An exclusive interview with Andy Griffin.
I spoke to the former Newcastle United and England Under 21s star via zoom on Thursday March 26th.
The one-time NUFC defender is currently running the Andy Griffin football academy near Stoke.
We began by talking about him signing for NUFC in 1998 before moving on to his memories of playing under three different managers until 2004, as well as his thoughts on Newcastle United in the present day.
(ED: This epic interview covers a lot of ground and has been split into four parts, this is the second of the four. Our thanks from The Mag to The Armchair Fan for this top quality interview with Andy Griffin)
How did you feel when Kenny Dalglish left the club after only two matches of the 98/99 season?
Was it only two games?!!
I didn’t realise that, that has really surprised me to be honest.
That’s very early in the season to get the sack especially as we were unbeaten, we’d been to Chelsea and got a decent score draw. With me being so young at the time, it was all still a bit of a whirlwind. I was still trying to get used to the mechanics and politics of football. As a player you notice he’s no longer there and it’s a bit rubbish but it is what it is, as a professional all you can do is get on with the training and carry on as normal.
Were the players excited when Ruud Gullit was made manager and promised a return of sexy football?
I grew up watching Ruud play for the legendary AC Milan side on channel four. My weekend routine was to play Sunday league, have a bath, Sunday dinner and watch Gazzetta Italia.
I remember when Ruud Gullit walked through the door, I was like ‘Blimey! I’ve gone from Kenny Dalglish…King Kenny, and now Ruud Gullit is going to be my manager’. It was footballing royalty at its best! I was disappointed that Kenny had left because I owed a lot to him for showing his faith and signing me and I think a lot of him both as a manager and a man but then you’ve got Ruud walking in, he’s massive! He’s about six foot two and has those famous dreadlocks. The whole ‘sexy football’ thing didn’t faze me as my game was built around tackling, blood and thunder. I was no Roberto Carlos!
How did Ruud Gullit differ as a manager to Kenny Dalglish?
Training was a lot tougher, he was quite unforgiving. He almost didn’t tolerate you giving the ball away. The pre-season of 99/00 was exceptionally difficult and I remember him being quite brutal. As a young manager coming in, he was maybe trying to rubberstamp his authority on the group as well as the club. I understand that because that’s what a lot of managers do. I had the utmost respect for him as a player and I thoroughly bought into his ideas and philosophies as a manager. I enjoyed it; the tempo and the standards that he created as well as what he would and wouldn’t accept.
A lot of senior players have subsequently come out and said they felt isolated from the first team under Ruud. What was the dressing room like when he was in charge?
I didn’t really notice the cracks at the time. As a youngster, you’re still a bit shell-shocked. You come in, have your food and enjoy a laugh with the other younger lads. There weren’t cliques as such but as younger players we didn’t notice anything too untoward with the seniors. Maybe you’d notice a player being left out of the team and hear a few moans and groans about the manager but that’s normal in any dressing room, the manager isn’t there to be liked, he’s there to do a job and unfortunately you are going to upset a couple of players. That’s football, that’s management. It’s normal in the footballing world. If a new manager comes in and doesn’t want you then he will push you to one side. It’s nothing personal. If you are wanting to challenge near the top of the Premier League, maybe Ruud felt he could have more of an influence over the younger players, they also have more energy and will recover quicker. If that’s the direction Ruud Gullit wanted to go in, you accept that, shake hands and move on. If it’s done in a disrespectful way however then you have the right to voice that as some of those players have.
Issue 123 – June 1999
When Sunderland were promoted in 1999, did it come as a surprise just how important the Tyne-Wear derby is to the region as a whole?
I think you’re made well-aware quite quickly of the importance of that rivalry. I’d already played in a Stoke City v Port Vale derby at the age of seventeen. There was a bit of hatred there and I couldn’t understand how you could hate or even despise someone so much from the same city just because they support a different football team.
