Steve Gibson is the focal point for Teessiders

Feb 28 2010 by Steve Brown, Sunday Sun

“It was incredible. I turned up for training and couldn’t get in! A security guy said ‘Sorry mate’. I asked if I could get my boots, and he said ‘No’.

“They locked everything, and you couldn’t get anywhere near the training ground or anything. It was a case of ‘What do we do?’

“We were disillusioned, disorganised, had no direction. The one person who kept things going from a players’ point of view was the manager, Bruce Rioch.

“He didn’t get paid and could have walked out, but he tried to keep us together. We trained on parks, with shirts for posts! That’s all we could do, but it galvanised us – although I’m not sure it would galvanise millionaires.

“We needed the job and the money – we needed to work. I’m not so sure that is the same with multi-millionaires. We had no kit, it was like a pub team. We had no training balls, we borrowed our kids’ from the back garden.

“We went three months without being paid, and at the time we weren’t earning a lot. Your mortgage had to be paid, and I had a call from the bank manager asking ‘What’s going on?’. Nothing was going in my current account.

“But Steve Gibson came round with Bruce Rioch with cheques to pay us and get us through. It galvanised us all. We could have walked, but we stayed.

“The first game of the season, we had no idea where we were going to play and borrowed Hartlepool’s ground and we kicked on and got promoted.”