“There was a lot going on,” says Shaun Teale with a nice line in understatement as he remembers his short but significant spell at Carlisle United in turbulent times.
Teale had risen to the top and won cups with Aston Villa before, in his mid-thirties, he joined the Blues on the way back down. The defender’s experience proved crucial to a floundering Carlisle team and a wider club in disarray.
His arrival from Motherwell in February 2000 came at a time United were embroiled in a struggle for Football League survival. It was the season after Jimmy Glass yet the outlook was no better, as supporters turned ever more agitated at Michael Knighton’s ownership.
Teale had 18 league games to help strengthen a poor team’s foundations. That he did over a tumultuous period.
“The truth is, I just wanted to keep playing,” says Teale, who has written about a richly varied career in a new autobiography, Here, There and Everywhere. “Things had happened at Motherwell which weren’t very pleasant, and a lot of promises were broken. Carlisle, in a sense, was a lifeline to my full-time career.”
United at the time were managed by a reluctant figurehead in Martin Wilkinson and, though their team included some determined local talent in Paul Reid, Richard Prokas and Tony Hopper, their trajectory had long been poor. Teale was therefore a striking addition given his reputation as a player who had made a characterful climb from non-league to the Football League and, via Harry Redknapp’s Bournemouth, to Aston Villa at the beginning of the Premier League.
He had also helped Ron Atkinson’s Villans win the 1994 League Cup, Teale scoring in an epic semi-final against Tranmere Rovers before beating Manchester United in the Wembley final, and was a familiar, moustachioed face in the game as well as a tough and authoritative defender. Just, all in all, what Carlisle needed.
“The day I came down to speak to the club, the first thing I was told was, ‘We’ve not just brought you down here to play’. But I didn’t really go deep into that – that all came later. We sorted the contract out and then I realised the next day we were going to Plymouth, of all places…
“By then I’d met Martin, who I really liked as a person. I thought he was honest about his intentions. He stated straight from the off that he didn’t want to be manager, but he was forced into the role by Mr Knighton.”
Teale’s debut came in a 2-0 defeat at Plymouth. “I managed to help by bringing a few more players down with me – Stevie Halliday came down [from Motherwell], and Rab McKinnon from Hearts,” he says. “Believe it or not, the environment wasn’t that bad. Martin was a jovial kind of character, and Bakes [Paul Baker, United’s first-team coach] certainly was.
“Yes, they were struggling to put wins together, but the lads were a great set of lads. I got on with them all straight away – there was no, ‘Oh, look who’s here now’ kind of thing. There were a few senior players – Billy Barr, people like that. They very quickly filled me in on what was going on. I was just glad to pull a shirt on, and help as much as I could.”
The Division Three survival battle also involved Chester City and Shrewsbury Town in a race to the bottom. There was one relegation place and, to avoid it, Carlisle went with a central defensive line incorporating the well-travelled Teale and the prodigious, Carlisle-born teenager Reid.
“Reidy was the massive plus point for me,” says Teale. “He was such a raw talent, and only 17 at the time, but he was quick, aggressive, and listened – which for me was the most important thing. If he listened, I could help him. If he didn’t there was no hope for him, he’d have probably got both barrels every game.”
Teale, who commuted from Motherwell, had to deliver reassurance as well as rockets. “I think that was Martin and Bakes’ whole idea of me coming in – as an older head to calm the young lads down, try and push and pull them into positions where maybe they weren’t familiar, to help the team.
“When you’re young you tend to play off the cuff and awful lot and that’s when mistakes happen. We certainly did make mistakes. I probably wasn’t at 100 per cent myself – at 36 you do tend to suffer injuries and stiffness. Martin used to say, ‘Listen, if you don’t want to train today, just don’t train. You know what you need better than I do.’
“For the most part, though, I trained every day. I wasn’t one to take a day off for the sake of it. If I’m gonna be there I may as well have my boots on and be out on the pitch.”
Carlisle’s stressful run-in led to a notorious face-off at Chester in early April. The Blues had two men sent off and had no shots on target until injury-time, when Scott Dobie lashed home a memorable winner.
Teale, in the defensive battle that preceded that erupting finish, had been magnificent, winning headers, timing challenges, making blocks, leading the rearguard. “I think by that time it was pretty obvious it was going to be a toss-up between us and Chester,” says Teale.
