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Unwritten: The story of the team who conceded 100 Premier League goalsBy Stuart James Mar 27, 2020 25
It was the final day of a long and unforgiving season. Swindon Town’s relegation from the Premier League had been confirmed a fortnight earlier and John Moncur decided it was time to lighten the mood as the players gathered in the home dressing room about an hour and a half before kick-off.
Swindon had conceded 95 goals from 41 league games and Moncur, whose party tricks included climbing onto the roof of the team bus while it was en route to away matches, took the view that laughing about their predicament was better than crying.
With John Gorman, Swindon’s manager, yet to come into the dressing room, Moncur picked up the pen next to the flip-chart and played to the crowd. “I wrote a treble down and put some odds up,” he says, smiling at the memory. “It was something like Elvis to come back from the dead: 80-1, Shergar to be found alive: 50-1, and then us to concede 100 goals, which was the odds-on favourite.
“It was just a bit of fun. We were done. It’s a bit like now. What do you do? Do you worry all about this virus? I can’t do that. And I didn’t want to get relegated. It killed me. But it’s how you deal with it.”
Moncur would have made a good bookmaker. Leeds United were the visitors that May afternoon in 1994 and Chris Fairclough scored their fifth and final goal in the 90th minute. It was a goal that didn’t matter at all. But it also mattered a lot.
“It had happened,” Moncur says, ruefully.
Swindon become the first top-flight team in 30 years to concede 100 goals in a season, and nobody has done it since. Leeds were the fourth club to put five past them that season. Everton scored six. Newcastle racked up seven and Jan Aage Fjortoft couldn’t believe his ears on the coach journey home from St James’ Park that evening. “Shaun Taylor (the captain) turned to me and said, ‘At least Andy Cole didn’t score.’ I said to him, ‘For Fuck’s sake, Shaun, every other Newcastle player scored!’”
It is, on the face of it, easy to see why Swindon’s one and only season in the Premier League is defined by that goals-against column. Even allowing for the fact that the top flight was later reduced from 22 teams to 20, Swindon conceded goals at a ratio (2.38 per game) that is unrivalled in the modern era.
That, however, does not come close to telling the story of a season that saw them win a lot more friends than matches, with Gorman’s unwavering commitment to playing open and expansive football. Swindon scored 47, which was more than 10th-placed Aston Villa and only six fewer than Arsenal, who finished fourth. They even put four past Manchester United, the double winners, across two meetings.
Life was rarely dull off the field, either. There was the pub lock-in that ended with their player-of-the-year stealing the keys to the youth team minibus, the ponytailed central defender who invited team-mates to play chess on his narrow boat, and the Dutch midfielder who asked to borrow the record signing’s car whenever he picked up his mother-in-law from the airport because her hair was too high to fit in his Porsche.
Fjortoft will tell that last, utterly bonkers, story later but for now, he is focusing on football and coming up with an interesting analogy when he thinks about the way that Swindon’s solitary year among the big boys has been perceived ever since.
“I saw an article about teams who did badly in the Premier League, and we are not the worst,” Fjortoft says, “but I think conceding 100 goals is a story of its own. I also think we were a symbol early in Premier League history for being that charming team that wanted to pass the ball but in the end, still lost.
“We were like that Norwegian who was the first to get zero points in the Eurovision Song Contest. There are a lot of countries who have got zero points, including the UK. But everyone remembers that Norwegian guy who, by the way, died two weeks ago. I think we were a symbol of that somehow.”
It seemed like an unusual request when Gorman poked his head around the boot-room door at the County Ground and asked the apprentices to pack “flats” for his players on a cold morning in late November. “Flats” were trainers and that generally meant running, which ended in pre-season.
Swindon were still waiting for their first Premier League win at the time — a run that stretched to 15 matches — and Queens Park Rangers were up next, at home on a Wednesday night. Gorman’s team only had six points on the board, Fjortoft was yet to score in English football and the players’ confidence had taken a battering.
What happened in the Shepherd’s Rest is not in dispute. The only question surrounds when exactly it took place. Gorman says it was 48 hours before the QPR game. Several of the players say it was the day before. My memory — I was a second-year apprentice at the club at the time — isn’t good enough to confirm one way or the other. But I do remember the handbrake turns on the cricket square and being late home for tea.
That Moncur is laughing before he starts to tell the story says it all.
“We went out for a run. It was one of them: ‘Let’s change the momentum.’ I then had a mad idea — and this is true — there was a pub there (near the training ground). I was close to John — I loved him, really — and I said, ‘John, let’s sack this. It ain’t half cold. How about let’s go and have a little heart-warmer?’ I used to drink brandy. And I was thinking he’d say no. He went, ‘Shall we?’ Whether he planned it or not, I remember going into the pub. Well, fuck me, I think that was the greatest afternoon I’ve had in football!
“It was, ‘Right, let’s have 16 large brandies.’ Within half an hour, it was eight Guinness, 10 more of them brandies, steak sandwiches. The jukebox was on. The geezer had a lock-in, we were partying in there until about 5pm.”
All the while, the apprentices and John Trollope, the youth-team manager and a club legend who played 770 games for Swindon, waited and waited, wondering from where and when the first-team would return, so that we could pack up their training kit, go back to the County Ground and get home to our digs.
We found out the answer when a familiar face was spotted behind the wheel of our minibus, sitting alongside a former England international, wheel-spinning and leaving tyre marks everywhere. “I remember nicking the keys and driving it over the cricket pitch when we got back to the training ground,” Moncur says, giggling. “Terry Fenwick, an old team-mate of mine at Tottenham, he was in the passenger seat. We laughed for ages about that. That’s how crazy it was.
