What You See Is What You Get: My Autobiography (84 page)

The whole thing was unbelievable! We'd spent a fortune preparing for this case over many years. We'd flown in loads of witnesses and conducted the case in the proper manner - and the whole thing was scuppered in the end by the Alan Sugar' stuff from Western Digital's lawyer, which had nothing at all to do with the core issue of the case.

I complained to David Gold in England about the decision to go down the American route in the first place, but it was too late now - it was over and done with. Our only consolation was that in America we were not liable to pay Western Digital's legal costs. In the UK, had we lost the Seagate case, we
would
have been responsible for paying all their costs.

On the brighter side, at least my tactic of worrying Seagate with a punitive damages action was working. Seagate's internal senior legal counsel finally contacted my office and asked me to call him. When we spoke, he started to jockey for position with a load of legal crap. He was telling me our claim for punitive damages was ridiculous and not applicable, and that they would strenuously defend it. All the usual fighting talk you'd expect.

I just listened and waited until he finished, then calmly told him we certainly
were
going to pursue it. Here's a little tip I've learned when it comes to negotiation: the art of silence. Imagine the exchange of words I've just described. After I said we were going to pursue it, I just went silent. A silence like this can feel like ages when, in fact, it's just a few seconds and it forces the other person to continue the conversation. This always works.

Normally, the other person will say, 'Hello, hello, are you still there?'

All you need to do is say, 'Yes, I'm still here.'

In the end, he stopped waffling and asked if there was any way we could settle this matter rather than get involved in more court action.

All
I
wanted was the money released. I told him I'd noticed in Seagate's annual accounts - made public in keeping with American Stock Exchange rules - that they had declared a provision of $160m for the Amstrad litigation issue. I pointed out that this was $10m more than the amount in escrow and
I put it to him that the $10m was to deal with further legal costs coming from arguing the appeal and the punitive damages case. He didn't comment.

I then told him I had a great idea - if he would agree to pay the $150m and drop the appeal, and we dropped our punitive damages action, then he would be able to release the $10m they had set aside back into their accounts, thus boosting their next financial year's profits. He went silent and told me he'd get back to me. Seagate was suffering a downturn in their business and I had clearly touched a nerve. The guy called me back a few hours later, agreeing to my idea.

Once the cash was released, in accordance with the scheme of arrangement, it was distributed to all the Old Amstrad shareholders. I recall a newspaper commenting that most shareholders had taken this litigation entitlement note with a pinch of salt, thinking they'd never get any money out of it - yet here they were sharing a windfall of $150m.

*

Despite the fact that Claude Littner and Daniel were doing a very good job on the day-to-day running of Tottenham Hotspur, the club still rested on my shoulders with regard to providing finances for the manager to put together a team.

After beating up the FA and getting Spurs back into the FA Cup, we went on a great run. In fact, we did so well that we got to the semi-finals, against Everton, which was to be played at Leeds United's Elland Road ground. I flew up to Leeds in a private plane with Simon and some of the directors. Funnily enough, the minibus taking us from the airport to Elland Road had 'Kelly's Minibus Hire' painted on the side! Considering that Graham Kelly was the person who'd given us so much aggravation, I thought that if we ended up winning today, a photo of us being taken to the ground in this minibus would go down a treat with the media. Someone there had a camera and took a picture of us standing with Kelly's minibus.

Gerry Francis had not been able to train with the players all week, as his son was in hospital and Gerry had spent a lot of time with him, but he managed to come to the semi-final, as his son had started to recover.

At Elland Road, they'd built a new section to their stadium, a massive East stand which held about the same amount of people as the other three sides. The FA had allocated this stand to Tottenham fans. From an acoustics point of view, since the other three sides were full of Everton fans, it sounded as if Everton were at home and we were plonked in an away stand. It all seemed a bit unfair.

Darren Anderton, labelled 'Sicknote' by the fans because he was hardly ever available to play for us, was still complaining that there was something wrong with him. He was finally persuaded to go out and play - with a big bandage around his knee!

We lost the game, but the 4-1 score didn't tell the true story. We were 2-1 down with ten minutes to go, but in trying to press for an equaliser, we left ourselves open at the back and Everton scored twice.

The private plane flew us back to Heathrow, where Simon and I caught the Concorde to New York to connect down to Florida to join Ann. As Simon reminds me, I never spoke a word to him for the entire flight. Our dream of winning the trophy that year was over and I was gutted with the result. We'd gone through so much to get back in the Cup, only to be scuppered by a series of disasters, such as Gerry not being available to train the team all week, the unfair stand allocation at Elland Road and a few stupid mistakes on the pitch.

Despite finishing seventh in the league that year - clearly nowhere near the relegation zone - Popescu decided he no longer wanted to play for Tottenham. At the last game of the season, he told all the players he was leaving and simply walked out!

Popescu had turned into a great player. A lot of people were writing about him in the media and Gerry really admired his defensive skills. Behind the scenes, however, his agent had set up a deal for him to join Barcelona. What Popescu had forgotten when he arrogantly walked out was that he would not be able to play for
anybody,
as he was contracted to Tottenham. Eventually, I was contacted by the chief executive officer of Barcelona, asking me to negotiate a transfer for Popescu. It was clear the player was not going to stay with us, so I accepted a fee of PS4m, which was some kind of consolation, as we'd only paid PS2.7m for him at the start of the season.

