Russell Slade, the master of the Great Escape
For a man who was in charge of the Albion for just 31 competitive games over the course of only eight months, Russell Slade played a huge role in the shaping the modern day history of the Seagulls.
Imagine for a minute a world in which Slade never took the Albion job on March 6th 2009. Without him, there is no Great Escape from relegation. Brighton are condemned to League Two football for the 2009-10 season. An ex-player of the calibre of Gus Poyet isn’t touching the management job of a side in the bottom tier and without Poyet, there is no revolution of playing style and professionalism on the pitch.
No Poyet also means no League One title in 2010-11 and no Championship football for the first season at the Amex. Interest levels in the Albion aren’t anywhere near as a high as a result. A 2011-12 season spent in League One or Two means fewer season tickets sold. We can’t attract big-money players of the calibre of Will Buckley, Craig Mackail-Smith or Vicente. The Amex doesn’t need to be expanded and there is no push for the Premier League as early as 2013.
You can trace all the success that Brighton have enjoyed over the last decade back to Slade’s miracle work in those final few months of the 2008-09 season. Without it, we could be supporting a very different football club. It’s a remarkable story, but it becomes even more so when you consider the fact that Slade wasn’t even initially wanted by the Albion.
Dick Knight’s first choice had been Stockport County manager Jim Gannon. So desperate was Knight to get his man that he actually left everybody’s favourite television salesman Dean White in charge for three weeks while he waited for Gannon to secure his departure from Edgeley Park. It was only when it became apparent that Gannon wasn’t actually going to make the move south that Knight turned to Slade.
It certainly wasn’t the most inspiring appointment for a side two places off the bottom of League One when he arrived. Slade’s career amounted to saving Scarborough from relegation out of the Conference, leading Grimsby Town to a League Two play off final defeat and taking Yeovil Town to the League One play off final. That success with the Glovers in the 2007-08 season earned Slade the accolade of Manager of the Year but by the following February, he left Huish Park with Yeovil battling alongside the Albion to avoid the drop into the bottom tier.
He had only been out of a job for a month when the call to come to Withdean arrived. Slade had effectively swapped one relegation-threatened team for another and that meant excitement levels among Brighton supporters could best be described as non-existent. With Micky Adams having spent the previous nine months assembling a 200 man squad of perennial underachievers, plenty of us were resigned to the fact that League Two was calling. A bloke who looked like a cross between the Fat Controller from Thomas the Tank Engine and a boiled egg certainly wasn’t going to save us, especially when he must have been fourth choice for the job at best behind Gannon, Paul Ince and Aidy Boothroyd.
Before the Albion had even kicked a ball under his management, Slade began to challenge those opinions of him however. His first game in charge was away at Leyton Orient with nearly 2,000 away supporters having made the journey to Brisbane Road. As the players went through their pre-game warm up, Slade came striding out onto the pitch wearing a pretty disgusting all-brown suit. Fashion, or in this case lack of it, was very quickly forgotten though as he headed straight to the away support and produced this first in the air salute, a defiant gesture which instantly endeared him to the travelling faithful.
With one simple pose, Slade had made himself likeable. He genuinely looked like Benito Mussolini, a dictator who was going to whip a side who were failing badly into shape. The contrast with the Adams era couldn’t have been more stark. While Slade’s predecessor talked about his players needing a hug after they’d lost 1-0 at home to Huddersfield or told us that we shouldn’t be too upset with losing as we were playing The Leeds United, now we had a bloke who looked like he wasn’t going to take any nonsense. At least we weren’t going to go down as a laughing stock now, the sort of side who lost 1-0 at home to nine-man Walsall.
Slade’s approach was simple. He jettisoned all the players signed by Adams who were simply there to pick up a pay cheque such as Chris Birchall, Jason Jarrett and Craig Davies and replaced them with battlers who’d run through a brick wall for the cause. He worked on building strong partnerships through the spine of the team, pairing Doug Loft and Tommy Fraser in a diamond midfield and the experienced duo of Lloyd Owusu and Gary Hart up front. He knew how to coax the best out of Calvin Andrew. He strengthened the defence with Gary Borrowdale and deployed Gary Dicker, on-loan from Stockport at the time, as the heartbeat of the side. From an initial squad bloated by loan players and mercenaries, Slade settled on a core group of around 16 players he put his full trust in to get us out of the mire.
Not that results were instant. Slade’s first eight games yielded only four points, three of those coming from a 5-0 hammering of his former club Yeovil at Withdean. When defeat number five arrived in game number seven with a spineless display at Milton Keynes Dons, fans turned on players. “You’re not fit to wear the shirt” rang out from the stadium:mk away end. The players were booed off. Brighton were eight points adrift of safety with seven games remaining and the end appeared nigh.
But that proved to be a watershed moment. While most of the 2,130 in the away end that day gave up at that point, Slade kept believing. He remained positive in the press to the point that you began to wonder what he’d been sniffing. The faith paid off through and three days later, the Albion were unrecognisable in winning 2-1 away at Hereford United with Fraser’s reinvention as some sort of Paul Scholes-type figure gathering pace as he scored an overhead kick. A home loss to Swindon Town followed but that was to be the last defeat of the season as 13 points from a possible 15 completed the greatest of great escapes.
Slade was responsible for so many fantastic memories in that little run. He sprinted the length of the touchline, Jose Mourinho for Porto style to celebrate Andrew’s winner away at Bristol Rovers before throwing his trademark baseball cap into the crowd at the end. He went mad in front of the away end at full time after Colchester United were vanquished. And then there were the brilliant scenes on the final day of the season as he was carried from the pitch on the shoulders of supporters after a 1-0 win over Stockport County confirmed Brighton would still be a League One club for the 2009-10 season. People were desperately trying to rub his shiny head for good luck, as if it were some sort of ancient statue.
The great escape was enough to convince the Albion to extend Slade’s contract and with Tony Bloom taking over as chairman that summer, he had money to spend in a bid to launch a challenge for promotion. He revamped the squad, spending big on the likes of Liam Dickinson, James Tunnicliffe and Jake Wright but the spirit that had underpinned survival was gone and so was Slade by the end of October, a 3-3 home draw with Hartlepool United which left the Albion just outside the relegation zone proving to be the end of one of the most extraordinary managerial reigns in Brighton history.
Not many agreed with Bloom’s decision to sack Slade in spite of the Albion’s precarious position in the table and the fact we’d won just three league games in three months. But that said much about the enduring popularity that Slade had from the Withdean faithful.
Because how could you not love him? After all, without Russell Slade, who knows where we could be today.
