Copyright West Ham Till I Die. No part of this interview may be reproduced without crediting West Ham Till I Die Blog

ID: Was there ever any prospect of getting Tevez back?
SD: With any player you never say never. He’s a player who made a huge contribution to us and a player I would love to see back at West Ham United but I think at the moment his aspirations are at a Champions League level, so when we’re in the Champions League, who knows.
So, no conversations have been had?
No, no, not at the moment.
But a new striker is absolutely crucial, isn’t it?
It’s not crucial, but Gianfranco has identified who he wants. He wants a creative, attacking midfielder, which we have got now in Jiminez and we’d like another striker to complement Cole, Ashton and Savio. At the moment we are in dialogue to sign Mancini and I am due over to Milan this weekend. The deal with Inter Milan is all but done so it is just down to the player. That will come down to his conversations with Gianfranco and whether he sees West Ham as a club he’d want to play for. The beauty about the way Gianfranco operates is that with previous managers the discussion would start with how much money do I have, and from that he determines which players he wants. We never talk about money with Gianfranco. He just identifies various players in various positions that he wants and then me and Gianuca will go off and try to secure them. On certain targets money will be the stumbling point but if you work hard and are creative there are ways to get around that. But it is a refreshing approach that Gianfranco has. He will identify players – Mancini, Jiminez, X,Y and Z. Mancini is the one we are getting close on but we are working on 3 or 4 other players in the same position that if we can’t move forward on Mancini we will move forward on.
Is there a worry that they always seem to be looking at foreign players? We’re more used to home grown talent or English players.
Gianfranco understands the heartbeat of the club has to be English because we are in the Premier League and if you look at our players – Collison, Noble, Tomkins, the spine – Green, Upson, Parker, Cole it’s English. He’s happy with his squad and he would go into battle with it again but what he wants to do is get three players with a much higher standard than perhaps what we’ve got, which will raise everybody. We are in dialogue, and we have been to be fair, with English players, who fit that bill, but for a variety of reasons, mostly economic, we’ve not been able to secure them.
When you say economic, you mean because of wage demands?
Yes but transfer fees too. Transfer inflation is massive. There are a lot of talented young English players in the Championship, or even the Premiership, we could get, but we’re looking for the finished article. We are looking for three players who will come in and give us more than what we have got at the moment.
So you are still looking for three players in total and want to offload some fringe players to get the squad down to 21?
Yes
Faubert and Davenport have come back. Presumably they might be ones you’re looking to ship out?
Absolutely, yes.
I see Tottenham might like Faubert. That would test your resolve not to deal with them again, wouldn’t it?
[laughs] I’m sure that’s not true! I think Faubert has higher standards as he was at Real Madrid. I think he will look for a slightly bigger club than Tottenham. We’ll see [smiles wickedly].
I know you said you’d never deal with Tottenham again, are you deadly serious about that?
The essence of the project is fans’ expectations. Fans do not want to see their club selling their best players to their most bitter local rivals. It’s nothing to do with Tottenham, it’s to do with our fans. There could be nothing more sickening than to see one of our top players playing for Tottenham. And there’s been a history of it unfortunately. That has to stop. One of the most powerful aspects of our current resurgence, which we must maintain, is that the fans are on board. It would sickening, an absolutely awful, awful thing if our best players left and went there. It’s why Craig Bellamy couldn’t go. And in the future, the same philosophy will apply.

Coming next in Part 5: Lucas Neill’s future.

