That was all on the playing side of things, which is of course the most important part of our game. Just look at what Brian Clough did at both Derby County and Nottingham Forest. Look at Sir Alex at Manchester United and what Jose at Chelsea, Inter Milan and Porto. Bill Shankly at Liverpool and yeah, you got it, my greatest of all-time man, manager and mentor, Tony Waddington, who had the roof not fallen off at the Victoria Ground would have went onto show the world what I think about him. He was well on his way when that tragedy happened, which was much like Seattle bringing in Anderson and destroying ones dream.
Well that brings me onto ownership and Vince Collucio, who was a man of many talents and of great integrity and natural ability to be a great part of any set-up and I might have said before in this book, ‘Had he been amongst today’s Seattle Sounders set-up, the club would have been even greater’.
As General Manager, Jack Daley ran our show well enough, and if I had had a crystal ball and saw Anderson coming into our lives I would have gone in to see Jack on a regular basis and thanked him for being Jack Daley and not Bruce Anderson. The only time he called me into his office was out-of-the-blue he asked me to sit and once I did he said “Alan, I know that you are doing a brilliant job both on and off the field, but can you take into consideration that other players cannot go out drinking like you and then turn up and train and play like you”. This not only took me back but something I appreciated very much and also something I took as him caring about the club, which was what his job was all about. Like in several cases I never got the opportunity to thank him before leaving, and that was only because I left in a blur….and it was the worst flight of my life, as I was no longer captain of the Seattle Sounders.

My physiotherapist was Don ‘The Boot’ Greiert, who was breath of fresh air in a place where players dreaded spending time. The only time that I had treatment was after my ankle had been performing on one too many hard surfaces and needed a rest, so I’d take a couple of days off and get on the standing bicycle, which I sometimes took home with me and worked on my balcony in my House on the Hill.
Although I told you of my most special match in the Big Apple against Bogie, I think our greatest performance was when going to Fort Lauderdale, an after getting the run-around (by Cubillas of Peru), we slaughtered them 4-0 with some breathtaking football or was it scintillating soccer?

PS: If what Bruce Anderson did was the darkest cloud of my now settled life and career, and I had some and more, then all I can say is that every cloud has a silver lining and that came overhead after being back in London for about nine months. I had spent six of those at Chelsea in the ‘stiffs’ (reserves) in a return which did not quite work out, through nobody’s fault but John Neal and me. It was half my fault because I still played the game the way it should be played but Neal was a manager who hated my style of play and got promotion playing ‘Route One’ football, the kind of game that had wrecked the English game since Charles Hughes introduced such robotic and obscene behaviour. I had no problem with him though because it was his job and his belief, at least he was not like most managers, totally hypocritical. I was going to get involved in a move that was bitter sweet, because as I went up the motorway to the Potteries, my friend Mickey Thomas was coming the other way to become an absolute ‘smash’ at the Bridge, as he was at all of his clubs. Funny thing was that I did not get to know Mickey until he was locked up in an Open Prison near where I was living in Uttoxeter about five years later. I say ‘funny’ because the woman whose hotel I was staying at that time had a brother who was a ‘screw’ there and I asked if I could visit the boy from Mochdre, Conwy near his first club Wrexham, where he played for 12 years before joining Manchester United.