Thirty seasons ago, Glenn Hoddle guided Swindon into the top flight for the first and only time – it was the high watermark of a mad decade in which the Robins had promotion cancelled, were fined for tax fraud and shipped 100 Premier League goals
Words Ed McCambridge
SWINDON TOWN
Everything seemed to be going so well when Nicky Summerbee opened up his newspaper, one morning in August 1989. That was, until one particular headline left him stunned: “Swindon owner embroiled in betting scandal.”
The Robins’ academy graduate, son of Manchester City great Mike Summerbee, had been eagerly getting ready for the 1989-90 campaign in the second tier of English football. Now, tabloid The People were publishing allegations that chairman Brian Hillier had been placing bets on his club’s results in a bid to raise funds, to be used for discreet player payments hidden from the Inland Revenue.
“It was really shocking,” Summerbee tells FourFourTwo. “The players knew nothing about what the owner had been up to. We’d been preparing for the new season and I was looking forward to enjoying some first-team action. Then that story surfaced. Things had been going very well for us up to that point. It was a real shock.”
Swindon had indeed been on an upward trajectory – they’d been in the fourth tier in 1985, before Lou Macari led the club to two successive promotions. In 1988-89, they’d come close to reaching the top flight for the first time in their history, only denied in the play-off semi-finals when Mark Bright and Ian Wright found the net for Crystal Palace.
Macari exited to take charge of West Ham that summer, but the blow of his departure was softened by the news of his replacement – Spurs and Argentina legend Ossie Ardiles, installed as player-manager at the County Ground. “Lou had been a big loss, but Ossie was a legend of the game and a World Cup winner,” says Summerbee. “We were excited to have him in the dugout.”
While the allegations bubbled away in the background, Ardiles implemented an easy-on-the-eye South American philosophy on his promising group of players. A switch to a 4-4-2 diamond formation, with the gaffer occasionally operating in front of the back four, pushed Swindon into early promotion contention after a run of one defeat in nine games from late September.
Yet further allegations against the Robins surfaced throughout the autumn. On top of betting on Swindon to win the Third Division in 1986-87, as the original article outlined, Hillier had also reportedly wagered £6,500 on Swindon to lose against Newcastle in an FA Cup tie the followin