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ID: So how did you get Zola, then? He wasn’t your first choice, was he?
SD: He was my first choice. The club was particularly keen on Donadoni, then I met him [Zola] in Rome. We had a long, long talk, about the philosophy of the football club. He is a very ambitious man but he also knows what his limitations are and if he was coming to a club which gave him a huge cheque book and said we want to be in the Champions League in two years’ time, we want you to spend it on the best players in the world, he simply wouldn’t have come. He knew what he was doing with the Italian Under 21s – develop players, coach. He wants to be on a training field one on one for an hour to improve players. He was really excited by the prospect of coming, working with our renowned academy and the young players there and developing players. It’s back to basics and seeing if coaching and developing and bringing all the elements of a football club together can bring success in this world where it seems the chequebook is king. He was really, really keen and encouraged by that and I was just blown away by the meeting with him in Rome. As I say, Donadoni was in the driving seat, and probably with me if I am being honest, but when I met Zola in Rome it was just unbelievable. I remember flying back and driving to work on the Monday having made the decision. Everybody, and I won’t name names, said I was mad. It was the most ridiculous decision I had ever, ever, ever made.
If everyone was against you in that decision, just from a management point of view, how did you drive it through?
Fortunately at that point I was in quite a strong position. My business plan – the much over-used Project – was the only way forward for the club. I had been at the club ten years and with the financial problems that BG clearly had, he needed me. So he couldn’t really question or go too far against me, so I was convincing in the board meetings as to why we had to do this. But then once we had gone six games without a win there were quite a few people willing to point that fact out and reckoned I had made my biggest mistake and that it was all my fault!
Did you ever doubt yourself?
I think everybody doubts themselves at times. When they go home at night. I can honestly say I didn’t doubt the decision, no. I think if you saw the performances we were superb. Someone said that if football games were 75 minutes we’d have been top of the league. It was really easy to fix. I went to Gianfranco’s house, told him that football matches are 90 minutes, not 75 and then we started winning games. It was easy! [laughs]
When teams ship goals in the last 15 minutes of games your automatic thought is that they must be very unfit. Were they?
In the eyes of Gianfranco, yes. He has quite exacting standards. He brought in a fitness coach who is unbelievable and he has raised the fitness levels.
That was quite noticeable towards the end of the season.
We haven’t had a pre season yet under Gianfranco so we will see a huge improvement. I could see fitness was getting better but the only thing that worried me was that this is a results driven industry. I wanted to get points on the board quickly. The media would turn against us, there were already key people in the club who were turning against me. During that time… Gianfranco is a very, very loyal person and all the talk about Chelsea didn’t concern me. I was at the training ground every day with him. We very supportive of each other to be honest because he saw the pressure I was under as well. But we got through it. I was so glad we had that difficult time because it made the bond a lot closer and a lot stronger. When all this talk about Chelsea coming in for him started, I knew it was never an issue.
What about Steve Clarke’s role in all of this? He’s integral to the setup isn’t he? Zola is only half a Zola without Clarke.
This is where there was a certain method to the madness. I wasn’t just thinking we had to get Zola, he was an awesome player. It was quite clear that when we looked at what we required from a manager, in my view one man couldn’t do it. It’s better if you take various skills and separate them, so Zola is an inspiration, he’s a one on one coach and can really develop players, wheareas Clarke has huge, huge ability with regard to tactical awareness, setting up the team defensively. So if you get the two of them together you have got a pretty powerful combination. The experience Clarke has had with a variety of high profile managers meant that if we got the both of them it would be a lethal combination. Then add Kevin Keen to the mix, who is West Ham United through and through and a tremendous coach, and we had a pretty powerful coaching combination.
Did Zola make it clear right from the first discussion that Clarke was an absolutely vital component to the deal?
Absolutely. He made it clear he [Clarke] was vital. We were led to believe that there wouldn’t be too many obstacles to securing Steve as he didn’t seem to figure in Scolari’s plans. That’s what Gianfranco led me to believe. Once we had secured Gianfranco we then started to negotiate on Steve with Chelsea, who made it clear they didn’t think Steve should leave Chelsea and he was very much part of their plans. This created a problem. Gianfranco flew in to sign his contract and we had the press conference arranged. At that point we couldn’t secure Steve as it wasn’t quite as Gianfranco had led me to believe. With an hour to go before the press conference Gianfranco said, ‘well, I can’t sign without Steve’.
And you said? [laughs]
I said ‘I’ve put my entire reputation on signing you. Everybody is against it, and I am completely for this. You have to sign right now, otherwise I am finished’. If you look at the press conference again carefully you’ll see that I am sat there sweating and not smiling, and Gianfranco is looking at me nervously, because we knew that all this was dependent on Steve Clarke and we still had some work to do to secure him. But fortunately we did.
What would Zola have done if you hadn’t managed to get Clarke?
Let’s not think about that!
What did you notice most in his first few weeks? Presumably there was a complete change of atmosphere from the glass half empty days of Alan Curbishley.
It’s coaching and ambition. He will say ‘we can win the league and qualify for Europe’. There is complete and utter optimism. It wasn’t just the usual honeymoon period with Zola. You could see against Newcastle, the improved performance, the belief, the triangle play off each other. This is why I sit here quite confident about the future. Even if we don’t invest in players, which we will do – we just signed Jiminez – our team will improve and be better than last year because Zola, Clarke and Keen will coach them. It will improve them as players. If we add players who are technically better anyway, such as Jiminez, suddenly our level improves. Collison will be a better player, Cole will be a better player. He will coach them. He will improve them. In my opinion it is a far better strategy than just throwing money at a problem because invariably that doesn’t work.
Is it true that in training very often it’s Zola who takes the defenders and Clarke who takes the strikers?
Yes, it’s completely insane. I keep telling them about this [laughs]. Zola was a superb striker and Clarke was a great defender. We’ll be top four if they get that bit right. No, I don’t want to interfere in their training methods, so yes it’s true. It may seem strange, but that’s exactly what happens.

