Bruce Rioch was interested in the City job in the summer of 1995 but accepted an offer from Arsenal instead, so ceased to be an option for us. The way it worked out for him there, he may have been better off coming to us, but I can understand why he regarded the Arse as an opportunity he couldn't turn down.
We had talks with George Graham as well, but he was facing FA charges over the bungs he received when he was at Arsenal and ended up being banned for a season, so we switched our sights to Brian Kidd. If we'd managed to appoint him at the time it would have been hailed as a massive coup, but he wouldn't resign his post at United. He wanted to go with Ferguson's blessing, which wasn't forthcoming. Given how Kidd performed at Blackburn, he'd probably have been no better than Ball, anyway.
Ball operated with Francis Lee as a kind of de facto Director of Football and Lee felt we had to reduce a wage bill which was vastly excessive relative to our income. It was Lee's contacts who were responsible for the signings of German players in this period, but Immel and Frontzeck as effective replacements for Coton and Phelan left us greatly diminished, as did the swap of Walsh for Creaney, Then there was the signing of Nigel Clough, a painfully slow deep-lying forward when the team required pace and width.
With a bit of luck, we could have avoided the drop but, having sold Quinn and Curle after going down without replacing them, we ended up with a very underwhelming side in the second tier. And the players who were clearly Alan Ball choices rather than Lee's - the likes of Martin Phillips and Scott Hiley - hardly set the pulse racing, either, so Bally doesn't have the mitigating factor that all the players were sourced for him. The recruitment was disastrous all round.
Clark was definitely worse, though what was weird was that he started off pretty well when he lifted us out of a relegation battle when he arrived. He seemed quite assured, identified all the obvious problems and put them right. In the summer, though, he turned into a disaster. I knew he'd lost the plot when, having signed Tony Vaughan and loudly proclaimed the player to be the answer to our problems at left-back, he put the player's poor performances down to not being suited to playing at left-back.
Just before Clark arrived, we'd had a big share issue in which Stephen Boler together with John Wardle and David Makin refinanced the club as it floundered following relegation and the shock of Steve Coppell walking out after 30-odd days in charge. There should have been enough cash to put together a side with a decent chance of promotion in 1997/8 but Clark pissed it all away, left us facing relegation and accumulated a squad of 50-odd players in the process. He was utterly dire.
