Neil Lennon: Man and Bhoy

CHAPTER FOUR Joining Dario’s Crewe

It was not all work and no fun for me at that time. In a bar in Manchester I had met a lovely girl called Claire Whiteoak and I plucked up the courage to ask her out. A stunning blonde, she was slightly older than me and worked as a hairdresser. Soon we were ‘going steady’, as the phrase was in those days, and I met her folks and got on well with them. She was my first love and we were very serious about each other. All of a sudden I was a very happy young man with a terrific girlfriend and good prospects even if I wasn’t earning fantastic money. I was on about ?00 per week, but out of that I had to pay digs as these were no longer provided by the club. After tax and outlays, I had about £20-£30 per week to live on—it certainly wasn’t the high life at that time.

Manchester City were back in the top flight, however, and good earnings would surely come my way if I could break into the first-team reckoning and City could stay in Division One. From the youngest apprentice to the manager and chairman Peter Swales, there was huge anticipation for the season ahead. You couldn’t help but get caught up in it, especially as City had bounced straight back after relegation. Personally I felt that, at eighteen, this could be my time to seal my place in the first team.

Yet from the start of the 1989/90 season, things did not go according to plan. There were times when the first team played very good football, but in retrospect there were not enough quality players to sustain the effort over a whole season—you need strength in depth simply to survive in a top league, especially when you make a bad start to the season, as City did in 1989.

There were some very good days, however. We had won only one of our first seven matches before we faced our great Mancunian rivals at Maine Road on 23 September 1989—a date emblazoned on every City fan’s memory. United had paid millions for Gary Pallister and Paul Ince to strengthen a squad which already had the likes of Steve Bruce and Brian McClair, but they were not going well either and the pressure was growing on manager Alex Ferguson. The atmosphere was electric at Maine Road that day, and by the end it was the City support which was celebrating, a record victory over their deadliest rivals, a feat which I know lives on in the memory of City fans to this day.

I was not playing that afternoon but was in the stand to watch an unforgettable match as we ran riot, blitzing United with terrific attacking football. Two goals from David Oldfield and one each from Trevor Morley, Ian Bishop and Andy Hinchcliffe earned us a final result of 5-1. You had to feel sorry for Mark Hughes as he scored United’s only goal and it was one of the best I’ve ever seen, a hitch-kick into the top corner performed about five feet off the ground.

We all thought that such a sensational victory would spark a mini-revival but it was not to be. By December we were deep in relegation trouble and had lost heavily on occasions, Derby County beating us 6-0 away, Nottingham Forest winning 3-0 at Maine Road and Liverpool also hammering us at our place, 4-1.

Mel Machin then paid the price for the poor run when Peter Swales sacked him. Joe Royle, then manager of Oldham Athletic, was appointed in his place but changed his mind before Howard Kendall, who had managed Blackburn Rovers, Everton and Athletic Bilbao, took the job. Howard had but one aim, to keep City in the First Division, and that was going to be a tough task given our lowly position at the time.

Not surprisingly, he sent for some of his Everton ‘Old Boys’ to help out, including Peter Reid, Alan Harper and Mark Ward. Every manager needs people around him he knows and trusts, but new signings also mean that younger players get pushed to the back of the queue while other players are sold or swapped to make way for the newcomers. My mate from Lurgan, Gerry Taggart, for instance, had made ten starts for the first team but in January was sold to Barnsley for £75,000. It was a very good move for my friend as he made such an impact at Barnsley that within a few weeks he was called up to make his full international debut.

I knew I was going to miss Taggs and I also wondered what fate lay in store for me. For in truth, the reserves were not Howard’s priority, though I could soon see that he was a great coach, a very good man manager who knew how to build a team.

He didn’t seem to notice me so all I could do was keep plugging away in the reserves where I hardly missed a game. However, I was soon spending more time on the treatment table than I would have liked, due mostly to a succession of niggles which affected my groin area in particular. Still, I played every reserve match and thought I was doing well, and I was quite confident of having my contract extended at the end-of-season talks with players which every manager held in those days before Bosman pre-contracts and transfer windows.