Part Four coming tomorrow

The KUMB interview with Scott Duxbury has now been posted online in full. It’s an excellent piece of interviewing. Although it covers some of the same ground as I have done, there’s a lot of different stuff too. The extract on Sheffield United is particularly interesting.

Enjoy!

I have at least four more parts of my interview to publish, but I need to transcribe them first so I am afraid you will have to be a little patient as I have a very busy week at work. But I hope to have an extract up later today which reveals that Zola nearly walked out, 45 minutes before the press conference announcing his appointment. Is that enough of a taster for you?!

Copyright West Ham Till I Die. No part of this interview may be reproduced without crediting West Ham Till I Die Blog.

ID: Would it be an exaggeration to say that almost for the first time since the days of Harry Redknapp that it’s a happy club?
SD: I have been at the club ten years and it’s the happiest I have seen it. There is a genuine belief that there is a permanence to it.There’s a clear structure. This isn’t just ‘we’ve signed a particular player who’s performing very well, and as long as he stays fit, happy days’. There’s a clear – I’ll use it early on – The Project – there’s a clear business plan…
ID Very New Labour. [laughs]
Exactly! Spin, spin spin! [laughs]. There’s a clear direction that has a certain longevity to it. I believe in it. Gianfranco believes in it. Gianluca [Nani] believes in it. I think the supporters have every right to be cynical and wary but I think they want to believe. They see a structure and a long term future.
What reaction have you had personally from supporters over the last few months? I don’t think many people believed you when you came out in January and said you wouldn’t sell players, but you delivered.
The death threats have reduced a little bit, but they haven’t completely gone away. Joking aside, I used to look at the unofficial sites. I stopped doing it but Greg Demetriou, my head of media keeps me informed of the general views. There can be quite emotive comments and some of them quite personal. I used to go home at night and I couldn’t sleep. I remember when McCartney left and we signed Ilunga, but we couldn’t announce it because of various red tape we had to get through, I really was getting death threats. One said that if I left the club they knew who I was, where I was going and I would be killed. It is quite disturbing. The danger is that you start to make decisions that aren’t rational because you are conscious of a personal perception. So I try to ignore it and make the right decision for West Ham. There have been lots of incidents throughout my ten years at the club but I can honestly say I have always done what is best for West Ham United. So I can sleep at night and I believe in my own ability so I am not here for my own personal gain. I am here because I do believe I can contribute to this football club and I believe we can achieve success.
Do you think that your comparative youth in running a club like West Ham means that people haven’t taken you as seriously as you might have liked them to?
I think yes, there is a danger of that, but the fact I have been here for ten years means I don’t look particularly young any more! Maybe. I make decisions that someone who is a little more conservative wouldn’t – Zola, for instance. But I have a team around me now which is a young team at all levels. I think that’s an advantage for us. It’s supplemented with experience. I think especially after the last year and a half I am taken seriously. We are negotiating CEOs of Inter Milan, Barcelona. We are on a very very high stage. They respect what we as a club, and me as a smaller part, have done. I don’t think that’s an issue any more. In the past ten years I have probably experienced more as a CEO than many others do in a lifetime.
When you talk about “The Project” what is a realistic ambition to emerge from those plans?
