Best Mistakes

Harry Secombe eats, shoots and leaves.

So here we are. 8pm. Dinner with God. The Vere Suite has surely never looked so lovely – except maybe for the time when Sasha Kane stepped forward to announce the winner of the Wanderer’s Foxiest Argentine award at the black-tie dinner. But I turned my nose up at that nonsense. Whereas tonight is unmissable – the return of the sainted Son of Kilrea. And more than 200 Wanderers supporters are here and poshed up too – no polyester tonight.

"You mix your drinks and words, you make bad jokes, you make bad time …”

Parry hosts us with his lame jokes about Everton and the IRA and he's trying a bit too hard. And yet, try hard as he might, he cannot diminish the night for me.

Martin shares a table with Hutch, Lambert, Big Tel, Dave Jones and Tony Crowe. Hayes is on the next table. I listen hard, for the sound of fences being mended. But no. No personal disputes can sully this occasion.

We play a fund-raising game involving fivers and envelopes and heads and tails. Saint Martin comes so close to winning, I sense a conspiracy by Parry, who reads the coin. But, hey … relax; suspicion cannot detract from the night for me.

“The cabaret is frozen and the laughter comes in cans.”

The dinner isn’t quite heavenly manna: pate, a roast and lemon brulee. Oh and cheese and coffee and mints. The new cheese maybe? But it’s all right and no lack of imagination in the menu can tarnish tonight for me.

We get a ghastly auction of a lovely Pippins painting of Saint Martin. Hayes drives the price up to £2,000. I momentarily cringe, thinking of the pathetic ripple this drop will make in the ocean of the club’s debt to … Hayes. But no tasteless, irrelevant display of wealth can lessen this night for me.

“This is the place where I made my best mistakes”

10.30pm. Finally, we get to hear from the great man. An interview with Parry punctuated by selected questions from the audience. For ninety minutes that pass like nine, we are all transfixed.

Parry talks him through his childhood, his Forest days and his management career. He doesn’t take much prompting, waxing so lyrical about his father’s barbers shop, Man Utd and Sunderland, his relationship with Clough and his relationship with Mrs O’Neill. And it all comes flooding back – like when I came across a copy of his programme notes in a dusty box. The wit, deliciously dry and ladled with self-deprecation, as if he can’t understand why we’d turn out for him. The way with words, surely unrivalled by any manager from these isles. The insight and the decency.

And the passion. We can all see that he’s touchingly seized by the recollection of his time here. Even after Celtic and Leicester, after World Cup Finals, after European club competitions as player and manager, he still fidgets and gesticulates and enthuses as he recalls “the journey” from Conference also-rans to the brink of the second division. He positively effervesces as he talks of the players and of the memories that came back to him of his girls growing up here – playing shove-halfpenny in the board room after a match and walking onto the pitch at Wembley.

It is in this context that the oddest moment comes. When Parry asks him whether he really resigned after a dispute over a tidy desk he says, no, that it started before that. There was a nil-nil draw at Bootham Crescent. A match, he said where the team, having had the chance to get back into the play-off places, had disappointed. Where he himself had disappointed.

But, he says, it was “my team”. He was happy to be accountable, answerable to the board and the fans for his team. But the team was his. So after the match, he had gone back to the away dressing room and Matt Crossley had called him from the shower to say that the Chairman had been in. “What’d he say?” That the performance was “passionless”. A line clearly crossed.

So far as I can see, Beeks is not here tonight. Neither is Graham Peart, but Martin makes a couple of mentions, too, of Graham Peart’s apparent belief that management really couldn’t be that difficult. So we were left to read into all this that Martin had finally decided to let the board find out for themselves how easy management was, as he left for Norwich.

Unsurprisingly, he said that he was desperately disappointed not to get in the play-offs, which he absolutely believed we could win. He would have stayed had he got us promotion and generally he got on well with Ivor. But amid that disappointment he had decided to go.

It was all such a poignant reminder of what we had. Such great times. Perhaps the most touching thing of all was that, after spending part of the evening reminiscing amongst ourselves about our favourite O’Neill matches, it turns out that he identifies the same one as we did as standing out.

Asked to name his favourite memories as manager, he said that one that was right up there was that match at Sutton in the Trophy semi-final. A goal behind after a poor first-leg performance, Scotty passed a late fitness test and, up against it, the team produced a characteristic O’Neill performance: committed, skilful and successful. A four-nil win to set up another Wembley appearance; fans on the pitch; delirium for fans and players alike. But note that it was not the Wembley appearances themselves he was drawing attention to, but the getting there: the shared challenge; the shared experience; the winning together against the odds.

For reasons that only he will know, Hayes had to say a final word after the standing ovation. Had to tell us about how he first met Martin. Why? I guess just as Channon was given to football punditry to make Keegan look intelligent, so was Hayes sent to emphasise Martin’s complete and utter class.

We get up and walk out into the night. Glowing and chatting like we used to.

27.09.2007. 12:23

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