Yep, the last time I was in Birmingham to see a Forest vs Bluenoses game (which I admit is a very very long ago), we were assaulted in our van by a bunch of gobshites throwing bricks at us. It's as if they have form or something....
Chicago: Hard Headed.
Fa cup, when we oddly had both ends? We dodged a few rocks then as well, while the police suggested we probably shouldn't have travelled.
If that was the 97 /98 promotion season I was at that one. Bricks an all.
Trev said "alright lads" to us outside. He did not throw bricks. Because Trev.
Slaven (sp?) Bilic is available which would be amusing and would also possibly start a small war in Sarf East London.
Otherwise there's a rather uninspiring crop of usual suspect Championship managers looking to rejoin the carousel. Michael O'Neil? Dean Smith? Smoochie? What's Warburton up to?
Gary Rowett, your trainers are shit.
Me too - delightful fans in those days.
Is that the one van Honkeydonk scored late? That was my last visit to that particular shithole...because of the volley of bricks.
That would be this one.
My memory is that was all if them that season.
I have no memory of seeing this amusing tale before.
Kind of a managerial Ali Dia. Featuring Swanny.
Very, very long post.
From The Athletic, Stuart James.
“It’s Kevin who?”
February 7, 1996, and the headline says it all.
Swansea City’s search for a new manager had somehow brought them to the unlikely and humble environs of Cradley Town, a non-League club fighting relegation in the eighth tier of English football, based on the outskirts of Wolverhampton and owned by a man by the name of Kevin Cullis.
Aged 37, Cullis was a civil engineer by trade and had never set foot inside the world of professional football. He was the former manager of a nightclub in Shrewsbury that had been converted from a bowling alley and, apparently, once hosted Bobby Davro and The Drifters (on stage, not trying to knock pins over). Night Out, as the club was called, went into liquidation.
In his spare time, Cullis ran Cradley, who played in the West Midlands League Premier Division on a sloping pitch and in front of crowds of less than 100. Cullis coached their under-16s team on a Sunday morning and, according to the father of one of his former players, used a formation that he called “the circle system”.
At the risk of stating the obvious, Cullis was one of the most bizarre and extraordinary managerial appointments in the history of British football. His reign was also one of the shortest.
After agreeing a two-and-a-half-year contract with Swansea that was never signed, Cullis departed within seven days. He never took a training session, wore a tracksuit that did not fit, talked about offering the centre-back a Mercedes, and spent only one and a half games in charge (the players took over at half-time in his second match).
To cap it all, Cullis claimed he discovered he was out of a job after ringing “ClubCall” — a premium rate telephone service that, in the pre-internet age, provided news, interviews and score updates.
“A day in football is long,” Christian Edwards, the former Swansea defender says, smiling. “But that week… you could write a Hollywood film off the back of that.”
Paul Molesworth, Cullis’ former assistant, shakes his head. “I reckon it’s one of the craziest stories that ever existed in football.”
How Cullis came to get the Swansea job is a story in itself, albeit not one that Michael Thompson, the man responsible for making that remarkable decision, hung around long enough to tell. Described by those who spent time in his company as “a Walter Mitty-type character who said things to try to impress people” (he made winning two promotions to get to the Premier League sound like a formality), Thompson lost a six-figure deposit after he pulled out of a deal to buy the Welsh club in the wake of a 4-0 defeat away to Blackpool that signalled the end of Cullis’ reign.
Thompson seems to have disappeared off the face of the earth thereafter and it is a long time since anyone in the football world crossed paths with Cullis.“If you offered me 10 grand on the table now to find him, I wouldn’t know how to do it,” Steve Daniels, the former Cradley manager, says at his home in Dudley.
What Daniels does know, though, is how Cullis came to be the Swansea manager.
“Swansea needs a management team which has a blend of enthusiasm, skill and ability. I believe I have found the perfect combination,” said Thompson, the chairman.
John Cornforth was the Swansea captain and did not share Thompson’s view that the club had made an inspired appointment.
