Steve Cotterill 'Part Three'

"Steve Cotterill and the Last Supper"

    It was such a shame, but things were not working out even though new players had been brought in. The return of Robbie Blake was a masterstroke. A real crowd favourite, he had not had a happy time at either Birmingham or Leeds where he subsequently went. Cotterill brought him back and fans were delighted. “I have unfinished business here,” said Blake.

     What nobody realised at the time was that here then was the nucleus of the side that two years later would triumph at Wembley: Jensen, Duff, Caldwell, Carlisle, Elliot, Gudjonnson, Alexander, McCann and Blake. Cotterill had signed seven of them including the re-purchase of Blake. McCann had already been at the club but it was certainly Cotterill who nurtured and developed him. The most fascinating perhaps was Graham Alexander. Already in his middle thirties when he was signed from local rivals Preston, it was a signing that lifted fan’s eyebrows in surprise. What was the use of someone already near the end of his career? Three years later he was still an integral part of the side; fit, wiry, influential, so much so that he was later appointed as a coach, and is possibly the world’s best penalty taker. He came as a full-back but eventually switched to midfield.

     Yet, his final season started so well with a win over promotion favourites West Brom, 2 – 1, in front of a good crowd of over 15,000. But, by Tuesday November 5th, there would only be three more wins. Four wins, six draws, four defeats and 18 points had been garnered by then. Not unreasonable, if mid-table survival was the only aim. But what the bare statistics did not show was the poverty of the football, by now known as Cotterball, the direness of the displays, and that by the time of the fateful Hull City game, the attendance had slumped to a depressing sub 10,000, an alarming 50% drop on the opening game.

     If the 0 – 0 game against Luton Town in the previous season had sunk to new lows, or the 0 – 1 defeat away at Southend, then the Hull City game was even worse when it ended with a last minute winner for Hull, and a 0 – 1 defeat for Burnley. By now Cotterill had come up with the most bizarre reason ever heard for the continual poor performances, when he told the Press that the players were now under too much pressure placed on them by the new plans for ground development and the resultant raised expectations. He described the weight of expectation undermining their confidence at home. Supporters simply raised their eyebrows in amazement. His gloomy demeanour, plus the tortured excuses and reasons did not go unnoticed by his employers. To be fair to him, injuries to Duff and Caldwell had been disruptive, and it was the old Akinbiyi that re-surfaced, the player who scored few goals.

     The Hull game was the nadir. This was a display that was inept, ineffective and utterly abysmal. There had been something like nine wins in the last 45 games. It was clear to all that Cotterill had lost his way, and possibly even lost the dressing room and the confidence of some if not all the players. The football had become negative and spectators, frankly, were bored.

     The game was the last straw for Brendan Flood in particular, although one may assume other directors and the chairman held the same views. It was November 8th when the news broke and the club announced that Cotterill had left the club by mutual consent after a stay of three and half years, making him at that time the longest serving manager in the Division. This time, however, instead of enduring another four-month winless run, the club acted.

     Cotterill’s last interview for the local Press, illustrated the problems he felt about the ground development announcements:

     “The crowd are more anxious this year than they have been before because of the hullabaloo that’s gone on off the pitch. That’s a definite fact. There’s less patience with the boys at home now and I don’t think that’s fair. We shouldn’t get edgy about playing at home.”

     Perhaps it was no surprise, wrote Phil Whalley, that a manager so desperately looking for scapegoats, anywhere but in his own coaching and tactical preparation of the team, had been jettisoned. Looking back through the season, he continued, perhaps the real undoing of Steve Cotterill was the arrival in the boardroom of Brendan Flood, a powerful man who remained to be convinced by the merits of the manager. Perhaps Cotterill’s self-generated PR about his ambition and his own potential had stopped fooling people. As long as he kept telling fans that he was “getting there” and as long as he sounded sure of himself, fans might have continued to give him the benefit of the doubt, even in the face of dour, percentage football and extremely poor results. But, then when he was eventually and clearly crumbling under the pressure, with the shield of self-confidence evaporating, people were then seeing the manager as the problem and not the team.

