As Mark Hughes’s name crawled along the Breaking News ticker tape, Roddy Collins flashed to mind, roaring and laughing and gleaming head-to-toe in a Louis Copeland number.
Hughes had been named as the new manager of Carlisle United, more than 20 years after Collins had parted from the club for the second time. Now, just like then, Carlisle are lying in the gutter, looking up at the stars.
Since Collins left, there had been 13 other managers and 10 caretaker appointments, three promotions and three relegations, but really, they had been marooned in shallow water, waiting for a tide to take them. When Hughes took the job less than a fortnight ago, Carlisle were five points adrift of safety at the bottom of League Two.
Professional football is full of dirt tracks off the highway and crazy intersections. Hughes reached that corner of Cumbria by a path in his life that was once paved with gold; Collins arrived chasing a rainbow.
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For Hughes it has been an extraordinary descent from the apex of football’s pyramid. In September 2008, when Abu Dubai United Group became the majority shareholders in Manchester City, Hughes was the manager they inherited.
The previous owners had been so determined to secure Hughes’s services that, just three months earlier, they paid Blackburn Rovers nearly £4 million in compensation to release him and three members of his coaching staff from their contracts – a world record figure at the time. That was his market value.
Man City were a mid-table club who had struck oil. He signed a three-year-deal worth £9 million and over the course of his time at the club he was given £200 million to spend on players. For Hughes, this would be another trampoline for his vaulting career. How far was that from Carlisle? Nobody had ever made that journey.
When Collins joined Carlisle for the first time they were owned by Michael Knighton, the flamboyant businessman who had made an audacious bid to buy Manchester United in the late 1980s. That deal fell through. Three years after that he landed in Cumbria.
By the time Collins arrived in the summer of 2001 the club was heading for administration and were starting the new season under a transfer embargo. They couldn’t offer Collins a contract, but they were prepared to pay him £200 a week, put him up in a Holiday Inn at a motorway roundabout and offer him complimentary meals in a restaurant owned by two Carlisle fans. Collins jumped at it.
His relationship with Knighton came to a fiery end and Collins left before the end of the season. Sixteen months later, he returned. Another Dubliner, John Courtenay − who had made his fortune from selling fitted kitchens and football kit − had taken the club off Knighton’s hands. Collins climbed back into the dreamboat, paddling for all he was worth.
In his second stint at Carlisle, Collins was followed by a film crew for a fly-on-the wall documentary called The Rod Squad. Those documentaries are a booming genre now with a host of top clubs parting the curtain to reveal the mask they had prepared for the cameras. The Rod Squad, though, was gritty and authentic and funny and Collins’ big, bursting heart was smeared all over the screen.
That season was chaotic too. Collins led them to them to the final of the Football League Trophy at the Millennium Stadium but in the week of the match he had a blazing row with the squad’s star striker Richie Foran. When Collins tried to iron it out, Foran threw a punch.
“I squared up to him in the style of a boxer,” wrote Collins, in his hilarious autobiography The Rodfather. “We had a straightener. Richie was trying to dig me in the head while I concentrated on body shots because I didn’t want to knock him out or even mark his face, what with the final being televised.”
Carlisle lost the final to Bristol City and finished the season one spot above the relegation places. His relationship with Courtenay, though, had become so toxic that Collins was sacked a few weeks into the following season.
Hughes lasted 18 months at City. In his career Hughes had been unused to failure or rejection. The prime of his playing days had been spent at Manchester United and Chelsea and Barcelona, winning a dozen major trophies.
As a manager, he expected nothing less. After City he went to Fulham. When he complained about the size of the manager’s office, they knocked walls to make it bigger. A new computer was ordered, and a new leather chair and a bigger desk. After less than 11 months he resigned.
His agent said that Hughes wanted to manage a club more in keeping with his playing career. But the phone didn’t ring with offers of that kind. Six months later he landed at QPR, fighting a relegation battle.
The game decides your level, regardless of what you think. Hughes kept Stoke at mid-table in the Premier League for four seasons, which reads well now, nearly a decade later, but overachieving in ninth place wasn’t the dream either.
After 14 years of managing Premier League clubs, Southampton was his last gig at the top level. That lasted nine months.
How much had he made from football? Fortunes. Why did he need to come back? It was nothing to do with money; it was to do with living. Part of him couldn’t live without it. The same bug coursed through Collins’s veins. After Carlisle, he had nine other jobs in management, the dream reimagined, over and over.
In 2022, after more than three years out of the game, Hughes applied for the vacant job at Bradford City when they were in the bottom half of League Two. By chance, the Bradford CEO found Hughes’ email in his spam folder.
Now, here he is. The same place that Roddy was. Carlisle have American owners now, just like 22 other clubs outside the Premier League. Looking up at the stars. For a fortnight in 1974 Carlisle were top of the old First Division. They haven’t forgotten.
Carlisle were held to a scoreless draw at home on Saturday. Six points adrift of safety.
“It’s not a terminal illness,” said Roddy in episode one of the Rod Squad, immediately after Carlisle had lost the first match of his second spell. “It’s only an emotion. It goes away.”
But the feeling in your gut? That never leaves.
