I had forgotten some of this, but it is worth reading whether you are familiar or not with the history of 'Mr Creosote'!
STEVE EVANS: FOOTBALL MANAGER. CONVICTED CRIMINAL
From
www.twohundredpercent.netAt Broadfield Stadium last night, Crawley Town beat Bath City in the Blue
Square Premier to move up to seventh place in the table after four
matches. A crowd of 1252 people turned out to watch it – hardly, one might
think, a ringing endorsement of the “Project Promotion” that the club has
put in place since new owners decided that money was no object in buying
the club a place in the Football League. Perhaps the people of Crawley
aren’t quite as excited at the prospect of “Project Promotion” as those
running the “project” might have hoped. Should they continue to win, the
likelihood is that crowds will increase, but the wider reputation of
Crawley Town remains low. There has been some degree of distaste at the
way that the club has been throwing its money about, but even this has
palled at the continuing involvement at Crawley Town of one of the biggest
bête noires of modern football: Steve Evans.
Why, though, is Steve Evans so despised? It’s easy, from a distance, to
assume that the ongoing antipathy towards Evans is an antipathy like any
other. An abrasive “larger-than-life” character will always stir up
negative emotions in the supporters of other clubs, but Evans seems to
strike something baser – a raw nerve that provokes florid and colourful
streams of abuse, something that makes others desperately hopeful to see
him fail. There may be an element of truth in this interpretation of the
dislike of him, but it seems likely that much of the hatred of Steve Evans
is based on something more tangible. Because Steve Evans is a convicted
criminal, part of a scam that took a club from the middle ground of the
non-League game into the Football League and, moreover, for many non-
League supporters, he is also the man that, in spite of his criminal
record, for many people, got away with it.
After an average playing career in his native Scotland that was cut short
by a knee ligament injury at the age of twenty-eight, Evans briefly
pitched up at Corby Town as chairman in 1994 before moving on to Stamford
FC. After four years at Stamford, he was given a managerial leg-up when he
accepted the managerial job at Boston United – a club frequently described
at the time as “sleeping giants”, in non-League terms at least – in 1998.
Two years later, they were promoted into the Football Conference as the
champions of the Southern League, and after a further two years, following
a neck-and-neck race against Dagenham & Redbridge, he took his club into
the Football League on as slim a margin as goal difference. Both of these
title wins, however, would come to be regarded as fundamentally tainted by
the revelations that followed them.
Within weeks, the FA’s then-compliance officer, Graham Bean, had launched
an investigation into the financial irregularities at Boston United, and,
July of that year, the club was found guilty by an FA disciplinary
committee of systematically lodging false contracts for players. The ploy
was a simple one. Players signed contracts that were worth a fraction of
the value of what they were being paid. In one case, Ken Charlery was
recorded as being paid GBP120 per week when he was actually being paid
GBP620 per week and had received a GBP16,000 signing on fee for the club,
against which no tax had been paid. In another, the former Liverpool
defender Mike Marsh was contracted as being paid GBP100 per week when he
was actually earning GBP1000 per week. The difference was paid
through “expenses”, against which no tax was payable.
The club was fined GBP100,000 and docked four points for the following
season, a decision that enraged Dagenham & Redbridge, who had missed out
so narrowly on promotion to Evans’ club. More notable than this, though
(at least from the point of view of this particular story), was the fact
that Evans and the club’s owner at the time, Pat Malkinson, were both
found guilty by the FA of having, “”facilitated a payment of GBP8000 to a
witness to attempt to mislead, impede and frustrate” the FA’s enquiry into
the scam. Malkinson was fined GBP5250 and suspended from football for
thirteen months. Evans was fined GBP8000 and suspended from football for
twenty months.
Evans may have been banned from football, but he wasn’t out of work for
long, taking a job working for a recruitment company owned by a
Staffordshire businessman called Jon Sotnick. Sotnick (who went on to act
as Chief Executive at Darlington and was linked with a take-over of
Sheffield Wednesday in 2008) was persuaded to put money into Boston United
and Evans returned as the Boston manager in February 2004. By this time,
though, the mere bans of the FA were the least of Evans’ concerns. A
criminal investigation had been launched into the goings-on at Boston, and
in September 2005 he and four other people connected with Boston United
(including former Boston chairman Pat Malkinson) were charged with – and
denied – committing fraud at the club between 1998 and 2002.
