Ernie Hunt's Sideburns: The Missing Contribution! - p2.
The list of quality players we've had in our side over the years is fairly endless too, but we just don't seem able to get the right recipe. Like the chips served at Highfield Road on matchdays, they look pretty decent from the outside, but there's never any potato on the inside! We find/buy raw talent, fine-tune it, then watch helplessly as one of the bigger clubs makes us and/or the player that we cannot refuse! (Nowadays it's not necessarily the size of the offer that forces us to let players go though, it's the tantrum they throw if they are not allowed to leave due to being asked to honour their contract....). There seems to be at least one stage in every CCFC players career that a top club makes a serious enquiry about them. Ogrozovic (Probably the finest example of a professional footballer over the last two decades, but once again left out of the Queens `New Years Honours' List. Thanks ma'am....), Danny Thomas, Pearce (Stuart, obviously! Not Andy....), Gillespie, Peake, Stewart Robson, Speedie, Gallagher, Dave Bennett (Inconsistent, but on his day unbeatable! - And once told by the Brazilian manager (after he watched D.B. During the Cup Final) that he would select him! Hell, if he was good enough for Brazil's manager....!), Regis, and Terry Gibson (or maybe Robbie Keane) - a potential championship winning side if ever there was one, unfortunately not all playing for CCFC at the same time though! And even if they had of played together, something would have gone wrong....!
The bad times by far outweigh the good (Though just surviving has to be regarded as an achievement for a club of our size - It's not enough, but is a better option than relegation....), and when we reached our lowest point - the Ron Atkinson era (season 2) - a simple phone-call brought me back from my slumber. I had sent a letter to R.A., telling him how he had spent more more than everybody else who had managed CCFC put together (imagine how many non-league players Bobby Gould would have bought with the amount of money R.A. spent?!), had - on paper - the best team and squad possibly ever assembled here, and how we were being served up possibly the worst football ever seen from a Coventry City side! (A tip to anybody that wants to collect managers' autographs: I suggest you send them a letter telling them how they should do their job! You do have to put up with a patronising `Thank you for your comments, they will be considered' line, but it's usually signed by the person themselves....). They had taken only nine points from the first 16 games of the season, and included in that was only one victory! He wasn't the person to rebuild my enthusiasm (Probably to busy on the golf course....), it was his trusty assistant....
A few days after sending said letter, and upon arriving home from work, I was told by my now ex-girlfriend that `some Scottish sounding bloke called ... I think his name was Gordon .... something about Coventry City', had called (she had to go, she knew nothing about football!). I was supposed to be going down the pub to celebrate the start of another weekend (It was a Thursday (A tip to anybody who thinks the working week is to long, get mullered on Thursday and you won't even realise that you've been to work on Friday!)), and sat there re-doing my answer-machine message to say something along the lines of, `If that's a small, ginger-haired former Scottish International whose initials are GS, will he please call back tomorrow after 4....', when the phone rang.
A 35 minute chat with CCFC's (then) assistant manager, is probably why, despite the fact that at this moment in time a lot of people are wondering whether GS should step down, I am 101% behind him (without a knife!). Like most of the memories from THAT day in 1987, my poor memory has robbed me of most of the details of what was said between us on December 7th 1995 (Though he did make me realise that there are a lot of things that go on behind the scenes, things that we only ever get to hear whispers about (if even that!), for example, why certain players that everybody thinks should be in the team, are not). And I do remember chatting about how the team should play though, who should be in (And as mentioned above, was told why they shouldn't be!), and who should be out. I also remember telling GS that my average strike-rate was a goal a game during my schooldays - I now wish I had accepted that trial he offered me! I could be reading about me in this book! (I also wish I had taken the opportunity as being a footballer is a licence to print money these days....!). Not only that, but I would wear my CCFC shirt with pride, unlike some (it seems!)....
Two days later we hammered the previous seasons champions Blackburn Rovers 5-0! (A team that included Flowers, Le Saux, Berg, Sutton, Batty, Sherwood and Shearer!). And to prove how special the day was, even David Rennie scored!! I never got the credit I (thought I) deserved in the press afterwards, but will forever live in the knowledge that I have a 100% record as CCFC manager (with GS as my assistant!)....
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