How NOT to be a Football Millionaire - Keith Gillespie My Autobiography (16 page)

I needed a favour and my old pal from Blackburn, Craig Short, delivered. He’d moved to Sheffield United because of a long standing association with their boss, Neil Warnock, and put in a good word that led to an invitation to come training. It was the final week of pre-season and after stretching the legs on Monday and Tuesday, a friendly with Scarborough on the Wednesday was the chance to shine. I quickly learned that training alone leaves you miles behind fitness-wise. Warnock was blunt afterwards. “You did nothing right for 45 minutes,” he said, “but you put in 14 unbelievable crosses into the box after the break.” He offered me a year’s contract, and on the Saturday, I found myself coming off the bench to set up a goal in a live TV game. The opponents? Leicester. A sweet 4-1 win, given the circumstances. “Just the kind of delivery I’d expect from an international player,” Warnock said afterwards on the box.

Nice to hear, but the terms of my contract had planted the feet on the ground. I’d have scoffed at a £2,500 a week deal a couple of months earlier, but I had no bargaining position and signed what Sheffield United put on the table.

This was La Manga’s legacy. £115,000 in damages was considered a large payout in libel terms, yet it paled in comparison to the bigger picture. Within the space of two years, my annual salary had dropped by £598,000.

23

Ups And Downs

“TIME for Gilly”

My fellow substitutes at Sheffield United always reacted the same way when Neil Warnock turned around and told me to warm up. Like an announcer at a boxing match calling a prize fighter into the ring, they’d bellow ‘Time for Gilllyyyyy’.

I always had an instinct when that moment would come during my first season in Sheffield. We’d be in front, looking to close out the three points, and the gaffer would bring me on. My football evolution was complete. I used to be a flying winger who was considered a risky proposition. But now I was the safe pair of hands, a thirty-something with a lot of mileage. “Look at Gilly,” Warnock would say, as he talked an audience through a video of our previous match, “never gives the ball away.”

Warnock was old school and, on the football pitch, I thrived under his influence. He was unique, a real individual whose mood and mind would flick in an instant. A ranter and raver, but never cruel. It was just a short temper. We never knew what would come out of his mouth. He might be on the training ground, talking us through a set piece in detail and then he’d go off on a tangent and inquire about someone’s family. I remember Neil Shipperley, who had just moved to the club from London, asking around to see if anyone could recommend a babysitter. Mick Jones, one of the backroom staff, was recommending one of the girls from the club shop when the gaffer interrupted. “I’ll do it,” he said. He was 100 per cent serious as well, but his kind offer was politely refused.

That was typical of Warnock – he was hard to predict. Occasionally, he’d take a step back and leave the training to Stuart McCall. He might arrive 45 minutes into the session and stand at a distance with a brolly over his head. But he knew exactly what was going on. And I joined at the start of a special season. He’d been at the club for six years and steadily constructed a team that was good enough to win promotion. His only real flaw was an addiction to buying strikers. Loved them. We always had far too many.

I liked the way that Warnock dealt with players. He allowed lads to miss training if there was a good personal reason. Because I had a four-hour round trip, he used to give me an occasional day off to relax and I appreciated that.

Phil had an entirely different view of the man. I was thrilled when, after just a month at the club, Warnock beckoned me up the bus on the way home from a League Cup game in Shrewsbury and offered a contract on the spot, an increase to £3,000 a week and an extra year on my deal. Without hesitation, I agreed. Phil was furious. “They’ve mugged you into signing on the bloody cheap,” he screamed.

But after the uncertainty of the summer, I was content and enjoying football again. Everything fell into place that season. Ourselves and Reading set the pace, with Blackwell’s Leeds pushing us close after the New Year as the final straight approached. The gaffer sanctioned a trip to Cheltenham in March, the mecca for a horse racing fan like myself, and by chance we bumped into a gang of Leeds lads. Sam Ellis, Blackwell’s assistant, was in my ear saying they should have signed me because they were having problems on the right side of midfield. Our squad strength shone through over the closing weeks, with Danny Webber clinching promotion with a winner at Cardiff, a game I watched at home due to injury. After contributing to over 30 games, I could reflect with satisfaction. Not bad for a free agent who nobody had wanted.

Two and a half years after La Manga, I was back in the Premier League, and desperate to prove I could still cut it. I came off the bench in the opener with Liverpool and laid down a marker. Warnock was happy and, gradually, I progressed from super sub to regular. He even gave me the armband for the trip to Newcastle in November, knowing the significance of the fixture. We took home the three points. A month later, I banged home an 88th-minute winner against Charlton, one of the best strikes of my career, to lift us clear of the relegation zone. It was always going to be a battle to stay up, but it seemed as though we had control of our destiny.

