PaddockLad

Man Utd have been shit since he retired 🤔

Anyone remember Billy Davies?...by Daniel Storey in The Athletic... It isn’t easy trying to understand how Billy Davies is wired when he has already convinced himself there are people in this world who are out to get him. His reputation goes before him: angry, feeling persecuted, reeling from the wickedness of it all. So how do you tackle that subject without feeding his suspicions that he was right and, look, the bastards in the media are ganging up on him again? And he will be reading. It is coming up for six years since he last worked as a football manager and that is enough time, unfortunately for Davies, for a legitimate question to be asked about whether he is ever going to find a way back. He has, however, kept himself busy judging by an interview he gave to the Scottish edition of The Times in September 2017 when he made the pretty spectacular allegation that, if he was seen by some as unemployable, it was because a PR company — he would not give its name — had been recruited with the explicit intention of dirtying his good reputation. Davies carries a leather briefcase filled with documents, print-outs and newspaper cuttings to support his various grievances. It is the proof, he says, of an orchestrated campaign against him. “The lies, the smears!” And, sitting with Graham Spiers, Scotland’s four-time sports journalist of the year, it didn’t take long for everything to pour out. “I have gone through various QCs, Scottish and English law firms, the League Managers’ Association, HMRC and more, chasing all the data I needed to show I was an innocent man. It has taken me a long, long time but I have now got that data.” An innocent man against what or whom? “In the face of the lies, the smears,” Davies went on. “I’ve spent in the region of £100,000 — maybe higher — on my case. I know I am innocent. “You saw it everywhere on social media: ‘Bloody Billy Davies… there is a reason why no club will touch him with a ten-foot pole… even shitty Scottish teams’. It was all over Twitter and elsewhere, these lies about me. My integrity and my morality will not allow them to do what they are doing to me… these smears, these lies. I’m going to prove it.” It was quite some read. Davies appeared to believe an assortment of journalists and ex-players had been recruited as part of this malicious PR campaign. He argued that he had lost the chance of managing Rangers because “they hit the Rangers fans’ forums, and they wrote nasty things about me there.” He had screenshots on his phone from “the Midlands mafia press corps”, who he also referred to as “the gang,” and who he alleged had been spreading rumours he was to blame for the sudden death of Nigel Doughty, the Nottingham Forest chairman, aged 54. “Then you get these ex-pros coming along and saying, ‘Don’t touch Billy Davies, it must be terrible working with Davies.’ Look, I know these people aren’t just writing these things off their own back.” What he would not do was identify the PR company, or explain who had commissioned it, or provide any logical reason why so many people would be so dedicated to such a cause. But he insisted he had all the evidence. “What they decided to do in their smearing is identify the bottom six EPL clubs, and some English Championship clubs that they know I would go to. They’ve sat down and identified these clubs. Plus, throw in the only club in Scotland — Glasgow Rangers — they identified them as well. These people identified a certain level of club that they knew Billy Davies was suited for — six EPL clubs, ten Championship clubs, one Scottish club. They have targeted 16, 17 clubs. That’s what they’ve done with their lies, their smears.” I mean, where do you even start with all this? Tomorrow, it is Forest against Derby County, two of his former clubs, at a time when Preston North End, the other English team on his managerial CV, are currently enjoying the view from near the top of the Championship. Football isn’t waiting for Billy Davies but, even now, there is a curiosity at all of those clubs when it comes to a man who has provided compelling evidence in the past — whatever you might think of him — that he can be a skilled manager and motivator. Davies used to say he was statistically the most successful manager in Preston’s history, which was an interesting take given the club’s status as the original Invincibles. He did, however, guide them to the play-offs in successive seasons. He had two spells at Forest, taking them nearer to promotion than any of their other managers in the last decade (a sizeable list), and Derby have never been back to the Premier League since he took them up in 2007. Take away the baggage, the politics, the unpleasantness and, at times, the raving paranoia and Davies could be managing his country or any number of upwardly mobile clubs. Except he, of course, sees it differently. It’s us, not him. Billy Davies — and he always did like to refer to himself in the third person — is making his way through life like an untipped waiter. And he will not bend for anyone. At which point I should probably make it clear that I happen to be one of the journalists he dislikes. The reasons have never been fully explained but I suspect it might go back to the first time he was sacked at Forest after being beaten by Swansea in the Championship playoffs in 2011. A manager would not normally lose his job in that position, especially with a chairman in the mould of Doughty. But Davies had worn down everyone behind the scenes. Doughty had been giving serious consideration to sacking him — or at least delivering a behave-or-go ultimatum — even if they went up. I mentioned this in an article and word got back that Davies suspected I must be in cahoots with Mark Arthur, the club’s chief executive, who he seemed to detest. It was, like a lot of what Davies says, fantasy. After that, judge for yourself. When Davies returned to Forest in February 2013 they had a new owner, Fawaz Al Hasawi, who also agreed to take on Jim Price in a general manager/chief executive role, effectively running the club on a day-to-day basis. Price had previously been a solicitor at Ross Harper in Glasgow but had been suspended by the Law Society of Scotland because of the alleged financial irregularities that led to the law firm closing down, resulting in him being found guilty of professional misconduct and struck off in 2017. As such, he was not eligible to pass football’s fit-and-proper-person test of the time, leaving the club facing a number of Football League inquiries