Roy Hodgson was leaving the pitch, still flushed with the success of winning his first game back at Ashton Gate as Bristol City manager when he was stopped in his tracks by the imposing presence of Dave Rodgers.
‘Dave, what the hell are you doing here?’ exclaimed Hodgson, amid a blur of expletives from the former England manager, handshakes, backslaps and how-do-you-dos and great-to-see-you greetings as the pair tripped back in time to February 1982.
Rodgers was in the tunnel area on behalf of City’s former players to present a Man of the Match prize to goalkeeper Radek Vitek for his clean sheet against Sheffield United, but that was hardly the point.
Rodgers is one of the legends of the Ashton Gate Eight. One of the players who tore up their contracts to stop the club going out of existence during Hodgson’s first spell in charge.
Those were turbulent and acrimonious times. And they led ultimately to what all these years later remains a shameful blight on the club’s history with loyal players integral to its most successful era scapegoated then discarded to rectify the gross mismanagement of others.
Once the sacrifice had been made, contracts nullified and bankruptcy averted, they were brushed aside. Compensation promised never came and they could not even get a ticket to a game. And while each of the eight have their own version of what happened next, resentment simmered and lives fell apart.
The Ashton Gate eight – back row (l-r): Geoff Merrick, Jimmy Mann, Julian Marshall. Front row (l-r): Chris Garland, Gerry Sweeney, Peter Aitken, Trevor Tainton and Dave Rodgers
The eight were honoured by Bristol City in January with a minute’s applause
Fans show their appreciation for the players who saved their club from extinction
The Ashton Gate Eight begins with a scrap of paper passed by one of the club’s directors to midfielder Jimmy Mann, who was told to bring those on the list to a meeting in the boardroom.
‘I never believed it would lead to anything as bad as it did,’ says Geoff Merrick, in flat cap, jumper and tweed jacket as he greets Daily Mail Sport at his farm on his 75th birthday last week. ‘That little piece of paper, about two inches long and three inches wide.’
The seven listed were captain Merrick, then aged 30, Rodgers (29), Mann (29), Chris Garland (32), Trevor Tainton (33), Peter Aitken (27) and Julian Marshall (24). Waiting for them were chairman Archie Gooch and the club’s accountant. Gerry Sweeney joined them in the boardroom. At 36, Sweeney was the senior pro in the dressing room and had been at home washing his car when he took a phone call and was told to report to the ground immediately.
The urgency was clear. He was asked not to delay, not even to change clothes, so he bounded into the ground in his Bristol City tracksuit, at which point he ran into Garland who assumed Sweeney was about to be named as manager. Sweeney, meanwhile, thought he was being pranked. He took a chair in the boardroom and checked for clues only to find team-mates with long, solemn faces so demanded to know what was going on.
‘Like a right hook,’ recalls Sweeney, miming the impact while perched on a low coffee table in the front room of his home near Portishead Marina. ‘Somebody says, “The club’s going to the wall, we want you boys to tear up your contracts”.’
City were nearly a million in debt and losing money fast. The escape plan was to liquidate and reform. Dazed, they left Ashton Gate asking for time to take advice. Very little was on offer, certainly not from the PFA. ‘They didn’t fight our cause,’ recalls Rodgers from his home by the River Avon. ‘They didn’t know how to handle it.’
The narrative spinning from the boardroom through media was that only these eight players could keep the club alive, and that they were stalling to protect comfortable lifestyles and lucrative contracts.
There is a misconception about the contracts. Having reached the top, Bristol City lost control of its spending. Those seen as valuable players were tied down on long-term deals to guard against new freedom of contract legislation.
Roy Hodgson (centre) with Bristol City’s board members, who turned the club into a new company called Bristol City 1982 Ltd
Hodgson, now 78, on his return to Ashton Gate as manager in March – 44 years after his first stint
Clive Whitehead, scorer of the goal against Portsmouth to clinch promotion in 1976, signed an 11-year deal, but had been sold to West Bromwich Albion for £100,000, in November 1981. Most saleable assets were sold as they plunged back through the leagues.
The Ashton Gate Eight were not in the same category. Their contracts at the point they were torn up were worth a cumulative total of £280,000. Mann had the longest to run with two more seasons. Still, they were portrayed as the problem and subjected to threatening phone calls in the night telling them to leave or else, verbal abuse in the streets and even the occasional snide comment from colleagues at the club.
‘Wicked’, is the word used by Merrick. ‘The whole experience broke my heart and my mind.’ He and Tainton are proud Bristolians who came through Bristol City’s youth ranks. They had been at the club for 15 years and never wanted to leave. Bill Shankly tried to sign Tainton for his great Liverpool side. Merrick, City’s captain by the age of 20, turned down Arsenal among others.
‘I’m glad I stayed,’ says Merrick. ‘It was a magical place for many years. We had a good team coming together. We won promotion. If I’d gone to London, I wouldn’t be sat here today with a farm and cows and surrounded by my friends. I remember saying to my wife, “If I sign for Arsenal, I’ll never see another cow in my life”.’
Rodgers was another homegrown player. His father Arnold is the third highest scorer in the club’s history with 112 goals. Rodgers and Sweeney, a Scot signed from Morton in 1971, had each been there for 11 years. Mann for eight having joined from Leeds. Those five were heroes of the promotion under Alan Dicks. They toppled Don Revie’s champions-to-be Leeds in an FA Cup fifth round replay, in 1974, two years before going up.
