The Football Pink Volume 1 | Page 9

Changing Rooms Beck would use a combination of skulduggery with away dressing rooms. He would turn the heat up when the weather was hot and then turn it off completely during the winter. The club would prepare tea for their visitors who often found it had been topped up with a whole bag of sugar. Having said all this, he would also use some unconventional methods on his own players. He was well known for giving his players cold showers. He would tip buckets of freezing cold water over his players. Back in the late eighties and early nineties this was quite unusual, but now so many different sports use ice baths to remove lactic acid, further enhances the proof Beck was often way ahead of his time. Dugouts Beck had the away dugout moved so that it was difficult for the coaching staff to see the action properly. When combined with his other unorthodox methods it was a complete ‘drip-drip’ effect of spoiling tactics designed to get into the opposition staff and players’ minds. But to consider these tactics in isolation is to misunderstand the achievements of Beck at Cambridge. In his first season as manager he guided them to a play-off win over Chesterfield to win promotion to Division Three (now League One). The club had spent just one of the previous 12 seasons in Division Four but now they had hopes of going further. The following season they were Division Three champions to gain back-to-back promotions. On the verge of a remarkable third successive promotion they reached the play-offs in the old Second Division (now The Championship) only to lose out to Leicester before they could reach the Wembley final. This particular promotion was to prove a crucial goal for clubs from this division as those who went up at the end of the 199192 season earned a place as inaugural members of the newly-formed Premier League. Cambridge United had finished 5th and almost made the big time. During this period they had two fantastic FA Cup runs, where they reached the Quarter-Finals in both 1990 and 1991. They lost to eventual runners-up, Crystal Palace 0-1 in 1990, and then the following year, in one of their finest moments they pushed Arsenal all the way narrowly losing 1-2. But with just 2 wins and 6 defeats from their opening 10 games of the 1992-93 season Beck was sacked. This resulted in a fall from grace as alarming as the rise had been monumental and two relegations in three years saw them back on the bottom rung of English football. In an interview in 2008, Beck claimed all these stories were apocryphal, and had no basis in fact. All apart from the cold showers, for which Beck feels rightly proud to have been a pioneer of such methods. After Cambridge, Beck had spells at Preston North End and Lincoln City before returning briefly to the Abbey Stadium in 2001. He later went onto manage Histon and is currently managing Kettering Town. So was Beck an evil man who engaged in underhand tactics simply to make up for deficiencies in his own team? Or was he a genius way ahead of his time, whose methods have since been taken on and enhanced by other managers? PETE SPENCER