I am the wrong person to ask because I am ambitious. My answer will be to win the league. It’s not a stupid remark because we are in a league, it’s a race and if you’re not in it to win it, why on earth are you taking part? Simply to exist is not what I am about. If we get the right set of circumstances and continue to grow as a club, why not? Why can’t we achieve the ultimate? I was with Gianfranco just before the season ended and I said, well, if we sign these players we’ll definitely finish seventh and qualify for the Europa League next season. And he said: “Only seventh? No way, we’ve got to finish much higher than that”. He shares my ambition and my view. Of course I am aware of the financial constraints on the club and the perceived financial requirements to compete at that highest level, but we’ve got our vision and we believe in it. If we continue to develop the players, who knows where we can end up. We are certainly not going to limit ourselves and say we can never finish at this level because we all believe we can.
Moving on to the ownership question, it appears there is now a degree of stability but the owners are effectively the creditors of the former chairman. They are not in it for the long haul so they will want to maximize their return at some point. It’s not an ideal situation, is it, if you want to launch a bid to get into the top four?
I disagree to be honest. It’s a perfect scenario. The past year and a half has shown that if we can run the club without interference… It’s not just my decision, it’s Gianfranco, Gianluca, the three of us. Our decisions are not questioned and we can push the club forward. Straumur allows us to do that. Their vision is that over the next three years the world economy improves. They do intend at some point to invest in the club and grow the asset and then realize it in three years time. Three years is a lifetime in football. If the three of us can work together during that time and grow the club, wonderful. The one thing I cannot control is ownership issues. My big fear is that tomorrow a new owner comes in, doesn’t want Gianfranco as the manager, wants some high profile individual, doesn’t believe in the ethos of the project, wants us to sign the most high profile midfielders and centre forwards and it’s all destroyed. We have seen the impact of owner led issues at Newcastle. We have seen what it can do to a football club. We have had a year and a half of the football club being run on footballing principles and Straumur will hopefully allow us to continue that for the next three years. Then Straumur – and this is where I will try to be involved – will hopefully sell to someone who believes in Gianfranco, believes in The Project and simply continues the development. But unfortunately that’s out of my control.
Do you on a personal level feel quite sad about what’s happened to the previous chairman and indeed Eggert Magnusson in some ways? They clearly were not the kind of people who wanted to come in and rip the club apart, they seemed to me to have a vision and the world economic circumstances meant they weren’t able to realise it.
It’s dreadful. BG and Eggert are invited back to games. They had the best interests of the club at heart. I hope BG comes back to games next season. He personally has been dreadfully affected by the world economy. Individually he is a bankrupt. He’s lost everything. He loved West Ham. He really did. Again, during his personal troubles, and I am not saying he would have done this, but it would have been easy for him to say Scott, sell Upson, sell Green, sell Parker and I’m having that money. That pressure was never put on me at all. On the contrary. He completely endorsed the plans I had and backed me when I was having some pretty difficult conversations with the banks. Their place in history should be remembered fondly, and they have really contributed to a club that has improved during difficult times. It’s no small thanks to them.

Part Three to come soon!

