When the call came Ronnie Moore had mixed feelings. A little voice inside his head counselled caution but even as several decades worth of bad memories about the place came flooding back, another part of him was already mapping out the first training session.
Hartlepool United were on other end of the line. It was December, they were six points adrift at the bottom of League Two and had just sacked Paul Murray. Unemployed for the previous eight months since being dismissed, harshly in his opinion, by Tranmere Rovers following a contravention of Football Association betting rules, Moore sensed he was unlikely to receive a better managerial offer. “To me, as both a player and a manager, Hartlepool was always a freezing cold Tuesday night,” he says. “The thought of those Tuesdays frightened me a bit. But I was out of work and it was a job.”
Even so, there are less challenging forms of employment. As the April sun streams through the canteen windows at Maiden Castle, the idyllic training facility Hartlepool share with Durham University and the iPad their manager studies over a pre-work out breakfast confirms their latest, relatively healthy, position one point above the relegation zone, all seems serene but, in reality, Moore has endured weeks of struggle.
A recent run of four wins in five games has transformed the club’s landscape as they prepare for Saturday’s all important trip to their fellow relegation rivals York, but not so long ago Hartlepool were nine points from safety. It did not take Moore long to realise the weather was the least of his problems. “Shocked is probably the right word to describe my reaction when I got here,” says the 62-year-old, who remains a cult hero in South Yorkshire after guiding Rotherham to successive promotions. “Before you get started you think: ‘It can’t be as bad as people say,’ then you get here and you realise it really is that bad,” he says. “I remember in one of my first training sessions we literally took about 15 minutes to string six passes together.
“The whole club had a fear factor so we tried not put the players under too much pressure in training. I tried not to get too upset when they gave the ball away, which is hard sometimes and I talked to them, put my arm around them.
“I think they’d had a lot of size nines and 10s aimed at their backsides but I needed to find the ones to kick and the ones to love. I don’t want players sending me birthday cards but you have to get them on your side.”
As Marlon Harewood, Hartlepool’s most high-profile individual, and his team-mates happily eat breakfast surrounded by students spending the Easter holidays in Durham and wearing their distinctive Palatinate purple sports kit it is almost impossible to imagine how toxic the atmosphere had become.
“Our supporters have been unbelievable – we’re taking 2,000 to York,” says Moore. “But when I first came you heard ‘you’re not fit to wear the shirt’ from behind the dugout. At the time it was true. Only a few weeks ago we still weren’t getting a response and I felt like letting a couple of supporters into the dressing room to tell the players what it’s all about.”
Happily Moore’s brand of tough love – in between sustained bouts of encouragement he has informed his squad only one player would be good enough for League One while others are lucky not be working in the local supermarket – was set to pay off.
“The penny’s dropped,” he says. “Luckily we didn’t need the supporters in the dressing room. For the last month or so we’ve all been together, we’ve got a lot more commitment from the lads and they’ve got a bit of belief. With five games to go we know what we’ve got to do. We’re in a position where we don’t need help from anybody, wheras two or three weeks ago we were all on the prayer mat.”
A year ago he was sacked by Tranmere. Although Moore admitted breaching FA rules, he feels the issue was amplified out of all proportion. “It was nothing but a family syndicate,” he says, surveying the undulating fields and wooded hilltops outside the window. “And I didn’t get a chance to sit down and talk and put my points over to anyone at the club. I’m convinced if we’d been top of the league I’d still be there.”
It gives him no pleasure that Tranmere were relegated from League One last spring and now a point beneath Hartlepool, occupy the second of League Two’s relegation places. “When you’re sacked for gross misconduct there’s no pay-off so that was an easy way out of paying me £130,000,” he claims. “You try not to be bitter but I was bitter. It smells of something not right.”
He failed to relish his sabbatical. “You do the garden,” he says. “And when your missus goes out you do the ironing and the washing. I learnt what temperature to stick the whites on, I know all about cottons but there’s only so much of it you can do. You think this ain’t right.”
Managing Hartlepool has left him feeling properly alive again. “If we survive this will be better than the two promotions I had at Rotherham,” he says. “It will be my greatest season.”