     Flood’s words earlier in June had hinted at his ambitions and what he wanted from a manager.
     “The immediate plan is to get a good entertaining team and we are doing our best to do that now. Steve Cotterill has been out there shopping and is very careful who he goes for. This is his big, big chance. His heart is definitely in the club and he’s massively ambitious. I think he’s got the brains and the willpower and with the right people around him we’ll get the best out of him and he’ll get the best out of his players. I’m confident that he’s as good as you get and he just needs the breaks and he’ll grow into it”

     Reading between the lines there, if entertainment was what Flood was after, he was maybe aware neither he nor the supporters were getting it. ‘This is his big chance’ were more words that hinted that it could well be his last at Burnley Football Club, and that he was now under close scrutiny.

     In an unusual twist to the usual ‘dismissal’ Press conference arrangements, Cotterill actually sat in on the conference, next to Chairman Kilby and Flood. Bizarrely, Kilby told the gathering that Cotterill still had the capabilities to manage in the Premiership.

     “However what has happened in the last ten games and the slide down the table, maybe the directors thought it was time for a change.We played poorly against Hull and bad home defeats never help. That was a defining moment. I think we are fourth lowest in the Division in terms of attendances. People want winning teams more than anything else. If you can win and entertain, then that’s all the better. We still have ambitions to get into the top six and I was very conscious we were sliding down the table.”

   Flood also congratulated the departing manager, who, sitting alongside, slumped in his baggy grey tracksuit looking as though he was bewildered and shell-shocked by the whole thing. His heart was at Burnley there is no doubt of that, and he had come to identify strongly with both club and town. It was also a massive blow to his personal ambition, denting any future CV. Flood admitted that the manager had done a lot for the club but he considered him unable to take the club further. Again reading between the lines, there were hints that he had spoken to the playing staff about their attitude towards Cotterill’s tactical approach.

     “Maybe Steve has done everything he can here and his opportunity lies elsewhere. He has already done a lot and I think those extra yards might feel too much for him, whereas someone else might see them as small steps.We have to entertain, and we have been entertaining in some games, but we have been fragile in others. From my point of view, knowing what I do about the players, they have probably got into a mentality that is maybe not their natural way of playing. Perhaps with a greater freedom and different tactics, we might see a team that is consistent evey week and does attack teams from the off. They are good footballers and we just have to see if a better team can be got by having a different person leading them. There is a big ambition beating away in the club and hopefully we can do better and entertain ourselves doing it.”  

     One wonders how Cotterill felt hearing these words. They were tactful and diplomatic rather than brutal and hard-hitting. Yet behind them there was a clear and unmistakeable message. These were good players. Cotterill was not getting the best out of them. His tactics were negative and stifling. The players didn’t want to play his way. Doing any more with them was beyond Cotterill’s capabilities. Someone with a different philosophy might take them to the next level.

     Steve Cottterill, though he may well have been inwardly fuming at the subtle criticisms, was himself the diplomat. If any rank and file supporter had said these things to him, he would have received short shrift. One wonders what Cotterill’s reaction to one supporter would have been who wrote: “The Cotterill book of excuses was rivalling War and Peace.” Phil Whalley himself had been on the receiving end of a Cotterill blast for something he wrote in the London Clarets magazine. But in public Cotterill was restrained.

     “If ever there was mutual consent this was it. There are no problems at all, no bitterness with the board of directors. It is a big shame that it has happened.I have had a great time here. It has been a tough couple of days for me, but that is something I will have to come to terms with. It’s a great club; I have loved every minute of it.”

     Brendan Flood said more in later articles that revealed the state that Steve Cotterill was in. He had got as far as he could and was pretty much down and out, the suggestion being that he just didn’t know what to do next.

     “We need someone who’s going to light the touch paper… You’ve got to have people who are clever at getting things done; Steve’s energy levels were getting low and that’s a problem when you’re a manager.”  

