I wrote on Monday of Dean Saunders’ successes and failures at the club, his statistical place in the club’s history and the legacy he bequeaths his successor. That’s only half the story though, and in some respects the least interesting half. The more intriguing aspect of Saunders’ reign was the change in him as a man.
We look at football in terms of tactics, skills and drama, and tend to forget the human aspect. The players and managers we worship and castigate are just people like you and I, remember, with the same hopes, fears, frailties and dreams. You can’t even begin to understand the game without trying to understand its protagonists, and Saunders bears this out more clearly than most. He was a different man when he left us to the one which arrived, and not only was he all the better for it, but the club was too. His success on the pitch was directly linked to his journey off it.
He arrived full of bravado, with fans being constantly told we were lucky he was willing to stoop so low as to help us out. Such hubris was bound to end catastrophically.
Some of his early attitudes really were remarkable, and while one might have seen some positive aspects of his work as a coach, it was difficult to warm to him as a person.
Constant complaints about the way players failed to carry out instructions and a grudge with the BBC were constant themes of his earlier press conferences. A statement at Oxford at the end of his first season in charge that only two players in the Conference would get into his squad, despite the fact that we’d just staggered dismally to tenth place in the table, was a perfect illustration of his blinkered arrogance.
Yet he changed, and became hugely likeable and admirable as a result. As a yardstick of his shift in attitude, I think back to a question and answer which I hosted early in his tenure in which I put it to him that many in the non league fraternity felt we ought to have appointed someone with experience of the Conference. His sneering answer was that anyone with extensive experience of that level of the game was, by definition, a failure for having failed to go higher.
Three years later he found himself still at that level, and the experience seemed to have humbled him. A decent man with a sincere desire to drive the club forward, he developed an openness and charm hard to imagine in his early days. My wife’s theory that his attitude seemed to have altered in direct ratio to the amount of hair gel he used seems to hold water; in appearance he went from a henchman of Tony Soprano to a normal guy, and the change was reflected in his manner. All of a sudden he was a bloke you’d like to have a pint with., as long as you could put up with him telling you about the number of chances we’d created in the previous match.
DragonHeart 