As my influence grew, so did Phil’s anger at the contract I’d rashly signed a year earlier. Promotion had increased my wage to £3,500 a week, well below standard Premier League terms. Phil was constantly trying to speak to Neil or the chairman, Terry Robinson, to improve it, but he was getting nowhere. We wanted £10,000 a week, a figure which the club were baulking at. Relations soured. The gaffer rang Phil and said, “Keith is the sort of player who shouldn’t earn a lot of money, he should earn it by bonuses. If you give him money, he’ll spend it.”

I thought that was a load of bollocks, paying a player below the market rate because of how he might use the cash. I know that I threw cash away flippantly, but I’d never known a club to show too much concern. It was a tough one. I didn’t want to rock the boat because the football was going well, but Phil was adamant that I had to force the issue and his argument made sense. I had only six months left on my contract and the club didn’t seem to be in any hurry.

“Tell them you’re not fucking happy,” he’d say. “They’re trying to convince me you’re as happy as a pig in shit.”

By January, it had become apparent that slapping in a transfer request was the only way to go. We typed up a letter that I brought in my bag to a game at Reading. I was staying in London afterwards, so the plan was to get it to Robinson before the boys travelled home. My timing was poor. There was an edge between the teams after our promotion fight the previous season and Neil had a long-running feud with their assistant, Wally Downes. Things were already fraught on the sidelines when I came on in the 53rd minute. My first act was to challenge their winger Stephen Hunt, for a throw-in, and he pinched me on the hip as a greeting. I swung my arm back and caught him around his throat. He went down dramatically, and Mark Halsey flashed a red card.

I lost the plot and, after walking a few steps down the touchline, I went back to have a proper go at Hunt, leading with my forearm. I was dragged away and marched down the tunnel into the dressing room, not realising that I had made history – the quickest-ever sending off for a sub at that level. I’d been on the pitch for 12 seconds. The throw wasn’t even taken. Hunt had flicked the red mist switch and although I hadn’t worked up a sweat, I needed a shower to cool down. When I came out, Warnock was standing there, scowling.

“Is that what your fucking agent told you to do?” he screamed. “Get fucking sent off!”

I flipped, grabbed one of my boots and hurled it at the wall. “It’s got fuck-all to do with fucking agents.”

That was the end of the row. The game was still going on so I had no idea what the gaffer was doing there. It turned out he’d gone to war with Downes after my dismissal, and Halsey had sent him off, too.

We lost 3-1 and I pondered whether to hand in the letter. But it was now or never so I gave it to our goalie, Paddy Kenny, and asked him to pass it to Robinson on the coach home.

I was London-bound when he opened it, with the lads on the phone giving me a running commentary on his reaction. They thought it was hilarious. “Oh, he’s not happy... he’s straight on the phone.”

The request was refused, and the tension between Robinson and Phil escalated. The club had learned that Phil’s agent’s licence had expired. He had missed the papers in the post, and needed to go through the formalities to renew it. Robinson went to the press with the story and said they would be postponing all talks until June. Phil was certain it was just an excuse to delay negotiations, and was convinced that Warnock was part of a plot. He brought in a lawyer who could represent me in discussions instead of him, but they still baulked at our demands.

Despite all of that, I maintained a good relationship with the gaffer. I respected that he kept me in the team during the contract dispute when others might have taken a different course. He didn’t even hand out a fine for the sending-off. Perhaps they were trying to drive a wedge between myself and Phil, but that was never going to happen after all we’d been through.

Unfortunately, the Reading game was part of a sticky patch that dragged us right into the dogfight again. Warnock had assembled a capable squad, a grounded set of lads.

The only exception was Colin Kazim-Richards, a youngster who was a bit of an idiot. He would come into training wearing a t-shirt with a picture of himself on it. Paddy Kenny drew a little moustache on it one day when he was in the showers. He was a cocky little kid. Even when I scored that screamer against Charlton, he ran over to tell me what a fluke it was. Nobody was sad when he left for Turkey.

With a good spirit and solid work ethic, I reckoned we would pull through in the final weeks, particularly when our main rivals were an inconsistent West Ham side. They were struggling and their fate looked to be sealed when it emerged that their Argentine signings, Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano, were effectively owned by a third party, their agent’s company, which represented a breach of Premier League rules. Mascherano had moved to Liverpool in January, but Tevez played on for West Ham, even though he had been signed illegally.

