There was no sense in the dressing-room of `let’s show we can win without Georgi’ but it won’t do them any harm.”I don’t know him well yet but he seems very well balanced There is no `Charlie Big Potatoes’ about him. The first question in the press conference is nearly always: `When is he going to be fit?’ In that respect it was nice that the players showed they can win without him. “I don’t think I’m particularly hard.”This brings us on to the Georgian playmaker, Kinkladze, who had been injured during City’s good run Is he staying?”People have a fixation about him. He had said I was the `hardest’ manager he had ever played for and he thought it was right that he did not get any special treatment.” Clark looks half-puzzled, half-pleased. Shortly after I arrived I read a piece by someone who had spoken to Georgi [Kinkladze]. It is about discipline and laughter, you can have one without the other but you won’t have a good football club if you do.”One or two players have stepped out of line in small ways and been dealt with They all get treated the same.
When I say we start at 10.30, I mean 10.30.”The fines are only tenners It means nothing financially but it is the principle. It might seem a little thing, but I hate going into a dressing-room to start training and finding half of them are not ready. They are not oppressive, just basics like turning up on time. The longer the takeover went on, the more you could see the insecurity spreading.”In the circumstances Clark’s first act at City, a code of conduct, was probably welcomed by his players as an sign of order replacing chaos.”I’m not into sitting people down and giving them long lectures It was a case of laying down a few rules and standards. I found that at Forest, not so much with players, but the staff.
People at any organisation don’t perform to their best when there is instability, they like security. I looked at the teams and we were putting out sides with eight internationals. The office, noted Clark, “is austere” but that is partly because it is almost new – being just a couple of years old it has only had five or six occupants so far.”The club needed stability,” City’s fifth manager of the season said “Players had been underperforming. Even Newcastle closed their training ground when they had problems.”This accessibility is one reason why the manager’s office door has a security-coded lock on it, rather than the revolving door City’s turnover of managers would suggest. At the moment, people want to come and say `well done’ but it is not always like that.”You don’t want to be in an ivory tower, separated from the supporters, but there has to be a line somewhere where the players can work in privacy. After a corkage charge and “rent” to the brewery, beer works out at 62p a pint.Reg Vousden, whose family has lived in the Cuckmere Valley for generations and who is probably descended from the original “Gentlemen” who so inspired Kipling, said: “It’s so stupid that the French pay so little duty and we pay so much.
Sadly this was erroneous.The offending garments are an indeterminate blue colour with an eruption of puce/yellow on the front.The only explanations I could come up was that the team had upset our beloved chairman and he was wreaking his revenge.This bizarre “design” has even meant that Southend United could possibly have achieved a league first. My initial opinion was that the tension of the evening had somehow got to “our boys” and they had all been sick down their fronts as they ran out on to the field. Both he, and his guide dog, were both obviously criminally insane.When the team took the field that night there was an audible gasp from the crowd It was not one of admiration. I had begun to believe that a rational mind was at last in charge of kit selection I was soon disabused. Admittedly, I was fairly cynical about the whole affair in that this would be about the 10th new kit in as many years but I had been lulled into a false sense of security over the past few seasons.The Southend team had of late been decked out in what was a largely understated and rather tasteful outfit as football strips go.
However, could the team strip also be playing its malign part?I must admit to having been only mildly curious as to the design of the much-heralded “new kit” before its first official airing in a pre-season friendly against Tottenham Hotspur. It has even been mooted in crueller circles that if he took his superstition to its logical conclusion and did not come out at all then the team would only benefit further. It transpired that one of the miscreants, Andy Rammell, had been wrestling with his contact lenses and the other, Phil Gridelet, refused to leave the dressing-room before him because it was his custom to always be the last on to the pitch.
In view of the team’s results so far one can only speculate with dread just how bad things could have been had he not kept up this tradition. “It must have been very difficult for the players when they were having a bad time. They also have fans passing judgement on the touchline (as well, perhaps, as other clubs’ spies).”It is too accessible for a professional football club,” Clark said.
