Remembering Big Ron Manager: the Ron Atkinson documentary which laid bare Peterborough's woes

This feature remembering Big Ron Manager first appeared in the August 2021 edition of FourFourTwo.

Subscribe to FourFourTwo today and save! You'll get 13 issues per year...

Jeff Stelling’s bubbly intro promised “an experiment unique in the football world”. Sky didn’t get where it is today without knowing the value of a hard sell. For once, though, the hyperbole was justified. Big Ron Manager was unique... just not quite as intended. 

Fifteen years after it aired, the chaotic fly-on-the-wall documentary covering the fag-end of Peterborough United’s 2005/06 season has cult status among connoisseurs of non sequiturs, dressing-room bust-ups and the world of shouty Proper Football Men. The show’s attempt to rejuvenate Barry Fry’s perennially poor Posh, while rehabilitating Ron Atkinson’s tarnished reputation two years on from his racist remarks about Marcel Desailly, certainly leaves a bit on you. 

But rather than witness the swift return to League One that Peterborough’s play-off spot promised when the cameras rolled for Big Ron’s consultative arrival in mid-February, we instead see the wheels coming off. The slow spiral into backbiting and hissy-fits culminates in a spectacular finale, where the dressing room appears well and truly lost – and rookie manager Steve Bleasdale walks out, an hour before a must-win game.  

For Posh fans used to having their patience stretched by Fry back then, having it all laid bare – “warts and all”, as Fry recalls it to FourFourTwo – was no laughing matter. Too much f**king perspective, as Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins might have put it. 

Yet to those with no dog in the fight, Big Ron Manager mined a rich seam of tragicomedy, which landed it a Royal Television Society gong for the best sports show of 2007 and birthed such immortal lines as, “When it’s a battle, you f**king battle!” and (to be screamed with all of the lung power you can muster) “I’m the f**king manager!” 

For everyone, a battle was what they got. 

Second time (un)lucky

Hindsight is always the best optic, particularly in football, but another winter of discontent at London Road had left even Fry, the consummate showman, lost for words as the business end of 2005/06 loomed. 

The ensuing summer would mark a decade at the club he’d originally joined as both chairman and manager, but realising the dream of buying the place had turned into a waking nightmare. Fry had sold his holiday home, cashed in his pension, re-mortgaged his own house and used the deeds of his mother-in-law’s as security to stave off mounting debts. Even a relatively modest wage bill was increasingly tough to meet on average gates of around 4,000. 

Here, then, was a gilt-edged opportunity to raise the club’s profile through exposure and inject much-needed funds: £100,000 from Sky, for access-all-areas. With relegation to League Two having brought an end to Fry’s nine years in the Posh dugout (but not to his time in the boardroom), Sky’s project would see Atkinson, a winner of two FA Cups and two League Cups, dispense troubleshooting wisdom to 45-year-old first-time manager Bleasdale. Bringing in Atkinson and the associated cameras seemed worth a gamble. 

“The game’s most outspoken gaffer has a point to prove,” declares Stelling in his introduction, over clips of Atkinson’s arrival in February. Backed by a glitzy theme tune of skronking brass and furious congas, complete with a Goldfinger-esque refrain and cartoon images of a cigar-waving Big Ron on the beach/in the motor/drinking champers, the real Ron steps out of his car to survey the scene, as the new sheriff in town. He swiftly outlines the three keys to success: “Hard work, from top to bottom; decisive, strong management; and boardroom backing.” Stelling adds: “Sounds simple, doesn’t it?” 

Yet this was not the first attempt to get Big Ron Manager off the ground. Filming at third-tier Swindon Town had been canned after a month in only January, when manager Iffy Onuora decided he couldn’t continue with the background noise. 

The evident tension between the two men was laid bare in a subsequent documentary; Onuora quashed the notion that Atkinson’s infamous outburst against Desailly had been a factor, citing instead what he perceived as old-hat methods, saying, “If he’s just ringing Bryan Robson and players who played for him 10-20 years ago and saying, ‘What have you got?’ then I could do that.” For his part, Atkinson found Onuora unreceptive. “He didn’t buy into it – he should have bought into it,” Atkinson said through pursed lips.

So, with fresh focus, the drama switched to London Road, where Peterborough sat sixth in the Football League's basement division with 13 games left. They had been hotly tipped for an immediate return to League One under Mark Wright, but the former England man had just been fired following a dressing-room bust-up. Bleasdale, Wright’s No.2 with no previous managerial experience, had taken over as caretaker. 

Initial results were good, even if our first view of the action, a 2-1 win at Notts County – a fourth victory in five – is most notable for Bleasdale’s touchline response to a fan who calls him a prick. The manager’s riposte: “See you after the game, down here.” Atkinson is watching for the first time, too; his start was put back by, of all things, hospitalisation with a rare form of blood poisoning. At Meadow Lane, there’s another goal for 20-year-old striker Danny Crow, and the fourth-tier presence of defender Sean St Ledger (21), who will one day score in a European Championship, is evidence of Fry’s evergreen ability to find diamonds in the rough.

