Surprise Insight Into Getting The Better Of Jez

“I decided I had nothing to lose so would ask for everything at the interview…..there was a permanent deal on offer and I asked for a car.”

The would-be employee expected to be knocked back over his highly ambitious demands or at least forced to compromise. Not a bit of it. He got what he asked for.

So who was the man across the table from him? A pushover who didn’t know how to say ‘no’? Wrong….it was Jez Moxey.

We have turned to veteran physiotherapist Ian Liversedge’s entertaining autobiography on this website before to quote him on the virtues of Denis Irwin and Paul Cook, both of whom he has worked with at length.

Another ‘newsy’ angle was the goal he scored as an emergency substitute for Oldham against Wolves in a Central League game in the mid-1980s.

Now we can relate the story about how he came to be appointed as part of Lou Macari’s backroom team in the summer of 1995 after being interviewed by Mozey and the club’s chief scout.

Liversedge proved he was prepared to walk out on a job under Sam Allardyce at Blackpool when the call came from the Potteries.

The former Newcastle man, who had also compiled long-service at Boundary Park during Oldham’s glory years, felt sufficiently emboldened to aim high as he also had a private clinic and family responsibilities in Manchester.

“I didn’t really want to go to Stoke but I went and asked for daft things, thinking they’d say ‘no’,” he said. “But they must have been turned down by a few and said ‘yes’, so I couldn’t turn it down.”

How many Wolves players and off-field employees from the Moxey years here will roll their eyes if they read this piece?

The man who developed a reputation as a tough negotiator appears to have bowed on this occasion early in his football career to inflated demands….how strange that will sound to many of those who confronted him across the table in the chief executive’s office!

Liversedge, who has served more than a dozen clubs but none south of the Potteries, stayed at Stoke for nearly three years – a stint that took in their switch from the Victoria Ground to the Britannia Stadium.

He is still working full-time in the game, back at Oldham and approaching his 74th birthday this Christmas. A feature on him by David Instone is due to appear in the next issue of Backpass.

Please put Liversedge’s name in our search engine at the top to see what he has to say about Messrs Cook and Irwin.