Joe Royle’s decree
THERE was a time when just 10 minutes separated Paul Jewell and Joe Royle as they grew up in Liverpool. Today, they might as well be a world apart.
As Jewell begins his summer holidays safe in the knowledge his Wigan side have already reached the promised land of the Premiership, Ipswich manager Royle must tonight negotiate a play-off semi-final second leg against West Ham at Portman Road, just to keep the dream alive of a return to the English elite.
The Tractor Boys have already made one great escape from the jaws of failure, coming back from two goals down to earn a 2-2 draw in the first leg at Upton Park and Royle must have at least once pondered on the cruelty of his situation.
Both Ipswich and Wigan went into the last day of the regular season level on 84 points and heading into the last game divided only by Wigan’s better goal difference.
That gave Jewell a slight advantage as Wigan took on Reading at their JJB Stadium, while Ipswich travelled to Brighton.
Ninety minutes later, their fates had been sealed as Wigan waltzed past Reading to claim a place in the Premiership, just 27 years after joining the Football League.
Ipswich, meanwhile, had earned only a draw at the Withdean and resigned themselves to a seventh turn at the play-off roulette wheel, knowing they had only prevailed once before. Jewell could afford to wax lyrical about the attractions of Premiership football.
“It’s that sense of being involved in something so many people want to watch, turning up at away grounds and being absolutely mobbed,” the Wigan boss said. “There’s hate there; I quite enjoyed that.”
Royle, however, with disappointment as real a possibility as success, took a more realistic view. “The Premiership means £26 million, no use pretending otherwise.”
Royle, 56, was 16 when Jewell was born four and a half miles across Liverpool from his Norris Green home. Yet the teenager was getting to know the Jewell family’s Scotland Road turf very well as he had that year in 1965 made his debut for Everton.
“They’re both working-class areas, about four, five miles apart,” said Royle. “Scotland Road is spitting distance from both Anfield and Goodison. It had over a hundred pubs. Norris Green was one of the first overspill areas built after the war. I used to have to get two buses to Everton as a player. I got two buses on my debut.”
But while both sides of the city have something to celebrate in this merry month of May - Everton a Champions League spot for next season while Liverpool play in this year’s final against AC Milan next week - Royle still has work to do.
Both he and Jewell, 40, have tasted life in the Premiership and each is desperate to prove himself again on English football’s highest stage.
Royle’s time in the top flight with Oldham Athletic, Everton and Manchester City has left him plenty of experience of the agonies and ecstasies the game can bring.
Under Royle, Oldham had reached the old first division the season before its metamorphosis into the Premier League and in its new guise he survived a relegation battle by one place.
Returning to Everton, Royle won the FA Cup in 1995, played in the Cup Winners’ Cup and finished sixth in 1996.
Yet rather than Royle’s achievements, it has been Man City’s relegation in 2001, following two successive promotions, that the manager is reminded of most by others and his departure from Maine Road provides the drive to prove those detractors wrong.
Returning to the Premiership would provide the perfect riposte. “It is the reason I came back into management: I wanted one more crack at the Premiership,” Royle said. “I hadn’t retired after City but I was doing a lot of media work and turned down offers. I was determined that if I came back it would be with a club with a chance of the Premiership.
“Ipswich is a Premiership club in all but name. Of course the job soon changed when they went into administration, and we’re ahead of schedule after that.”
Jewell is similarly driven. When he won promotion with Bradford in 1999 he became the youngest Premiership manager and spells with Sheffield Wednesday and now Wigan mean that he has delivered 358 team-talks in the professional game.
Yet still he feels his experience and Wigan’s success have unjustly remained below the radar.
“I want to be the best I can be, not what other people perceive to be my best. I don’t go to bed thinking I’ve got to be a Premiership manager, but I want to be.
“On the odd occasion I’ve put on the radio on the way home from the match and after the Premiership results they’ve mentioned how Sunderland have done, Ipswich, West Ham. Then it went on to League One. It was as if Wigan didn’t exist. And we were top of the league at the time.
“Whereas, when Bradford played Liverpool on the last day of the 1999-2000 season, to stay up, I had a mate who was in Bangkok, he said that everyone in the restaurant was watching Bradford v Liverpool. You forget sometimes the reach the Premiership has all over the world.”
While Royle is still striving to get back under that spotlight, Jewell is already looking forward to the wake-up call.
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