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Tommy Docherty, who died at 92, often liked to say that he had “had more clubs than Jack Nicklaus” – a joke that referred not to his successful career as a tough and smart international player, but to his peripatetic existence as manager. He started with six years at Chelsea in the 1960s, which started out brilliantly but ended in chaos, had over a dozen spells in the administration, including at Aston Villa, Queens Park Rangers, Derby County, Porto, Wolverhampton Wanderers and his own national team. Scotland. His most celebrated stage came at Manchester United in the mid-70s.
Although he was one of the highest-profile football coaches of his generation and remained highly marketable well into the 1980s, Docherty’s returns were actually quite mild, adding more than three decades to a Second Division title and a FA Cup victory with Manchester United and a League Cup victory with Chelsea. He took on all the ups and downs with his trademark exuberant humor and was always willing to tell a story against her. In 1967, after Chelsea officials called him into the boardroom and told him they were releasing him, he disappeared momentarily before returning with several bottles of champagne, which he cheerfully toasted to those who had just fired him. His enemies said of him that you always knew he was lying because his lips were moving, but he also made jokes about that.
The son of Georgina, a cleaner, and Thomas, who worked in an iron foundry, Docherty was born into poverty in the Gorbals area of Glasgow and joined his first club, Celtic, in 1948, after national service. At Celtic Park he was under the aegis of English coach Jimmy Hogan, who had led the Austrian team to unprecedented levels of success and was considered one of the great pioneers of the game on the European continent. Hogan was an older man by then and was not always taken seriously in Britain. But young Docherty was open-minded and brilliant enough to benefit from Hogan’s refined techniques, which eventually led to his own managerial career.
He didn’t spend long with Celtic. In 1949 it was bought by Preston North End. Docherty made his off-left debut, but soon settled into the right-midfield position as the ideal successor to another uncompromising blond Scotsman, Bill Shankly, beginning an outstanding managerial career himself. Preston had slipped to the Second Division after several impressive years in the First Division, but in the 1950-51 season Docherty helped them come back, playing in all 42 games; as it would the following season.
He won the first of his 25 games for Scotland in 1951 against Wales, and in 1954 he played in both Scottish World Cup finals in Switzerland, the first narrowly losing 1-0 to Australia, the second a 7- win. 0 at the hands of the irresistible Uruguayans. He traveled to Sweden for the next World Cup final in 1958, but failed to get a game, unable to displace Hibernian veteran Eddie Turnbull, who had backed away from the inside to the left.
Docherty regained his international place the following season, however, he won three more games for Arsenal, which he had joined in 1958. At Highbury he was also sometimes successful in the central half. The 1961-62 season saw him move from London to Chelsea as a player-manager, making just four more First Division appearances and ending his career having played over 400 league games for his various clubs.
Chelsea manager Ted Drake was clearly nearing the end of his reign and in January 1962 Docherty succeeded him. It was too late to save Chelsea from relegation, but the following season the new manager, who was always ready to give the youngsters their adventure, frantically bought and sold on the transfer market and won the promotion in goal average.
Brian Mears, then Chelsea manager and later president, reported that his new role was “enthusiastic, bully, funny, outrageous, successful, rebellious, abusive, incredible” and “always his own worst enemy.” Docherty, he said, acted on impulse, “promising the players one thing and then demanding it from the board, mocking people behind their backs, playing practical jokes, saying ridiculous things to the newspapers, scolding players one day and then asking them to die. for him next ”.
The confrontations with the players were a characteristic of his managerial life. At Chelsea, Terry Venables, then a young rising player, constantly tangled with his manager and was eventually sold to the Spurs. He was also one of eight Chelsea players controversially sent home by Docherty from Blackpool in 1965 before the penultimate game of the season. Docherty insisted that the players had gone out at night without permission; They argued otherwise and accused Docherty of courting publicity. Another big name future coach, George Graham, was among the eight, and although Peter Bonetti, the acrobatic goalkeeper, was not, Docherty also managed to get into a fight with him.