Klinsmann was also making noises about wanting to leave, invoking the clause in his contract that stated he could leave at the end of the first season. I reminded him and his agent, Andy Gross, that the clause was meant as a get-out if we got relegated. Regrettably, in the euphoria of signing him and having taken Klinsmann and Gross at their word, I didn't articulate the point about relegation in the contract. Nevertheless, I was angry with Klinsmann and Gross and said they were reneging on a gentlemen's agreement. Gross kept referring to the strict letter of the contract; he said they were
not
reneging and that Klinsmann was entitled to go. His year at Tottenham had been a great advertisement for him, as he'd played brilliantly and was loved by all the fans. Now he had re-established himself as a top-class striker, he was
head-hunted by Bayern Munich's Franz Beckenbauer. Reluctantly, I had to let him go and Bayern paid us the agreed contractual compensation.

There are some stupid things I did in my football days - maybe it was something to do with my short temper. When Klinsmann left, I made lots of complaints to the FA about the approaches made by Bayern Munich and what the clause in his contract
implied,
but it all fell on deaf ears.

Klinsmann told the media he had enjoyed his year at Tottenham and that he wanted to personally thank the chairman, Alan Sugar, for letting him go to Bayern Munich and that he would give me a signed shirt. The BBC wanted to interview me about this incident because they knew I was very angry. The interviewer came to my office in Brentwood and brought up the Klinsmann departure, telling me he thought it was a nice touch that Klinsmann had given me a signed shirt. I don't know to this day whether he was deliberately winding me up but, on camera, I got up, grabbed the shirt (which was in my office), screwed it up and threw it at him, saying he could go and clean his car with it as far as I was concerned. Not one of the moments I'm proud of.

That incident, of course, was manna from heaven for the media. Next day, the
Sun
ran a double-page spread and a little competition offering the Klinsmann shirt I'd chucked at the BBC reporter as the prize. I guess my over-reaction was a result of real frustration, as Klinsmann was not only a good player, but was expert at manipulating the media. Daniel and I experienced how he would turn on the charm when a camera was there, but off-camera he could be more difficult. I felt that the charm he could turn on at the flick of a switch made him seem a little sly, and in fact on one of our trips on the boat, Daniel and I jokingly made up some new lyrics to the famous
Dad's Army
song.

We now needed to recruit some more players and, to add insult to injury, Nick Barmby, who had signed a new contract with us earlier in the season, also declared he wanted to go to Middlesbrough. Things were crumbling around Gerry - he'd lost Klinsmann and Popescu, Sicknote was never available to play and now Barmby wanted to leave. Gerry didn't want to let him go, but the player wanted away. I put a PS6m price tag on him, which in those
days was a record fee. Bryan Robson, Middlesbrough's manager, protested that this was outrageous and I was standing in the player's way, stopping him from progressing in his career.

I told him I didn't give a shit about the player's career because Barmby didn't give a shit about us. The player had signed a deal with us no more than a year earlier and now wanted to leave. I told Robson that if he wanted the player, then that was the price.

After a lot of argy-bargy, I ended up doing the deal for PS6m with Steve Gibson, the chairman of Middlesbrough and a very nice fellow. Barmby's transfer made the headlines in the next day's newspapers because of the record fee. It was particularly noteworthy because Tottenham had only paid something like PS100,000 to Hull when we bought him as a youth player, a fact that got a lot of admiration from my fellow Premier League chairmen, but obviously didn't go down well with the fans.

Gerry had identified a young striker at Crystal Palace he liked the look of - Chris Armstrong. David Hyams, the corporate lawyer at Amstrad, was a mad Palace fan and we were always ribbing each other over our respective clubs. It so happened that Chris Armstrong and his agent came to negotiate a contract with me at Amstrad's Brentwood headquarters. Having signed him for Tottenham, I called David Hyams in his second-floor office and asked him to come up to the tenth floor, as I had some serious news for him that would affect him personally.

He must have wondered what I was going on about. You can imagine his face when he came into my office and saw his hero, Chris Armstrong, sitting there. I said to David, 'This chap has just signed for Spurs and I thought you'd be delighted to be the first to hear it.'

He was as sick as a parrot. 'Thank you very much, Alan, very funny. Very, very funny.' He turned around and walked out of the room.

My actions the previous season to shore up the team with the acquisitions of Klinsmann, Popescu and Dumitrescu had been rather a bold move for a British club. While there were
some
foreign players in the UK before this point, the arrival of this trio started an influx. So much so that when Klinsmann and Popescu left, I was contacted by loads of foreign agents to see if we were interested in replacements. I didn't know half of the players being offered to me. I'd just tell Gerry that so-and-so had been on the phone and offered me a Carlos Kickaball mark-2.

I got a call from a fellow who said he represented Dennis Bergkamp, who apparently was a Tottenham fan and had all the old Spurs players plastered on
his bedroom wall when he was a kid. I've lost count of the number times an agent has spun this line to me!

Gerry hadn't really caught on that I wasn't your typical club chairman. They say every football fan is a manager - well, some
chairmen
are glorified fans with power who want to be involved in player selection. Old-fashioned managers like Gerry saw this as the most heinous of crimes, and I agree. However, Gerry misinterpreted my frequent reports about the calls I was getting as me interfering and
insisting
we buy this player or that player. So when I told him someone had called me about Dennis Bergkamp, he exploded. 'Look, I am the fucking manager, right? And I pick the fucking players,
not
you.'

'What are you going on about, Gerry?'

'I pick the players, right? I'm not interested in all these players you keep coming up with. It's
my
job to decide on players.'

'Yes, I know that. I'm not saying we should buy them, I just tell you when people have been on the phone. I am just passing information on to you to see if you are interested or not - that's normal, right? What's wrong with that? Do you want me to ignore these calls? I haven't got a fucking clue who Dennis Bergkamp is - he could be Denis Thatcher as far as I'm concerned.' I don't think Gerry had been spoken to this way by past chairmen. He could see I was angry.