1) Danny Blanchflower (Middlesborough 7-2 Chelsea, 16 Dec 1978)
If ever a man seemed destined for management, it was Danny Blanchflower. He was an inspiration on the pitch for Tottenham Hotspur from the moment he replaced Alf Ramsey as captain, running the game from midfield with exceptional intelligence and leading them to the double in 1961. Spurs’ manager, Bill Nicholson, happily admitted that Blanchflower was free to orchestrate play as he saw fit, and Blanchflower’s vision was beautiful – “the game is about glory”, after all.
The Northern Irishman captained Spurs for 265 matches before retiring as a player in 1964 and joining the coaching staff at White Hart Lane. When Nicholson stepped down in 1974 he recommended that Blanchflower take his place but Spurs’ directors decided to look elsewhere just to show who was boss. After lending his class to a far shabbier profession, football journalism, Blanchflower did enter management in 1976 with Northern Ireland, where he used his lovely way with words to deliver one of the great pre-match speeches of the age, telling his players’ before a daunting World Cup qualifier away to Johann Cruyff’s Holland that: “A giant is going to knock on our door so we have an alternative: do we slam the door and run away, or kick him in the balls?” The match ended 2-2.
The Londoners who eventually asked him to turn his talents to club management were Chelsea rather than Tottenham. In December 1978 the Blues were in a deep financial and sporting rut, £2m in debt and bottom of the First Division. Blanchflower had covered their first match of the season as a journalist and wrote after the 1-0 home defeat by Aston Villa that: “Chelsea were terrible. They looked demoralised from the start.” But he agreed to try to raise them when his friend, the Chelsea chairman, Bill Mears, asked him to step into the position vacated by Frank Upson. “When he walks through the door he lifts the place,” explained Mears. Alas, that is not quite how things panned out.
Blanchflower’s debut began perfectly, as Peter Osgood opened the scoring at Middlesbrough to ignite hopes that Chelsea were about to end an eight-match winless streak. But, as we keep telling you, that is not quite how things panned out. Micky Burns scored four goals as Middlesbrough came back to win 7-2. Subsequent results included a 5-1 home defeat by Ipswich, a 6-0 loss to Nottingham Forest and a 5-2 embarrassment at Arsenal. Chelsea were relegated, finishing 11 points adrift at the foot of the table and forced to sell their prized asset, Ray Wilkins, to Manchester United. It had turned out that Blanchflower’s aesthetic and moral ideals were incompatible with a relegation scrap. And so after 31 matches, featuring just five victories, Blanchflower, as ever, did the honourable thing, resigning and explaining that the club needed “a younger man with a different set of values.”.
Blanchflower, you see, figured that in order to win promotion Chelsea would have to change the way they played and also spend heavily to revamp the squad, and that would entail binning his principles. “There is no way I could spend £1m on a player without having a conscience about it,” he said, back when no one had heard of Roman Abramovich.
2) Harry Redknapp (Southampton 2-2 Middlesborough, 11 Dec 2004)
Talk of refusing to bin principles leads naturally to Harry Redknapp. What? Of course he has principles. But strange things happen. On 24 November 2004, when he surprisingly quit as manager of Portsmouth after seemingly falling out with the owner, Milan Mandaric, Redknapp made it absolutely clear that he had had no intention whatsoever of defecting to arch-rivals Southampton. “I will not go down the road – no chance!” he vowed. Two weeks later he went down the road and became manager of Southampton.
These days Saints have a reputation for shrewd managerial appointments thanks to the successful reigns of Ronald Koeman, Mauricio Pochettino and Nigel Adkins. But things were different 12 years ago, and Redknapp completed a hat-trick of haplessness even though he was supposed to bring the nous lacked by his two inexperienced predecessors, Paul Sturrock and Steve Wigley. Southampton fans welcomed Redknapp warmly, their glee all the deeper because Pompey fans were distraught at losing a manager who had become a folk hero at Fratton Park by guiding the club back to the top-flight.
