Cast your mind back to the season of 1975/76, which is the season when Newcastle United sacked Joe Harvey and replaced him with the then Blackburn Rovers manager, Gordon Lee.

Lee had a reputation as a manager who liked to play dirty football, a future England manager once commented and related football violence on the terraces to football violence on the pitch after playing a team managed by Gordon Lee.

Some of the first words of wisdom to emanate from him were to tell us how he didn’t rate star players, he told us that stars should remain in the sky. One of the first things Mr Lee did as Newcastle manager was to label our left winger (Terry Hibbitt) a trouble maker and Hibbitt was then forced out of the club, he was sold (almost 30 years later our next manager from Blackburn would tell us that the modern game had no place for wingers).

I really can’t think of anything that could have lead Mr Lee to come to this conclusion, especially so soon after taking over, it was as if he had arrived with his own ideas of what people were like, he wasn’t going to change.

Lee got rid of the flair (he said these were for the bottom of trousers) players and replaced them with hard workers, we got to the stage where if we went behind we couldn’t come back into a game, we had no players who were capable of changing the play.

Malcolm Macdonald was sold because he wouldn’t bow down to the manager, he was a star and Lee had already told us about his feelings on this type of player. Lee tried to bully Macdonald into submission but Macdonald wasn’t going to lie down and as a result was sold, the fans didn’t like it.

Lee had brought in a player the year before Macdonald was sold, Lee said he would outscore Macdonald and he did, Lee was right. Gowling was such a good player that the Leazes christened him “Fanny Gowling” and sang this during the games. Gowling outscored Macdonald for one season as he fed off Macdonald, as soon as Macdonald left the goals dried up for “Fanny”.

To cut a long story short, Lee left Newcastle, he upped ship and went to Everton, and he hadn’t even moved to Newcastle, his home was still in Lancashire. He wasn’t sacked, he left, I can’t remember anybody being bothered although people may have been, Lee had been at Newcastle for almost 18 months

Most wanted entertaining when they’d finished work for the week, football was a release from the boredom of the times.

Back to the point, when Lee resigned Newcastle tried to bring in the Bolton manager but he wasn’t interested so in desperation the job of Caretaker Manager was given to Richard Dinnis until the end of the season. Lo and behold Dinnis steered Newcastle to European qualification and thus forced the board into appointing him as full time Manager on a two year contract, ouch.

This was about as good as it got, if you want to know the outcome of season two then look it up, it doesn’t make good reading. I just hope that when you read this and possibly think you’ve seen it before, that’s as far as it goes and history doesn’t repeat itself, I’ve missed the worst bit out on purpose, I don’t want to tempt fate, I don’t believe in fate but I’m not going to take the risk.

Mick