At the other end of the scale is 29-year-old centre-half Phil Bolland, signed from Chester by Wright in the days before his dismissal.

“I just wanted to be in a good side at a good club,” Bolland tells FFT now. He was well looked-after on his arrival, but as a seasoned pro, alarm bells soon began ringing.

“It was wild, really – you couldn’t write it,” he recalls. “This thing just evolved. The next minute, Ron Atkinson’s turned up and he’s taking training sessions with make-up on. It was like being in an episode of The Office.”

At first, Bleasdale is willing. “It’d be silly for me, Steve Bleasdale, 27 – no, 45,” he jokes for the cameras, “to not get experience off anyone. Provided I’m not eating me breakfast with Ron, eating me dinner or having me tea with him, that’s fine. And I’m not going on the sunbeds with him. Sorry, Ron.” 

Noting the players’ overfamiliarity with him as ‘Bleo’, Atkinson first advises Bleasdale to insist on ‘gaffer’. 

“I’m Ron, you’re the boss – the boss of all bosses,” he says to Bleasdale’s ‘Morning, gaffer’ as Atkinson strides across the training ground, dressed head-to-toe in black, backed by the spaghetti-western trumpet strains of Ennio Morricone. 

“If I’m ready to be called 'gaffer', then I’m gaffer, you know what I’m saying?” answers Bleasdale, not sounding as if he necessarily knows what he is saying himself.

“Today I’m picking the f**king team”

The cracks don’t take long to show. After a 2-1 reverse at home to Bristol Rovers, a 2-0 victory over Stockport at the start of March makes it five wins from seven, but still Atkinson wonders whether Bleasdale needs “someone with him”, which sounds ominous. 

A specialist goalkeeping coach arrives, in Atkinson’s former West Bromwich Albion stopper, Tony Godden. Then, after Njazi Kuqi – Shefki’s brother – has one hapless game on loan from Birmingham, Big Ron advises bringing in Stefan Moore from QPR to bolster the goal threat; Bleasdale instead plumps for Cheshunt striker Lloyd Opara, who goes on to net two goals in 22 games for Posh. Yet even after the club muster just one point from their next four outings, they hold a play-off place with six games remaining. 

Then it really does go wrong. There’s a feisty dressing-room clash between defender Mark Arber and midfielder Paul Carden, while Bleasdale falls out with Crow and St Ledger. By the time Macclesfield come to London Road with three games left, Posh are eighth and desperately needing a win. 

The day before the game, Fry – aware that scouts are coming from Celtic, Blackburn and Birmingham – scotches Bleasdale’s plan to leave out a mutinous St Ledger. “It’s clear to me that you’re muddled up and don’t know what to do... looking back, I asked you to do an unfair thing,” Fry explains. “But I did brilliant,” a broken Bleasdale offers in reply. Fry insists on St Ledger’s selection anyway, offering to face the press himself if Posh lose. 

It doesn’t get that far. As the players assemble in the dressing room at 1.50pm, Fry announces, “Today I’m picking the f**king team.” The camera cuts to a close-up of Bleasdale, who looks straight back at it. Fry engages in tactical talk and Bleasdale finally snaps. “I resign, fellas. Good luck, everyone. See you later,” he says, leaving the room to awkward silence and a few equally awkward smirks. 

“Life’s full of pleasant surprises,” Fry chuckles. “It’s like watching a f**king soap opera here,” adds Atkinson, apparently not overburdened with self-awareness. 

Somehow, Posh win 3-2, Crow’s late strike putting them level on points and on goal difference with Lincoln, occupants of the final play-off spot. Defeat in the last two games, however, kills their play-off hopes. Atkinson’s presence has yielded four wins, a draw and eight losses; nine if you include the manager.

Phil Bolland left Peterborough that June. Fifteen years later, he is no less bemused than he was when sporting safety goggles during the squad bonding exercise to a local factory, likening it to a Peter Kay sketch. 

He tells FFT, “I think it was just purely for him [Atkinson] – I don’t think he had any interest in us or the play-offs. His driver brought him in, his driver took him away, and that was it.”

Today, Bolland is lead physio for Liverpool’s Under-18s, and has just finished a master’s degree. He isn’t in regular touch with his old team-mates, but he crossed paths with Crow while playing for Cambridge and Wrexham, and is regularly reminded about his 17-game stint with Posh. 

“It pops up on social media every now and again,” he says with a laugh. “I get the odd picture sent to me with ‘Look at your face here!’ or ‘What are you doing there?’ I’ll end up with a voicemail off Barry Fry now – he’ll probably phone me and give me some stick. I hope he does.”

As for ‘Bleo’, with the exception of one caustic Daily Mirror interview, he seems to have disappeared; a ghost in the YouTube graveyard. He was reunited briefly with Mark Wright at Chester in 2008, but all attempts from FFT to contact him drew a blank. Short stints at Bangor City and Leigh Genesis aside, London Road was the end of the road.

