WHEN Glenn Hoddle took over at Swindon he arrived at a club that had been caught up in a financial scandal, stripped of its place in the top tier of English football and was feeling pretty sorry for itself.

The fans at the County Ground needed a saviour, someone to make them proud of their club again, and in Hoddle, they found a young manager who had a vision. “I was going into my first job in management, which was a massive job,” he said.

“When you have been a player it is completely different and I learned very quickly that you are looking after a group of people, rather than just keeping yourself fit, keeping your form good and playing well and staying in the team.

“It was a big responsibility, but I must say it was an eye-opener on some of the issues I had to deal with as manager. It was surprising, but in a way was good experience to then go on and learn and progress as a manager.”

Hoddle admits that he was very naive and did not know the full extent of what he was entering into.

However with the prospect of coming into the twilight of his playing career, Hoddle saw the opportunity as too good to turn down.

“I was a little bit in the dark if I’m honest. Peter Day, who was the chief executive at the time - I knew him from my Tottenham days - he said about Ossie (Ardiles) moving on and would I like to take over,” said Hoddle.

“I said ‘look, I’m not a player, I don’t think my knee is going to be good enough’ and it would be as a manager.

“If my knee recovered sufficiently and I felt I could play and have an impact on the pitch, then I would do that.

“It certainly wasn’t a case of them trying to get me there as a player and then be manager - it was the other way around and I told them that.

“I did manage to play on what was a pretty dodgy knee and it was a great opportunity for me to get into management.

“I didn’t really have a look where they (Town) were in the league.

“It was only when John Gorman and myself were travelling down that I saw they were fourth from bottom and I think about five points from the drop. It may have been less.”

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Hoddle scoring in the 1992/93 Division One play-off final

Despite Hoddle’s lack of experience in management, he had a clear idea in his head of how he wanted his team to play.

The first challenge though was keeping Town from slipping into the Third Division before he could get on with moulding his vision.

“I knew it was game on from the start. We had about eight games to play and it was going to be a challenge but I couldn’t set down the foundations of how I wanted to play 100 per cent because more importantly for the club was points on the board to survive,” added Hoddle, who went on to manage Chelsea Spurs and, of course, England.

“I knew that I would then have a pre-season then to lay down some foundations.

“We did change things a little bit, but it was a slow progression.

“I had strong vibes. I saw what they had very quickly and the talent they had and I knew we had to improve it.

“I knew there was a budget concern, it was always going to be a club that had financial constraints on it all the time but, at the end of the day, it was one of those scenarios where I had to replace people and bring people in who I thought were going to suit my system.

“I always felt we were too rigid in England. I wanted to play a three at the back and flood the midfield and play wing backs.

“I knew nobody else was playing that system and playing it out from the back.

“In the first major year that I was there, the back-pass rule wasn’t in place so you could play it back to the goalkeeper and whizz it out the other side no problem, and I knew it would cause a lot of other teams problems because most teams were playing 4-4-2.''

With a limited budget Hoddle set about his revolution.

He returned to his old team Chelsea to bring in David Mitchell and also splashed out £200,00 on Shaun Taylor from Exeter that summer.

Paul Bodin then returned from Crystal Palace as Hoddle guided Town to an eighth-placed finish, falling just short of the play-offs.

“A lot of clubs in those days had spent a lot of money and we certainly weren’t going to be able to spend money, so I had to do it with talent and hard work on the training ground with the players and they responded. I got the right players in,” he said.

“The likes of Micky Hazard were there. Ross Maclaren, Dave Kerslake, people like Martin Ling had a great career with us.

“Paul Bodin, they’re all good footballers, but we had to organise ourselves with how we were going to defend.

“I had big Shaun Taylor because in Division One that was one of the things I felt we had to balance off - the aerial threat that teams had - and he improved a lot as a player, playing on the left channel of the central three.

“It was a challenge, but it was a great challenge and I look back on it with real fond memories.

“I thought the football that we played was sublime at times, it really was.

“In the last third, we had to sell Duncan Shearer, our main goal threat, who was on 30-odd goals when we had to sell him and I think if we hadn’t have sold him we would have got up in the first year, to be honest.”

The next summer Hoddle again made the most of his old contacts as he signed John Moncur from Tottenham as Swindon secured what Hoddle still says to this day is one of his greatest-ever achievements.

“The second year came around, Dave Mitchell came in and Steve White and that was the part of the pitch where all the good football had to pay off with goals,” he said.

“We managed to get enough goals from the team and the way we played we were always going to be a goal threat.

“We managed to get up, so it was a great achievement from everybody at the club, it really was.”