Sometimes in the reserve matches you would find yourself playing against big-name players who were either coming back from injury or had been dropped to the reserves for some reason. I remember having a rare old tussle with Nigel Clough, for instance, and Viv Anderson was another famous player I faced on the pitch.

Playing Manchester United was always a bit special no matter what level it was. Reserve matches were played more often at Maine Road than Old Trafford, which was probably just as well for my landlord and friend Len Duckett. He would come along to support his City lodgers, such as Michael Hughes and myself, and when we played United he would use his season ticket and find himself shouting for us while sitting among his fellow United fans. They would tap him on the shoulder and ask him, ‘Why are you sitting here with us and shouting for them?’

Undaunted, Len would reply, ‘I’m a season-ticket holder but that’s my boys out there.’ That’s the type of character Len is—loyal to a fault.

We went out of the League Cup at the quarter-final stage, beaten 1-0 by Coventry City, and lost in the FA Cup to Millwall after three games. First Division survival was all that mattered and the club spent £1m on Niall Quinn to see if he could provide the goals that would save us from the drop.

He scored on his debut to earn a 1-1 draw with Chelsea and then we beat league leaders Aston Villa away which sparked a run of victories. Howard Kendall had managed to turn things around and by Easter Monday of 1990, City were safe from relegation. All that remained was for me to make it into the first team and get my contract extended.

I thought I might get a run out in the first team in the end-of-season games but that did not happen. All the contracts were sorted out on one day shortly after City had ensured First Division survival. I remember being in the dressing room waiting to be called up. Another young player, Ian Thomson, and myself were the first to be called out. I thought it was not a good sign that only two of us were given the call, and I was slightly apprehensive when I was the first to be summoned to the manager’s room, though I still did not feel too worried at that point. Although I had only played for the reserves, I had done consistently well so I did not think there would be a problem.

Howard had Peter Reid with him, as he was his assistant at the time. The manager got straight to the point. ‘This is the time of year when it is good news or bad news for players,’ he said. ‘I’m afraid that in your case it is bad news.’

He proceeded to talk to me for at least another five minutes, but I’m afraid I can barely remember a single word he said. My mind just could not take in the enormity of the fact that I was being sacked, though football calls it by the supposedly nicer name of ‘free transfer’.

There have been thousands of boys like me in that same position. I doubt if any one of us could really explain how it feels when you hear the dreaded verdict that someone thinks you are not good enough to make a career as a professional with his club. You really do feel as if it is the end of your world, and in a sense, it is. If you’re with a top-flight club as I was, then the only way to go is down, or even completely out of the game.

Maybe Howard Kendall and Peter Reid advised me to look for another club down the leagues. At least that’s what I assume they said, but I was so deeply in shock that I really cannot recall much of what they said. I do remember Howard finishing by saying that he would put my name on the flyer containing the names of players who would be out of contract that went round every club. He added that he did think I had a future in the game but it just wasn’t going to be with Manchester City at that point.

What really hurt was that the two members of the coaching staff who had worked most closely with me, Tony Book and Glyn Pardoe, thought otherwise, believing that I could have a future with City.

I was angry and bitter for some time afterwards. I felt I had done enough to justify being kept on, but I learned as I progressed in football that such oustings are often not the fault of the player and that managers can get it wrong, about youngsters in particular. I myself have often said that I am a late developer, so I want to make it clear that I do not hold any grudges against Howard or Manchester City in any way whatsoever. He had a decision to make and he took it with a view to what was best for the club at the time. He just concluded that either I was not going to make the grade at Maine Road or that I would not be suitable for the kind of team he was trying to create. I don’t blame him for that—even though he was wrong!

The worst thing was that I then had to go back to the dressing room and relay the verdict to my colleagues and peers. I just could not face them. I went into the toilet beside the manager’s office and immediately burst into copious tears. It must have taken me about five minutes to compose myself. Eventually I made my way into the dressing room but as soon as I had told them, I started crying again anyway.