about his involvement. Though it suited Davies to have such a close ally: Price just happened to be his cousin and agent/adviser. Davies had returned to the City Ground with the mantra of “unfinished business” and that did not just refer to the team. His second coming coincided with all sorts of unexplained sackings, including the finance director, John Pelling, the operations manager, Brandon Furse, and the head of media, Fraser Nicholson — all part of the previous Arthur regime. In Pelling’s case he encountered Davies in the car park and offered his hand to welcome him back to the club. Davies declined to take it, said something uncomplimentary, and Pelling was gone shortly afterwards. Davies was awarded a new contract, without anyone appearing to think it was unusual, only eight months into a three-and-a-half year deal. The Nottingham Post and BBC Radio Nottingham were ostracised. The Guardian, my employer at the time, was banned from the pressbox. Soon, Davies was insisting that a member of staff filmed every press conference. He wanted to know in advance which journalists were at each game and, in one particularly bewildering scene, arranged to hold a post-match conference before the game. Another Championship club’s chief executive was quoted in the Daily Telegraph referring to Forest as “the Midlands version of North Korea”. He wasn’t too far off: at least one member of staff at Forest became convinced that Davies, mid-conversation, would surreptitiously reach into his pocket to record what they were saying on a dictaphone. Or that he preferred to talk outside in case his office was bugged. And then the bee in Billy’s bonnet really started to buzz out of control. In one game at Brighton, he worked himself into such a state about the presence of a pitch-side television camera, and the frequency with which it seemed to be pointing his way, he sent out his substitutes to warm up with the specific instructions of obstructing its view. For another game at Millwall, Davies thought he saw a photographer aiming his lens at the Forest dugout and marched over to the 18-yard line to confront him, repeatedly shouting: “Where are you from?” into his face. Stewards had to get involved. The photographer was covering the match for, among others, the Forest programme. “I just sat there in stunned silence not knowing if he was going to hit me or threaten me or what he was going to do,” he said afterwards. Price had a Twitter account in which he dismissed football’s financial fair-play regulations as “illegal and unworkable” (Forest were later given a transfer embargo for their overspending). But it was when Davies logged on to the same account that things really got interesting. “It’s about payback,” one message read. “Vengeance is best served cold. Trust me the innocent will not be harmed.” Davies was sacked in March 2014 and, by then, Al Hasawi had started compiling his own dossier. One issue for Forest’s owner was the number of times the club seemed to be doing business with one agent in particular — Brian O’Neil, a former Scotland international who had played under Davies at Preston. Put all this together and it creates the impression of a good, occasionally excellent, football manager who, at best, could be said to have badly blurred his priorities. At worst, however, it leaves another caricature: a damaged individual, staring at the world through cold, suspicious eyes, little puffs of toxic black smoke coming out of his ears. William McIntosh Davies — football’s WMD. Whatever he may think, this is not intended to dance on his grave. I do wonder, though, whether there is anyone in his life with the gumption to inform Davies of some hard truths and explain how, back in the real world, if a football manager has made himself unemployable it does not usually wash to hold everyone else accountable. Does he ever stop to examine the behavioural flaws that have inflicted the most grievous damage to his reputation and that once allegedly compelled Nigel Clough — yes, lovely, well-mannered Nigel Clough — to knee him from behind as rival managers in a previous Derby-Forest encounter? Is he aware that Paul McKenna, the former Forest captain, has been known to tell a story on the after-dinner circuit about going into the training ground early one day and how Davies, arriving to find his player eating breakfast on the same table as Doughty, barely spoke to him for the next month? Was Davies actually being serious when he said there was a PR company targeting online messageboards and hiring ex-players to poison his reputation and keep him out of work? And yes… yes, I think he really was. Davies, in the words of Alex McLeish, is a “nippy sweetie”, which is basically Glaswegian for the smaller the pip, the louder the squeak. He comes from Govan, the part of the city where Sir Alex Ferguson grew up, and he always seemed very proud of that fact. He and Ferguson, he once told me, “both like picking up chewing gum from the street and eating it.” And no apologies here for repeating the story about the time he took the Derby job and a football reporter from the local paper rang the Lancashire Evening Telegraph to find out more. “He’s 5ft 5in, he’s from Glasgow and he owns a Rottweiler called Axel,” was the verdict. “You make up your own mind.” At Forest the common belief is that Price could be every bit as taut and conspiratorial and that the biggest problem for Davies was that he seemed to live and die by whatever he was told by his cousin and adviser, rather than seeing him, perhaps, for what he actually was: a banned solicitor. Davies is 55 now. He has never managed a team in his 50s and that is a long time to be retired if there really is no way back. He is a very rich man, taking a formidable payoff from his last job. But is he happy? It is over two years since anyone in the media heard from Davies and, on that occasion, the interviewer noted that he was twitching with anger and reddening in the face. “I will not jump back in to a St Mirren, a Dundee United, a Hearts, with all due respect to these clubs,” Davies said in that 2017 interview. “I know I am a very good football manager. I will not jump back into football and take a job that is beneath me. A smear campaign has driven me away. For whatever reason, they have decided to take away from me something that I love. They have put my career on pause. But I’ll be back soon. I don’t think there is any doubt that one day I will be back at the top of football.” He chose not to respond when approached by The Athletic. (Photo: Shaun Botterill/Getty Images)

