THE star-spotters were out on Tuesday night, albeit that few digits were required to count them and that Compton Park, home of Cogenhoe United, the Eagle Bitter United Counties League premier division leaders, seemed an unlikely place to find him. Their logic, however, was good. Paul Gascoigne had been following Kettering Town in the league, so why not when they played Cogenhoe in the local Hillier Senior Cup, too? After all, Gascoigne is not merely a fan, he is shortly to become an owner.
But they were disappointed at Compton Park, just as they will be at Clarence Park, the home of St Albans City, who play Kettering on Saturday. The trouble for Gascoigne is, his movements have started to become predictable. The local paper, the Evening Telegraph, has started snapping him in the stands for their front page. A heightened sense of incredulity abounds; if only everyone could get used to the idea, the commotion might just start to quell.
But disbelief will soon become reality. The evidence? Gascoigne has started looking for property in the area. And on Friday, at 6.45pm, the solicitor’s letter from the consortium of which he is a part arrived in the hands of Peter Mallinger, the Kettering chairman, formally offering a buy-out. All parties are willing; in fact, they cannot settle it fast enough. In two or three weeks, the deal will be done. “We’ve had all sorts of cranks and strange people come along looking to take over this club,” Mallinger said. “But this is a serious offer with serious money. It is what the football club needs.”
Question: how is it that Gascoigne can be made to look a safe pair of hands? He last appeared on the pitch as player-coach at Boston United and left two months into the season. Before that was the China disaster. In the summer, he flirted with a coaching job at Clyde but forsook that for a scouting/coaching role in Portugal at a club called Algarve United, who play in the Faro District first division. That did not last, either.
Only last week, he was up before an insolvency hearing in Glasgow when the public relations firm in his name was placed in liquidation owing £100,000. So another question: why the crowing in Kettering?
The answer: Imraan Ladak, a 27-year-old Tottenham Hotspur-supporting local businessman. Ladak has the brains and the chequebook. And the way he tells it, at least, is pretty convincing. The first time Ladak met Gascoigne was when he queued up for two hours for his autograph. The second time was in August, when Gascoigne dropped in to his home in Milton Keynes to talk takeovers. Ladak wanted to buy a club and he wanted a name from the football world as his front man. So he rang Gascoigne. “It was a call out of the blue,” Ladak said. Why Gascoigne? “The three players I’ve admired most are Maradona, Ronaldinho and Paul,” he said. “Ronaldinho’s under contract and Maradona’s not really management material.”
Without appearing to try, Ladak comes over as utterly undaunted by a challenge. In telesales, where his business life started, he once pushed so hard on a cold call that the voice on the other end refused to buy his double-glazing, but offered him a job instead. That was the managing director of Quality Locums, a recruitment agency for medics. Ladak took the job, learnt the business and two years ago bought a 33 per cent share in a medics’ recruitment agency of his own. The turnover of DRC Locums, he claims, has since grown from £600,000 to £23 million; its last registered accounts show net assets of £1,891,682.
He now owns two locum agencies and a dry-cleaning business. And when one agency plays the other at six-a-side, he gets a celebrity appearance from Gascoigne.
The Midas touch indeed sounds splendid for Kettering, as do his plans. “I am very ambitious,” he said. How far can Kettering go? “I can’t talk about Premier League football; if I did, no one would take me seriously.” But he does talk about going from the Nationwide Conference North “up through the divisions . . . playing football in the right way . . . getting into the League and then taking stock”. He mentions emulating Wimbledon’s achievements and that “this isn’t a five-year project, it’s a 15-year project”.
And here is another coup: “We would expect a couple of other very big names to join the club in the near future, on the playing side. We’re talking very, very big former internationals who have played Champions League.” Graeme Le Saux was one tentative guess. “Bigger than that.”
So, ambitious? Yes. Clever? Yes. The Labour Party’s plans for spatial development in the East Midlands mean that the number of potential fans in Kettering will double. And Gascoigne? “His fitness is really good,” Ladak said. “Paul will only play if he’s going to make an impact on the pitch. His primary objective is not playing, but coaching.”
And what about Gascoigne’s fatal flaws? Apart from everything else, what is there to stop him walking out, the way he has done on countless other recent commitments? “The fact that he’s getting involved financially shows that he is committed,” Ladak replied. “When I first met him two months ago I went in with an open mind. He really surprised me. Really great guy, really enthusiastic, you can see that one thing that he is really missing is football.”
Fantastic story, all this. Gazza and Kettering reborn simultaneously. “Fairytale stuff,” Mallinger, who has done his due diligence and also acknowledges the “two big names” in the offing, said. Except Mallinger knows how hard it is to make a small club work. In each of his 11 years, Kettering have made losses. They started at about £120,000 and were down to about £30,000 last year; the club have cost him personally £1million. He also knows that Kettering’s lease on their Rockingham Road ground has seven years left to run; for all his efforts, no new location has yet been found.
Which says something about the nature of football fans, because Kettering have been here before. In the early 1990s, a bright young thing named Mark English took over, brought a big(gish) name manager with him (Brian Talbot), promised the world and then left double-quick when the police and the administrators moved in to sort out the resulting mess.
It was Mallinger who saved Kettering from the winding-up order. Given that the town was so shaken by this threat to a club woven so deeply into its fabric, it is no surprise that a sense of unease accompanies the excitement at the start of another switch-back ride.
Does Ladak have an answer to the relocation issue? “There was a plan with the Duke,” he said with no real conviction. This is the Duke of Buccleuch, who once proposed building a stadium on his land. The council rejected the plan.
Does Mallinger have complete faith in his buyer? “You can only do so much,” he said. “At some stage, you have to put some trust in people.” But in Gascoigne? The romance of it — and the sheer, undiluted uncertainty.
