Sweating spinal fluid

Hi. I’m Mal­colm Dav­ison. I like wear­ing sharp suits and pos­ing for oddly cropped pho­tos. Also, foot­ball. I like foot­ball. A lot. I played a bit, but was never quite good enough to go pro­fes­sional. Yeah, right. Believe that and you’ll believe any­thing. Still, I’d always dreamed of being a foot­baller, then, later, the dream an impossib­il­ity, I wished for any kind of job in the beau­ti­ful game.

I’m the wrong side of 40 and I’ve never actu­ally worked in foot­ball, but could I blag my way into a job anyway?

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I am forced to sit through some ter­rible foot­ball. I start my Brad­ford career with a 2–0 defeat in the FA Cup and mut­ter the usual stuff about being free to con­cen­trate on the league.

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It’s worse than I thought. I’m over­whelmed by the scale of the prob­lems facing Brad­ford City. Novem­ber is not going to be a happy month.

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I hadn’t really noticed the spec­u­la­tion in the press. I was so focused on what I was doing that it must have passed me by some­how. Besides, there’s an awful lot of rub­bish spewed out onto the back pages of news­pa­pers. So when the job offer came in, I was shocked. Would I like to man­age Brad­ford City?

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I badger a num­ber of wealth­ier clubs into vis­it­ing us for pre-season friend­lies. Big clubs mean big bucks. I ima­gine that the loc­als turn out to see the fam­ous play­ers strut their stuff at a sta­dium that resembles a ploughed field with a shed next to it. Then there’s the away sup­port with some money to spend. Five games in and we’ve already covered the play­ers’ wages for the com­ing season.

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“We can win pro­mo­tion this sea­son,” I told the chair­man. Oh God! What am I saying?

Ostens­ibly, it’s the same team as last sea­son. These play­ers just about man­aged to get the club to four­teenth in the league. Now they have to do much, much bet­ter. I’m tak­ing a gamble, I know, and the odds aren’t good. 20–1 accord­ing to the book­ies. That’s like a 95% chance of find­ing myself unem­ployed in the next twelve months…

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The sea­son starts badly as my worst fears about the strength of my play­ing squad are real­ised. A pat­tern emerges over the first few games: FC Hal­i­fax go ahead, build up a two goal lead, then go on to lose the game 3–2. We don’t record a win until the sixth game of the sea­son, giv­ing me a false hope that things are going to turn around. This hope is quickly squashed by a 4–3 defeat then a crush­ing 6–2 defeat away to Bar­row. Read more

I think I might have made a mis­take. Read more

After walk­ing out of Basing­s­toke, my mor­ale was at a real low point. It’s the gap between what you hoped to achieve and what you actu­ally achieved that causes the pain. The big­ger the gap, the more it hurts. I wondered whether those five dis­mal months at Basing­s­toke would be it for my career in foot­ball man­age­ment. Read more

It was my first job. I was nervous. Who wouldn’t be? Still, I knew what to do. What needed to be done. Faced with that room full of men for the first time, though, I felt some­thing akin to fear. “Who are you?” they were think­ing, “And why should we listen to you?”

“I’m the man that will put Basing­s­toke on the map,” I thought. Read more