There is no sport quite like football for slotting people into pigeon holes. Ergo, Graham Taylor is a root vegetable incapable of asking his wife to pass the marmalade without sprinkling his request with at least three expletives, while Ron Atkinson is never further than a Ray Wilkins square pass from a glass of champagne. He takes over at Sheffield Wednesday this weekend not so much weighed down by the job as his jewelry.
The public perception of Michael Knighton appears to be similarly ingrained. At best, the chairman of Carlisle United has delusions of grandeur; at worst, he wakes up in the morning imagining himself to be Napoleon Bonaparte or two poached eggs fist. In short, a fruitcake.
The Knighton saga began in August 1989, when he appeared out of nowhere, bought the most famous football club in the World, and demonstrated his stated aversion to publicity by kitting himself out in the full Manchester United strip, bouncing a ball on his head from halfway line to goalmouth, and volleying into the top corner of the net at the Stretford End.
Subsequently, Knighton's £10 million deal fell through amid rumours that closer inspection of his wallet had revealed a couple of toffee wrappers and one of those foreign coins with a hole in it, before the man himself eventually resurfaced in Carlisle in 1992, since when he has kept a low profile.
According to newspaper cuttings, having sacked his manager Mervyn Day, he now picks the team, and dictates the tactics. He recently named himself on the bench for a reserve game, he put
up wanted posters around the ground after a local newspaper reporter had upset him, and has conversations with alien spacecraft. Little green men have landed at Brunton Park and, all in all, Knighton would provide richer material for Dr. Anthony Clare than Geoffrey Boycott.
The truth of the matter, however, is that Knighton's only departure from what we perceive to be normality is in refusing to fit a public stereotype. Football League chairmen are supposed to wear camelskin coats, smoke fat cigars, drive to the ground in a Rolls Royce at a quarter to three and drive home again at a quarter past five. They don't spend all day at the ground, put on a tracksuit, join in at training, and, in times of staff shortages, man the switchboard.
Knighton, in fact, is an engaging, intelligent, successful businessman who just happens to present a slightly unconventional image. He himself offers the following imaginary scenario. "I'm a doctor. I'm wearing a white coat, with a stethoscope in my ears, no problem. I'm a doctor. I've got earrings in my nose, a stud in my ear, and I'm wearing a pair of jeans with holes in the knees. Big problem." The whole Michael Knighton file ("so big you can hardly pick it up") is, he says, "nothing more than a classic case of journalists getting their footballing knickers in a twist".
He is he insists, just an ordinary bloke with the ordinary bloke's passion for football - in his case fuelled by standing on the terraces at Derby from the age of five with his mineworking father, a great-grandfather who picked up FA Cup and championship winning medals with Sheffield United between 1895 and 1910, and a potential career in the game cut short by a serious knee injury as a 15 year old groundstaff apprentice with Coventry City.
His whole ethos is hewn from this addiction to football and, after making a pile in property development, his original intention to retire quietly to the Isle of Man aged 37 was interrupted when the chance came along to buy Manchester United.
It is remarkable to think now that United were losing money when Knighton offered his £10 million in 1989 and, far from having to back out of the deal when his finances came under closer scrutiny, Knighton concluded what he said was a "watertight" contract. In fact, he recently won a court settlement for "substantial undisclosed damages, plus full costs" when a book came out suggesting otherwise.
"The club was mine," said Knighton. "But what I had not appreciated was the media feeding frenzy which surrounded the deal and the fact that I was ritually slaughtered by the Robert Maxwell owned press in the weeks that followed (Maxwell was - illegally as it turned out - a six per cent shareholder). My family and children were suffering, and, more importantly so was the image of the club. ho I decided enough was enough."
Knighton, though, was offered a seat on the board, which he took up for three years before realising his ambition - with Carlisle - to own his own club. "Anyone with an ounce of intelligence would have realised that if I really didn't have the money to buy Manchester United I would scarcely have been made a director."
"I had promised to turn a loss-making company into a £150 million concern in three years and only a very few people had realised the way Football was going to take off. With all due respect neither had Manchester United, otherwise they wouldn't have flogged it to me for £10 million! Now they're worth £450 million."
Knighton blames the press for persuading him that there was a higher price to pay than £10 million and for promoting his subsequent image of a slightly potty megalomaniac. "A lot of the journalism in this country is brilliant, but some of it is rubbish. They can make a sane, semi intelligent, rational, straightforward, non eccentric, reasonable person come across as a raving bloody lunatic.
"At Manchester United, I'd taken over before the first home game of the season, with 50,000 people waiting for the kick off against Arsenal and a photographer wanted to take a picture of me in the full United kit. So I obliged.
"But the reason I ran onto the field and 'scored' was a purely spontaneous thing. The board were not popular with a large section of the fans at the time and I just wanted to show that I was one of them. The ball went into the net and it was me saying 'There you are, I'm really one of you.' Football consumes every fibre of me. There's nothing to compare with it. Every time I come through the door to start work at Carlisle it's like lifting the FA Cup."
So did he sack Day so he could pick the team? Did he ban a local reporter from Brunton Park. Did he pick himself for the reserves? Does he talk to aliens? No, no, no and no appear to be the answers.
"The team is selected by our two senior coaches and myself. We've never disagreed and I've never pulled rank. There's nothing worse than an interfering chairman. It's irresponsible and it's not my style. Even Mervyn would say that I never interfered in three years until the end.
"Four days after Mervyn left we beat Wycombe 4-1 and a reporter said 'Who's the manager?' I said 'We've never had one' and that's how I came to be perceived as putting myself in charge. But it's true. Mervyn was the coach. We have never had a manager since I came here. Manager is a confusing term - it implies that they're managing the club and the club's affairs which is patently a nonsense. They're coaches.
"Someone plays 250 games in the back four, has two weeks coaching at Lilleshall, and he's a apparently qualified to be in charge of millions of quid worth of talent. The evidence does not bear that out. Eighty per cent of this industry is utterly bankrupt and carries on largely through the deep pockets of directors.
''If ex-footballers don't become managers they become TV pundits, like Mark Lawrenson. They drip with jewelry, wear Gucci shoes, have their hair in a bouffant and make clever comments and they have the bloody cheek to accuse me of being on an ego trip. The arrogance of it is breathtaking."
The 'talking to aliens' image stems from the night he and his wife had a vision of a UFO, which neither can explain, and if was the realization that this was the sort of thing people made fun of that prompted him not to mention it for 20 years. A local reporter got wind of it, Knighton told him "off the record" and a story was in the paper next day.
"That's how these things happen. Before I knew it, I was all over the tabloids with a bloody flying saucer pictured above my head, under the headline 'Knighton Speaks to Aliens.' The 'reporter banned' story stemmed from a fanzine writer poking fun about the UFO and by way of a joke we put up a poster saying something like 'Unwanted! If this man is spotted, report him to a steward and we'll zap him.' He was never banned.
"As for picking myself for the reserves, we were riddled with injuries one week and whoever was filling in the sheet said 'There's no one left Michael we'll have to stick your name down.' So he did. There was never the slightest intention of me playing but the press got hold of it and said 'Look at that maniac! He's picking himself for the reserves, now'."
"What I resent is ex-footballers or managers feeling they have sole monopoly over footballing knowledge. I don't profess to know any more or any less than anyone else. I may be unconventional but I'm not in football to massage my own ego. I'm just an ordinary individual privileged to be able to indulge his passion."
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