Copyright West Ham Till I Die. No part of this interview may be reproduced without crediting West Ham Till I Die Blog.

ID: What are the main differences in the club compared to a year ago?
SD: The main difference is we are – it sounds a little corny – but we are as one. We are united. There is a general belief in what the club is trying to do, and what Gianfranco is trying to do, and the supporters are now with us. I’ve gone on the record on numerous occasions saying that one of the most divisive aspects of any football club is if there are competing elements and if the supporters aren’t with us and the supporters don’t believe in what we are doing, then there isn’t really anywhere for us to go. I think the January [transfer] window, or the end of it, was the defining moment. Everybody was as one, and believes in what we are trying to achieve and where we are going.
That was the first time you had really come out in the open and spoken directly to the public, wasn’t it?
Yes. The financial troubles of the football club have ironically helped me. There has always been pressure from above to run the football club in a certain way and I have simply had to follow orders, but for the first time, in the past year I have been able to implement my ideas without hindrance, which has been a good thing from my perspective and to be blunt, the direction in which Gianfranco Zola and I think the club should be going has been allowed to happen without hindrance, so when I came out in the January window and said the things I said I did so with complete confidence, because I knew there wasn’t somebody above me who could suddenly pull the rug from under me and say, no actually, we are selling Scott Parker, we are selling Matthew Upson. I made the decision we weren’t going to do that and I was extremely confident I could deliver on that.
Was there ever a point in all of the ownership situation when you thought there was a danger the club could go under?
No, there was never a thought we could go under, but there were various times, particularly during the January window where there were pressures put upon me where I couldn’t deliver what I was saying I would deliver. I have got no interest at being at West Ham and just surviving. The reason I brought Gianfranco in, and the trust between me and Gianfranco, is that we know what the situation is, we’re ambitious and we know what we can achieve but with the banking world collapsing, there was quite a lot of pressure put on me by the banks to sell players. The previous funding of the players – where we got players at prices we couldn’t afford was by virtue of bank loans. When the baking world collapsed the banks said, right, we want those loans back, so we had to reduce our debts. I came up with the strategy of selling the fringe players, and that would still keep us competitive, even self sufficient. Notwithstanding that, during the window there was quite a lot of pressure from our banks that we should sell Scott Parker. I argued very strongly against to the point of, er, perhaps moving on, because we had never breached any of our banking covenants. We had always made our repayments back, but because the banks were getting nervous about their own situations, to me they were putting undue pressure on us and trying to interfere in the operation.
So to be clear, you actually threatened to quit?
Yes. It would have been an untenable situation. I had brought Gianfranco in. We were working closely together and then suddenly top players would have been removed. That wasn’t part of our plan. I had made quite clear how we could achieve the savings – by selling the fringe players – and if we are not competitive and we are not growing, I don’t want to be here and Gianfranco doesn’t want to be here. That was the biggest issue we have overcome – battles with the banks.
So what you are saying is that there could have been a situation in January where you would have quit, and there would have been a strong possibility that Zola would have quit as well.
There are lots of hypothetical situations that could have happened, Iain, but I see it as part of my job to have these battles, to make sure that what I promised to Gianfranco, what I promised in our plan, is delivered. It’s part of my job to go into boardrooms and have these battles. Bankers have their own agendas. They just want debts to be reduced. They are not interested in the success of West Ham.
When you came out at the beginning of January and said you weren’t going to sell any top players, was that aimed more at the banks than anyone else?
No. It was a business plan which was absolutely watertight and I knew I could deliver on that. There was no pressure from the owners. The fact that the banks have their own problems with the economic climate meant they were a little more jittery. They had no ability to make me buy or sell players. They couldn’t action that. They were starting to get very nervous and push the boundaries but I wasn’t prepared to be pushed. You’ve got to remember as well that in January BG was facing bankruptcy and our ownership issue was up in the air, so there were lively discussions. Now Straumur have taken over the club, ownership issues are resolved. The banks are back where they should be, which is lending money and we repay it back and there is no interference. There will always be battles I have to have. You just have to make sure you win them.

