As he reaches his 1,000th match as a manager with West Brom’s trip to his old club Stoke, Tony Pulis is wearily accustomed to people denigrating his management style but says the secret of his longevity is his ability to adjustAutumn 1992. Tony Pulis is a rookie manager at Bournemouth setting out on the long road that has brought him to the point of his 1,000th match. His first company car, a gift from the chairman, Norman Hayward, has already been to the garage after smoke started pouring out of the dashboard on the M3 and Pulis is getting an early lesson in the economics of lower-division football.“The chairman has bought me a car that’s about 20 years old,” Pulis recalls. “Money meant everything to him. We went to watch Grimsby play one night. We drove up in his Mercedes, then all the way back and he dropped me off where my car, this enormous old shack, was parked by the road in Fordingbridge. The windscreen was iced up so I turned on my engine and Norman got out his credit card to try to get the ice off. As he was scraping away, I could suddenly hear him going: ‘Oh my God, no! I can’t believe it!’ I thought he must have broken his credit card. He’d actually just seen my tax disc. ‘They’ve given you 12 months,’ he was shouting: ‘I told them six months.’ I said: ‘Thanks Norman, that gives me loads of confidence.’” Related: Embattled Tony Pulis promises to stay at West Brom unless club sack him Continue readingreadfullarticle