We had all the build-up and the atmosphere which was great but it was a notch up when I went to Newcastle v Sunderland and realised that actually the two clubs do really hate each other, it was intense! You got told quite early what it means and it’s a fixture that you shouldn’t lose, you can’t lose with the amount of pride at stake. That’s how I played every match of football anyway and in training too.
The fact we now have Sunderland back in the Premier League is far better than not having these fixtures. It’s such an iconic fixture and everyone is up for it, home and away. It has such a build-up and has that meaning to the whole area and I was fortunate to play in two of them.
How did the players feel when Alan Shearer and Duncan Ferguson started on the bench at home to Sunderland in 1999?
Like everybody else, we felt perplexed, confused and were scratching our heads. Paul Robinson started ahead of Alan Shearer, it’s mind-boggling! Ahead of Duncan Ferguson too, where is the common sense in that?
I get that sometimes managers have to make tough decisions and rubberstamp their authority and so on but that wasn’t the wisest of moves. Alan Shearer – a Geordie, Newcastle through-and-through. He understands the fixture and is an absolute monster leading the line who doesn’t like Sunderland, one of the best players in the world in that position.
You’ve also got Duncan Ferguson – a talisman, a strong man who gives you another dimension to your play, a real handful for any centre-half who’s ever played the game of football and without being disrespectful to Paul Robinson, it was a ridiculous, ridiculous move. If a manager was to make that kind of decision now, you would think he was wanting the sack.
Would Newcastle have been relegated had Ruud Gullit been in charge for the whole of the 99/00 season?
Who knows?!
Ultimately, when Alan Shearer isn’t getting played, your team isn’t as good, you’re losing a lot of goals and goals win games. Even if you’re tight at the back, he might score one and we win 1-0. I would like to think that ultimately we would have had too much ability to go down. I think there were still some strong characters within the team that wouldn’t have capitulated like we’re maybe seeing with Tottenham Hotspur right now, where I think there’s a complete lack of leadership.
How did Sir Bobby Robson bring about such a dramatic improvement after a disastrous start to that campaign?
I think he brought common sense. We still had senior players that weren’t done at Newcastle such as Shearer, Warren Barton and Rob Lee. Alan came back into the team and he was an inspiration, the talisman and skipper. He set the standard and straight away the team is so much better.
Bobby got the senior players together and let them know that they still had a lot to give to the club. He showed he had a lot of respect for them and let them know what happened under Ruud Gullit was done with and they could draw a line under it. He let them know they still had a role to play, not just in the first eleven but also with the younger players that looked up to them. He’d give them that leadership responsibility, identified that they were the better players and, as a group, when you’re going into war and I’ve always viewed football like that, they are the ones to lead by example and that’s what they did. You want senior players around because they can look after a dressing room, you might get younger players who are getting a bit too big for their boots and good, honest pros can stop that from spreading.
Bobby was able to put this player here or that player there, to fit the pieces into the jigsaw. He was bubbly, he was enthusiastic and energetic. He was inspirational. He gave us the 1990 World Cup run all the way to the semi-final. That was the first thing I thought of when I saw Bobby Robson, one of the finest world cups I’ve ever watched. We’d had Ruud Gullit and now Sir Bobby and I’m thinking ‘this is incredible!’. At the start of that season, I was injured with a stress fracture in my lower back from a pre-season match so I was in a plaster cast from my hip bone up to under my armpit, I pretty much missed the whole season. My first start under Sir Bobby was against Arsenal and I scored in a 4-2 win but that was the last day of the season so Bobby thought I was like a new signing for him.
The thing with Sir Bobby was he brought common sense, he was respectful to the players and was able to get good young players through the door that were hungry to improve their game and were appreciative of being at Newcastle United. Sometimes you can go out and buy your ready-made superstars and there is almost a feeling of ‘you should be happy I’m at your football club’, whereas you want players to come in and be like ‘wow, this is superb’ and have that hunger to be the best they can be every game because you don’t win games just solely on talent.
(ED: Our thanks once again to Andy Griffin and The Armchair Fan. You can read the first part that went up on Sunday, then part three of four of this epic interview will go up on The Mag on Tuesday)