Post by bluetornados on Feb 3, 2017 21:04:48 GMT
From the BBC...."I had a family, three kids, a mortgage. I think I lost about a stone in weight, it was devastating. None of us wanted to leave - but everybody wanted Bristol City to remain."
Thirty-five years on, former captain Geoff Merrick remembers the day he and seven team-mates came together to save the football club they all supported from bankruptcy.
The octet - including Gerry Sweeney, Dave Rodgers, Peter Aitken, Chris Garland, Trevor Tainton, Jimmy Mann and Julian Marshall - have since gone down in City folklore as the 'Ashton Gate Eight', hailed locally as heroes.
But the tale from behind the scenes is a far less fantastical one - threats to the players and their families, mounting pressure from the local press and the impending possibility of financial collapse.
When the eight players agreed to cancel their contracts on the morning of 3 February 1982, Bristol City were just minutes away from folding, with the club set to cease trading at midday.
The incident was the nadir of a three-year period which had seen the Robins slump from a 13th-placed finish in the top flight under Alan Dicks to battling for survival in the third tier under future England boss Roy Hodgson.
"It all started on, I think, a Saturday evening," Merrick, now 65, told BBC Sport.
"I'd played at Arsenal in the reserves. I came back to the ground - there'd been a first-team match that day - and Jimmy Mann was one of the players at the ground.
"He was stood in the entrance way waving this little tatty bit of notepaper. One of the directors had kindly handed it to Jim and said 'give this to Geoff when he comes back'.
"On it was a list of eight names and Jim, who was one of those names, said 'we have to meet the board'."
However, in the words of Match of the Day commentator Jonathan Pearce, who worked for BBC Radio Bristol in 1982, the players had "absolutely no choice" but to surrender their contracts.
"If you don't do this, the club dies, the fans will suffer and the other younger players will suffer - and it's your responsibility to save them," recalls Pearce.
Much of the blame for City's financial problems has been placed on the decision to sign key players to 10-year deals, but Pearce says "that wasn't the only reason - the club had in many ways lived beyond its means and these players bore the brunt of it".
Merrick, who had been with the club for "17 or 18 years", remembers the abuse he and others received in the week leading up to their contracts being cancelled.
"The press came and took pictures of our houses, they sort of portrayed us as being very wealthy and the reason Bristol City were going under," he explained. "But the last contract was the best contract I had ever signed. We weren't earning a fortune whatsoever.
"But we didn't want Bristol City to go out of business. We were all ardent City fans. We were kids who had grown up and spent all our life at Bristol City so, obviously, we sort of went along with it."
Former midfielder Tainton continued: "A lot of nasty things went on behind the scenes, families were threatened and everything else, and it was quite a sad, rough time for us all.
"It wasn't my family, I've got to say, but it went on because some other people were thinking in terms of their own side of things.
"They could see that if we didn't do what was suggested that a lot of other people would suffer as well."
"The pain in those players' eyes when I sat there and had to record them on my little Uber tape-to-tape machine was something that will haunt me for ever," said Pearce.
"Always at the back of my mind in football when we get to this time of year is the way that friends of mine were treated, the Ashton Gate Eight. They saved the club.
"They were heroes and they haven't been treated like heroes. In many cases they've almost been treated like villains, and it's shameful.
"Football is keen to recognise heroes of the past. Why aren't these players being recognised as the heroes they were?"