“All of a sudden this muppet turned up in a Sports Direct tracksuit and trainers that were too big for him,” Cornforth says.
Molesworth, Cornforth says, “wasn’t a bad lad. But Cullis was totally useless”.
Cullis and Molesworth barely knew one another. The two had met not long before when a young goalkeeper at Cradley caught Molesworth’s eye while he was working for Liverpool as their Midlands scout.
A few months later, Molesworth received a phone call from Cullis out of the blue. “He said, ‘I’m going to be the next Swansea City manager and I want you to come with me as my assistant’,” Molesworth recalls. “He said, ‘I want you to meet the fella who’s buying it — Michael Thompson’.”
Not sure what to expect and wondering whether this was all some kind of hoax, Molesworth agreed to get together with Thompson at a motorway service station in Warwick. What followed was surreal.
“Thompson said, ‘I’m buying Swansea City and we want you involved’,” Molesworth says. “’I want you to go and watch every Swansea match between now and the takeover and give a valuation on every single player’.
“I said, ‘Why?’. He said, ‘Because I’m making sure that I’m taking over something that’s worth more than I’m paying for it’. I said, ‘But I work for Liverpool’. And then he said, ‘I’ll pay you a lot of money to do this every week’. He gave me £500 ($625) there and then, without batting an eyelid.
“I didn’t say anything to Liverpool, I just covered my arse. I evaluated the (Swansea) squad. I don’t know what he (Thompson) had in his head. I was just giving him realistic numbers. Steve Torpey, a centre-forward, I said he was worth possibly £300,000-£400,000. Christian Edwards, a centre-half, £250,000. And Roger Freestone in goal, you would have got money for him.”
Asked whether Thompson had any football knowledge, Molesworth replies: “Zero.”
In a decision he would come to regret, Molesworth ended up following Cullis to Swansea, where the club’s new managerial duo stayed at the Glevdon Park Hotel, on Oystermouth Road, overlooking the sea. It was cheap, cheerful and a short walk from the Vetch Field, Swansea’s ground.
Cullis was nervous on the morning of his press conference, Molesworth remembers, and had been “smoking like a trooper”.
Strangely, Cullis had no plans to get to work with the players on the training ground, even though he had been scathing in his criticism of the team’s display in the match before he took over.
“That performance was a shambles,” Cullis said. “I was appalled, it was little better than a non-League side. The defence needs shoring up, the midfield lacks direction and the leadership was non-existent.”
In the circumstances, it might have been wise for Cullis to choose his words more carefully, mindful that his appointment had been met with ridicule 24 hours earlier and he was stepping into a standard of football that was alien to him.
Instead, Cullis delivered a withering assessment of the Swansea team that he watched lose 3-0 at home to Stockport County on a Tuesday night, leaving them second from bottom in the third tier.
Cullis described the back four as being as flat as “a cardboard box”, accused the team of not being fit, highlighted the absence of any style of play, and said the strikers needed to be much closer together. “They are as wide as the M6,” Cullis said, referencing the motorway close to his home in the Midlands.
Edwards, who was a promising 20-year-old centre-back for Swansea in 1996 and is now a senior lecturer at Cardiff Metropolitan University, rolls his eyes when reminded of those remarks. “You’re trying to win a group of players over… well, there’s a way not to do it.”
Cullis made those comments on the day he was presented to the media. Ian Rush, a Liverpool legend, Mike Walker, the former Norwich City and Everton manager, and Dave Bassett, who had not long left Sheffield United, had all been linked with the job.
Instead, the Cradley under-16s coach pulled up a chair in one of the hospitality suites at the Vetch Field, flanked by Molesworth, his assistant, and Thompson, the chairman, and introduced himself.
“People are calling me Mr Nobody, but I’m going to be Mr Somebody,” was one of Cullis’ lines.
Molesworth cringes when he thinks back to that whole episode. “Imagine a press conference when you’ve got all the local media probably expecting Ian Rush to take over and Kevin Cullis and me are there: ‘Who the f*** are these two?’”