Tainton has a signed photograph framed on the wall in his home of City’s jubilant players inside the Elland Road dressing room after that famous win. They are a happy band of brothers on the up. They lost 1-0 at Liverpool in the next round but drew inspiration. ‘We pushed the two best teams in the country to the limits,’ says Sweeney. ‘That gave us self-belief.’
Garland, who grew up beside Ashton Gate, was City’s golden boy striker of the ’60s, who left for Chelsea and Leicester then returned after promotion to clock up 12 years over two spells. These were hardcore legends by any metric. And, together with Aitken and Marshall who signed after relegation in 1980, the eight accounted for 2,374 appearances, 185 goals and 75 years of service.
The more they loved Bristol City though, the harder it was to take the way it all unfolded. Merrick has always suspected there were other solutions to the crisis not fully explored in the haste. They signed the deal for £100,000 compensation between the eight of them, but the money did not materialise.
Merrick (left) challenges Arsenal’s John Radford. He was City’s captain by the age of 20 and turned down advances from the Gunners among others to stay with his boyhood club
They joined other unpaid creditors when the club was wound up and made do with a small windfall from a testimonial game between Southampton and Ipswich at Ashton Gate. ‘I was going round the pub with my mates, selling tickets,’ recalls Rodgers.
Some were asked to play at Newport before they left. ‘They still expected us to pull on that red shirt and give our all,’ says Tainton. ‘It was funny knowing it would be the last time.’
Four days after tearing up his contract, Garland paid at the turnstile to stand on the terraces and watch Hodgson’s depleted City draw 0-0 with Fulham.
‘The lads suffered,’ says Merrick. ‘We had to restart our lives, which we never expected when that scrap of paper came into our hands, but one thing needs to be said: We all remained Bristol City fans. We never held it against the club.’
Tainton’s mild manner masks the determination that typified him as a midfield dynamo and came to the fore when the Ashton Gate Eight set a domino effect in motion.
‘We’d put our savings into a business selling clothes to try to get something going when I finished football,’ says Tainton. ‘The business went to the wall, I lost my house and my marriage suffered. I lost my marriage. I was at rock bottom.
‘I wouldn’t want to go through it again or see anyone go through it. I started again at the bottom. The council offered me a flat and I worked every hour I could to get back on the ladder. It was the only way I knew. It took me four or five years to get over it, but lots of people lose their jobs don’t they. Life goes on.’
Tainton found a job in security at Oldbury nuclear power station and stayed for nearly 30 years. Merrick played for a couple of months in Hong Kong with Garland and worked as a window cleaner on his return before moving into the building trade, then to his farm.
After retirement, Tainton found a job in security at Oldbury nuclear power station and stayed for nearly 30 years
Rodgers became a groundsman at Bristol Grammar School and later at Clifton College where he was a house master by the time he left. Sweeney was a postman in the mid-90s when then-City boss Joe Jordan invited him back to Ashton Gate as a coach.
Garland briefly returned to City on a non-contract basis in the following season, by which time they were down in the fourth tier, and struggled after football with a gambling addiction and bankruptcy. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease before he was 40 and died in 2023, aged 74.
‘Chris was a marvellous footballer,’ says Merrick. ‘He was two years older than me and when we first met playing against each other he broke my nose, but we became really good friends. While I went off and learned how to plaster and lay bricks, nothing fell into his lap which he enjoyed. He was a footballer and didn’t have a lot of love for anything else. He found it difficult and there was never any help from Bristol City.
‘He became very ill and it’s a sad story for such a wonderful man. And it all came from the Ashton Gate Eight. I don’t want people to be fed up hearing about it, but I can’t overemphasise how critical it was in our lives at the time, and that’s how I felt for a long, long time.’
Hard times are not forgotten but four of the surviving seven are firmly back in the Bristol City embrace where they belong. The process emerged out of the club’s commemorations to mark 40 years since the Ashton Gate Eight in 2022 and Merrick’s book, Life with the Robins and Beyond, written with author Neil Palmer and released in the same year.
A pre-match book signing event had queues snaking around Ashton Gate and a second session had to be arranged. The outpouring of affection inspired Palmer to formalise a former players’ association.
By the start of the 2023-24 season, Merrick, Tainton, Rodgers and Sweeney had been appointed among the club’s official ambassadors. Better late than never, you might say.
They attend every home game, frequently overwhelmed by the reaction of so many fans keen to stop them on the concourses to reminisce, acknowledge the sacrifices made and buy them a drink. Someone will usually ask if they brought their boots. And that person was Hodgson when he bumped into Rodgers at a time when he was desperately short of central defenders. They both had a chuckle.
Garland (left) with Alan Hudson at Chelsea in the early 70s. He was diagnosed with Parkinson’s before his 40th birthday and died in 2023
A permanent tribute to the Ashton Gate Eight at the stadium, telling the story of this selfless group
Hodgson’s surprise return has given City a shot of attention as another season fizzled to a close – but with hope rekindled that one day they might emulate these legends
None of City’s players could have envisaged the young boss struggling with the club’s meltdown in 1982 and unable to stop the slide towards a third relegation in three years going on to manage England, Liverpool and Inter Milan in a glittering career.
Hodgson’s surprise return has given City a shot of attention as another season fizzled to a close. He has met Tainton and Sweeney as well, and there has been genuine warmth from all sides.
‘What a career, what a top, top coach,’ says Tainton as Hodgson ended his second spell at Ashton Gate in happier style with victory against Stoke City on Saturday.
Eleven points from seven games, altogether happier memories than his first time around and hope rekindled that City might one day emulate these legends and reach the top flight once again.