Part Two follows tomorrow.

I’ve just come back from interviewing West Ham Chief Executive Scott Duxbury over lunch in Docklands. We covered a huge amount of ground and it is going to take some time to transcribe the interview, so you will have to be a little patient, especially as I am away most of the weekend. To give you a few tasters though, Duxbury…

* Details “The Project” – his vision for the club
* Believes we can win the league.
* Explains the full story of Zola’s capture and why he nearly didn’t sign
* Tells how the banks tried to force the sale of Scott Parker in January
* Reveals he nearly quit over the issue
* Says has been no contact with Carlos Tevez or his representatives over a return
* Is adamant that Dean Ashton will NOT be sold to Stoke
* Says Lucas Neill may well stay at the club
* Reveals a stonking half time entertainment plan for the Napoli game
* Tells why Jeremy Nicholas has a job for life
* Says Rob Green’s contract talks are on hold
* Says the club is looking to sell Davenport and Faubert
* Explains the kind of player the club wish to bring in over the summer

Enough to be going on with? But rest assured, there’s a lot more. I’m going to print the whole thing with no interpretation from me. It’s a word for word record of our 90 minute conversation. I have to say I have been impressed by Scott’s openness over the last six months. Ever since he came out fighting in the transfer window, he’s been like a breath of fresh air in his dealings with the media. Please don’t get the impression I speak to him often, or anything like that. I don’t. This was the second time I have met him, but I am impressed at his passion for his job, his vision for the future of the club (which he talks a lot about in the interview) and the clear glove in glove relationship he has with Zola.

OK, I have to write an article for the Independent on Sunday on gays in the Tory Party (!), and then I will wrap a cold towel around my head and start transcribing.

Herita Ilunga is about to start to twitter. Well, he’s just invited me to follow him, so I assume he is! If you’re on Twitter and you’d like to follow his tweets, sign up HERE. And if you want to follow me, you can do so HERE.

The Club Website is confirming the season long loan signing of Chilean striker Luis Jimenez from Inter Milan. This is what the player himself has said today…
“I am very happy, very excited and very determined to show what I can do. I am a player who loves to play football, to be in a team that keeps the ball, to create opportunities and also score goals. I can’t promise anything but I am going to do everything possible to do a good job for the club.

“I know West Ham are a fantastic club who have had a lot of great players. I had options to join other clubs but I watched West Ham’s last game of the season and I liked it a lot. I preferred this option because I really admire the way they try to play. Gianfranco Zola was one of the things that drew me to West Ham – I can identify with the type of football he wants to play.”

It’s well worth reading the full article on the website as it contains a comprehensive review of Jimenez’s career to date.

In other news, there has been a bit of speculation that Dean Ashton may be on his way to Stoke for £5 million. Rubbish. Yes, they have expressed some sort of lukewarm interest – although you’d have thought James Beattie was quite sufficient – but the Club would be mad to offload a player who has the potential to score 20 goals a season. We know what he can do when he’s fit and will be raring to go in August.

Ok, yes, it probably is, but we can all dream. Let’s indulge in a bit of football counterfactual… Tevez has made clear he is leaving Man U. Liverpool haven’t got the money to afford him, nor have Arsenal. He has made clear he wants to stay in this country so that leaves Chelsea and Manchester City. Chelsea could afford him, but it’s difficult to see where he would fit into their formation. Apart from the money, why would he go to Manchester City? Could he really work himself into a frenzy of excitement to appear at Eastlands. No, what could really float his boat is a return to Upton Park. He’d forego the huge salary, Kia wouldn’t worry about the fee too much and we’d be guaranteed a fourth place finish.

A nice thought, isn’t it, however brief?!

I’m going to have a lie down…

August 15 Wolves A
August 18 Aston Villa H
August 22 Tottenham H
August 29 Blackburn A

Top of the table by the end of August, eh?!