“I was there,” John Burgum, who reported on Swansea for the South Wales Evening Post, says. “It was as much as you could do not to laugh. The club were a laughing stock and the headlines were national: ‘Kevin Who?’”
Thompson was unperturbed. “There is a trap which suggests that a big name is the way forward, but I intend to disprove that theory,” the chairman said.
With no experience of working in football, Thompson’s involvement at Swansea was curious to say the least. Born in Birmingham, he claimed in an interview with the South Wales Evening Post that his interest in buying a “light engineering business” had initially brought him to Swansea and said he was a friend and close associate of Howard Walker, the son of Jack, who was the owner of Blackburn Rovers.
“I want to see Swansea City back in the First Division (the second tier) by 1997 and there is no reason, once we have achieved that, we should not continue onwards and upwards, to a place in the Premier League in time for the new Millennium,” Thompson said.
The decision to opt for Cullis as the man to deliver that vision left everyone baffled, including the staff at Cradley.
“I just thought it was funny,” says Trevor Thomas, who was Cradley’s under-18s coach and ended up buying the non-League club off Cullis a few days later. “I don’t know how that could possibly happen.
“Kevin is a clever guy and he does know football. But you’ve got to really be in the game to understand how the game is run at professional level. You can’t just walk into it.
“Kevin only ever coached young kids on a Sunday morning. He had the one team (initially under a different team name) all the way through from the age of eight, nine, 10. He got up to the age of under-16 — they were playing in that at the time.”
According to a fact-file in the South Wales Evening Post in 1996, Cullis’ under-16 team were unbeaten in 111 matches.
“He got a group of players with him that really didn’t need much coaching,” says David Attwood, who is Cradley’s secretary and had a son who played against Cullis’ team before signing for him.
“When we used to play against them, he’d say, ‘I’ve got this system. We call it the circle system’.”
Jimmy Rimmer sighs.
“Cullis said to me, ‘You take the first team, then the reserves, then try and get the youth team in after that’. He’s the manager!” Rimmer, the former Manchester United and Aston Villa goalkeeper, says.
Rimmer was Swansea’s youth coach and had been caretaker manager of the first team before Cullis was brought in to replace him. Except Cullis never did replace him on the training ground.
“He just sat in his office,” Rimmer says. “It was all wheeling and dealing. He (Cullis) said, ‘Come in and have a look at this. These are the players that we want to get’. I’m in there looking at him and going, ‘We’re Swansea City Football Club. We’re not Real Madrid‘. He had crazy ideas. I don’t think he knew anything about football.”
According to Swansea’s goalkeeper Roger Freestone, Cullis watched a total of 10 minutes of training and that was the day before his first game. The weather was so bad that the players had to train on astroturf.
“He turned up and you were just walking around kicking the snow,” Freestone says. “We couldn’t stand up because it was so icy. We went back down to the Vetch and got changed. He (Cullis) said, ‘Boys, fantastic training session. Best session I’ve seen in a long time’. We were all looking at each other thinking it was a shower of s***.”
By now word had got through to the former chairman Doug Sharpe, who was holidaying in Spain at the time and still in the process of selling the club to Thompson (he had agreed a deal in principle but a 21-day cooling off period was in place), that there was a circus in town.
“It was that (a circus) for seven days,” Cornforth says. “I was quite fortunate I was injured because I’m hot-headed and I would have done something really daft.
“I remember sitting in a meeting for about five minutes and he (Cullis) was talking so much s*** that I got up on my crutches and just walked out. I managed to get in touch with Doug and he came back early from Spain.”
“Horrified” by the news of Thompson’s decision to appoint Cullis as manager, Sharpe was back at the Vetch Field to watch Swansea lose 1-0 to Swindon Town.
That was Cullis’ first game in charge and within the club, there was still some confusion around the identity of their new manager. In his programme notes, Cullis described the decision to appoint him as “bold”. Unfortunately, those same programme notes were signed off under the name of “Keith” Cullis, rather than Kevin. Swansea went on to wish “Keith” the best of luck at the club.