“Loads of Carlisle fans travelled. They sensed it was do or die. You could sort of hear the gasps as the first one [Stuart Whitehead] got sent off, then the second one [Halliday], and we’re hanging on for grim death until Dobie scored.
“I just remember the end of the game, and the euphoria that we’d managed to scrape the win out of nothing, getting on the coach thinking, ‘How did we get away with that?’ Mind you, I had that a few times in my career.”
Dobie’s goal ought to have been a launchpad, but Carlisle’s form remained so exasperating that, for the second successive season, they were still at risk of the drop to non-league as they prepared for their final game at Brighton & Hove Albion. Two Blues players, Halliday and John Durnin, then courted shameful controversy by visiting a nightclub the evening before the game.
It added up to yet more melodrama in an era full of it. Teale thinks as dimly of the illicit night out now as he did then. “We weren’t aware of it at the time, but Martin pulled me the next morning and told me. I wasn’t best pleased because I’d brought Stevie Halliday to the club – he’d let me down as much as he’d let Martin and the club down.
“John Durnin was senior enough to know better than to do that. He was one of our best players. I’d met John years earlier when I was at Southport and went on trial to Liverpool for a period, but we didn’t cross paths again until Carlisle. I didn’t really know his make-up. Yes, he was a Scouser, a jack-the-lad and those things. But I know plenty of Scousers and jack-the-lads who wouldn’t have done what he did that night. It was Carlisle’s biggest game of the season and they chose to go and do that, which for me was just ridiculous.”
Teale says the offending duo were “read the riot act” on the morning of the game by Wilkinson and Baker, yet United’s desperate need for a result meant that Halliday started against Brighton and Durnin was sub. “If we’d been safe by that point I think they’d have been dropped completely from the squad and left sat in the stand.”
Carlisle lost 1-0 at the Withdean Stadium – but Chester’s 1-0 home defeat to Peterborough meant United survived on goal difference. “I know it got a bit precarious, but it was job done – that’s what I was brought in for, just to make sure the club didn’t go out of the Football League,” says Teale.
This being Carlisle, though, survival could not be a healthy new beginning. Instead, uncertainty further enveloped the Blues. Knighton pledged to leave the club while, soon enough, Wilkinson and Baker were removed from the managerial positions.
“It was tough on Martin,” says Teale. “I think he suffered for a period after that because he was put in a position he never wanted to be in. To be honest, I don’t think he could get out quick enough. When the season finished, if you’d caught hold of his shirt tails you’d have been in a foreign country within seconds. All in all, I think he and Paul Baker coped admirably given the pressure they were under.”
Teale says, and writes in his book, that he was given strong grounds to think he would fill the managerial vacancy. The defender says he seldom encountered Knighton during the final months of the season but was summoned to a meeting in the owner’s office at the end of the campaign.
“He threw everything at me – ‘We firmly believe you’re the man that can take us forward’. Teale says he was told by Knighton that the ultimate decision would be down to directors.
“In hindsight that should have been a bit of a red flag because, at the end of the day, he [Knighton] owned the club and could do what he wanted.
“I was paying for a hotel in Carlisle out of my own money, just so I could go and see Knighton and I was on hand to meet the board. I then went into the board meeting, and they literally picked the bones out of me, asking which players I would and wouldn’t keep, leading me on to think it was gonna happen.”
Teale says he was then deflated to learn, whilst reading a newspaper on holiday the following week, that Carlisle had instead appointed Ian Atkins.
“That did leave a bad taste,” he says. “They then went on to release everyone I’d said I would release. I sort of felt like they’d done me, really. They’d gone behind my back and picked the bones out of my thoughts. In hindsight I wish I’d just said, ‘Sort it out yourselves’.”
Teale says he was offered a new playing contract but one that only lasted three months, and on a third of his existing wage – terms all parties must have known he would never sign. “When I initially signed, it was on the basis that if we stayed up, I’d get another deal,” he says. “What actually happened in terms of the actual offer felt like a broken promise.”
He is now more philosophical about being denied his break in league management. “As you look back you think, ‘Would getting the job have set me on the road to a managerial career?’ Who knows. You don’t know how well it would have started the next season and how long it would have lasted.”