Meanwhile, on the pitch, he was earning himself a reputation for the
levels of abuse that he threw around when decisions didn’t go his way. In
February 2006, for example, he was escorted from Grimsby Town’s Blundell
Park by the police after verbally abusing the fourth official. After the
match, Sotnick (by then the Boston chairman) claimed, with regard to the
police’s involvement during the match, that, “There seems to be a
conspiracy at work. At every game Steve seems to be singled out for extra
attention from the police – and I’m determined to get the bottom of this”.
Perhaps the choicest quote of all from Sotnick on the matter, however, was
this, which needs no further comment: “Steve was thrown out of the ground
with no money, no mobile phone and was left to fend for himself.”
Sotnick resigned in June of 2006 to take over as the Chief Executive of
Darlington, and sold his shares to director Jim Rodwell for a nominal sum.
The trial of Steve Evans, Pat Malkinson, et al, meanwhile, reached trial
at Southwark Court in September 2006. The court heard evidence regarding
the contracts from Ken Charlery, and the total amount that had been
creamed off by the club through fraudulently failing to pay tax and
national insurance contributions on the wages of Boston’s players was
confirmed at GBP245,188. While two of the other defendants were acquitted
by the judge and one more had his case thrown out, though, Malkinson and
Evans changed their pleas to guilty at the last minute. Malkinson was
given a two-year prison sentence, suspended for two years and ordered to
pay back the money that the club owed in tax plus just over GBP100,000 in
interest. Evans received a one-year suspended sentence.
The one common thread of the summing up of Evans’ trial is how much
sympathy many concerned seemed to have for him. His defence counsel, Jim
Sturman QC, for example, stated that, “If your honour sends Steve Evans to
prison today he will lose his job again. It has already cost him
GBP140,000 in legal fees, fines from the FA and loss of income. I ask for
tempering justice with mercy. Is it worth sending Steve Evans to
overcrowded prisons? He is terrified of spending one day in prison… There
has been the stress and anxiety over four years. He has not slept. His
family have not slept. He is terrified”. Diddums. To the fury of Boston
supporters, who had seen the name of their club dragged through the mud by
the whole affair, Jim Rodwell announced that, “I think Steven has been
working under incredibly difficult circumstances and it’s been a struggle
for him”, and kept him in his job.
Evans resigned his position as Boston’s manager in May 2007, shortly
after, a, by then, financially-crippled Boston United were relegated from
the Football League after a last day of the season defeat at Wrexham.
Boston were demoted straight into the Blue Square North in June 2007 and
then demoted again into the Premier Division of the Northern Premier
League a year later, but Evans landed on his feet. Two days after his
resignation, he took up the managerial position at Blue Square Premier
club Crawley Town. Crawley’s financial problems since then have been well
documented. Crawley’s financial difficulties over the last three years
have been well documented (they were fighting off a winding-up order from
HMRC earlier this year), but they ended up under new ownership and the
club paid off all of its debts at the start of this summer.
Since then, the club has been on a spending spree that is unprecedented in
recent years. They have, to date, spent GBP330,000 on new players (without
taking into consideration the burden on their wage budget) and have been
looking at plenty of others as well. Their attempt to sign AFC Wimbledon’s
captain, Danny Kedwell, on the eve of the new season, however, was less
successful, with Kedwell himself saying: “Crawley are trying to buy
everyone and I’m flattered but I’m captain of this club and hopefully next
season we’ll be in the Football League instead of them.”
Boston United beat Bradford Park Avenue in the play-offs in May to secure
promotion back into the Blue Square North. The legacy of Evans’ time as
their manager is that they had fallen so far in the first place. Crawley
Town supporters have had three years of Evans and do not need to be told
about his past and they may well not give a damn about the moral aspect of
Evans’ past if their team does manage to get promoted into the Football
League at the end of this season, but the story of Steve Evans is a story
that stands being told again as a reminder of chronic mismanagement and
one of the most clear-cut examples of what has come to be known
as “financial doping” imaginable. Ultimately, whatever else Evans achieves
in his career will be tarnished by his past and whichever club employs him
will be tainted by his involvement with them. Promotion is one thing, but
respect can’t necessarily be bought.
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