. “The team spirit was just fantastic. They just gelled,” Warnock vividly remembers.
The club at this juncture exuded a collective self-confidence and distinct sense of purpose evidently palpable
amongst everyone – the fans, the officials and the Boro players.
Scarborough’s rapid ascendency to the GM Vauxhall Conference League title of the 1986/7 season had resulted in them becoming the first team to win automatic promotion to the Football League following the abolition of the re-election system.
Warnock had arrived at Scarborough in 1986 after a chance conversation with club chairman Barry Adamson during an away match at Nuneaton Borough, which subsequently led to the offer of an interview.
“Scarborough to me at that stage was like I had got the job at Manchester United,” said Warnock, describing his reaction to acquiring the managership. “The stadium, the stand, the pitch, the town. I loved the seaside and I just loved everything about Scarborough. I thought wow, this is my dream club.”
Warnock’s approach to his profession has never diverted
from those Scarborough days, which he likened to a catalyst for his later career: “I never changed. Whatever league I went to, I was exactly the same. The way I dealt with people, the players, the fans, the board, the directors. Scarborough was an excellent grounding for what came after.”
On what drove him as a manager he explained: “I have always tried to make people enjoy themselves when I have managed their club, always tried to make the fans enjoy the football and get the team involved with the fans so they feel part of it.”
In addition to Warnock, some of the other participants of that August match would also progress to Premiership careers. Wolves eventually acceded to the
Premier League (in 2003). Referee Joe Warrell would take charge of the 1989 FA Cup Final between Liverpool and Everton and acquire international duties in the 1992 European Championships. Departing in December 1988 to take command of Notts County, Warnock’s brief but triumphant tenure at Scarborough would become the precursor of an expansive and highly successful career in the top flight of British football.
It spanned five decades, 16 clubs, a total of eight promotions (the record in English football) and 1,602 managerial appearances (another record).
Warnock, when asked if he had ever had ambitions to be the England manager, commented: “I wouldn’t have minded an international career,
but it’s like being Prime Minister being the manager of England. You can never win or please anybody”.
Although not specifically highlighting any achievement from a lengthy and eminent career, Warnock, reflecting back on his time at Scarborough, said: “We were 50-1 outsiders to win that league, we were supposed to finish bottom. It was tremendous and that is as good as you were ever going to get.”
That indomitable team spirit generated by their manager is deemed to continue as it is expected that a number of his former Boro team are to appear at Saturday’s event.
A landmark in Scarborough’s football history, Boro’s greatest exploit, spearheaded by Warnock and as described by John Fawcett, had indeed been the achievement of “the impossible dream”.
•Neil Warnock appears in conversation in ‘Are You With Me?’ at Scarborough Spa on Saturday November 19.