As a reserve player at City, I had earned £100 per week, so as a first-team player—even in the Third Division—I was expecting to earn double that. But Dario outlined the club’s budget and financial problems, and offered me a two-year deal worth £110 per week, plus bonuses.
I had been hoping for a bigger club and more money, but Dario proved very convincing and he did have a reputation for his work with young players. In particular, he was good at improving players freed from other clubs and selling them on, as he had done with David Platt, who he got for nothing from Manchester United and sold to Aston Villa for £200,000. Also, when I had played for City’s youth team against Crewe Alexandra, they had always impressed me as a team who were trying to play good football.
I had to make my mind up quickly as my contract was running out, so though I was bitterly disappointed at having to join a club two divisions lower, I only had one concrete offer on the table and it was a two-year deal, so I decided to sign. I suppose I could have waited to see whether an offer materialized from Port Vale or some other club, but Dario had done such a good job selling Crewe Alexandra to me that I plumped for them. At the time it seemed a disastrous backward step, but in hindsight it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I have long since learned in life that sometimes you have to take a step backwards to go forwards.
Dario did indeed live up to his reputation as a fantastic coach, particularly of youngsters like myself. At times he could be very straightforward, even curt, but at other times he would be funny and he was always very encouraging. He kept telling us to go out and play football and enjoy the game, and try to express ourselves on the pitch.
He was very ‘hands on’ or should that be ‘feet on’. I particularly remember that when we were practising set-pieces, if we did not get it correct and hit the wrong spot with the ball, he would march up and get hold of the ball, then deliver the free-kick perfectly to the exact place he wanted it.
He taught us a whole range of things which were new to the game in England. He had been very influenced by Ajax of Amsterdam and their training methods, and in a way it was he who brought the continental philosophy into the game in England, following their approach a few years before the big influx of players and managers from abroad in the 1990s. He emphasized movement on and off the ball and told us to try to copy the good European teams.
Goodness knows how he managed it, but he persuaded Red Star Belgrade to play Crewe in a friendly, and even though we lost 0-4, it was a really pleasurable experience to take part in a game with such skilful players. They scored four, but it could have been fourteen, and afterwards Dario told us that he would love us to play like them—we ended up getting relegated and Red Star won the European Cup that season, so that plan didn’t exactly work out.
Although much of the attention focused on Dario’s youthful brigade, the Crewe squad at the time were not just a bunch of raw youngsters. Kenny Swain was the assistant manager and he had won the European Cup with Aston Villa in 1982. He was still playing even though he was coming up for forty and was fantastically fit. Apart from being a really nice guy, he taught us a lot and for all his achievements in the game he was a modest man.
Steve Walters was another fine player. He had been Crewe’s youngest-ever first-team player and had captained the England youth team. He was a very talented boy but he didn’t make the impact expected of him later in his career.
One of the players who joined us for a season later in my time there was someone I knew quite a bit about. Jim Harvey hailed from Lurgan, and like myself he had started out with Glenavon FC, though he had played rather more than my two matches with our home-town side. He had gone on to have a long stint with Tranmere Rovers before moving to Crewe. He was in the later stages of his career, and went on to become assistant to Sammy McIlroy when he was manager of Northern Ireland, where I encountered him several years after I had left Crewe. Jim was manager of Morecambe of the Nationwide Conference League for a dozen years and twice took them to the brink of Football League qualification, but he was sacked in May 2006, to be replaced by none other than Sammy McIlroy.
Other players at the time included Rob Jones who went on to sign for Liverpool for £300,000 and then played for England, while Craig Hignett was a Scouser who was transferred to Middlesborough for £500,000. I recognized one player as soon as I walked in the door—Andy Gunn had played against me in the Manchester City v Watford Youth Cup Final.
It was a happy dressing room at the start of my time at Crewe and would generally stay that way for the rest of my time there. It took me a while to get to grips with the demands of playing for the first team even at that level, but Dario had confidence in me and picked me from the start of the season, which sadly began disastrously as we took just one point from our first six league games.
The first really big games I played for Crewe were against a club who were legends of world football. After knocking out Grimsby Town, we were drawn against Liverpool in the League Cup. We actually took the lead against them at Anfield, but that probably only served to annoy them and they came back to overwhelm us 5-1. The return leg was an all-ticket affair at Gresty Road, which at least showed that the stadium when full could generate plenty of atmosphere, but we were on the wrong end of a 1-4 drubbing. In fairness to us, that was the Liverpool team who were league champions and even to be on the same pitch as the likes of Ray Houghton, John Barnes and Ian Rush was a big thrill for all of us, especially since I was still only nineteen.
I had decided to stay in Stockport, and even though I wasn’t being charged the earth for my digs, money was very tight. Those were the days when a tenner could buy you five or six pints, which was just as well as that was usually how much I had left for a night out.
My favourite local pub was the Elizabethan in Heaton Moor Road, Stockport, and it was there that I met and drank with two friends, Chris Mooney and Scott Woodhall, who are still mates of mine to this day. There were a lot of talented people who drank in the Elizabethan at that time and formed a loose grouping of friends. There were actors such as Craig Cash who was in The Royle Family. He and a guy called Phil Mealey wrote a television sit-com called Early Doors which was based loosely on The Elizabethan where they both drank. Sally Lindsay, who played Shelley Unwin on Coronation Street, was another regular, and it was a place where a lot of musicians gathered, including two brothers called Gallagher. I was just getting seriously into music at that time so you will not be surprised to learn that I was a big fan of Mancunian music at the time of ‘Madchester’, when bands like the Stone Roses and Happy Mondays burst onto the scene.
Noel and Liam Gallagher were a class apart from the start. They were just putting their band together and it was great to watch them develop and became bigger than all of the other Manchester bands. I’m still a huge fan of Oasis today. From the first time that I went to see them I was blown away by their live performances, and I saw them quite a few times before and after they were famous.
One of their best-ever gigs was at Maine Road in Manchester in 1996. Everybody wanted to be at that concert and it was generally reckoned to have been a high point in the Manchester scene of the 1990s, but I don’t have the fondest memories of that day.
I had just signed for Leicester City and Steve Lomas, a great friend of mine who was captain of Manchester City, managed to get us backstage passes for the day. It would be fair to say that we had enjoyed a drink or five before the gig even started. I remember there was a long corridor backstage and as we went along it I spotted Liam and Noel and Liam’s wife Patsy Kensit, plus Stan Collymore and a few of the Liverpool players. As we went outside to stand beside the executive boxes, for some reason Steve Lomas and I started to have an argy-bargy. I cannot even remember who started it or why, but we were soon rolling about on the floor in front of all the VIPs, trying to punch each other but failing miserably because we were under the influence. The bouncers took a dim view of our scrapping, but for some reason it was me who got thrown out and not Steve. A few years later Oasis played a gig in Glasgow and we managed to get backstage to meet the band, the Gallaghers being great Celtic fans as well as Manchester City diehards. The first thing that Noel said when he saw me was ‘Right, you, no fighting tonight.’
Back in the early 1990s I was happy to be on the edge of what was a hard-drinking, drug-using scene, but I was a little like a spectator looking in. As I