Wycombe plunged into the reds after bonus gamble

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 8, 2001 | by Michael Grant

The Wanderers need no incentive for their clash with Liverpool today which, Michael Grant finds, is just as well - as they won't be getting any

LAST summer, three of Wycombe Wanderers' senior players sat down to thrash out the squad's league and cup bonus payments for the season ahead. Dave Carroll, Jason Cousins and Keith Ryan knew the figures they would put to chairman Ivor Beeks and they stuck to them. It was the best bit of business Beeks had done in 14 years in charge.

The players volunteered to sacrifice meaningful FA Cup win bonuses to enhance the payments they would receive for winning matches in the push for promotion to Division One. They may as well have picked their own pockets. While Wycombe struggled in the league this season, they embarked on the longest FA Cup run in their 114-year history. The players are rich on memories alone.

After tax, they took home only #130 for defeating Premiership Leicester City in the quarter-finals. If they beat Liverpool in the semi-final at Villa Park this afternoon they will collect a paltry #250. For winning the cup in Cardiff? A measly #1000. Hardly worth going.

The bonus misjudgment is doubly cruel on Wycombe's players because it was the only FA Cup error they made all season. Today more than 19,000 Chairboys supporters (the club was formed by furniture traders) will travel to back the team against a side Barcelona could not find a way past three days ago.

Wycombe manager Lawrie Sanchez left the squad's training camp in Spain to spy on Liverpool in the Nou Camp. It is a long way from Catalonia to Harrow Borough, the team Wycombe defeated to begin their cup run in front of a 2700 crowd in November, and it has been a colourful journey. Millwall, Grimsby, Wolves and Wimbledon were then beaten before the thrilling 2-1 victory at Leicester. Roy Essandoh's last-minute headed winner, watched live by audiences in 16 countries, put a full stop on a remarkable cup tale.

An anonymous former East Fife and Motherwell forward, he had signed only after his agent responded to the club's appeal on Teletext for any striker fit and not cup-tied. Wycombe had six injured forwards at the time but Essandoh arrived on the doorstep and played one full match, for the reserves, before Sanchez threw him in against Leicester. The manager had never heard of him 10 days earlier.

Essandoh later signed for the rest of the season and is likely to be on the bench today. Chris Vinnicombe, who joined Rangers in 1989 and spent almost five years at Ibrox, will be at left-back and veteran Steve Brown in midfield. Brown received a red card against Leicester for removing his shirt to reveal a T-shirt bearing his baby's son's name.

Maxwell Brown had endured 20 operations after being born with his stomach unconnected to his throat, and his father's T-shirt was intended as a tribute during Essandoh's goal celebrations. But the FA was unsympathetic and Brown was made to serve a four-game ban. Sanchez, too, was disciplined for disputing the red card and an earlier penalty claim, although his three-game touchline ban will not come into force until later this month.

The club have been distracted by success. Since defeating Leicester they have won only one, and lost four, of its six league matches and sits only 10 points clear of the relegation places at the foot of Division Two.

Beeks told the squad to forget about the semi-final and concentrate on stabilising their league position. Easier said than done, though, when almost 100 journalists - five times the normal amount - arrived to cover their match at home to Oldham. When they lost to Wigan last weekend Sanchez left the ground in disgust. "Sometimes you can say things in the heat of the moment that you regret, so he decided to go home," said Terry Gibson, his assistant.

For decades Wycombe were a middling non-league club who played for 95 years at a ground, Loakes Park, notable for an 11-foot slope on the playing surface. In February, 1990, a charismatic young Northern Irishman arrived to bring the most sustained period of success supporters had ever known. The Berks Senior Cup disrupted the cobwebs in the trophy room within two months of Martin O'Neill's arrival as manager. By the end of his debut season Wycombe had relocated to purpose-built Adams Park.

Buoyed by previously untapped local enthusiasm, O'Neill took them into the Vauxhall Conference and won the FA Trophy final at Wembley in 1991 and 1993, taking 28,000 supporters on their second visit. In 1992-93 they won the conference league by a record 15-point margin and became Buckinghamshire's first representatives in the Football League.

O'Neill was offered the manager's job at Nottingham Forest and later Leicester City only to surprise everyone on both occasions. "It's bad news, I'm staying," he told Beeks. But Wycombe could not hold him forever and in 1995 he left for Norwich. The club entered a spell of mediocrity under Alan Smith and Neil Smillie, and to a lesser extent John Gregory, who left for Aston Villa, before Sanchez arrived in February, 1999.