Before it went tits up. The quality then man. We were so close. So ****ing close. And then got walloped in the nuts with a sledge hammer.
Yes indeed but still the best in our lifetime. Played some cracking attacking football back then. Johnstone & Summerbee on the wings. Micky Gray at LB doing overlapping runs. Quinn & Phillips up front, the big Irishman getting the knockdowns for the little fox in the box. Best football I've ever seen us play. Like you say though, so close but so far.
He then had us doing not so well. I might be wrong but I seem to remember us replacing Quinn with Flo, it went downhill from there.
He proved he could assemble a team that could only play one way and we got found out in the second half of each season. He lost his two wingers and NQ within a year and could just not replace them.Then he made some big money signings that just did not work and he could not lift his game.
Flo, Laslandes, Nunez.................Johnson left on bad terms as far as I remember. Then it all started going downhill...................
He bought some utter ****e at inflated prices all using the same agent. The cynical side of me suspects that there was more than meets the eye with some of these dealings.
Heard Reidy liked a bung more than Cloughie and the Flo deal went through because he wanted the bung rather than Flo. You'd have thought he would have walked into a decent job after his time with us, but the bung shenanigans were widely known in the game and that was that...
No, his methods are totally outdated in today's football, modern players dont like being shouted at like Reidy famously did when times,were not so good. Can't take away what he did when we moved to the new stadium but he's definatley yesterdays man.
These were some of my happiest memories supporting SAFC. Fans, players, owners and coaching staff all pulling in the same direction.