On his debut at Southampton the home fans took great relish in boasting that they would be the ones to gain from Portsmouth’s loss. Indeed, throughout the game against Boro they belted out chants celebrating the imminent capture of another Portsmouth legend, Jim Smith, as Redknapp’s No2. “Harry and Jim, red and white!” they sang. They never saw the punchline coming.
It looked like Redknapp would start justifying Southampton fans’ joy immediately, as Kevin Phillips and Peter Crouch shot them into a 2-0 lead. But the visitors pulled a goal back when a corner was deflected into the net by Danny Higginbotham and Stewart Downing then equalised. So the match ended 2-2, precisely the same result as Wigley’s last home match. Wigley, a rookie manager, won one league game in his 17-match reign. The fact that that victory had been over Redknapp’s Portsmouth should perhaps have warned Southampton that Redknapp might not be the man to turn things around. So it proved, as Southampton were relegated in last place.
Just under a year after his sensational arrival at Southampton, Redknapp left – to return to Portsmouth. “I spoke to Harry who told me he had been considering his future and that he believed Portsmouth to be his ‘spiritual home’,” said the Southampton chairman, Rupert Lowe, whose consorting with Sir Clive Woodward was among many things that made Redknapp a misfit at St Mary’s. “Gobsmacked is too small a word,” gasped the Southampton director Andrew Cowan. “You don’t even get a plot like this in Star Wars.”
3) Malcolm Allison (Manchester City 1-0 Aston Villa, 5 Aug 1972)
The match was an inglorious affair from the start and, as such, a suitable way to mark the break-up of a once happy couple. Firstly, the league champions, Derby County, and the FA Cup holders, Leeds United, declined to take part in the Charity Shield so organisers had to scramble around looking for alternatives. The traditional showpiece wound up having an untraditional lineup, pitting the winners of Division Three, Aston Villa, against Manchester City, who had finished fourth in Division One. But the fact that Villa were from a lower league was not the main reason why City’s manager, Malcolm Allison, was under pressure to win: he needed success because he had just been given sole charge of a club at which he had enjoyed glittering times under Joe Mercer before the relationship turned to dust.
Mercer and Allison were diametrically opposed as characters – the former was never a man for cigars, fedora hats or dressing room frolics with glamour models – but for a few golden years they were great together at City. After being appointed in 1965 Mercer wanted an energetic and innovative coach as No2 so hooked up with Allison, whom he had met at Lilleshall. City won the league in 1968, the FA Cup in ‘69 and the League Cup and European Cup Winners’ Cup in ‘70. Magic moments.
But Maine Road became a den of intrigue. The relationship began to veer off course, not helped by directors sticking their oars in. Allison came close to being jilted several times over the next 18 months but eventually it was Mercer who left, choosing in the summer of 1972 to leave for Coventry City rather than be manoeuvred into irrelevance at the club where he once led. “I did not want to stay at City with the tag of Good Old Joe and be shoved into the background,” he explained. Allison moved up a place and his first match was the improvised take on the traditional curtain-raiser for the following season. City won 1-0 thanks to a penalty by Franny Lee. But the bleakness of their performance was ominous.
“It was not so much a light aperitif for the new season but a heavy warning of diminishing entertainment should negative methods increase,” wrote Cyril Chapman in his match report for the Guardian, adding: “It would not have been easy to persuade a stranger to football that the main object of the game was to put the ball in the net.”
City remained unconvincing when the season kicked off properly, losing five of their first six matches. Despondency took hold. Allison had talked City into spending a club record fee on Rodney Marsh the previous March but months after his arrival the ingenious forward was still looking out of place. He was not alone. The whole team looked out of sorts. Eric Todd, writing in the Guardian later that season, complained that the stroppy spirit that had enveloped City was disfiguring their performances - “bad temper, petulance, time wasting, argument, resentment – you name it.” By the time Mercer returned to Maine Road with Coventry in March, Allison seemed on the edge, having been thrashed 5-1 by Wolves after being dumped out of the FA Cup by Sunderland, who had zero chance of going on to win the competition, apparently. Mercer’s Coventry won 2-1 at Maine Road. Allison’s prospects darkened still further and his mood was not helped by the club selling Ian Mellor to Norwich against his wishes while he was ill. After a 1-0 home defeat by Chelsea he quit. As it happened he went straight to Crystal Palace and used his debut there to take immediate revenge, beating Chelsea 2-0.