Cullis’ second and final match in charge took place on a Tuesday night at Blackpool, where the lead-up was odd.
Edwards, who later signed for Nottingham Forest, recalls Cullis pulling him aside for a quiet word along with Freestone, the former Chelsea goalkeeper.
“He (Cullis) said, ‘You two are my biggest assets’,” Edwards says. “‘I’m going to offer you new contracts’. So me and Roger looked at each other and Cullis said, ‘Yeah, big, big money, Mercedes cars’. It was as if it was monopoly money that he was playing with. I was on £125 a week and driving a Ford Escort Eclipse 1.3 (litre). All of a sudden he starts talking about Mercedes cars.”
In normal circumstances, Cullis would have travelled on the team coach to Blackpool with the players, but nothing about Cullis’ tenure was normal.
“He (Cullis) said, ‘No, no, no. I’ve got things to do’,” Molesworth says. “He said, ‘I need to get back to Birmingham (after the match). The players will have a day off anyway, then we can go back down (to Swansea).”
The 263-mile trip from Swansea to Blackpool in Cullis’ car wasn’t straightforward. “We’re on the motorway and who do we overtake?” Molesworth says, rolling his eyes. “I’m in the passenger seat and there’s Doug (the former Swansea chairman) with Robin (Doug’s son and the club’s chief executive).”
In a scene that feels like it belongs in a comedy sketch, Molesworth remembers awkwardly lifting his hand and mouthing the words “all right” as he looked across at Sharpe and nodded.
“He (Sharpe) was like that (shaking his head) and I don’t blame him,” Molesworth adds. “Then Cullis, for some reason, decided to play cat and mouse up the motorway, let them overtake him and then he’d overtake them. I said, ‘What are you doing?’.
“We ended up in Lytham St Annes at this hotel that was doubled up as an old people’s home. It was so subdued that it set the tone for the game.”
Cullis’ team selection and tactics didn’t help. “He was playing noughts and crosses more than anything else,” Edwards says.
Swansea were 2-0 down at the interval and what happened next is the stuff of legend among those who were present.
“Dave Penney took the team talk at half-time,” Freestone says, laughing.
Penney, to be clear, was one of the Swansea players. “We had Mark Clode, a right-back, playing left wing. We were all over the shop and getting absolutely battered,” Penney says. “We came in at half time and it’s chaos. I stood up and said, ‘People are playing out of position, they don’t know what they’re doing’. The comeback was, ‘Well, I don’t know what positions people play’.
“So I just said (to the players), ‘You go back to right-back, you do this, you do that’. And he (Cullis) just accepted it. We played better in the second half but we still got beat 4-0. It could have been 7-0 at half time.
“I remember we came off the pitch and we went across to the Tangerine Bar, which was like their clubhouse, to have a few beers before setting off to Swansea. Robin Sharpe said, ‘Can we get the lads on the bus? My old man wants a word’.
“So we got on the bus ready to go to Swansea and Doug said, ‘Well, that’s the last you’ll see of those two jokers’. And that was it. They came in on the Wednesday and by the following Tuesday night, they were gone. Unbelievable. It’s crackers. Cullis took two games but didn’t take one training session.”
But that wasn’t the end of the story.
Immediately after the Blackpool game, Cullis was handed a note by Thompson’s secretary, asking him to meet the chairman at a motorway service station at 10.30pm that same night.
According to Cullis’ account at the time, the two of them “discussed several matters which were not directly to do with football itself”.
Something must have got lost in translation. Sharpe, who travelled back to Wales on the team bus with the players, claimed that Thompson informed him in the early hours of the morning that Cullis had resigned for personal reasons and Swansea later put out a statement confirming that was the case.
Cullis insisted nothing of the sort had happened. He claimed he was still Swansea’s manager and said it was not until he telephoned 0891 121639 on the way back from Blackpool that he found out he had stepped down from his role.
