The light goes out for Venables

Football: Leeds manager may have been victim of circumstances beyond his control but career seems doomed to underachievement

As Terry Venables drove home to London yesterday, nursing wounds that may never heal enough for him to return to big-time football, he could only grimace at the last irony of his ill-starred eight-month reign at Leeds United.

Twenty-four hours before he was sacked by the club's floundering chairman, Peter Ridsdale, Venables and his wife, Yvette, had agreed to buy a house in a Yorkshire village next to a stud farm near Wetherby racecourse.

If Venables – whose stand-in replacement is Peter Reid, who has himself twice fallen off the managerial roundabout at Manchester City and, earlier this season, Sunderland – does elect to return to a television studio, the abandoned house in the Dales will serve well enough as a symbol of an itinerant football life which many will say was marked more than anything by missed opportunity – by doors which closed at the wrong time, adventures which were too quickly conceived and, maybe, too rapidly aborted.

At Leeds, though, justice insists that even his most relentless critics have to recognise that he was mostly a victim of circumstances which flew utterly beyond his control.

However, ambivalence will inevitably cling to any appraisal of a football career which has always carried the promise of high achievement – and certainly had its moments – but now may well be over without the underpinning of the Premiership title which he allowed himself to dream might just be possible at Elland Road before near half his dressing-room was sold off without a hint of consultation.

John Giles, who walked away from football management at an early stage after some initial success at West Bromwich Albion and a brilliant playing career at Leeds, may yesterday have delivered the most telling epitaph of Venables' misadventure at his old club.

"In football terms," said Giles, "it seems to me that Terry was a victim of his own mind – most in the game finish up as just victims of football."

That last belief, you have to believe, coloured every phase of Venables' football career from the moment he hung up his boots at Crystal Palace after successful stints at Chelsea, Spurs and Queen's Park Rangers and representing his country at every level, including amateur.

The street-smart brain of the Dagenham-reared Venables, it seemed, took in the whole sweep of football management almost at one glance. He saw what happened to managerial titans like Stan Cullis, Matt Busby, Jock Stein, Bill Shankly, and Don Revie. He saw Stein die of a heart attack on the touchline after being offered the job of pools promoter by Celtic, the club he had lifted to the stars. He saw Shankly die of a broken heart. He saw Revie spend his last days filled with the pain of illness and angst over his final days in football. He saw Busby eke out a modestly rewarded retirement. He saw Wolves, out of a clear blue sky, order Cullis to drop off the keys of his club car and remove his personal effects.

Venables saw all that and swore he would never be caught in such a denouement. It meant that he was never up for the long march, the kind of trawling for glory which eventually brought Sir Alex Ferguson all of football's glittering prizes but no guarantee of proper financial rewards and lifetime financial security until his high-powered Irish racing friends, John Magnier and JP McManus, bought a slice of Manchester United.

So Venables chose a policy of hit-and-run, one which, in recent years, followers of Crystal Palace and Portsmouth have bitterly claimed was conducted at the expense of the financial security of their clubs. Venables angrily disputes such charges, saying that at Palace he merely entertained, and then demanded the honouring, of the extravagant offers made to him by the failed entrepreneur Mark Goldberg, and that at Fratton Park he was dealing with the family of the man who first planted the seeds of his ambition to own his own club.

It was during his second managerial assignment – at QPR – that the owner, Jim Gregory, who subsequently took control at Portsmouth, advised Venables that he should buy his own club so that he would be in full control of his own destiny. The idea hooked into Venables and he could never let it go. It led him to his personally disastrous partnership with Sir Alan Sugar, who came out of football with a £33m profit and a knighthood and with a finely honed vendetta against the man who had given him his window of opportunity. Venables made some mistakes of his own, including acquiring some business colleagues with cv's that made alarming reading, and his own idea of himself as a modern Elizabethan who could write novels, storm the City and maintain a consistently winning hand in football died hard and damagingly, not least when he was banned from holding a directorship.

Here, certainly, was the fuel for the categorisation of Venables as a "Cockney chancer" and a tide of criticism that at its most hysterical pitch can only be described as disordered. The truth, for all his misjudgements about the way the world might evaluate his actions, lies elsewhere. It is, heaven knows, a not uncomplicated truth.

At Barcelona, where he won the league title after years of dominance by Real Madrid and came within a penalty shoot-out of winning the European Cup, his feelings about the vulnerability of the football man were heavily reinforced. He knew he was one of an expendable line, another roll of the club president's dice like Johan Cruyff and Cesar Menotti and Bobby Robson, and soon enough he was at Tottenham, and having his best players sold and, on the morning of the day he won the FA Cup, arranging a rescue meeting under the unforgiving gaze of a creditor bank.

As Giles observed, Venables had a mind to see the pitfalls of football management in a way that the great managers did not. They served their time in the tunnel and, because of their passion and their narrower obsessions, came out covered in public glory and private regrets.

There was the paradox which so many times ambushed Terry Venables. He saw the problems but he thought he could beat them by giving himself options. Perhaps too many options; at least more than a Stein or a Busby or a Ferguson ever had to confront.

He won respect as coach of England and Australia, but suffered some cruel fate. At the Football Association he could never shake the image in which his critics insisted he be draped. He was putty in the hands of the crudest makers of caricature, but you never heard a player say a bad word about him, and at Middlesbrough a few years ago he made a great statement about his enduring ability to inspire a broken team and shape coherent tactics.

For a while the Leeds fans swallowed the "Cockney chancer" reputation whole, but Venables stayed around with considerable dignity and those who reviled him came to see him through different eyes. They saw a man who cared about what he was doing, a man of pride who rode the disappointments of his first deflating months at the club, when, unquestionably, he had reason to be disappointed with his impact on a squad which was still stocked with great ability.

Yesterday all that became another inconclusive chapter in the football life and times of Terry Venables. Regrets for the sometime crooner at Hammersmith Palais? Not too few to mention, no doubt, but then he does not have to suffer the burden of carrying the heaviest one of them all. He never ran before unpromising odds. He always tried to win the battle on his own terms, something even the greatest of football managers, in the end, never quite achieved.