“But, to be fair, it (the afternoon at the pub) worked. That was the maddest game. Luc Nijholt got sent off after 10 minutes. I think I dropped a one-liner into Buzzer (Nicky Summerbee), ‘Thank fuck we prepared well for this one.’ But we ended up winning 1-0 with 10 men. We had a lot of bonding that day before, had a few rows, had a few cuddles, and I think there’s a place for that sometimes, especially when you’re struggling like we were.”
Keith Scott, a £300,000 signing from Wycombe Wanderers earlier that month, scored the goal and there were raucous scenes afterwards. Swindon, written off by anyone and everyone before a ball had been kicked, were off the mark at last.
“That was one of the best changing rooms I’ve ever been in when we won that game,” Andy Mutch, the former Wolverhampton Wanderers striker, says. “I remember we were pretending to blow those party (horns). It was a great celebration, that, because it was like a relief — we’d finally got a win.”
Gorman sighs a little.
“It’s always hard to speak about it because people only remember winners,” he says. “So it’s a bit frustrating when I go back to Swindon, which is a lovely place, and people tend to think, ‘You took us down.’ If only they knew — any manager would have found it hard.”
Gorman (below), who turned 70 last August and is as nice a man as you could wish to meet, pauses for a moment as he thinks back to that summer of 1993. “I might as well tell you the true story,” he adds. “Everybody knew that Glenn was going to Chelsea. I said, ‘Well, whoever is going to be the new manager is going to be right in the shit’, because there were about eight players out of contract. That manager turned out to be me.”
Gorman On Sidelines
Glenn Hoddle’s departure to Chelsea shortly after Swindon won promotion via the play-offs was entirely expected. Gorman’s decision to stay certainly wasn’t. The two were close friends and a double act — Hoddle the player-manager, Gorman the No 2. Almost everybody at Swindon had said farewell to the pair of them.
“I had one last person to see,” Gorman says, “and as I was doing that the chairman, Ray Hardman, came running after me as I was going down the stairs and said, ‘John, you’re going nowhere. We want you to be the manager.’ Glenn was waiting, saying, ‘Come on, John!’ because we were going to meet Batesy (Ken Bates, the Chelsea chairman).’”
Gorman talked the offer through with Myra, his late wife, and says he went against her better judgment by turning down the chance to be assistant manager at Chelsea in favour of taking over at Swindon. Hoddle was also disappointed. “Glenn and me fell out for the first time because I’d already said I was coming,” Gorman says. “But because of the chairman and how they felt about me, and the chance that it gave me to be a manager, I took it. My heart ruled my head, if I’m being honest.”
It would have been hard enough to compete in the Premier League with the promotion-winning team, let alone a side that had been severely weakened in the aftermath of Wembley. Swindon lost their two most influential players that summer in Hoddle, who, even at the age of 35, was outstanding, and Colin Calderwood, the long-serving captain who left for Tottenham. Both were part of a three-man central defence, leaving Gorman with the impossible job of trying to replace them on a shoestring.
“We wanted to play football (in the Premier League),” Moncur says. “But it wasn’t like the previous year because you lose two of your best footballing players from the back — they started off all the attacks — and it’s difficult then.”
With money tight and the contract renewals dragging on, Gorman made only three signings during the close-season. Adrian Whitbread joined from Leyton Orient, Nijholt arrived from Motherwell and Swindon paid Rapid Vienna £500,000 for Fjortoft. That trio were never going to be enough.
Swindon lost 3-1 at Sheffield United on the opening day. That was followed by a cruel home defeat against Oldham four days later. The only goal was scored in added time and it floored Gorman, literally. “It was the last kick of the game and John went prostrate — that was how much he cared,” Moncur says. “But when you’re putting messages out like that, your manager doing a dying swan, it sometimes goes through the dressing room.”
The next two games saw Swindon lose 5-0 at home to Liverpool and 5-1 at Southampton. Four games, no points and 14 goals against. “We were all arguing in the changing room at Southampton,” says Mutch, who had joined from Wolves for £250,000 prior to the Liverpool game. “David Hay (the assistant) said, ‘What are you all arguing for? We’re going down anyway.’ We’d only played four games at the time. We had a laugh about it. He didn’t mean it in a bad way. It was a case of, ‘Accept where we are and let’s try and improve.’”
The new signings who arrived after the season started — there were no such things as summer and winter transfer windows then — tended to be old faces. Fenwick, Frank McAvennie and Lawrie Sanchez were all 33. Brian Kilcline was 31. Even Mutch was 29. “We went from being the youngest team in the Premier League to the oldest in history,” says Fjortoft.
Gorman wonders what would have happened if Fjortoft had got off the mark sooner — the Norwegian couldn’t stop scoring once he started but his first goal didn’t arrive until the middle of January. That said, the biggest problems were at the other end of the pitch. Swindon couldn’t stop shipping goals.
Asked whether the 100-goal statistic hurts him, Gorman replies: “Yeah, it does, because people throw that in your face. They don’t say that we scored so many. The reason we let in so many is because we went out to play.”
That is not to say that Gorman doesn’t have a few regrets.
“If I look back now, I did make mistakes by signing too many experienced players. Everyone is advising you. But when you get experienced people, they tend to think they know more than the manager. One of the biggest mistakes — and I gave him a big, big chance — was Fenwick. I loved him. I stuck by him and really looked after him.
“But I’ll never forget, we were playing Arsenal at home. I remember I said, ‘We’re going to go back to three at the back because they’ve got so much pace with Ian Wright and Kevin Campbell.’ The players, Fenwick in particular, were saying, ‘Gaffer, don’t do that, we’re playing so well.’ They were saying, ‘Let’s stick to what we’re doing.’ That was the first and last time I ever listened to players!”
Swindon lost 4-0.