The vibe was that West Ham were in real trouble. They went before an independent hearing in April and were fined £5.5 million. But there was no points deduction. The verdict gave the Premier League the power to terminate Tevez’s registration, yet they allowed him to play on. He scored seven goals in their final ten matches.

It wouldn’t have mattered to Sheffield United if we’d taken a point from our final game of the season. Wigan, who were also part of the equation, were the visitors to Bramall Lane. They needed a victory to overtake us. Considering that West Ham also had to win away at Manchester United to send us down, we kicked off ‘Survival Sunday’ in a strong position. But it all went wrong. I had a terrible game. Wigan led 2-1 at the break, and word filtered through that Tevez had scored a goal at Old Trafford that would be enough to keep West Ham up. We dominated the second half and missed chance after chance. Danny Webber clipped one over their keeper and was following up for the rebound off the post but the ball took a weird ricochet in a different direction. That summed it up. Time ran out and we had that horrible, sinking feeling.

Warnock resigned, while the club promised to fight the injustice and got stuck into a messy legal battle. I was part of a group of players that filed for compensation, but that went nowhere. The club eventually settled out of court for a substantial sum in March 2009, a piece of news that meant nothing to me. By then, I was on a short-term deal with Bradford, a world away from the bright lights. The Wigan nightmare was the end of my Premier League career.

I was oblivious to that reality at the time. True to form, I didn’t get bogged down in disappointment and, instead, looked on the bright side. Warnock’s departure had a silver lining. Eight years after the move to Middlesbrough fell through, I finally got a chance to work under Bryan Robson, who was drafted in as the replacement. Robbo immediately showed a desire to sort me a new contract. And, even though we’d been relegated, I secured a deal that was close to Premier League level. £6,500 a week with a £3,000 appearance fee. The tension between Robinson and Phil was still there as we reached agreement. “I like you, but I don’t like that fucker,” Robinson said.

My luck was in, even when it came to the horses. I’d moved to Harrogate, a beautiful spa town, that was closer to Sheffield. So I was spending less time in the car and more on the gambling. One morning, I stopped in a bookies on the way to training and stuck £20 on a Lucky 15 – an accumulator bet involving four different horses. They all came in, at prices ranging from 9/4 to 15/2. The shop wrote me a cheque for £24,000. A few weeks later, I landed another for £6,500. I diverted the winnings into my William Hill account, fuelled by a thirst for more.

Robbo could have done with some of that fortune. It just didn’t happen for him. Really, we had a formula that should have worked. Warnock had brought in Kiddo towards the end of his reign and he stuck around, so we had an iconic manager and a top coach, in addition to a squad with plenty of Premier League quality. But it ended up a bit like the Blackburn experience. Teams lifted their game against us and we crumbled under pressure, right from the opening day when we conceded a late equaliser to Colchester. Robbo was under pressure from there on.

Outwardly, he didn’t show the strain. He didn’t go around the place bollocking people or throwing teacups. But when he raised his voice, it meant something. And he was capable of constructive criticism. I wasn’t giving him enough. I know he was disappointed with me, especially after pushing for the contract.

We lost 3-2 at Scunthorpe and he called me into his office.

“How many crosses did you get in?” he asked. I had no idea.

“You didn’t get any in. What’s happened to you?”

The words stung and in the next game, against Cardiff, I started well and delivered a few decent crosses. And then I pulled my hamstring. It was typical of Robbo’s luck. He was getting the grief when his soft players were to blame. After Christmas, the murmurs about his future grew louder, to the extent that we were all talking about it. I think everybody knew what was coming. We did hint at promise, winning an FA Cup tie at Bolton, but then followed it up with another dismal show against Scunthorpe, a team we should have been beating 10 times out of 10. Fittingly enough, Robbo’s final game was at promotion-chasing West Brom, where we fully deserved our point. On paper, the two teams were evenly matched. The problem for Robbo was that they were Premier League bound, and Sheffield United were 16th.

I remember looking at him on the sideline that night, a former West Brom player and manager, listening to the chants of ‘you’re getting sacked in the morning’ from their fans, and thinking what a lonely place management must be. Here was a legend of the game, a decorated former England captain, being mocked by people who used to sing his name. The club tried to persuade Robbo to stay on in an ambassadorial role but he saw that offer for what it was, and they parted ways.