Ex-Bolton Wanderers manager Bruce Rioch's exclusive interview, part five

Two promotions, a League Cup final and a run of audacious giant-killings were crammed into three successful season’s under Rioch’s watch as Legends were made.

Three decades on, The Bolton News sat down to talk with one of Wanderers’ greatest-ever managers to talk in detail about his time with the club.

In part five, Rioch discusses some of the subtle tricks of the trade which made his time at Bolton so memorable.

IT was roughly seven minutes to kick-off, players were doing their final stretches against the walls of the dressing room which failed to muffle the sound of an expectant crowd at Burnden Park.

The adrenaline was kicking in and Bruce Rioch was going round with last-minute reminders of where this game would be won or lost.

“Didsy, get beyond that full-back like you did last week. He wants to push on, he will leave you space.”

“McGinlay, I want you within the width of those posts. In the box. Are you listening?”

Last minute adjustments are being made to sock ties, laces. Studs clatter and scrape against the tiled floor.

The bell sounds. Five minutes and the referee will expect players out on the pitch.

One senior player chirps up with some motivational words for the group but he makes a cardinal error.

“Come on boys!” he bellows. “We’re not going to lose this one today!”

Even if the group absorb the comment as it was intended, the manager fixes his player with an icy stare. His team-mates jostle out the dressing room door, but Rioch’s hand is on his shoulder. He is going nowhere, for now.

“Hang on a minute,” says the former Scotland international, any warmth lost from his face. “You don’t use that word in my dressing room.”

The player apologises. He goes out and helps Wanderers to another three points towards their promotion push in 1992/93. Thirty years later, Rioch politely refuses to name him but wanted to make the point.

“The word lose, or tired, was not allowed at my club,” he told us.

“I reminded the player that he should be telling his team-mates they were going out there to win. That is what our club does.

“It never happened again. It killed that word stone dead.”

Every manager has his own way. Some can give Churchillian speeches to a group, others are happier dealing with players one-on-one; the best do both.

But the more you learn about the most successful teams, the more you appreciate that it is small touches which create a winning environment. A stern word here, a lighter touch there.

And though everything about a football club is geared towards 90 minutes on a Saturday afternoon, what makes them work well has little to do with offside traps, Geggenpressing or overlapping full-backs.

“When it was someone’s birthday – be it staff or player – they had to buy the cakes,” Rioch recalled, knowing better than most that these were the days before Arsene Wenger and the foreign Premier League revolution had changed English football diets for good.

“That was standard in the club. If we were in training on the Tuesday morning and it was someone’s birthday we’d get Alan (Whittle, the groundsman) to go out and order them so that when we got back in they would be in the dressing room, everyone could help themselves and we’d sing happy birthday and so on.

“I came in one day and some of the lads had come back early from training and cut into one of the cakes and stuck some soap underneath the cream.

“I think it was Andy Walker who was the unlucky one. The lads knew what was going on but by the time he got back in there was one cake left, he grabbed it and bit into it, and as he was chewing the soap kicked in.

“They all started laughing and the cakes started flying across the dressing room.

“I walked in seconds afterwards, looked around and there’s cake on players’ faces, all up the walls, on the ceiling, splattered everywhere.

“It was silent when I walked in. I walked straight up to Alan Stubbs and sat beside him.

“They were obviously expecting me to go ballistic, so I said to Alan: “Stubber, everything alright today?”

“He said: ‘yes gaffer’ and there was still cake smudged on his face, by the way.

“I stood up, said “OK, then, carry on” and walked off as if nothing had happened.

“That was how it was. They were an amazing bunch of lads and led by a great captain at the time, Phil Brown, a super guy.”

Rioch liked to have fun with the supposed ‘fear factor’ – as young midfielder Jason McAteer can attest.

“There was a little garage on the corner at Burnden Park and McAteer had been in there to have a look at a car but the lads had said to him ‘you haven’t got a cat in hell’s chance, the gaffer won’t let you have that”’ “He’d been told not to buy it but Jason came knocking on my door and asked for a word. He explained there was a car he had his eye on and wanted permission to get it.

“I asked him what type it was, and he explained it was a two-door sports car.

“I said ‘two-seater?’ No chance. How are you going to take myself and Jane out for a meal in the evening?

“For a minute I think he believed me. But, of course, we couldn’t stop him. He went and bought it and I think not long after that it got damaged closer to where he lived in Liverpool and he came back and got a four-door saloon.

“The lads were like ‘told you!’ “We had fun with each other, it was such a fantastic time.”

Anecdotal evidence from the players who worked for Rioch at Burnden paints the picture of a man who paid attention to detail, set high standards and was more than capable of taking them down a peg or two, if needed.

But while that disciplinarian image had followed him to Bolton from Torquay, Middlesbrough and Millwall, then amplified afterwards in a solitary season at Arsenal, those same players tell tales of warmth and humanity.

Nicky Spooner, whose first team career was wrecked by a horrific broken leg against Burnley in 1994, found after surgery that Rioch and his players had collected money to send him and his wife on a holiday to the Caribbean to help his convalescence.

Players’ wives would be treated to a regular meal on the town, with husbands and partners told to stay at home and babysit.

“The complaining was unbelievable when we told them about that one,” Rioch laughed.

“The club wasn’t blessed with a lot of wealth. You’d go to the board and ask for £20,000 to buy a player and know it wouldn’t just be an automatic ‘yes’ because it couldn’t be.

“But the late Frank O’Farrell, who passed away recently in Torquay, said once about signings – he said when you get one right, you’re more likely to get the next one. And that is how is worked for me.

“You can make an error and it might not be a footballing one. It might be that a player doesn’t settle in the area, his family doesn’t settle.

“But that is why we tried our best to make sure any players who came to our football club had as much support as we can give them.

“We had a creche on a matchday. We took the wives out for meals on their own to make sure all the different families knew each other.

“I knew from my playing days what it was like to move from London in the south to somewhere up north. And for some of the wives it might have been their first move away from her family, so it is not easy, no matter what people think.

“You have to find a home, so you can be living in hotels. We had people on the staff who knew the estate agents and would take the wives and children out to show them the areas and properties around the town, where the schools were, all the stuff that is so important.

“When my wife came to Birmingham in 1969 it was the first time she’d ever been out of Luton. I went training and she had to get herself around the second largest city in Britain trying to find estate agents with no support at all.

“We had been through that, and I wasn’t allowing that to happen again. The players get support, they train every day, and we can keep our eye on them, but the families need it more and I was adamant we would do what we could.”

In 1992, football was relatively untouched by PR. But one of Rioch’s most famous acts of altruism happened by chance on a wet midweek morning at Burnden.

“I remember getting ready to go out to training before one of the cup games and looking out of the window and seeing these queues of fans waiting to buy tickets. There were hundreds of them in the car park, huddled together like sardines.

“Me and Toddy looked at each other and we knew what to do. We grabbed the players back in, said ‘training is still on, but you’re coming back in here to make pots of tea for those people outside.’

“It was only 40 minutes or an hour – and we could always go and train. We could train later, it didn’t matter to us. But the fans were waiting to come and watch us, we needed them, and that is the relationship you have to build as a player or as a manager of a football club. It is very, very important.”