The Alan Ball era

[melrose40yarder]

This is a common myth IMO. Horton had us playing some great football in the first few months of the 1994-95 season for sure - who could forget the 5-2 win at home to Spurs in particular and convincing home wins against Everton and West Ham as well? - but it was only home games where we were performing. Away from home we were getting twatted left, right, and centre. 3-0 defeats at Arsenal, Chelsea, and West Ham, and that 5-0 debacle at Old Trafford. All those defeats came before Christmas and once our unbeaten home record went against Arsenal in December 1994, our home form fell off a cliff too. We went from 6th in the league in early December to the brink of the relegation zone in the space of 3 or 4 months and it was only those back-to-back wins at home to Liverpool on Good Friday and away to eventual champions Blackburn on Easter Monday that kept us up. Those 2 wins were huge and fully deserved but they actually came totally out of the blue and were outliers during a prolonged run of terrible results and performances which had seen us win only 2 of our previous 19 games.

Sacking Horton was the right decision for me as I feel he may well have taken us down the following season. Appointing Alan Ball is a different discussion altogether and it doesn't in any way make Horton's sacking wrong. And let's not forget that Horton hardly set the world alight in any of his subsequent jobs apart - IIRC - from a very brief spell where he had Huddersfield performing well. But it all went pear-shaped in the end and he was sacked just over 2 years into the job with Huddersfield bottom of the table.

Maybe so but sacking Horton for Alan Ball was mismanagment on a major scale.

 

[Bobby the blue]

City job was too big for Ball. With all due respect Portsmouth were or never have been on the same league as City.
I just think it overwhelmed him and everything surrounding city.
He also probably thought all his luck was in to get the job and didn’t want to knock the apple cart with regards to franny lee.

I was quite excited by frank Clarke coming in after he did a very good job at Forest. I don’t think transfers were his forte though either at city or forest. I mean Andre silenzi says it all.

Maybe he would have kept us up that season but will never know.

 

[edinburgh123]

My mate used to play golf with Ian Brightwell. I remember my mate saying how Brightwell was gobsmacked when Alan Ball said in a team talk "lets keep it simple, when any of you 10 get the ball just pass to him (Kinky) as he is the one with the ability. Then find space and he will find you".
How to alienate over 90% of your team in 10 seconds

 

[Corky]

Pearce had a significantly better record than Horton, so the actual Horton sacking wasn't that surprising.

Balls record at Soton was marginally better than Horton's at City.

 

[Pingu the Penguin]

Pearce had a significantly better record than Horton, so the actual Horton sacking wasn't that surprising.

Balls record at Soton was marginally better than Horton's at City.

Before posting the OP I was looking at his Soton record. Feast or famine and Matt Le Tis got him out of the cart on a couple of occasions (admittedly brought back into the fold by Ball)

 

[eversince 76]

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.

Think I said “ah yes, I remember” about 20 times. Well done.

 

[RayCTID]

I agree with a few posters in this thread that Alan Ball wasn't completely responsible for our decline; and he wasn't our worst manager in the world but he was totally shit

 

[ooh vonky vonky]

Then there was the signing of Nigel Clough, a painfully slow deep-lying forward when the team required pace and width.

Fuck me reading through this thread has put my therapy back a few decades.

My memories of Clough in a city shirt are thankfully limited to the game when someone ran on the pitch and literally told him how shit he was and then proceeded to try and rip the shirt off him. Happy days indeed!

To anyone who wasn’t around in those days … all I can say is that it was character building.

 

[jma]

You've touched on one of the biggest problems of this era: Franny Lee.

Whilst I agree that hindsight shows it would have been a failure, the reason that Kidd didn't come was directly down to Franny. Kidd had agreed to join City verbally but not told United. Lee rang Kidd and asked if he'd done it yet, and Kidd said he hadn't and he wasn't looking forward to it, to which Lee replied "Are you sure you're the right man for us then?". At that, Kidd got cold feet and changed his mind. This is the side of Lee which fucked up the club: he was an abrasive, aggressive, controlling "leader" and that type of management rarely works in the long run, certainly not in a football club. That's why I personally give short shrift to the Coppell rumours: I think Coppell was a nice man, like Kidd, and was bright enough to realise that Lee was a prick.

Also we nearly got Dave Bassett from Palace who was a resepcted manager at the time, maybe after Ball's resignation. He tells a similar story from memory: he accepted and then Lee put him off.

You also forgot one of the decisive factors in our 1996 relegation which can again be traced back to Lee: we sold our best player, Garry Flitcroft, at Easter in the middle of a relegation battle, purely because we had totally run out of cash.

I think there's a lot of truth in this.

Seem to remember that Dave Bassett (who would have been considered a bit of a coup at that point - which, given his style, is depressing) accepted the job verbally, went to bed, woke up at 4 in the morning shitting himself, asking his wife what the fuck he had agreed to, coming to a basket case club, and phoned up first thing to say "fuck that".

 

[jma]

My mate used to play golf with Ian Brightwell. I remember my mate saying how Brightwell was gobsmacked when Alan Ball said in a team talk "lets keep it simple, when any of you 10 get the ball just pass to him (Kinky) as he is the one with the ability. Then find space and he will find you".
How to alienate over 90% of your team in 10 seconds

Sounds (and is) ridiculous but it is common knowledge that this was also his tactic at Southampton with Le Tissier and they bought in to it.

Still mental though