The reality at Brunton Park was more struggle and more turmoil, something Atkins did his best to defy. Teale recognised that his full-time days were done and so he returned to the part-time game. A period back at home-town club Southport followed, before he took over as Burscough’s player-manager.
This produced a memorable coda to his career when he led the Lancashire village club to the FA Trophy in 2004, defeating Tamworth 2-1 at Villa Park. “We had so many games in the Trophy – we kept drawing. Every time we played in a replay, the club got x-amount of money. We were totting finances up!
“Then we got through to the final at Villa Park, which, at 40 years old for me, was just a blessing – being able to turn out in a real game at Villa Park, as player manager, live on TV…it was the icing on the cake for my career in a sense. And to go there and beat Tamworth, who were a league above us already and had just got promoted to the Conference, was a massive feather in the cap. Little did I know five weeks later I’d be sacked.”
Football’s cruel realities were, by then, no surprise to Teale yet his attempt to secure a life after the game was challenging. He bought a pub in 2006, and duly left a managerial role at Chorley to dedicate himself to the venture full-time, but the business struggled in the face of 2008’s financial crash. “By the time I sold the pub in 2009 I’d lost the best part of £200,000,” he says.
“So it was a case of, ‘what do we do next?’ I had to reinvent myself all over again.”
Teale fell back on an old trade of painting and decorating before spending three years coaching football in the USA. A wish to be back home and closer to their six grandchildren led Teale and his wife Carol to return home in 2017, since when he has expanded his tradesman’s repertoire.
“In a really weird way, Covid’s helped,” says Teale, now 59. “Everybody’s been getting work done. I changed from purely painting and decorating to fitting windows, fascias, soffits, doing bits of building work, relaying and designing gardens. We’ve been really busy over the last four years, to the point where I get moaned at now by the missus because I keep saying there’s no time to go on holiday. Hopefully the book will sell enough copies to send us away…”
Teale keeps in touch with the heights of his career by making regular corporate hospitality appearances at Aston Villa, while he sits on the former players’ association committee. The rigours of his playing days are reflected in a knee operation he has just undergone, while his perspective is mixed on the growth of the top-flight game.
He played in the first Premier League season, 1992/93, and notes wryly in his book that he was Villa’s first player to receive a yellow card in the new-look league. “People ask me how long I would last in a game today – if I lasted five minutes I’d be lucky,” he says. “But that was the name of the game in those days. If you could take the ball, take the ball, but make sure you take the man as well, and if he was out of the game you’d done your job in a sense. Now you can’t blow on someone now because they fall over anyway.”
Teale is not, though, a bitter old pro when he sees how modern football has expanded. “The money in the game is astronomical compared to that first year in 1992. We [Villa] signed Dean Saunders and I think he went on to something like eight grand a week. Nobody, not even Paul McGrath, was on anywhere near that.
“That was the start of wages going up slowly. We got to 1997 and they started going mad. Now look at some of the money that has gone out in the last 12 months or so and it beggars belief that somebody has to be paid that much to play a game of football.
“But the whole Premier League commodity is massive now, from the TV rights to the clubs making money on the back of players, by selling shirts. I suppose it’s only right that the players get a kickdown off that. Every player earning millions and millions…good luck to them. I know how difficult it is to play at that level for a period of time. Supporters may sit there and say, ‘He’s not worth this,’ but they don’t realise what these players go through week to week, day to day.”
It was, it’s safe to say, very different in the bowels of the game with crisis-ridden Carlisle in 2000. Teale says he keeps in touch with his old defensive partner Reid, who he was glad to see enjoy such a good career, and communicates with Baker on social media. He has never been back to Brunton Park, and doubts whether he’d be remembered, but surely there would be some lasting respect for someone who came to United’s aid in the hardest of times.
“I think if they’d been relegated at that point, there might have been no way back,” Teale says. “That’s why it’s so good to see how the crowds have gone up at Carlisle recently. In those days we were struggling to get a few thousand in.
“The good thing is the club seems to be growing, year on year, and those times seem to be in the past. I just hope they keep getting stronger and stronger.”
Here, There and Everywhere by Shaun Teale with Rob Carless is published by Morgan Lawrence, priced £15.
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