241 Pizza

“You want me to find players for someone you are putting in my job?” I asked. “Let him go and find his own players.” Ann’s anger boiled over and she asked them to leave the house.

From my standpoint, I understood the team wasn’t doing as well as Rupert may have wished, but in that case they should have just paid me off. Rupert tried to make out that he was giving me gardening leave so I could concentrate on the court case, but I couldn’t have told him more clearly that there was nothing I could do. It was progressing perfectly well. I was going to London every six weeks or so, but there was nothing else that could really be done until I went to court the following November.

I couldn’t quite understand why, after supporting me for the first half of the 1999-2000 season, he suddenly backed off. Certainly I had not been doing my job any differently. I was now very angry — mostly because this was yet another hammer blow to me on top of everything else that was going on.

Rupert told me he wanted to hold a press conference the following day, with me sitting one side of him and Hoddle on the other, to tell the football world why the changes were being made. Insensitive or naive, or a bit of both? For me it was a total non-starter and that was the moment my patience finally snapped and I told him to “f*** off and get out of my house”.

It may sound odd, but I do still quite like Rupert Lowe. It’s just that I felt he let me down. I felt I was being made a scapegoat by the football club, but friendship is friendship, business is business. I had a really good working relationship with him over the years.

Jones was suspended on full pay and came to a compromise agreement to leave the club after a League Managers Association tribunal ruled in Southampton’s favour. The trial began at Liverpool Crown Court.

“David Jones, not guilty,” I stated. They were the only words I was to utter throughout the whole process.

Right from the start I had prepared myself for the prosecution lawyer to have a real go at me, but when he began I felt almost as if he was on my side. It was as if he was working for me, not the CPS — a really odd sensation. He called me upstanding, said I’d never been involved with the police. In fact it seemed that everything he said about me was nice.

His punchline was: “We have to prove that the defendant has a dark secret.” That was the worst thing he said about me. I got the impression he did not believe I had done anything wrong, that he was simply going through the motions because he’d been employed to do a job. I speculated in my mind that he had been forced to continue with a case that he knew he had no chance of winning. It was all so surreal.

Thoughts crossed my mind. What am I doing here? Why are all these people here? What’s going to happen? I had been informed from the outset that the case could last over two weeks, so I was prepared for the long haul. But ultimately the trial collapsed in under four days. We had a whole list of people lined up as defence witnesses, but none of them were needed as one by one my accusers melted away.

Before the jury was even sworn in seven charges were dropped as one of my four alleged “victims” pulled out from giving evidence against me, while a second failed to show up. This man, who was arguably their key witness and who I shall call Donald as I am not allowed to name him for legal reasons, was an ex-convict.

The judge gave the prosecution time to persuade him to attend, but by the third day it became apparent that Donald had got cold feet. It seemed that he was not prepared to go through with the lies on oath in case it earned him more time inside.

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