It would all end in tears, although the club won the League Cup in 1965 and reached the 1967 FA Cup final against Tottenham Hotspur. That summer, Docherty was suspended for 28 days by the Football Association for an altercation with a referee during a club trip to Bermuda, and his fate at Stamford Bridge was sealed. In October he officially resigned and was replaced by much less exuberant Dave Sexton, who took on Chelsea to win the Cup Winners’ Cup in 1971.
Docherty slipped through the league to coach Rotherham United in the 1967-68 season. Then came the first of his two spells with Queens Park Rangers, with whom he lasted only three league games. Aston Villa Second Division quickly named him in December 1968, and saved them from relegation. However, despite heavy spending under a new board of directors, the following season was disastrous and he was on track again in January 1970 when his team languished at the bottom of the league.
Technically, it was the first time he had been fired, but he was out of work for only a month, and he joined Porto in Portugal. He remained there for almost a year and a half before resigning in May 1971, without having managed to break the dominance of Benfica and Sporting Lisbon in the league.
Upon returning to Britain, he briefly became Terry Neill’s assistant manager in Hull City, but left to become Scotland’s interim manager, taking on the job permanently before the end of 1971. It was his work with Scotland that which gave Docherty the manager position at Manchester United, as Old Trafford’s hierarchy sought to replace the incumbent, Frank O’Farrell, and two of United’s Scottish internationals, Willie Morgan and Denis Law, gave Docherty references enthusiasts.
So in 1972 he began his hectic five years at United. History quickly repeated itself; He dropped to the Second Division at the end of his first full season. But Docherty’s attacking style matched the traditional expectations of the Old Trafford crowd, and green shoots began to appear in the spring of 1974.
In Second Division he threw the previous yellow flag overboard, used a quick young winger on Tranmere’s Steve Coppell, and accelerated back to First Division. The following season he signed Gordon Hill from Millwall and defied conventional wisdom using two extremes. In 1976, the rejuvenated United side reached the FA Cup final, only to lose, sensationally, to Second Division Southampton. Docherty promised that they would return the following year, and so it was, this time beating the favorite, Liverpool, 2-1.
The internal consequences of that victory were quite typical of the Docherty government. The coach had promised the team £ 5,000 in cash if they won and handed it over to the boss, Martin Buchan, after the game. Buchan returned it to him for safekeeping and was never seen again. There were many other alarms and excursions during his tenure, many of them motivated by Docherty’s fondness for shooting and trading.
When he arrived at the club, he had started buying and selling with his usual abandon, and among those who had fallen apart was Law, who became deeply embittered and went to Manchester City, scoring in due course the goal that sent United to Second. Division. George Best also retired from the club and there were strong disagreements with Morgan, Alex Stepney and Pat Crerand, who was then an administrative assistant.
“El Doc,” as he was known, also had a reputation – in which as a coach he was not alone – for treating generously his favorite players, but those he abominably excluded. He even engaged in a failed libel action against Morgan that led to a perjury charge, of which he was acquitted.
However, it was the public revelation of Docherty’s extramarital affair with Mary Brown, wife of club physio Laurie, that prompted his departure. He was fired in a wave of national publicity in July 1977 and replaced by the same man who had followed him to the Chelsea managerial job, Sexton.
Despite the scandal attributed to him, Docherty continued to work for some time after: in Derby for two years, from 1977 to 1979; again in QPR; in Preston, briefly, in 1981; and in Wolves, then a sinking ship, in 1984-85. Once he retired from soccer management, he became a successful post-dinner speaker and despite all his triumphs and disasters, his sense of humor remained pure.
He is survived by Mary, whom he married after his first wife, Agnes, divorced him, and by six children, three sons, Tom, Michael, and Peter, and a daughter, Catherine, from his first marriage, and two daughters, Lucy and Grace, from their second.
• Thomas Henderson Docherty, footballer and coach, born April 24, 1928; died on December 31, 2020