My first thought was for Claire. Things were going so well between us, but here was I with no job, no prospects and probably no money in a few weeks’ time. It already looked to me as if I would have to go home to Lurgan and start all over again, so I just could not see a way ahead for us. It appeared that I would lose my career and my girlfriend in one go.

All the lads in that dressing room were sympathetic and gave me plenty of advice, most of which was not to panic and try to find another club as soon as possible. I think I have shown over the years that I’m a pretty resilient character, but back then as an eighteen year old it was difficult to bounce back. Eventually I told myself that I would show Howard Kendall that he had made a mistake and that I could make it as a professional.

Luckily for me, there were seven or eight reserve games left so I could put myself in the shop window. My contract did not expire until the end of June so I had about two months to find another club, and I soon became pretty determined to do so as I wanted to stay in England and hopefully play for a team near Manchester and Claire.

I also had another method of showing the football world that I was worth signing. At the beginning of April 1990, I had been picked for Northern Ireland’s Under-21 squad to play against Israel at Coleraine—the place where I had enjoyed such good times in the Milk Cup. Perhaps that was a good omen for me, because manager Billy Bingham put me straight into the team to play Israel.

This was a memorable game for me as it marked my debut at that level, but I’m sure the other players who took part and the small number of spectators who attended will remember it for other reasons, as there was a blizzard in the second half. The match had to be abandoned two minutes from time as the floodlights failed—the second time that had happened in matches between the two countries, the first time being in Tel Aviv in a World Cup qualifier.

I have to say I was never totally impressed with Billy Bingham, not least because he had the annoying habit of calling me Noel, and my dad was amazed and angry that the manager of the national football team couldn’t even get my name right. He did it so often that even the football writers picked up the habit and one of the reports of that match against Israel refers to me as Noel Lennon. It was not as if they could confuse me with Noel Bailie, who was also in the team that night, as we look nothing like each other.

It was Noel who set up the move for our opening goal, scored by Iain Dowie of Luton Town. Banini should have scored for Israel after thirty-eight minutes but he dallied and I just managed to nick the ball off his toes. Israel did equalize after eighty-five minutes but Paul Gray of Luton, who had come on as a substitute, scored three minutes later. We were still celebrating when the floodlights failed, and since the game was a friendly the score stood in the record books.

I knew I had done well and a few weeks later I was delighted to be picked for a rather more prestigious game, this time at Under-23 level. Although the players of both sides often play alongside each other in England, games between Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland are always keenly contested and the match at Shamrock Park, Portadown, on 15 May was no exception.

By that time, I was feeling rather better about life as I was doing very well in the City reserves and had already received a couple of calls from scouts and one manager. The first person to take an active interest and come along to see me play was Des Bennett, a scout acting on behalf of Crewe Alexandra of the Third Division.

Des watched me play a couple of times and persuaded Crewe’s manager Dario Gradi to come along and see me. After he had watched me a couple of times, Dario called to say ‘We would like to take you aboard at the end of the season.’ No details were discussed but at least I had an offer.

Obviously I was still hoping for an offer from a bigger club, and the Under-23 game gave me an ideal opportunity to show what I could do. A couple of newspapers highlighted the fact that I was in the shop window and I told them that I felt I had been badly treated but was still ‘determined to make the grade’.

Gerry Taggart captained the side that night, having already made his debut at senior level, and my City colleague Michael Hughes also played. There were several managers from big clubs in the stadium that night, such as Chris Nicholl of Southampton, and I wasn’t the only one out to impress them.

In the first half in particular I played out of my skin, as did several others in our team, and we went in at half-time 2-0 up. The Republic fought back and equalized when John Sheridan tripped over me in the penalty box and the referee pointed to the spot—the match reports say I brought down John but of course we full-backs, as I was then, never see it like that. David Kelly of Leicester scored from the spot and also hit the winner ten minutes from time.

