In the autumn of 1992 we’d made our usual shocking start to the season. During the summer the club had decided to sell Alan Shearer, who had made it clear he wanted to move to bigger and better things. That was fair enough but Saints allowed themselves to be bullied by Blackburn through the negotiations, even though they were in the driving seat. Alan had three years left on his contract so Southampton did not have to sell, and they certainly did not have to accept any old deal. I think the directors’ eye lit up with pound signs at the prospect of a British record fee, and they rushed the deal through in case Alan got injured. They even pulled him out of a pre-season trip to Scotland for the same reason.
To be fair to Ian Branfoot (read all about it in Chapter 9), he wanted to take Blackburn striker Mike Newell as part of the deal, but Rovers didn’t want to let him go. Instead of playing hardball and holding out for a quality replacement, Saints caved in and sold Alan for £3m with NO sell-on clause. Even I can work out that if they had insisted on getting 20 per cent of any future fee then when Al eventually moved to Newcastle for £15m, Saints would have pocketed another £3m.
Instead of getting Mike Newell we ended up taking David Speedie. It seemed to me as though Speedo didn’t want to be here. He never got what Southampton was about, and it looked to me as though he resented being used as a makeweight in the deal. So Ian Branfoot spent part of the fee on Kerry Dixon in the hope of recreating the successful Dixon/Speedie partnership at Chelsea. Kerry had been an ace striker in his time but his best days were behind him. He had lost that yard of pace and sharpness and Speedie just didn’t settle. It was hardly a match made in heaven, and it didn’t help the situation or the fans’ mood when Branfoot made the staggering prediction that Speedie and Dixon would outscore Alan Shearer that season. Kerry got just two goals and Speedo precisely zero while Al had scored 16 by December, when he picked up a bad knee injury ruling him out for the rest of the campaign. The following season he scored 31. (Kerry did try and I set him up for both his goals, including his two-hundredth league strike at Leeds. I was through and could have shot but I knew he was on 199 and, the way things were going, this would be his only chance to get to 200 so I teed him up for a simple tap-in, and spurned my best chance to score at Elland Road. Leeds were the only established Premier League club that I failed to score against.)
Anyway, it is fair to say that David Speedie didn’t really settle in at Southampton. I don’t think he liked me and we certainly didn’t get off on the right foot. When he joined, he met up with us at the airport as we were heading off on a pre-season tour. As it happened the Manchester United players were at the same airport and I was chatting to Lee Sharpe because we shared the same agent. When we arrived at our hotel David Speedie accused me of being a big-time Charlie who wanted to talk only to the United players, and he promptly launched a bar stool at my head. Which was a good start. But he surpassed that several weeks into the season after we lost 2-1 at home to QPR. The fans were restless, the mood was grim. So the manager Ian Branfoot decided to take us to Jersey in the Channel Islands for a bonding trip. It suited me because it meant I was able to get home to Guernsey but it meant that I missed all the excitement.
After a meal the lads had a clear-the-air meeting in the bar where they went through all the things they felt were going wrong. As the alcohol flowed, the debate became increasingly heated to the point where David Speedie and Terry Hurlock came to blows. Very few people would ever dare tangle with Terry Hurlock but David Speedie didn’t worry about that. There were a few punches thrown and a bit of blood. Eventually it all calmed down and Speedo went off to clean himself up. As he walked back in Terry went to throw a heavy glass ash tray at his head—only for Micky Adams to get in the way. For once in his life Fusey was trying to act as peacemaker and paid the price, ending up with a cut on his forehead. To make matters worse, the hotel manager called the police and Micky ended up spending the night in the cells even though he’d done nothing wrong. Speedo was arrested and hauled before the courts the following morning before being sent home in disgrace.
I flew in from Guernsey a couple of hours later and turned up all bright and jolly. It was like gate-crashing a funeral. The mood in the camp was the most sombre I had ever experienced. There was no banter so I asked what was wrong and the lads looked at me as though I was an alien. There were no mobiles or Sky News in those days so I hadn’t heard. I was gutted to have missed it because I could have lobbed in a few of my sarcastic hand-grenades and inflamed the situation. (I met David Speedie on a golf trip to Mauritius last year. We ended up rooming together and he couldn’t have been nicer. He had certainly mellowed and I was even able to remind him of the bar stool incident without getting clouted. He was great company, good as gold and seemed very happy with life, so maybe he really didn’t want to be at Southampton.)
Games in the Channel Islands were always special to me, but for the rest of the lads they were a good chance for a few drinks and to stock up on the Duty Free before it was abolished. I remember a friendly against Guernsey in 1995 when half the team were still drunk at kick-off. I was a bit disappointed because a lot of people had turned out to see us, and my son Mitchell was our mascot. He ran out in a Southampton shirt with ‘7 Daddy’ on the back. He is 17 and very embarrassed by it now but it was cute at the time. We had to rely on a header from me to win the game 2-1 but I took it a bit personally that some of the lads couldn’t stay sober for a match which meant a lot to me.
Not all the foreign trips were to glamorous locations. We had a horrible trip to East Germany to play Carl Zeiss Jena before the wall came down. I can’t believe we went there; the club must have received a fair wedge to make it worthwhile. It was a real experience crossing the border, with East German armed guards searching every inch of the team coach. We were stuck there for at least an hour and the agent warned us not to do anything to antagonize the trigger-happy police. Even I knew when it was wise to keep quiet and we all sat there on our best behaviour—apart from John Burridge.
He was as mad as a bucket of frogs. He even slept with a football as part of his pre-match preparation and, when he was relaxing watching television, used to get his wife to suddenly throw oranges at him to test his reflexes. It was like Inspector Clouseau asking Kato to jump out and attack him. Anyway, ‘Budgie’ wasn’t noted for doing or saying the right thing and he kept on at one particular border guard asking him if there were landmines in no-man’s-land, the couple of miles of neutral territory between the two heavily armed border barriers. The guard steadfastly refused to answer him, so Budgie kept on asking. Eventually the guard admitted that there were mines in those fields and Budgie cracked, ‘Well, how do you dig up your potatoes then?’ Not the subtlest remark!
HE WAS AS MADAS A BUCKET OFFROGS. HE EVENSLEPT WITH AFOOTBALL ASPART OF HIS PRE-MATCHPREPARATION.
As we entered East Germany it was as though someone had flicked the view from colour to black and white. The whole place was so bleak and the poverty unbelievable. We had a stroll outside the hotel to try and buy souvenirs but the shops were empty apart from a few bits of rotting fruit. The food in the hotel was no better. We ate in a dungeon and it was the worst food I have ever tasted, but I did get one of the best tour gifts I ever received. Usually the players were given glassware or tacky commemorative souvenirs but we all got really nice watches from Zeiss.
The match was played in a stadium surrounded by a running track so there was very little atmosphere, and that was shattered by the sonic boom of East German fighters swooping low overhead every few minutes. But it meant a lot to the people that we were there. There was so little to brighten their lives that one guy cycled for four hours just to be there. We had a few souvenir pin badges to give out and each one caused a massive scramble, as though we were handing out food parcels. One guy burst into tears of joy at being given a simple badge.
Another grim trip was to Northern Ireland at the height of the troubles. We played a game at Cliftonville, a bizarre ground