39 Days of Gazza - When Paul Gascoigne arrived to manage Kettering Town, people lined the streets to greet him. Just 39 days later, Gazza was gone and the club was on it's knees…. Steve Pitts
boardroom prior to the takeover, admitted he would struggle to name any other Englishman, other than David Beckham, who could have had whipped up such a storm.
‘If it had been somebody of Gascoigne’s standing in football but without everything else that goes on around him, would there have been the same reaction?’ he speculated. ‘If it had been any of his teammates from that Euro ’96 team, such as Gareth Southgate or Stuart Pearce, would everybody have got so worked up? I don’t think so. But it was Gascoigne and he has always had that sort of aura. There were a lot of people in Kettering who were just overtaken by it all.’
Dunham had been deeply unimpressed when meeting Gascoigne for the first time. Gascoigne had finished his session in The Beeswing and arrived in the boardroom shortly before 2pm – two-and-a-half hours later than the agreed itinerary – and Dunham firmly believed from that moment on that Gascoigne’s involvement would end in tears. But, despite his misgivings, even he was moved to admit, ‘As for putting the club in the local, national and international domain, it was fantastic. Perhaps that was Imraan Ladak’s intention all along.’
However, even Ladak was surprised by the level of interest shown in Gascoigne. Despite agreeing with Mallinger not to comment publicly until the agreement was signed, he was unable to stop himself sharing his thoughts with the local paper. ‘The phone hasn’t stopped ringing,’ he said. ‘I knew the fact that Paul was involved would attract media attention but it has gone way beyond what I expected.’
And he wasn’t the only one. Mallinger found it impossible to concentrate on everyday business as the few phones at the ground rang incessantly. ‘As soon as we confirmed Paul Gascoigne was to be involved, the media were almost permanently camped on our doorstep,’ he recalls. ‘Sky TV made Rockingham Road their second home and other TV and radio stations from all over the world were constantly on the telephone. I was telephoned by a radio station in Melbourne on my way home in the evening to talk live on their morning programme.’ What did he tell them? ‘Anything I could think of about Paul. If anything, he was even bigger news over there.’
The fascination with Gascoigne seemed without limit, and the media storm was to become even more intense as the press conference was staged to unveil ‘Paul Gascoigne the manager’ to the waiting world.
I KNOW WHAT THEY’RE SAYING – AND I’LL PROVE THEM WRONG!
PRESS conferences at Rockingham Road were few and far between. Why would a Conference North club go to the bother of organising a media gathering when a good turnout would be two people, Jon Dunham for the local paper and perhaps somebody from BBC Radio Northampton.
Away from the games, the manager typically met Dunham once a week, normally a Thursday lunchtime, to discuss the forthcoming weekend fixture. But if the manager or chairman, or anybody else for that matter, wanted to impart news or request a plug, it was just as easy to pick up the phone.
If the story on 27 October 2005 had been the departure of Mallinger as chairman and the arrival of Ladak, with Wilson staying on as manager, a press conference would have been pointless. However, the story that day wasn’t merely the change of personnel at a minor-league club. The press had been invited for the unveiling of one of the worst-kept secrets in football: Paul Gascoigne’s first job as a football club manager. And some 70 print journalists, six TV crews and a clutch of radio reporters had squeezed into the social club which had been spruced up for the big event, as there was no other room big enough for such a gathering.
No doubt many of those seasoned journalists making their way to the club would have been cynical both about Gascoigne’s motives and his chances of making a success at a football club so far below his previous level. Plenty of them had seen it all before, having passed on Gazza’s good intentions to their readers as he embarked on yet another venture, only to have to report on the almost inevitable failure a short while later. Nevertheless, this was a man who had given many of them moments to lift them out of their press-box seats, plus some laughs, during his playing days, and there was definitely a certain amount of sympathy and affection for him.
Jon Dunham arrived at his office a mile from the ground and switched on the sports-desk television to see the Sky Sports News 9am headlines reporting live from outside Rockingham Road. The press conference wasn’t scheduled to get under way until 11am, and Sky was doing its best to whip up hysteria in the club’s deserted car park. Dunham began to realise quite how big this story was.
But, had he been in any doubt, the journalist from Rome who had flown in to cover the story for followers of the Serie A club Lazio would have convinced him. More than a decade after Gascoigne’s stint with their team, they still had great fondness for a footballer who may have played only 39 league matches over two years but who had captivated them with moments of sheer brilliance on the pitch, scored a winning goal against hated rivals Roma and made them laugh – even when he was being fined £9,000 for belching into a television microphone when asked how he felt about being dropped.
The start of the press conference was delayed, so the photographers further jockeyed for position and a few more chairs were squeezed in for the late arrivals. The seating order followed a rough pattern of photographers at the front, print journalists behind them, TV cameramen in an arc behind them and TV reporters and radio men hanging around at the back and to the sides, in the hope of securing one-to-one interviews later. It was clearly going to be a long day.
Pressing their noses against the windows was a group of supporters in their dozens who had come along to witness a historic event in their club’s history. With more intimate knowledge of the club than either those who had organised the press conference or those journalists attending it, several sneaked inside to watch from behind the TV cameramen.
Waiting to face the press was Billingham, the self-appointed host for the day, Mallinger, Wilson, Ladak, Gascoigne, Davis and Mick Leech, a Kettering stalwart who was a personal friend of Mallinger. Like the other directors, he was standing down. The new regime was coming in with its own personnel and ideas.
Gascoigne sat down to answer questions from the assembled journalists. He was wearing an open-necked, long-collared shirt that did nothing to hide the prominent white plaster on his neck, which was covering his recent operation scar.
Gascoigne clearly couldn’t wait to get going. In his difficult relationship with the press, he may have found much of what had been written about him to be ‘disgusting’, but he was evidently happy to talk about this new venture. For the first time in a long while, most of the questions were about football and a future in the game. He was positive, upbeat, charming and convincing. There were none of the nervous twitches and afflictions that were to become apparent only a week later.
Gascoigne and Ladak had both prepared statements, and were happy to answer questions before stepping out onto the pitch for more pictures and a series of television, radio and one-to-one newspaper interviews.
Even those who felt Gascoigne was the wrong man at the wrong club seemed to want him to prove them wrong, and they listened attentively as he spoke about a club which had only come to their attention because of his involvement. Davis was to be head coach, Wilson director of football, and Billingham and Ladak the men he was to work with off the pitch to generate the cash for a push into the Football League. ‘This club hasn’t been in the Football League for 133 years so that’s one of our main objectives,’ he said. ‘It’s something for the supporters to look forward to. It’s going to be a big thing for us.’
There was no doubt he believed it was possible, just as he believed he had committed himself to a long-term future at the club. And when he was talking about football he was happy to speak for as long as there was someone to listen to him: ‘I will be spending plenty of time looking at the current squad, working with my assistant manager Paul Davis and Kevin on the strengths and weaknesses of our players and hopefully looking to add some fresh faces where required. We will be working hard to achieve promotion this season. But