Davie Caldwell

Cyril didn't end up leaving over the Caldwell affair.

Caldwell played for us in the first Cyril season – 1987/88 – when we reached the play-offs. Towards the end of that season he was handed a ridiculously long suspension, eight games I think, from the start of the following season. That is why Pope was so keen to get him off the payroll in the close season of 1988. I don’t know exactly what went on between Pope and Knowles, but I got the impression that Pope refused to honour promises that Cyril had made - leaving Cyril feeling that his authority had been undermined. There was a picture in the paper of Cyril ripping up his contract and chucking it in the bin – although it turned out later it was just a piece of paper, not his contract. I don’t know how, but the differences were smoothed over somehow and Cyril stayed for another year or so – leading us out at Wembley in 1989.

During the summer after Wembley, Pope and Knowles fell out again. Knowles wanted profits from Wembley to be spent on the playing budget whereas I suspect they had already been swallowed up in the black hole of TUFC’s finances. Pope upped the ante by publicising the fact that a fair chunk had gone into Cyril’s pocket by way of a bonus.

Against that background, we made an awful start to 1989/90 and were second bottom above Hartlepool when Cyril felt he’d had enough and threw in the towel. Just to show he liked a challenge, he became manager of Hartlepool and grabbed them by the scruff of the neck just as he had done at Darlington and Torquay. Unfortunately, he passed away just before the team he built there clinched promotion.

Dave Smith took over from Cyril and had Caldwell back on loan, but wasn’t interested in making the deal permanent.

As a silly aside, I seem to remember that the Belgian club was amateur and so found “bogus employment” to pay players for – like rugby clubs used to do here. Apparently, they had Caldwell down as a “mattress tester”. Given Enzo’s comments about his “social life”, I imagine he would have been quite good at that!