“I’ve been in dressing rooms where the assistant has said something, but really you know you’ve just listened to the manager. Peter was the motivator, the bigger decision-maker. On the training ground he was the best coach I ever worked with, full stop. “Bobby never really gets the credit he deserves. The other would go, ‘Fuck off, I’m not listening to that shit.’ They were a great double act. “The two of them never said, ‘Well done,’” Quinn explains. Then we went to Chelsea on the first day of the season and got taught a lesson.”īobby Saxton, a former manager of Blackburn Rovers, was Reid’s assistant and could be, as Quinn tells it, the bad cop to Reid’s worse cop. “We were buoyant after promotion,” Quinn says, “full of our own importance. Sunderland were 2-0 down at half-time and lost 4-0. Peter Reid’s fast, assured, free-scoring team had come up from what is now the Championship on the back of 91 goals, those 105 points and were confident of making an impression in the Premier League. Quinn’s second story also originates in London, also after a devastating defeat. “That’s a real footballer’s reaction,” he says, “gallows humour.” The former striker erupts with laughter as he tells it all again. “He woke me up and said, ‘Quinny, I’m really sorry.’”Įxhausted physically and emotionally, Quinn was touched. He’d left the club and I think he was at Stoke. “He was the first person I remember ringing. Quinn reached through the fog of his hangover to answer. A former Sunderland team-mate was calling. Some five hours later, his telephone rang. Via a stop-off in Peterborough, where drink was taken - quite a lot of it - Quinn got to his bed in County Durham “around three in the morning”. Sunderland’s bus journey back to the North-East from Wembley was long and winding.
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