     As the season got going we beat Oldham 3 – 0 in the Carling Cup on a Tuesday night. It was a good result but Oldham could have had a hatful and the only difference between the two sides was the finishing. The following week we had a disappointing home draw with Blackpool and then we had a bit of a sticky spell. We won our next match at Sheffield Wednesday, but they were dreadful, having lost their last six games and they visibly had no confidence. I’d have backed North End to get a result that night. Bayern, that is, not Preston.

     Then we went on a run of nine games with only one win, a home result against Norwich who are often as kind to us as Plymouth. As the poor run gathered pace Steve was getting more and more agitated. Slightly bizarrely in my opinion, he was expressing regret that we’d sold Wayne Thomas.

     Steve and I had built up a friendship over the previous ten months or so and he was quite open with me. When Sammy Lee was fired at Bolton and Chris Hutchins at Wigan, he hinted to me that maybe he should try his luck and go for jobs there. I knew that he had made a couple of strategic phone calls to Wigan and Bolton. And he had actually asked Sir Alex to give him a reference for the Wigan job. He was feeling under more pressure at Burnley and was acutely conscious of what happened during the nineteen game winless run in the previous season, when we hadn’t dismissed him. But this spell certainly wasn’t good. We’d spent a lot of money by Burnley’s standards and brought nine or ten players since I’d been at the club but I could see he was becoming more and more aggravated and impatient with the players. You could see it during matches on the touchline.

     Steve had started commenting that Burnley was a small club. I don’t think he felt he was getting the rewards for all the effort he had put in, even though he was fairly well paid. And to make matters worse there was a growing tension between Steve and one or two members of the board. In his conversations with me he referred to his growing frustration with the ‘energy sappers on the board’. After a 3 – 2 home defeat by Southampton he came into the chairman’s lounge after the game, clearly angry and swearing. He was venting his spleen quite spectacularly about the players, the club, and everyone who was at fault apart from himself.

     Going back to my general philosophy that I always give people 12 months to prove themselves, I started to review our progress and what we had achieved in that time. I had to admit I was concerned that we might have wasted some of the financial investment. Steve was still asking me if we could go in for more players like Darren Huckerby at Norwich and Lee Bromby at Sheffield United. I felt they were older players who wouldn’t add anything to the club; and we’d be laying out more cash for little benefit. The difference in our views about the sort of players we should be signing was widening at this point. Steve was becoming concerned that by October I no longer supported him, and he wanted more players. 

Then on a miserable night on the 6th of November we played Hull City at home.They were near the bottom of the Division and a team that we should beat if we were well organised. Ellen and the whole family came along and we invited some friends who were Hull fans. It was a cold night and a desperately poor crowd of about 9,900. The atmosphere was terrible and it was obvious that a lot of people were beginning to feel the recurring pain of the nineteen games without a win from the previous season, and fans were starting to question what we were doing. But most of the fans didn’t know that Steve had already expressed that he didn’t believe that he had long left at Burnley and, naturally for an ambitious man, he had one eye on a Premiership job.

     The game was absolutely dire from start to finish and Steve was getting some criticism from sections of the fans in the Bob Lord Stand. The suppporters were becoming as impatient as he was and they had every right to be. At the start of the season I thought we had a reasonable chance of making it to the top six.  But three months into the season it was obvious that we still weren’t good enough overall.

     We lost the game 1 – 0 and I was completely horrified. It was such a bad performance that we had been outplayed by Hull. At the time we had no idea that they’d end up being promoted and they just looked like a workmanlike Hull team. This was a real milestone. Bloody hell, we’d just been outclassed by Hull.

     The next morning I woke up at five 0 clock. I usually sleep very well and I only struggle if I have something big on my mind. As I got up I said to Ellen:

    “I think we need a need a new manager.”

     I went down into the kitchen, made a coffee and started putting together a list of people we’d consider if Steve wasn’t our manager. And as soon as it was a decent hour I rang Barry and told him that I was convinced that we needed a change:

     “Barry I think we should take the bull by the horns. If we change now we’ll probably have more choice, but if we wait until January there might be fewer decent managers available. If we open up the running now we might get some good candidates and it allows a new manager the chance to recruit a few players in January.”