One of the journos tweeted yesterday that it was Raab who was supposed to be doing the sofas yesterday morning. They'd no idea why the late change happened but this could be it. I saw Cleverly on BBC breakfast then heard him on 5 live. He also did R4 Today, GMB & LBC. I think after a that he'd had enough and couldn't be arsed with Sky

Swinson comes across as someone who has never really left the sixth form common room...she just sounds like an over enthusiastic teenager looking after some under 10s..

Agreed. He's quite reasonable on twitter though. I saw his doc about how the middle class use money to get ahead. Cunt wants to learn the difference between middle class and middle income @Kevin Carr's Gloves

Yeah maybe you're right... Also Cleverly has been doing the rounds this morning to cover up for this shit show and apparently was annihilated on R4...

She’s her mother’s daughter in some ways...all Daily Mail and delusion... am going to keep working on her though...

still....no ones talking about select committee reports into Russia now are they?

Very good reason to vote Labour here in Dorset... https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-dorset-49095404 Shadow health sec Jonathan Ashworth has assured local PLPs that the closure of Poole A&E and maternity services will be reversed under a Labour government. They'll never get in here but Labour made big gains last time out and the incumbent is one of the most disinterested disingenuous pieces of Tory shit I've had the misfortune of encountering. I explained this to the current Mrs PL.. "Which lot are going to keep the hospital?" "Labour" "No. Dont like him" 🙄

From the party who brought you "Let's blame the victims of Hillsborough for their own deaths" Fuckin despicable cunts

VAR: brought in to help refs but has actually made them worse. I was against it in principle and wondered how such a faff would work in practice. I notice as it's got worse this season @Andrew has been on here less and less....."quelle fuckin surprise" as they say roond oor wey...

Being in it for the wrong reasons isn't Halls fault though. If you take him, Edwards at Manu, Scholar & Sugar at spurs, Dein at Arsenal and a couple of others they all saw two things in the late 80s that drew them towards getting closely involved with owning football clubs: 1. The millions Murdoch was about to pour in 2. The change in ownership rules brought in by the FA that allowed them to form parent companies to own clubs' shares, these acted as vehicles for stuffing Murdochs cash straight into their back pockets. Before that clubs' directors werent allowed to take a wage, all they were entitled to was s small dividend if clubs were in profit and 99.99% of them hadn't been since the day they were founded . Look for blame if you want, but you'll not need to look further than the FA of Kelly & Millichip. Their rule change had at least as big an effect on football in England as the advent of sky did. Nothings been the same since.

It's been a long two weeks.... I cannot divulge why I've spent most of it drinking but it's been in a good cause. Alochol had obviously impaired my vision and indeed common sense yesterday evening and I send my unreserved apologies to all pisstakers affected 👍

Is it fuck man. It’s Ken McNaught.

😮

This is the key image. It clearly says Peter Withe is on the right. He’s stood next to Peter Withe. Are you all stupid or something? It’s on Facebook, its obviously accurate 🙄

If Peter Withe says it’s Peter Withe, it’s fuckin Peter Withe, ok?

the bloke on the left is Gordon Cowans its a Villa reunion...

European champion & played for England at a world cup...tiny bit before our time @ SJP

Fellah on the right played for us... I'd have never guessed it in a million years