John McGovern: From dreamland with Forest to brink of bankruptcy at Bolton

John McGovern gives a hearty chuckle at the suggestion he had a tough time as Bolton Wanderers boss, and he isn’t short of an explanation.

The rock ‘n’ roll era of Ian Greaves, Frank Worthington and Co had long since drifted away at a dreary Burnden Park in the early eighties, successive managers in Stan Anderson and George Mulhall failing to revive its fortunes.

Chairman Terry Edge had attempted to lend an air of glitz and glamour to the vacant job by suggesting that Pele might be interested. But while the Brazil legend remained blissfully unaware that Bolton were touting him for the post, the opportunity had not escaped the attention of decorated midfielder McGovern, who was at the end of his top-flight career with Nottingham Forest.

The Scot had won almost everything there was to win as a player, twice lifting the European Cup with Nottingham Forest and winning a league title under Brian Clough at the City Ground and at Derby County.

He had been expected to make the transition into coaching eventually but had 14 months left on his contract with Forest when he sensed his time was up.

“Brian Clough had told me that Bolton were interested but that he wanted to keep me,” McGovern recalled to The Bolton News. “He hadn’t been getting on with Peter Taylor at the time and Peter was telling me it was time to go.

“I’d been going back and forth between the offices for ages until one day I sat down at Clough’s desk and said ‘come on, let’s get this right.’ “He told me I’d be playing 20 games the following season. That was out of 42 plus cup matches. Taylor had quite a lot of influence over the manager and think he had persuaded him to let me leave.

“So I phoned Terry Edge up at Bolton and said I’d come. He asked me how much I was on at Forest and said he’d pay me the same, no rise.”

It soon became clear to the new Bolton boss that the environment at his new club was something quite different to the one he had experienced in the Midlands.

“I was basically told we couldn’t sign anyone, which was quite a shock,” he said. “I was told we had a good youth team – which was one of things that was actually true – but that nobody could earn more than £250 a week, or else the bank would close us down.

“I looked at the first team and the majority of them were on more than that. So I knew we had to get rid.

“I had no option but to bring five kids up from the reserves and see how we went.”

Money was so tight at Wanderers that they were susceptible to having their best players picked up for bargain fees, as proved to be the case for Peter Reid when he went to Everton for just £60,000 – a tenth of the fee Bolton could have got a few years earlier had it not been for injury.

“I never had a problem with Reidy, he was a great professional,” McGovern said. “I remember him coming in on a day-off and admitting he’d had a skin-full the night before but wanted to run it out of his system. One of the directors pulled me to one side and wanted to know why I wasn’t fining him.

“I said: ‘I should be giving him a rise for being so honest’.

“And the thing you might not know about Reidy is that at the end of the season Everton rang to see if we wanted him back!

“Of course we never had the money but he’d had an injury and he started a bit slowly. The next year I think he won their player of the season.”

The likes of Steve Thompson, Warren Joyce, Neil Redfearn, Simon Rudge and Wayne Foster were fully blooded into the senior ranks but despite some encouraging early performances the team wilted in the second half of the season and finished up dropping into Division Three with a defeat against Charlton Athletic on the final day.

“I remember after the game sitting in a press conference and someone saying: ‘It must feel a million miles from the European Cup.’ Bloody hell, he wasn’t kidding.

“I wanted to tell them about Mike Doyle making two big mistakes that cost us the game but I just had to sit and take it.”

At that point McGovern also decided that juggling his playing duties alongside management was simply too difficult, so he played only a bit-part in 1983/84 before hanging up his boots for good.

“You can go so far with enthusiasm but then you have to start thinking about winning games,” McGovern said. “The following year we went about eight or nine unbeaten and I thought it was down to my superb management – but the players reckoned it was because I wasn’t in the team anymore.

“We had that sort of relationship, we could have fun to a point.

“There simply wasn’t enough hours in the day to carry on playing, though. It was the chairman who advised me to stop. I was scouting, playing, coaching the kids, talking to parents – it just couldn’t be done.

"And on top of that I was training for a marathon!

"I finished it in 3hr 20mins but had to stop twice. First because my mate from Nottingham had cramp and the other time to do an interview with Radio Piccadilly!"

Reports at the time suggested that McGovern had a difficult relationship with some of his squad and that his struggle to man-manage some players eventually left him vulnerable to the sack.

“I didn’t have a problem with the players, it was more about getting sense out of the people employing me,” he said. “I remember going into the board room having done my homework. I was told we had no money, so I asked why we had five club cars and Manchester United – who were getting 50,000 fans a week – only had three.

“Des McBain (then secretary) reminded me that one of them was mine, so I took the keys out of my pocket, smashed them down on the boardroom table and took a chunk out of it.

“They sacked me pretty quickly after that.”

McGovern admits he did have a few sharp words with his coaching staff too, particularly the man who would eventually succeed him, Charlie Wright.

“I was isolated, couldn’t bring my own people in to support me, and then I had someone like Charlie barking orders at my players. I kept having to tell him to shut up. That was my job.

