Читать книгу Taking le Tiss онлайн

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To be fair to Ian Branfoot (read all about it in Chapter 9), he wanted to take Blackburn striker Mike Newell as part of the deal, but Rovers didn’t want to let him go. Instead of playing hardball and holding out for a quality replacement, Saints caved in and sold Alan for £3m with NO sell-on clause. Even I can work out that if they had insisted on getting 20 per cent of any future fee then when Al eventually moved to Newcastle for £15m, Saints would have pocketed another £3m.

Instead of getting Mike Newell we ended up taking David Speedie. It seemed to me as though Speedo didn’t want to be here. He never got what Southampton was about, and it looked to me as though he resented being used as a makeweight in the deal. So Ian Branfoot spent part of the fee on Kerry Dixon in the hope of recreating the successful Dixon/Speedie partnership at Chelsea. Kerry had been an ace striker in his time but his best days were behind him. He had lost that yard of pace and sharpness and Speedie just didn’t settle. It was hardly a match made in heaven, and it didn’t help the situation or the fans’ mood when Branfoot made the staggering prediction that Speedie and Dixon would outscore Alan Shearer that season. Kerry got just two goals and Speedo precisely zero while Al had scored 16 by December, when he picked up a bad knee injury ruling him out for the rest of the campaign. The following season he scored 31. (Kerry did try and I set him up for both his goals, including his two-hundredth league strike at Leeds. I was through and could have shot but I knew he was on 199 and, the way things were going, this would be his only chance to get to 200 so I teed him up for a simple tap-in, and spurned my best chance to score at Elland Road. Leeds were the only established Premier League club that I failed to score against.)