4) José Mourinho (Chelsea 1-0 Manchester United, 15 Aug 2004)
Once upon a time the sight of a Manchester United team in disarray made life easy for José Mourinho. When a magnetic young scamp walked out at Stamford Bridge for his first match since arriving in England with a Champions League title and a self-made nickname, he took on a dishevelled United. Sir Alex Ferguson’s team had finished below Claudio Ranieri’s Chelsea and Arsenal’s Invincibles the previous season and for the opening match of the latest campaign they were ravaged by injuries.
Ruud van Nistelrooy was a glaring absentee from the trip to Chelsea but United were also short of bodies in central defence, with Rio Ferdinand suspended, and Ferguson unwisely elected to deploy Roy Keane alongside Gary Neville while John O’Shea played in midfield, as did Eric Djemba-Djemba and the debutant Liam Miller. Chelsea had more extravagant debutants, including Petr Cech and Didier Drogba, and won thanks to a scruffy finish by Eidur Gudjohnsson following a flimsy challenge by Tim Howard. “When [Mikaël] Silvestre said we haven’t got the time to create a big team spirit he was wrong,” jabbed Mourinho after the match.
The Portuguese would go on to win the title in his first season and become an icon at Stamford Bridge, so don’t expect anyone at Chelsea to agree that his comments after his very first match showed he was already angling for the Manchester United gig: “I have to say it’s maybe a bit unfortunate for Manchester United to leave Stamford Bridge without a point. They played well, weren’t afraid of us, and risked everything at 1-0 down. Mr Ferguson pushed me to make changes that normally I don’t do to play a safer match - and in fact the team defended very, very, very well.”
5) Kevin Keegan (Newcastle United 3-0 Bristol City, 8 Feb 1992)
No one saw this coming. When Keegan completed his playing career with fitting panache, leaving the pitch in a helicopter while still in his full Newcastle kit following a post-season friendly against Liverpool, it seemed that a dugout was one place he would not end up. He spent the next seven years living the good life in Marbella, once taking a break from playing golf to declare that occasional punditry would be his only other venture into sport: “If anyone ever hears that I’m coming back to football full-time, they can laugh as much as I will. It’ll never happen. That’s for certain.” But when Newcastle came calling in February 1992, Keegan could not resist. Newcastle were second bottom in the Second Division but the club’s multi-millionaire owner, Sir John Hall, promised Keegan funds to help guide the club back to the promised land. All Keegan had to do was play the role of messiah. He had a ready-made flock: over 32,000 fans turned up at St James’ Park for his debut in charge, double the attendance at the previous home match, a 4-3 defeat by Charlton. Having been in happy retirement just three days previously Keegan admitted he knew nothing about his first opponents, Bristol City, “other than that they play in red”.
His knowledge of his own side may also have been imperfect: when he read out his team selection at the pre-game press conference he named only 10 players. That fact that the player whom he forgot, Alan Neilson, was a defender was perhaps an indication of the attacking derring-do that Keegan would prioritise. In a stadium crackling with excitement Newcastle beat Bristol City 3-0, David Kelly scoring twice and Liam O’Brien once. This was the start of much more than a successful fight against relegation: it was a renaissance. Briefly the revival looked like being thwarted, as Keegan threatened to quit over unfulfilled promises. But he and Hall worked things out, money came forth and Newcastle surged up the league, starting Keegan’s first full season with 11 straight wins and ending as runaway winners. They graduated to the Premier League and immediately began challenging for the top-flight title. Two second-placed finishes were ultimately as close as they got but that was closer than they’d been for half a century. How Newcastle fans would love it, really love it, if their team could again go so close and play with such joy again.
6) Brendan Rodgers (Lincoln Red Imps 1-0 Celtic, 12 Jul 2016)
So far Brendan Rodgers has made a good stab at earning forgiveness for this result. But it can never be forgotten. The best he can hope for is that it is eventually reinterpreted as a misleadingly catastrophic start to a triumphant reign.