To lose 2-3 after being 2-0 up against our old rivals was hugely disappointing to put it mildly, but at least I had performed well overall. Back in Manchester, there was better news for me as John Rudge, the manager of Port Vale who were then in Division Two, called to say he was interested in signing me. He explained that he still had to sort out who was going and who was staying but he would get back to me once that process was completed.

Dario Gradi, meanwhile, had invited me down to Gresty Road, home of Crewe Alexandra. I did not know much about the town or the club, so I was in for something of a surprise. I knew the Alex, as locals called them, were nicknamed the Railwaymen because of the town’s huge train station and links with the rail industry, and I knew of Gradi’s growing reputation, but that was about the extent of my knowledge.

It was a complete culture shock when I arrived at the club. Maine Road was not the biggest and best stadium in the First Division, but it was a light year ahead of Gresty Road. I suppose it was very traditional in an old-fashioned Spartan way, but the facilities left a lot to be desired. The gym, for instance, was nothing more than a sweatbox with some weights—I was to get to know it all too well though, as you will discover.

Dario was impressive as he communicated his plans for the club, but when we began to talk money I was a bit disappointed. As a reserve player at City, I had earned £100 per week, so as a first-team player—even in the Third Division—I was expecting to earn double that. But Dario outlined the club’s budget and financial problems, and offered me a two-year deal worth £110 per week, plus bonuses.

I had been hoping for a bigger club and more money, but Dario proved very convincing and he did have a reputation for his work with young players. In particular, he was good at improving players freed from other clubs and selling them on, as he had done with David Platt, who he got for nothing from Manchester United and sold to Aston Villa for £200,000. Also, when I had played for City’s youth team against Crewe Alexandra, they had always impressed me as a team who were trying to play good football.

I had to make my mind up quickly as my contract was running out, so though I was bitterly disappointed at having to join a club two divisions lower, I only had one concrete offer on the table and it was a two-year deal, so I decided to sign. I suppose I could have waited to see whether an offer materialized from Port Vale or some other club, but Dario had done such a good job selling Crewe Alexandra to me that I plumped for them. At the time it seemed a disastrous backward step, but in hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I have long since learned in life that sometimes you have to take a step backwards to go forwards.

Dario did indeed live up to his reputation as a fantastic coach, particularly of youngsters like myself. At times he could be very straightforward, even curt, but at other times he would be funny and he was always very encouraging. He kept telling us to go out and play football and enjoy the game, and try to express ourselves on the pitch.

He was very ‘hands on’ or should that be ‘feet on’. I particularly remember that when we were practising set-pieces, if we did not get it correct and hit the wrong spot with the ball, he would march up and get hold of the ball, then deliver the free-kick perfectly to the exact place he wanted it.

He taught us a whole range of things which were new to the game in England. He had been very influenced by Ajax of Amsterdam and their training methods, and in a way it was he who brought the continental philosophy into the game in England, following their approach a few years before the big influx of players and managers from abroad in the 1990s. He emphasized movement on and off the ball and told us to try to copy the good European teams.

Goodness knows how he managed it, but he persuaded Red Star Belgrade to play Crewe in a friendly, and even though we lost 0-4, it was a really pleasurable experience to take part in a game with such skilful players. They scored four, but it could have been fourteen, and afterwards Dario told us that he would love us to play like them—we ended up getting relegated and Red Star won the European Cup that season, so that plan didn’t exactly work out.

Although much of the attention focused on Dario’s youthful brigade, the Crewe squad at the time were not just a bunch of raw youngsters. Kenny Swain was the assistant manager and he had won the European Cup with Aston Villa in 1982. He was still playing even though he was coming up for forty and was fantastically fit. Apart from being a really nice guy, he taught us a lot and for all his achievements in the game he was a modest man.

Steve Walters was another fine player. He had been Crewe’s youngest-ever first-team player and had captained the England youth team. He was a very talented boy but he didn’t make the impact expected of him later in his career.

