Steve Gritt was Albion’s manager in the second half of the 1996/97. In the first of a two-part interview with Spencer Vignes for the Southampton programme, he spoke about his arrival at the Goldstone that December and the events leading up to the final-day showdown at Edgar Street.
Twenty-five years… can you believe it?
That season is never going to leave me, that’s for sure. As a manager, I’ve never won anything. I’d done okay at Charlton and was proud of the job I’d done there with Alan (Curbishley, as joint-managers). But stepping into the scenario I found myself in at Brighton… well, we were bottom of the entire Football League when I arrived. It wasn’t a case of winning something. It was more a case of seeing if something could be saved.
Obviously with everything going on at the time, didn’t you think twice?
I’d been out of work and that was my pure reason for taking the job. I wanted to work and, to some degree, I wanted to prove to myself that I could do it on my own as well. Even though I’d worked well with ‘Curbs’, I knew when I left Charlton that some people thought they’d kept him on because he’d be the one to take things forward, not me. I needed to probably convince myself, and one or two other people, that I wasn’t too bad at it either. And I think I did that.
What was your overriding priority after taking over from Jimmy Case?
To try and shield the players from all the fallout that was going on, and to try and make it as football-orientated as I could for them, given what was happening off the pitch. It was almost a case of making it a ‘them-and-us’ situation. They (the players) had to be able to perform and do their jobs. The squad I inherited had a lot of ability and experience. For some reason it just hadn’t come out over the first few months of that season. I had to go in and organise it how I wanted a team of mine to play, and thankfully they reacted and responded to it.
You managed to dispel pretty rapidly the common misconception that you were merely a boardroom ‘puppet’ by delivering results on the field. Obviously the Doncaster win in the last game at the Goldstone set us up for Hereford, so what were your memories of that emotive game?
We had to try and keep the players grounded, just like it was a normal game, if that was at all possible. We had to prepare well, try and win and keep Hereford under pressure. I think in some way the [Ian Baird and Darren Moore] sending off [after just 18 minutes] might have settled it down a little bit. Even though I was disappointed to lose ‘Bairdy’ I wasn’t too disappointed to see their centre-half walking off as well. It probably opened up the game but, even so, it continued to be a very tense match with few chances. I think Doncaster had already sort of packed up for the season but it still took us a while to break them down. We got the goal and then it really was tension all around for the last 15-20 minutes.
Any memories post-match?
What I’ll always remember was having a bath afterwards in the lovely old fashioned team bath and all you could hear was banging and thumping outside. It was unbelievable to get changed and walk out onto the pitch at 6pm and basically see nothing. There was very few seats left, the big clocks in either corner had gone, massive hoardings had gone, a lot of the pitch had gone. I probably should have taken something myself but that was for the supporters who had been there God knows how many years. That day was for them.
And so to Hereford. A draw would be enough to stay in the Football League, so how did you prepare for that final game of the season?
I tried to make the week beforehand as normal as possible, which was never going to be easy. Everyone was aware of the importance of it but, at the end of the day, we’d done magnificently well to get to where we were and to have the opportunity of staying up, given where we’d been in the table. So we tried to keep it low key without making it too much of a big thing. We’d kept our composure and played it fairly well up until then, knowing for most of the season that we really had nothing to lose. Suddenly, on that last game, we had something to lose. We were in a situation nobody ever imagined we’d be in...