Rovers Revolution (eBook)

PROLOGUE

‘We took it away from the big city boys and they didn’t like it. There was some jealousy. We had money and that brought us success. People say that we bought the league but we didn’t spend as much as the big boys. We were always going to get stick for that as a small town club but that just made it sweeter.’

KEVIN GALLACHER

AS I LEFT FOR UNIVERSITY IN LONDON IN THE SUMMER of 1991, Blackburn Rovers were stuck in the bottom half of the Second Division. It was a league they had, over the previous decade or so, threatened to escape on a few occasions – usually upwards, occasionally down – without ever finding the exit. Ewood Park had not changed that much since it became the club’s permanent home in 1890. It was homely but had seen better days. When David Pleat had been fired by Tottenham Hotspur in 1987 and then took the Leicester City job, he said that it was only when the team bus arrived at Ewood that the fact that he was no longer a top tier manager finally sunk in.

At least Pleat had been there. For the Rovers, the prospects of playing a season in the First Division for the first time since 1966 were looking as murky as a January afternoon over the nearby moors. What only a few people knew at the time, however, was that just four months before I left for the capital, Jack Walker had been there, entering the dressing room at Millwall’s Old Den to tell a team that had just lost and barely avoided the drop to the third tier that everything was different now. The local boyhood fan made good steel and then good deals, leaving him with plenty of money to spend. He informed the players that promotion, a tantalising dream for much of the eighties, was finally going to be achieved. In short, funds would be available and Rovers would be going up.

He was true to his word. By the time I finished my studies, everything was different. The manager was the legendary Kenny Dalglish, the old ground had been transformed into a soon-to-be-completed 30,000 spanking new stadium that now towered over the surrounding streets and the Blues, runners-up the year before, were about to embark on a title-winning season never to be forgotten. Walker had been true to his word. ‘Jack Walker was a very clever and very tough businessman but he was a winner and one I respected hugely,’ Alan Shearer told me almost three decades later, finding the exact sentiments of the town of Blackburn just as accurately as he used to find the back of the Ewood net.

I grew up in Blackburn, born and raised on ‘the tops’ (the coldest part of a cold town, where the wind whistled through on its way from the Atlantic to the Pennines) not that far from where Walker had built his massive Walkersteel factory in which workers cycled from one part to the next. Look down into the valley and you see rows and rows of terraced houses of the type that still surround Ewood Park, with the cobbled streets that gave television producers up and down the country the kind of archetypal northern backdrop that could never be resisted. There weren’t many cameras around in the late seventies, at least I don’t think there were, as I was too young to make the ten-minute walk down the hill to Ewood. It was easy to hear what was going on though, all you had to do was open a window.

After leaving for university, the one year I spent back in the town was the one that ended with the title. It was timing as fortuitous as Walker’s sale of his company to British Steel just before Kenny Dalglish was to become available. English football would never be the same again.

That is because there is a little more to this tale than Blackburn winning the championship for the first time in 81 years. When captain Tim Sherwood lifted the gleaming English Premiership (as it was still called) trophy on 14 May 1995, in the bright sunshine of Anfield, it ended much more than eight decades in the – as newspapers loved to put it – wilderness: it brought down the curtain on a momentous campaign in English football. Tony Evans, former sports editor of The Times and author of a number of books on Liverpool, remembers it well. ‘It was a pivotal, watershed season, the season when you can look back and say that English football was really changing. That was the time.’

It was. Looking back, that season was the bridge between the old and the new, the dividing line between the old Division One and the new dawn and the soon-to-be unleashed global juggernaut.

