While an incredible moment it was far from the only unusual thing to happen during the 94/95 season, where legendary George Graham was shown the door at Arsenal. There were sackings on end, the insanely offensive playing style of Ossie Ardiles at Tottenham, led by the flowing locks of Jurgen Klinsmann and there was football for days on end. In the middle of all this, Blackburn claimed their one and only Premier League title, fending off the challenge of Alex Ferguson's Manchester United.
Little wonder then that someone thought of writing a book about this legendary season. That someone is Rob Fletcher who readily admits the project almost got out of hand.
“I first started off thinking the book would be about 55-60,000 words. It ended up being over 80,000 because there was just so much to write about as I got through it. And it probably could have been even bigger than it was,” he laughs from his adopted home in the Liverpool-area. The book, out now with Pitch Publishing, is called “Chaos, Controversy and THAT Kung-Fu Kick”, and of the latter two there is no doubt about, but where does the chaos come in?
“English football, both the old First Division and the Premier League as it became, always sort of seemed a little bit primitive in a certain way. That season started to bring chaos in terms of transfer dealings, money was being spent, teams changed the way they were playing.
“The month of November, for example, was absolutely chaotic with managers getting sacked left, right and centre. Every few days, another manager had been sacked. Someone else was employed. Another manager lost his job and soon popped up at another club.
“A lot of what happened was really chaotic and almost disorganised. The Premier League now is known as this really corporate product that is shared around the world for everybody to see. But the 94/95-season, there's so much going on that doesn't seem to fit with how the league wanted to see itself.”
Prime Shearer and King Eric
It doesn’t harm the story of the 94/95 season that it wasn’t won by one of the “usual suspects”. A Blackburn side led by prime Alan Shearer held on to be crowned champions for the third time in their history.
“Blackburn had a really great team. They'd obviously spent a lot of money to get to that point, which every team does anyway. There's always a myth around teams that are created from nothing and no one spends any money. It doesn't actually happen in reality. Blackburn needed to spend players to get better.
“They did it with Chris Sutton, who cost them £5 million. And I think it's great that Manchester United themselves changed quite a lot as well after this season. Especially after 1993/94, it looked like United were going to dominate and they did for a long time after that season.
“This Manchester United side was so good, but even bringing in Andy Cole from Newcastle, who'd scored loads of goals over the previous two seasons, still couldn't get them over the line because of what happened to Cantona. Blackburn had to play really well to win the title.”
Speaking of Cantona; THAT kung-fu kick to this day remains a jaw-dropping moment.
“I think the incident with Cantona is one of those things where football started to become front page news as well as back page news. This season pretty much had front page news all the way through it. But the Cantona incident was keeping him on the front page. He should be banned for life and not be allowed on the pitch ever again and so on. Then things started to come out on the victim, Matthew Simmons, and him and Cantona were kind of neck and neck for column inches on those front pages of the papers.”
Had it not been for Cantona, the sleaze of the season could easily have been George Graham getting booted out of Highbury. The man who rebuilt Arsenal into a title winning club had taken a bung and left Arsenal with little choice but to show him the door. Surely, he wasn't the only manager doing that?
“No, and I think what basically came out of the George Graham investigation was that there were probably quite a lot of other people doing very similar things. There were talks of managers meeting up with agents in car parks, at service stations, on motorways, taking brown envelopes with money in.
“I think some of the managers had already retired, so the league didn't really press on with some of those cases. Brian Clough, obviously, was one of the famous ones that was investigated afterwards. For George Graham, it really brought a sour end to that era that he'd had at Arsenal. He was the one brought to the fore as, “we need to show this is going to stop. We're coming down hard on this. We don't accept this anymore.”
All out attack at White Hart Lane
Rather amazingly, George Graham was the only manager ever to get a ban for receiving a backhander, which also puzzles Rob Fletcher.
“The fact that after a year he comes back into the Premier League and manages Leeds and then Tottenham kind of shows me that the football world accepted him back again because everybody was already doing it. If it was really, really that bad, you'd never have him back, you'd be banned for life or a chairman wouldn't appoint him as a manager. But I think people sort of realised; he's taken one here.”
On a more positive note, one thing many people remember from that season is the often-exhilarating football played by Tottenham, led by the lethal duo of Jürgen Klinsmann and Teddy Sheringham. In reality, Spurs didn’t do too well that year.
“They had a lot of promise. On paper, you thought, wow, bringing in Klinsmann, Popescu and Dimitrescu and they already had Teddy Sheringham, Darren Anderton, Nick Barmby. You think, this is top three, maybe two even. But Ardiles decided that five forwards on the pitch at the same time, constantly attacking would be a good idea. Now, maybe it was for people who were paying to watch the games in the stadium, but for Spurs fans probably not so much,” Rob Fletcher says with a grin.
Tottenham finished 7th, 10 points behind Newcastle in 6th as Klinsmann won FWA Footballer of the Year, scoring 20 goals to Sheringham’s 18. Klinsmann was never seen again in the Premier League and Spurs had to wait until 2015 to break into the top three.
While Rob Fletchers ponders over his next project, “perhaps the 1997/98-season”, his current book, “Chaos, Controversy and THAT Kung-Fu Kick” is out now with Pitch Publishing and obtainable at assorted bookshops or right here.