“The first I knew of my resignation was when I rang ClubCall,” Cullis told the South Wales Evening Post the day after his departure. “I have not been informed of anything by the club or the chairman. The chairman seems to have gone to ground. Perhaps he hasn’t got the bottle to take my call. To say I resigned was a pack of lies.”
Molesworth nods after hearing those comments. “That’s what he told me. He phoned me up and said, ‘Don’t you worry about this, we’ll get thousands here’. I said, ‘What do you mean?’. He (Cullis) found (a former manager) Frank Burrows’ old contract in the drawer in the manager’s office at the Vetch. He saw Burrows’ salary and decided he would be on the same amount.”
Cullis said he would be making no apology for putting six players on the transfer list after the Blackpool game and, in the same breath, insisted he had a “great rapport” with the Swansea squad. “I have got their respect and they have got mine,” he added.
Edwards has a different take. “Knowing what I do about football, particularly a professional environment, you need credibility, regardless of who you are. He (Cullis) had none.”
“Corny hit the nail on the head,” Freestone adds. “He looked like Sideshow Bob walking in with his trainers on and a tracksuit that didn’t fit — and he thought he was the dog’s bollocks. We were wearing Le Coq Sportif, which was quite trendy gear — but only if it fits you properly.”
Another twist was still to come. Three days after the Blackpool game, Doug Sharpe was due to fly to the Isle of Man to finalise Thompson’s takeover. Instead, he held a press conference at the Vetch Field, where he read a statement from Thompson, explaining that the man who had put down around £150,000 to buy Swansea was pulling out of the deal.
At the same time, Cullis held a press conference at a hotel in Dudley, near his home in the Midlands, and said he was taking legal action against Swansea for breach of contract.
Cullis said that neither himself nor Molesworth signed a contract with Swansea but claimed a “verbally binding agreement was entered into by Thompson in full knowledge, and Mr Doug Sharpe had full knowledge of that”.
Sharpe was combative. “He can sue all he wants, I’ll fight him all the way,” he said.
By now, the media were having a field day. Thompson, it transpired, was not listed as a director of any company in Britain at the time of his takeover at Swansea and those close to him were puzzled by the use of the word “millionaire” next to his name.
“If he is a millionaire, it isn’t at all evident,” John Puddifoot, one of Thompson’s business associates, told the Wales on Sunday newspaper in 1996.
The same newspaper reported how Companies House records showed that Cullis had been a director of eight companies, seven of which had been wound up because of debts or dissolved for failing to comply with requirements to submit accounts or annual returns. Thompson’s name appeared in relation to six of Cullis’ old companies. At the time he told the South Wales Evening Post that he had never been in business with Cullis although he may have set up a number of shelf companies for him.
Intriguingly, in the wake of the collapsed takeover, Sharpe revealed it was Cullis who had introduced Thompson to him and that there was an agreement that the Cradley under-16s coach would be employed at Swansea as a result. “I knew that Thompson had promised Cullis a job, but not as manager. I was horrified when I discovered that,” Sharpe said.
That leaves one key question unanswered: who on earth introduced Cullis to Swansea?
Steve Daniels looks up from his dining room table.
“I may have introduced Kevin to Swansea,” he says. “It’s got to be me, hasn’t it?”
Daniels was the Cradley manager when Cullis was given the Swansea job and his reputation on the non-League circuit preceded him. “A bit of an Arthur Daley, a bit of a Del Boy,” says John Williams, who moved from Cradley to Swansea in 1991 and became known as The Flying Postman because of his speed and former job.
Williams laughs when he thinks about Daniels’ potential involvement. “Steve Daniels could sell snow to an Eskimo!”
At his home in Dudley, Daniels’ mind is ticking over. He is thinking about taking Williams to Swansea along with Jon Ford, another Cradley player, as well as a youngster called Micky Moore, who is now director of football at League One club Shrewsbury Town.
Frank Burrows was Swansea’s manager for those transfers and was still in charge at the start of the 1995-96 season, during which Cullis was later appointed. Daniels says he knew Burrows well and reels off the names of several other players he introduced to Swansea.