Sherwood, without the mid-length mid-nineties style hair he would sport in Liverpool that day in May had been beamed into a nation’s living rooms almost three years earlier in the summer of 1992 ahead of the big and special kick-off. He was Blackburn’s representative in the Sky Sports commercial that tried to convince fans that the new era really was going to be different from the old football league and, for the first time, would be worth shelling out for. With ‘Alive and Kicking’ by Simple Minds blaring out, the footage shows a host of players from the-then 22-team competition. There was Vinnie Jones in the shower, Gordon Strachan getting a massage, Paul Stewart breezing in with a shell suit, perm and sunglasses combo and Andy Ritchie talking into a mobile phone almost as big as the gleaming new league trophy.

Despite all that glitz and glamour, it wasn’t the 1992/93 season with The Shamen at half-time at Highbury and cheerleaders – whose Premier League careers didn’t last much longer than Ali Dia at Southampton – that represented a ‘whole new ball game’, but 1994/95. That August, when Rovers kicked off at The Dell, the top tier still felt largely like the old First Division. By May, the Premiership juggernaut was starting to move up through the gears. In the past there had been plenty of Irish and a smattering of Scandinavians, with Eric Cantona thrown in as an outlier. That started to change. As English fans watched the 1994 World Cup without a team to support, they would at least see some of the talent that was on display in the United States. The biggest and the best was Jürgen Klinsmann from Germany. Following the conclusion of the tournament he joined Spurs, as did Romania’s Ilie Dumitrescu. Bryan Roy of the Netherlands joined Nottingham Forest, Dan Petrescu went to Sheffield Wednesday, Stefan Schwarz of Sweden moved to Arsenal and Daniel Amokachi was at Everton. Rumours of foreign additions were more common than dodgy-looking mid-nineties away shirts. Everton, who had just avoided relegation on the final day of the previous campaign, had an injection of cash to play with and saw their name in newspapers alongside such names as Oliver Bierhoff, Paulo Sousa and Anthony Yeboah.

There were concerns back in the summer of 1994 about what this foreign invasion would mean for English football. Gordon Taylor, the chairman of the Professional Footballers’ Association, warned in a press conference against the decline of the national team and the danger of smaller clubs going bust. Klinsmann was not a problem, but those who were not at the level of the 1990 World Cup winner potentially were. ‘… The vast majority have not made the grade and have been no better than our home-grown players,’ Taylor said. ‘Millions of pounds have been lost into thin foreign air and if it continues it may cause our natural full-time breeding clubs, those such as Crewe Alexandra, to collapse.’

Taylor went on. ‘We are going to have to decide if we want to be a cosmopolitan domestic league, albeit successful in its own back garden, while remaining a wallflower at the world dance.’ While poetic, there was a whiff of hypocrisy from a player who had moved to the United States in 1977 during his own playing career. This was denied, however. ‘I went because I was better than their own indigenous players. I do not mind any players coming in if they are better than what is available domestically, not because they are cheaper. This is a false economy, particularly for our international football, for which we paid the price this summer and may pay a stiffer price in the future.’

It may have been a new topic at the time, but the arguments have not changed that much. The trickle that started in the 1994/95 season widened and the following season Ruud Gullit, Dennis Bergkamp and many more arrived. The Premier League went on to become the most international of any major domestic tournament, a development boosted in 1995 as the quota on foreign players that was imposed on clubs participating in UEFA club competitions was lifted, leading to more doom-laden predictions from Taylor, who called for a ban on non-European players.

Look back at the newspapers from the time and football is just starting to push other sports off the back pages, even during the close-season. FourFourTwo, a quality and weighty magazine, was launched in August 1994. The fanzine craze was still going strong (though I remember one away fan at Ewood that season reacting with shock when seeing Blackburn’s fanzine named 4,000 Holes. ‘What have you got to moan about?’ was the understandable question, even if fanzines were about more than getting gripes off chests). And then there was the internet. It was just starting to become a thing and the number of users in the UK hit the one million mark not long after Rovers went top of the table on 26 November 1994 as Alan Shearer sealed a 4-0 win against Queens Park Rangers with a 30-yard rocket.

New rules were introduced that season which had major changes on how the game was played, to...