One of the players who joined us for a season later in my time there was someone I knew quite a bit about. Jim Harvey hailed from Lurgan, and like myself he had started out with Glenavon FC, though he had played rather more than my two matches with our home-town side. He had gone on to have a long stint with Tranmere Rovers before moving to Crewe. He was in the later stages of his career, and went on to become assistant to Sammy McIlroy when he was manager of Northern Ireland, where I encountered him several years after I had left Crewe. Jim was manager of Morecambe of the Nationwide Conference League for a dozen years and twice took them to the brink of Football League qualification, but he was sacked in May 2006, to be replaced by none other than Sammy McIlroy.

Other players at the time included Rob Jones who went on to sign for Liverpool for £300,000 and then played for England, while Craig Hignett was a Scouser who was transferred to Middlesborough for £500,000. I recognized one player as soon as I walked in the door—Andy Gunn had played against me in the Manchester City v Watford Youth Cup Final.

It was a happy dressing room at the start of my time at Crewe and would generally stay that way for the rest of my time there. It took me a while to get to grips with the demands of playing for the first team even at that level, but Dario had confidence in me and picked me from the start of the season, which sadly began disastrously as we took just one point from our first six league games.

The first really big games I played for Crewe were against a club who were legends of world football. After knocking out Grimsby Town, we were drawn against Liverpool in the League Cup. We actually took the lead against them at Anfield, but that probably only served to annoy them and they came back to overwhelm us 5-1. The return leg was an all-ticket affair at Gresty Road, which at least showed that the stadium when full could generate plenty of atmosphere, but we were on the wrong end of a 1-4 drubbing. In fairness to us, that was the Liverpool team who were league champions and even to be on the same pitch as the likes of Ray Houghton, John Barnes and Ian Rush was a big thrill for all of us, especially since I was still only nineteen.

I had decided to stay in Stockport, and even though I wasn’t being charged the earth for my digs, money was very tight. Those were the days when a tenner could buy you five or six pints, which was just as well as that was usually how much I had left for a night out.

My favourite local pub was the Elizabethan in Heaton Moor Road, Stockport, and it was there that I met and drank with two friends, Chris Mooney and Scott Woodhall, who are still mates of mine to this day. There were a lot of talented people who drank in the Elizabethan at that time and formed a loose grouping of friends. There were actors such as Craig Cash who was in The Royle Family. He and a guy called Phil Mealey wrote a television sit-com called Early Doors which was based loosely on The Elizabethan where they both drank. Sally Lindsay, who played Shelley Unwin on Coronation Street, was another regular, and it was a place where a lot of musicians gathered, including two brothers called Gallagher. I was just getting seriously into music at that time so you will not be surprised to learn that I was a big fan of Mancunian music at the time of ‘Madchester’, when bands like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays burst onto the scene.

Noel and Liam Gallagher were a class apart from the start. They were just putting their band together and it was great to watch them develop and became bigger than all of the other Manchester bands. I’m still a huge fan of Oasis today. From the first time that I went to see them I was blown away by their live performances, and I saw them quite a few times before and after they were famous.

One of their best-ever gigs was at Maine Road in Manchester in 1996. Everybody wanted to be at that concert and it was generally reckoned to have been a high point in the Manchester scene of the 1990s, but I don’t have the fondest memories of that day.

I had just signed for Leicester City and Steve Lomas, a great friend of mine who was captain of Manchester City, managed to get us backstage passes for the day. It would be fair to say that we had enjoyed a drink or five before the gig even started. I remember there was a long corridor backstage and as we went along it I spotted Liam and Noel and Liam’s wife Patsy Kensit, plus Stan Collymore and a few of the Liverpool players. As we went outside to stand beside the executive boxes, for some reason Steve Lomas and I started to have an argy-bargy. I cannot even remember who started it or why, but we were soon rolling about on the floor in front of all the VIPs, trying to punch each other but failing miserably because we were under the influence. The bouncers took a dim view of our scrapping, but for some reason it was me who got thrown out and not Steve. A few years later Oasis played a gig in Glasgow and we managed to get backstage to meet the band, the Gallaghers being great Celtic fans as well as Manchester City diehards. The first thing that Noel said when he saw me was ‘Right, you, no fighting tonight.’