     We shared our concerns over the club’s current difficulties and agreed that I should meet with Steve. Steve and I always exchanged phone calls the day after a game, and he had rung me twice on the Wednesday afternoon but I hadn’t taken the calls because I was still annoyed. At about 4 p.m. and at the third time of ringing I answered the call:

     “Hi Steve.”
     “Okay.” He paused sensing a problem. “How are you mate?”
     “Well, not good, it was shit last night.”
     Over the past year we’d got to know each other pretty well and Steve could read me, certainly on this occasion:
     “Yep it was. Have you got something to say Bren?”
     “Yeah, it’s time for a change Steve.”
     Even though I think in his heart he knew it may have been coming he was a bit taken aback and I could tell that he was understandably upset. So I said to him:
     “Look, why don’t you come round tonight for dinner and we’ll talk it through. I’m sorry Steve.”

     Then I rang Ellen and said:
     “Can you rustle something up? I’ve got Steve Cotterill coming round and it’s not going to be the best evening.”

     This clearly presented Ellen with a bit of a dilemma:
     “What do you want for an evening like that?” And she started talking about the type of food you do when you’re changing the manager. “Do you want beers or do you not want beers?”

     When Steve arrived he was dropped off by a driver so I think he was expecting a few drinks. He later described the meal as ‘The Last Supper’ and I don’t think he was referring to the fish. As we sat talking he was quite upset and I was genuinely moved. He’d put a lot of effort in over the last few years and he’d done a good job for the club, but I explained to him that I didn’t think he could take us up and we needed a different style to make things happen. And maybe it would be better if he tried to focus on going for jobs in the Premiership, because I knew he wanted to.

     So we agreed that he’d leave by mutual consent. At that moment it was the best thing for Steve and for the club. It was one of the most difficult days I have ever experienced and it genuinely scared me that I was then responsible for changing Burnley’s manager. I actually expected Steve to walk into the manager’s job at Wigan or possibly Preston shortly thereafter but it didn’t happen for him.

     The following morning I was on the 7 o clock train from Manchester to Euston when I rang Barry. I had my hand over my phone as I explained to Barry wjat had happened and that Steve had taken it well, all things considered. Barry was in Germany that day so we agreed we’d do the Press Conference on the Friday.

     As I sat in my meeting later that morning my phone started ringing non stop, and when I went outside to look at my messages they were from newspapers and SKY Sports. Steve had gone into training the next morning and told the players, who true to form texted their agents and off it went into the ether. And, in a further bizarre twist it turned out that my hushed conversation with Barry had been picked up by a Burnley fan opposite me on the train and then downloaded onto the Claretsmad website. I couldn’t believe it.

     So, we had a hurriedly arranged Press conference back at the club on the Thursday afternoon. I met Steve before the Press arrived and he went over a couple of points on his contract. He’s always been a strong negotiator and that had served the club well, and he left with a healthy compensation package.

     Looking back, that Friday, I was convinced that we’d done the right thing. After all, we had been sliding down the League. We couldn’t afford to have another winless run of matches and we had to do better. But the next two weeks were daunting. Without doubt they are on the shortlist for the worst weeks of my life. I had people ringing me all the time and you can’t help watching SKY Sports and listening to comments when the topic is discussed on the radio.There were phone-ins on Radio Lancashire with guys ringing up and saying, “I don’t think we should have got rid of Steve Cotterill so quickly.” And: “It’s obviously Flood who’s sacked him.”

     The consensus was pretty much 50:50 and for the half who supported Steve it was clear that whoever was brought in would be ‘Flood’s man.’

     His time at Burnley can be viewed in a number of ways. He was the man who got the impoverished club back on track in his first season.He was the man who was in charge during the winless run of 19 games. And he was the man who gathered together the players who went on to achieve the astonishing feat of Wembley promotion. Despite the fact that there were occasional games we slept through, his legacy will be remembered overall with gratitude and respect.