CHAPTER ONE
KEMPY
David Kemp strode into Home Park’s humble executive box No.8, a dark cloud above his head. His struggling Plymouth Argyle side had just succumbed to a 1-0 home defeat to Cambridge United on a bleak February night in the winter of 1992, and the hyenas were beginning to smell blood.
Barely 4,000 frost-bitten souls had witnessed Kemp’s journeymen pass John Beck’s industrial visitors off the park, but a third consecutive defeat and tailspinning attendances made the sword of Damocles a pervasive presence as Kemp prepared to meet the assembled pressmen in the executive box affectionately known as ‘Hodgie’ – after the club’s long-serving No.8, Kevin Hodges.
Gordon Sparks, then a reporter for the Plymouth Sound radio station, joined his colleagues in dissecting the not-so-fine details of the evening’s fare with Kemp, before delivering the loaded question that had been waiting impatiently on everyone’s lips since the final whistle.
‘As a journalist, if you’ve got the money question you always leave it till last, so if they don’t like it at least you’ve already got some quotes,’ remembers Sparks of that pivotal evening. ‘With the bad run we’d had, I asked him if he was in fear of his position after not getting the result that night.’
In fear he might well have been, but Kemp was not about to admit it to the press.
‘He started to answer the question, but then something took over in his mind and he said, “I’m not answering a question like that.” He ordered me to give him the cassette out of my machine and told me to get out. I had to go back to my editor to explain that I had no audio.’
The normally amiable Kemp may have lost his rag, but later that week he was to lose a whole lot more...
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CHAPTER TWO
THE GREEK GOD
The news of Peter Shilton’s appointment as Argyle manager rocked the city and reverberated across the country. If the club’s directors wanted a reaction from their big–name managerial appointment, they got one in spades.
The grand unveiling took place at the Forte Post House hotel on Plymouth’s seafront at 11.15am on Monday March 2 1992, though by then Rick Cowdery’s detective work had spread throughout the gathered pressmen and Shilton’s grand entrance wasn’t perhaps as emphatic as the Board had hoped.
‘We introduced him to the media at the Forte,’ remembers Peter Bloom. ‘He came into the room from behind a screen on the side and there was an immediate buzz around the place, though by then the news had got out somehow. A lot of the media seemed to know, word had leaked out as it usually does at Argyle.’
‘It was terribly exciting,’ says Ivor Jones. ‘When he walked in it was a really special moment. It was on the national news all that day – it brought the club into the limelight like never before really. No–one could believe that we’d got a manager like Peter Shilton – nor could we really.’
The unveiling nearly got off to an embarrassing start. An hour before the scheduled start time, the local media were sat twiddling their thumbs at Home Park, before an eleventh-hour phone call saw them racing over to the Hoe in readiness for the big announcement.When they finally got there, most had to admit they were impressed by the Board’s ambition – if a little reticent about Shilton’s lack of managerial experience.
‘I found it quite incredible when Shilton was appointed because he was someone who had achieved so much in football on a world stage,’ says Gordon Sparks.‘There were severe doubts in my mind, though, because he’d never been a manager or even an assistant. But he’d worked under some of the greatest coaches in the English game and some of that must have rubbed off. Every manager has to have a first club somewhere, so I thought, okay, let’s go with it.’
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CHAPTER NINE
‘WE ONLY NEED TEN MEN’
Argyle were allocated a section of Turf Moor’s Longside Terrace, with 3,800 tickets available for £6.50 each, though in the end just over 2,500 made the pilgrimage from Plymouth for the 3pm kickoff on Sunday, May 15.
Even with a reduced travelling contingent, the atmosphere inside Turf Moor as kick-off approached was as electric as it was volatile. The Argyle supporters were separated from the home fans by an unstewarded wire fence, and the Burnley faithful laid down the gauntlet by hoisting an Argyle scarf above their heads on a pole and setting it alight.
Down in the away dressing room, the Argyle players were preparing to enter the lion’s den for a match that was to be a particularly poignant occasion for one of them.
Centre-back Adrian Burrows was to leave the club that summer, and fittingly had made his debut in a green shirt at Turf Moor ten years before. ‘I remember thinking before kick-off that it could be my last match, because I wasn’t a regular by any means under Shilton and I didn’t know if I’d be selected for the second leg and beyond,’ he says.
‘I knew I wasn’t going to be staying at the end of the season. Almost six months prior to that match I was told that I wasn’t going to be offered a new contract, but I just wanted to play as many matches as I could and then get another club come the end of the season. So I just went into the match wanting to finish on a high note.’...