“It was just pathetic, honestly”

Fry goes on, as he always does. Now 76, he is the club’s director of football and retains an encyclopaedic knowledge of players past and present. Brentford’s Ivan Toney will be the latest Peterborough old boy to scrub up for the Premier League – a lineage dating back to Simon Davies and Matthew Etherington with their joint switch to Spurs in 1999/2000. 

Fry remains adamant that in 2005/06, he made the best of a bad job – and that what we saw was all true. “On my mother’s grave, there were no set-ups whatsoever,” he tells FFT now. “Bleasdale resigning in the dressing room – if I’d known he was going to do that, I’d have asked for another f**king £500,000, know what I mean? It was unbelievable.”

He has sympathy for Bleasdale, though he believes the manager's refusal to budge over St Ledger was a mistake. “Obviously no manager likes to be told who to play, but as owner of the football club I had to pay the bills,” says Fry. “I had to make that decision. He was all right, saying ‘yeah, yeah’, then the next minute we were in the dressing room and he resigned. In the end, we sold Sean [to Preston] for a few hundred thousand. Steve was paranoid about Ron, but he was never a threat.” 

The scene where the crestfallen manager returns with his company car – and his wife to drive him home – is a tough watch. “To be fair, he came back in on the Monday and said, ‘I’ve been foolish,’” Fry recalls. “I said, ‘Look, Steve. That’s going out on television. I can’t reinstate you – I’ll look like the biggest idiot in the world.’

“I’m criticised a lot for putting Peterborough in that position. But it kept everybody in a job, paying their mortgage or their rent, so I don’t mind the stick. I nearly got thrown out of the city of Peterborough, but I was doing it for the right reasons – to keep the club afloat.”

Alan Swann, who still covers Posh for the Peterborough Telegraph, concurs. “He wasn’t really in a position to turn that [money] down,” Swann explains. “I think even Barry had his suspicions about it, but the offer was too much for a club in our situation, so we didn’t really have any choice.” 

Swann recalls Atkinson and the film crew turning up at the newspaper’s offices. “The idea was that Ron would use his charm and intelligence to persuade us to sponsor the club in some way. He gave this dreadful little speech and our editor turned him down flat, saying, ‘We can’t afford that!’ I don’t think they used it. They had me and the editor entering in a certain way so it’d look better for the cameras – it was just pathetic, honestly.” 

And Bleasdale? “A lovely man, but out of his depth. He’d ring me on a Sunday morning to ask how I thought it went. I’d think, ‘Well, I’ll tell you but my opinion isn’t that valuable, is it, in professional football?’ He was such a lovely bloke, though, he really was.”

Bolland agrees. “It was a circus and I think it tarnished him – anyone you speak to, they all go, ‘Bleo! What about that programme?!’ It didn’t show him travelling from Liverpool at 5am to get there to set up. He was a really enthusiastic, thorough coach. He was quite personal with players and tried to establish a rapport. I think he was quite excited to be in the role and though he could do well in it. 

“I felt sorry for him – set up, just to try to get Ron Atkinson back on the map. He was stressed to the eyeballs. They just pressed him and pressed him to get something for TV. We all knew it was theatre. It’s a shame.”

For all of its backfiring moments, Big Ron Manager did get a Hollywood-ish ending. The interest of Peterborough’s current owner, Darragh MacAnthony, was allegedly sparked by his father seeing the programme while the property magnate, then 30, was looking for a football project (via email, MacAnthony plays down that version of events). “He saved my life,” says Fry. “I couldn’t have carried on like that. The worry would’ve killed me.” 

Fry recounts singing the Match of the Day theme as MacAnthony walked out of the tunnel during a fact-finding visit: “He was straight on the phone and I heard him say, ‘Oh, this is the dog’s bollocks – it’s brilliant.’”

Today, Posh are preparing for another crack at the Championship in Fry’s 25th year at the club, with plans for a new stadium well in motion.

“We haven’t set any targets,” he says of 2021/22. “We’re just going to express ourselves and entertain.” But the pensioner who survived two heart attacks in his Barnet days is still the kid who scored in front of 95,000 at Wembley for England Schoolboys against the Scots in 1960, playing alongside Jimmy Greaves, and he dreams big. “I’m a fan at heart,” he says. “Who would ever have thought that Leicester would win the Premier League? Miracles do happen, don’t they?”

Miracles do, indeed, happen in football. It’s just rare they’re delivered by Ron Atkinson. 

Subscribe to FourFourTwo today! Guarantee the finest football stories and interviews dropping on your doorstep first every month.

NOW READ

RETRO The Subbuteo story: how a war veteran-cum-egg-collector invented Britain’s legendary tabletop favourite

QUIZ Can you guess 72 correct answers in the Big Football League quiz?

FEATURE Lionel Messi: the 14 best moments of my career