Vince by Vince Hilaire

Author:Vince Hilaire [Vince Hilaire and Tom Maslona]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781785903762
Publisher: Biteback Publishing
Published: 2018-04-13T04:00:00+00:00

LUTON

My contract at Palace came to an end and I got a few phone calls from clubs. Gerry Francis, who I’d been quite close to at Palace, spoke to me about going to Coventry, as he’d gone there. They were the club that was most interested but then, out of the blue, David Pleat at Luton rang me. I really liked the way that he talked about the game. Every time I’d played against Luton they played good football and they had quality players there. He told me that he had a brilliant goalscoring winger called David Moss but that he was coming to the end of his career and he wasn’t expecting to get much more out of him so he wanted me to come and play on the left wing and take over from him.

Pleaty told me that he’d watched me a lot and thought that I could do the job. He was aware that I knew Ricky Hill and Brian Stein and told me that he was going to sign a few other players too. But I would never have agreed to go to Luton if I’d known that David Pleat was going to take a backseat in terms of running the football side, which happened as soon as I got there. The manager didn’t take any training. He left a fella called Trevor Hartley to do it all, and Hartley and I just took an instant dislike to each other. I immediately knew that I wouldn’t be there very long.

Pleaty said to me after a week, ‘Hilaire, I thought you had a better left foot than that. I wouldn’t have signed you if I’d have known it was that bad.’ All he kept going on about was my left foot and, for the next three years, after I left Luton, I kept getting Christmas cards from him with: ‘Is that left foot any good yet?’ written in it.

He was straight as a die, Pleaty, but he was a strange guy. He always spoke to you as if he was commentating; he never called you by your first name. His team talks were: ‘When Hilaire gets the ball, I want Stein to make a run in behind the full-back and get the ball and face up. In the meantime, Donaghy will push up from left back.’ It was just like he was commentating on a match. He was a funny man without meaning to be – very eccentric.

It was a shame it didn’t work out, as I could see that there were good players at Luton – Ricky Hill was as good as any mid-field player I’d ever played with and Brian Stein was excellent too. But some of the best players, like Garry Parker and Mark Stein, weren’t even in the first team and they didn’t get a look in at that time.

There was a bit of arrogance there that I didn’t like, but it wasn’t with the players – it was with the management. Pleaty resented Venables, which I found from a lot of managers during my career.

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