“I sound like I am being precious there but you had to have some order. I was making the place more professional and, hand on heart, I don’t think there is anyone who could have stepped in there and done better.”

Despite having little to spend, McGovern had some success in the transfer market, most notably with the twin striker signings of Tony Caldwell and George Oghani.

“I took Walter Joyce to watch Tony a few times and he never scored,” he said. “He never even got a kick.

“A few weeks later we went back and about 20 minutes into the game he cleaned the centre-half out and I turned to Walter and said: ‘He can play. We’ll sign him.’ “I knew he would work hard, even if he wasn’t playing well, and he got a lot of goals for us.

“We actually had a bit of an argument at one stage because he’d been in a bit of trouble and wasn’t allowed to drive at the time.

“I’d organised a dance to raise money and Tony turned up with a chauffeur. It was Mark Hughes from Manchester United.”

Oddly, Hughes – then a youngster and not yet in the United first team – nearly ended up a Wanderers player about 12 months earlier.

“I was sat in Ron Atkinson’s office at Old Trafford not long after he’d taken over and he wanted to talk about Tony, who had scored a lot of goals in his first year,” McGovern said. “I said we’d take £25,000 and the kid Hughes. Ron went away and made a call to the reserve team manager because he didn’t know a lot about him.

“I think I know how the conversation went because when Ron came back in he told me to get stuffed!”

Like Caldwell, Oghani would also go on to score plenty of goals for Wanderers, albeit after a spell of settling in after a move from non-league Hyde United.

“He hadn’t been playing and came into my office for a chat,” McGovern said. “He said: ‘Gaffer, I’ve been told once you don’t like someone you never get back on the right side.’ “I told him it was quite the opposite – and whoever was saying that wasn’t doing him any favours – but he needed to work hard.

“I swear, I have never seen anyone train as well in pre-season. He absolutely ran himself into the ground.

“He turned up for the first match of the season wearing a load of casual clothes and I had to pull him to one side and tell him it wasn’t on. I wanted them to look like footballers, suit and cuffs.

“But he says: ‘Boss, I don’t have a suit.’ And don’t forget this lad has come from earning nothing at all.

“I told him I’d buy him one myself when he scored a hat-trick, and a few weeks later we beat Preston North End – and he only went and scored one.

“I’d told him what tailor to use but before I could phone the guy up and set some sort of limit George had already been in to be measured. He didn’t waste any time.

“It cost me £50 – which was a lot of money back then. I didn’t even have a suit that cost that much!”

Another success story that McGovern remembers fondly was Everton full-back Brian Borrows, even though Howard Kendall might have disagreed at the time.

“Me and Walter went to watch Borrows and within five minutes he’d hit two 50-yard passes, right to left, and I knew he was right for me,” he said.

“The only problem is he was actually playing for Everton and I knew he had just given a goal away in the Merseyside derby, which didn’t make him particularly popular. So I phoned Howard up at Everton and suggested he should be surplus to requirement.

“He asked how much I could offer and I said ‘£2,500’ and Howard nearly fell off his chair laughing. He thought it was a joke.

“I kept pestering him and truth was if I had more money I would have offered it – but Borrows wasn’t a player who was going to catapult us through the leagues. And he was not going to be playing every week at Everton either.

“So Howard agreed, reluctantly. And when the player turned up we sorted out wages and he asked about signing on fee.

“I said: ‘Oh, your manager at Everton said he’d take that out of the transfer fee.’ “First thing next morning you’ll never guess who was on the phone, calling me a cheeky so-and-so. His last words to me were: ‘Just have him.’ “What a signing for nothing.”

Wanderers finished mid-table in McGovern’s second full season but was sacked in January 1985 after falling out with Edge’s successor in the chairman’s role, Neal Riley.

“At Forest I’d been living the dream, it was all quite surreal,” he said, 40 years on from his European Cup victory. “But Bolton was chalk and cheese.

“With a bit more help I think we could have done okay.

“I feel like we played attacking football and that I sent players out there without any fear.

“The signings I made helped the club make money down the line, so in all honesty and candidness, I don’t think anyone would have done a better job at that point in time.”

The Bolton board of the time clearly disagreed by the turn of 1985 and promoted Charlie Wright to the position of manager – a move which had looked a masterstroke while in temporary charge but turned out to be a disaster.

McGovern felt Phil Neal, or someone with Liverpool connections, was always likely to get the job longer-term.

“I think the chairman had connections there,” he said. “At one point he reckoned he could get us Phil Thompson on loan.

“I phoned Bob Paisley to ask if it was true, and Bod just told me: ‘Nah, you don’t want him, his legs have gone!’ “I complain but I did enjoy my time at Bolton and I don’t regret it.

“It was a difficult time to get sacked because there wasn’t as many jobs about as there is nowadays and it took me quite a while to get another one.

“I actually worked as Walter’s assistant at Hull City when he was in a really tough position at the bottom of the league.

“He told me when I got the job it might only be for a week, because they’d clear us off if they got relegated.”

• We have agreed to make a donation to the Wolfson Cystic Fibrosis Centre in Nottingham to thank John McGovern for his time. To find out more about the work they do, visit their website.