It is all coming back to him. He recalls going to watch Blackpool at Wycombe in 1996, three days before they played Swansea, to report on the opposition for Cullis and says there were plans for him to be appointed the Welsh club’s chief scout.
Daniels nods. “The Swansea scenario came through me because I knew Doug Sharpe wanted to sell,” he says. “Yeah, it’s definitely come off me because of my involvement with Swansea and my involvement with Frank Burrows, because he had not long left.”
By his own admission, Daniels was “really, really close to Cullis” at one time. When Cullis was appointed Swansea manager, there were reports that the two of them had tried to buy Exeter City a couple of years earlier. “That’s right,” Daniels says. “It wasn’t me (buying the club). It was Kevin. But it was me that would have opened the doors.”
In Daniels’ eyes, Cullis was doing a similar thing with Thompson at Swansea. “He got a chance to set a deal up between somebody and somebody else and he took the opportunity with the proviso, ‘I might be able to get you into a club. It might be difficult. However, if I can set this up, I would like you to take me, then I can become manager’. That’s how I saw it and that’s how it was.”
Sharpe had still expected Thompson to go through with the takeover after Cullis’ departure, but he told the South Wales Evening Post that “it was clear the money was not there to complete the deal”.
“It was probably a good job that it didn’t go through, even though it kicked me in the balls a little bit,” says Molesworth, who is now director of football at non-League Bromsgrove Sporting.
“You imagine if it had gone through what would have become of it. Would Cullis have been capable of staying long as a manager before there would have been a complete rebellion? No. Would I have enjoyed working for him? No.
“What I will say is that it was an experience and it didn’t affect me in the long term because I stayed in the game.”
As for Howard Walker, he told The Athletic via email that Thompson was “a business associate and we would occasionally socialise”, but said there was never any more to the Swansea links.
“I have not seen or heard from Michael from late ’95-96 since he left B Robinson & Co (where Walker was a director).
Indeed, Molesworth appears to be the last person associated with Swansea to have seen Thompson.
“He came to my house to apologise — at least he had the decency to do that,” Molesworth says. “I said, ‘You absolutely fucked me up. I leave Liverpool Football Club to go to Swansea, who are in dire straits, you promised me you were taking over and it hasn’t happened’. He said, ‘I’m really sorry, for various reasons I just can’t go through with it’.
“I remember he had lent me a car and it was on the drive of my house. But it (the car) went a few days later. I’ve never wondered where he (Thompson) is since.”
With some assistance from Molesworth, Swansea ended up replacing Cullis with Jan Molby, whose CV — a decade playing for Liverpool and a couple of years at Ajax — represented something of an upgrade on his predecessor. Molby was unable to salvage anything from the wreckage of that season, though, and Swansea were relegated.
As for Cullis, he threatened to “rock football to its foundations” with his revelations after suffering what he described as “a very public humiliation” at Swansea. Instead, he ended up accepting an out-of-court settlement from Swansea (both parties signed a confidentiality agreement) after he had threatened to sue the club for unfair dismissal and disappeared from the game altogether.
His name, however, has never been forgotten.
Whoever is Wycombe manager will be feeling nervous. QPR have sacked Ainsworth.
And Pearson leaves Bristols. Definitely into sacking season.
Phil Neville is the new Portland Timbers manager, Graham Alexander has rocked up at Bradford and Joe Edwards (me neither) is now in charge at Millwall.
And Oxford manager Liam Manning set for the Bristol City job.
Wasn't Neville at Inter Miami Circus? And Mark Hughes at Bradford? When did they get jogged on?
Also I note that Frank Lampard is still currently unemloyed as well which is (paradoxically) surprising despite his abject shitness at football league club management.
Neville was binned off by Miami shortly before Messi got there and Leslie was sacked by Bradford early October
Lampard was heavily linked with Rangers it seemed, although I think they tried to go with someone competent instead in the end
