UFO Info Week-End

I thought to myself ‘Surely things can’t be that bad!’When Noel came back I asked him what was going on and he

I thought to myself, ‘Surely things can’t be that bad!’”When Noel came back I asked him what was going on and he said that the players had got together and decided they didn’t want me.”Furphy didn’t add as much, but it was clear he wasn’t going to be peed around by a squad whose lack of success this season suggests they can barely string a few cogent passes together, let alone a few decent results “I was stunned. I rang the chairman, but he said he couldn’t get down to the training ground immediately, so I picked up my briefcase, got into my car and went home. No point hanging around where I wasn’t wanted.”As I left, some of the players came up and asked where I was going. When I told them, the captain said: ‘We never called for that. All we wanted was to have one voice telling us what to do’.”Subsequently Blake, the 38-year-old former Stoke defender, said he felt he had been undermined. He and Furphy were “pursuing different agendas and the players weren’t happy with the situation”. He added: “No one is more disappointed than me that it hasn’t worked out.”The Stockton-born Furphy had not worked in football management since returning from the USA in the early Eighties.

He settled in south Devon, where he is well-known as a match reporter and analyst for local radio. Although never an outstanding player, as a manager and coach he has been there, done it and worn the tracksuit. He coached for the FA in Czechoslovakia, Bulgaria, Malawi and Bermuda, and the £13,000 a year he negotiated with Sheffield United during his spell at Bramall Lane in the early Seventies was then the highest paid to any club manager.When he went to the States he signed Giorgio Chinaglia to team up with Pele, and went on to coach Fort Lauderdale and Jimmy Hill’s Washington Diplomats.”When the call came from the Exeter chairman I was flattered and interested,” he said He tapped his head. “There’s a lot of football knowledge up there that can’t be matched by too many people. The chairman said Noel had asked for me because he had started to play again and felt he needed help. The slide has been horrific.”So has the club’s disciplinary record, currently the worst in the Football League, with 65 bookings, 10 of them in one match when they lost at Brighton in December. The defeat at Hartlepool was their ninth in 10 games, and left them six points above bottom club Carlisle; but the Cumbrians had four games in hand.Obviously emergency surgery was required, but Furphy’s flying doctor role was never specified.

“Officially I was a technical consultant, but it soon became apparent that I had nothing to do with picking the team. After the Hartlepool match I felt I needed a more hands-on approach to justify my existence, but I knew it was a very tricky situation. I told Noel from the start I didn’t want his job, and that once the club was safe I’d be off back on the golf course. He is a nice man, very passionate about the club, and I know this is not a good time for him.”Furphy is dead right about that. Popular rumour is that the club known as The Grecians, whose greatest achievement, apart from holding Everton to a draw in the FA Cup last year, was finishing eighth in Division Three, are so broke (they were recently loaned £65,000 by the Professional Footballers’ Association) they cannot afford to pay off Blake, who says he has already spoken to someone else he wants as an experienced right-hand man.Someone who knows his place, obviously. Yesterday Furphy’s was back behind the microphone, commentating on Torquay’s match at Blackpool.Blake stepped up from assistant exactly a year ago this week when Peter Fox went after a heavy defeat at home against Leyton Orient Yesterday Orient were again the visitors to St James Park. Exeter duly lost 3-2, squandering a 2-0 lead; Carlisle won at home.

At one stage it seemed the glum Grecians might get a point, but 300 miles away in Blackpool Ken Furphy could be excused for thinking he had made his.. It may rank as one of the messiest of football transfers, but at least it’s over. What a chaotic episode it has been, with England’s coach-designate fretting out anincreasingly unreal existence at Lazio while those waiting to see how asbestosly he occupies his new hot-seat over here have been sparking with impatience. It may rank as one of the messiest of football transfers, but at least it’s over. What a chaotic episode it has been, with England’s coach-designate fretting out anincreasingly unreal existence at Lazio while those waiting to see how asbestosly he occupies his new hot-seat over here have been sparking with impatience.
Now, at last, we can study and analyse every move Sven Goran Eriksson makes and have our curiosities slowly satisfied during the inevitable dramas ahead.

The national sport is up and running again.The long wait has not been the most uplifting of experiences. Indeed, the only folk to emerge with any credit from these anguished months are the Lazio club officials. Although there has been much seething behind the scenes, they presented a brave and patient face as their team were failing in every direction, resisting the temptation to utter publicly the words: “If you’re going, for God’s sake hurry up and go”. Instead, they left it to him to decide and, eventually, he volunteered his departure.