BIG RON BIG PROBLEMS
Jeff Stelling’s bubbly intro promised “an experiment unique in the football world”. Sky didn’t get where it is today without knowing the value of a hard sell. For once, though, the hyperbole was justified. Big Ron Manager was unique... just not quite as intended.
Fifteen years after it aired, the chaotic fly-on-the-wall documentary covering the fag-end of Peterborough United’s 2005-06 season has cult status among connoisseurs of non sequiturs, dressing-room bust-ups and the world of shouty Proper Football Men. The show’s attempt to rejuvenate Barry Fry’s perennially poor Posh, while rehabilitating Ron Atkinson’s tarnished reputation two years on from his racist remarks about Marcel Desailly, certainly leaves a bit on you.
But rather than witness the swift return to League One that Peterborough’s play-off spot promised when the cameras rolled for Big Ron’s consultative arrival in mid-February, we instead see the wheels coming off. The slow spiral into backbiting and hissy-fits culminates in a spectacular finale, where the dressing room appears well and truly lost – and rookie manager Steve Bleasdale walks out, an hour before a must-win game.
For Posh fans used to having their patience stretched by Fry back then, having it all laid bare – “warts and all”, as Fry recalls it to FourFourTwo – was no laughing matter. Too much f**king perspective, as Spinal Tap’s David St Hubbins might have put it.
“YOU COULDN’T WRITE IT. SUDDENLY RON ATKINSON’S TAKING TRAINING WITH HIS MAKE-UP ON. IT WAS LIKE BEING IN THE OFFICE”
Yet to those with no dog in the fight, mined a rich seam of tragicomedy, which landed
