Gary Pallister recalls even darker days at Manchester United 30 years ago: 'Try losing a local derby 5-1 and flirting with the bottom three'

The passage of time has clouded some memories for Gary Pallister but not others. “I remember Tommy Docherty especially laying into me,” the former Manchester United defender recalls. “I’d sat with him a couple of weeks earlier at a luncheon and he was telling me to be careful because there were people out there who will stab you in the back, and there he was a fortnight later plunging a knife between my shoulder blades. But if you play for Man United, you have to accept it and expect it. Listen, it could have been worse – we could have lost 5-1 to Liverpool.”

Pallister is reflecting on the day, 30 years ago, when United were humiliated 5-1 by Manchester City. You have to go back that far for the last time United started a season so badly and the Liverpool reference is pertinent given that it is the Premier League leaders who visit Old Trafford on Sunday afternoon, hoping and doubtless expecting to inflict more pain on Ole Gunnar Solskjaer’s struggling side.

United, of course, would emerge from what Alex Ferguson – there was no knighthood then – would dub “the agony period” to usher in a dynasty of success but, as Pallister reflects, it was hard to see the wood from the trees at times in that troubled 1989-90 season, when they mustered just eight points from their first eight games, one fewer than the current crop.

Pallister had been at the club only a few weeks – a British record signing during an unprecedented summer splurge – when United went to Maine Road and watched a nightmare unfold. Despite the arrivals of Pallister, Neil Webb, Paul Ince and Mike Phelan, the team appeared to be sinking, the only knight on United’s horizon was the bloke trying to buy the club, Michael Knighton, and the infamous winter of discontent – when Pete Molyneux unfurled his “Ta Ra Fergie” banner and the atmosphere became mutinous – was still to come. But nothing quite embodied the misery like that capitulation across town.

“I think it was my third game,” Pallister recalled. “The new players got a lot of stick in the papers and me being the most expensive, and with probably the least experience, I bore the brunt of it.”

Viv Anderson talked this week about how United’s captain, Bryan Robson, ordered his team-mates to the pub to thrash it out and how, in one instance, Pallister found himself sandwiched between Anderson and Robson and copped an earful. Pallister chuckles when the story is relayed. “It must have been a hell of a session because I’m scratching my head to try to remember that,” Pallister said. “But, no, I think going for a drink like we did built a mentality where we weren’t just team-mates, we were mates, too. It galvanised the spirit within the team.

“We had Robbo, Viv, Brucey [Steve Bruce], Sparky [Mark Hughes], some really big characters, and you kind of felt it was going to happen, it just took a bit of time to piece together.”

Bruce and Pallister’s partnership in central defence was a case in point. “It took a while before Steve and myself came together as a partnership,” Pallister explained. “We played the game differently. I’d come from Middlesbrough, where we’d drop deep, to Man United, where we were trying to play a high line and condense the game a bit. So Steve would be up there like Tony Adams with his arm in the air and I’d be 10 yards behind him and he’d be looking around going, ‘Jesus, what are you up to Pally?’”

Pallister also wonders if United had a mental over-dependence on captain Robson. “Robbo was injured for quite a bit of that season and without him it was a bit rudderless,” Pallister said. “You felt as if he could take care of everything. He’d be the one in the referee’s ear, he’d be the enforcer in midfield, he’d get you a goal, he’d organise, and when he went out of the team we maybe lost our way. It took us a couple of years to learn how to be a strong enough team without him.”

Mark Robins’s goal in the 1-0 FA Cup win at Nottingham Forest in the January – a competition they would go on to win – has gone down in folklore as the moment that saved Ferguson’s job but Pallister thinks a league win at Millwall the next month was no less crucial. “Had we lost at Millwall we’d have been bottom three and you can only imagine the pressure and headlines after spending an awful lot of money in the summer. We went 1-0 down but hit back to win 2-1 and that was massive in the turnaround. After that, momentum began to change.”