When Terry Venables told Jim Gregory he had an interview to become coach at Barcelona, the QPR chairman just laughed and wished him luck. The man they would come to call míster admitted later that he was “flattered they had even heard of me” – plenty had not. He spent his first day in the city walking the Ramblas alone and ended it climbing out of the window to escape the journalists hammering on his hotel room door, wanting to find out about the new guy. Starting with the basics, which they never did get quite right: “It’s pronounced Véneibols, with the accent on the first ‘e’,” Mundo Deportivo reported. He was, the forward Pichi Alonso says, “a complete unknown”.
Twelve months later, Venables had led Barcelona to the league title, the first they had won in 11 years, only their second in quarter of a century. A year on from that he had taken them to within a penalty shootout of a first European Cup, and subsequent eternity. He had never felt so depressed after a defeat. “That had a devastating effect on him,” recalled Gary Lineker, who joined soon after and would eat with Venables a couple of times a week, tactics on the table, glasses here, forks there. “I knew they had lost the final but didn’t register that I had joined a club in mourning and it was like: ‘Oh, this isn’t the best time.’”
