Ian Baird is reflecting on the red card he received 18 minutes into the most important home match in Brighton & Hove Albion’s history.

Today marks the 25th anniversary of Baird picking a fight with Doncaster Rovers defender Darren Moore in the final game at the Goldstone Ground, with Brighton’s Football League future hanging on its result.

Advertisement

“I sat in the dressing room until half-time. I didn’t take my kit off,” Baird says. “I sat there thinking, ‘Why the fucking hell have I been sent off? Why have I gone and got myself in a situation like this, with everything that’s on it?’.”

There were 11,341 packed into the rickety old ground, which had a peak capacity of 33,000, and Baird was reprieved by Brighton’s eventual 1-0 victory. An improbable escape from fourth-tier relegation was completed seven days later with a draw away to Hereford United in the final fixture of that 1996-97 season.

The 58-year-old still has good reason for self-recrimination as he discusses his stupidity in the bar at Havant & Waterlooville, the sixth-tier National League South club based near Portsmouth where he is assistant manager.

Baird was Brighton’s captain and was supposed to be setting an example for manager Steve Gritt’s side on a drizzly, tension-filled day with huge implications for his 11th and last league club.

Scrapping with now-Sheffield Wednesday manager Moore, a man-mountain central defender who was also sent off over the incident, was not the example Gritt had in mind from the experienced centre-forward he’d inherited five months earlier at the end of a combative career that included spells with Leeds United, Southampton and Newcastle United.

Baird still gets fan mail at Havant from Leeds supporters recalling his two stints at Elland Road in the 1980s and early 1990s under managers Eddie Gray, Billy Bremner and Howard Wilkinson with affection.

Brighton fans would not look back with similar fondness on Baird’s goalscoring contribution to their astonishing Football League survival a quarter of a century ago if his team-mates had not dug him out of that Doncaster-shaped hole.

The flame-coloured hair of his playing days is no more and Baird speaks with gallows humour throughout our conversation about the turbulence he encountered at Brighton and the incident that defines his time at the club.

Advertisement

Recalling that must-win game against Doncaster, he says: “I was fired up for it. Darren had come right through me, literally in the first minute. The referee didn’t give anything.

“Then he came through me again, and the referee gave a foul. The third time, I lost it. I just turned around and tried to wallop him. There was a big melee. Everyone knew what was at stake. Tempers were frayed, the crowd were really loud.

“He (Moore) went down the tunnel first. I thought he was going to be waiting for a bit of a kick-off. Luckily, he wasn’t!

“Nothing was said when Gritty and the players came in. It was all about getting the result, rightly so. Their concentration was on that.

“I put a tracksuit top on and watched the second half from the stand. It was nerve-racking. I felt guilty that I’d let my team-mates down, let everybody down by getting sent off. It was a massive relief when we won.”

Baird’s inauspicious part in Brighton’s 1,534th and last league game at their 95-year-old home, which had been sold by the despised then-owners of the club without a succession plan, was not the closing chapter.

He would have been suspended for the season finale at Hereford if modern disciplinary regulations had applied. Instead, he helped Brighton to a 1-1 draw that completed a miraculous escape and sent Hereford down instead.

“The sending off took 14 days to kick in, so it carried over to the next season,” Baird says. “He (Gritt) could have left me out. I kept the armband.”

Baird was 35 when he moved along the south coast from Neil Warnock’s Plymouth Argyle for £35,000 at the start of that 1996-97 season. Brighton had joined Plymouth in the bottom tier after relegation the previous May under Jimmy Case.

It was an easy decision to make — Brighton was closer to Baird’s home near Southampton, also the club he supported. And Case had forged a reputation in his playing career as a fearless midfielder for Liverpool, Southampton and Brighton.

Advertisement

Baird says. “I had a bit of a falling-out with Warnock in pre-season. Casey lived 15 minutes from me. I went to a meeting, had a chat, he drove me down to Brighton and that was the first I learnt about the history and what was going on.

“Whenever I’d played against Brighton, I seemed to score. I loved the Goldstone Ground and there was the lure of playing for Jimmy.”

Baird knew little about the crisis engulfing the club, unrecognisable to the one that is comfortably established in the top tier thanks to the millions of Tony Bloom. Then-chairman Bill Archer and chief executive David Bellotti were selling the Goldstone for retail development without sorting out a home-ground replacement. Enraged fans were protesting as oblivion beckoned.

“It was just a bizarre experience,” Baird says. “I didn’t realise what was going on at the club, I was just a footballer not really thinking about it.

“You’d heard whispers, but when I signed, it was an absolute fucking shambles and I felt sorry for Jimmy.

“Bellotti would turn up to games with his missus as if nothing had happened. All the pressure of the Brighton situation took its toll massively on Jimmy — the players not being paid, the owners.

“We won the first league game and I was thinking, ‘This isn’t too bad’, but then it was a nightmare.”

By that Christmas, Case had been sacked. Brighton were 12 points adrift at the bottom of the fourth division, nosediving out of the Football League and facing life without a ground.

It was a desperate situation even though Dick Knight, a locally based supporter and owner of an advertising agency, was in the process of a takeover.

Baird and Gritt’s paths had crossed as players in dramatic circumstances in the 1986-87 season, when the play-offs had a different format, culminating in a tie between a team striving for promotion to the top tier and a side trying to stay in it.

Advertisement

Promotion-chasing Leeds and Baird agonisingly lost out to a Charlton Athletic side including Gritt in midfield, losing 2-1 after extra time (having scored first in the 99th minute) in a replay held at Birmingham City’s ground St Andrew’s, following a 1-1 draw on aggregate over the initial two legs.

Gritt succeeded Case and brought with him former Charlton goalkeeper Jeff Wood as his assistant. The task seemed hopeless, but Baird scored eight goals in 12 games from January as 10 wins and two draws in 12 matches at the Goldstone propelled Brighton’s mixture of senior professionals and young players such as locals Kerry Mayo and Ross Johnson to an escape.

How did he pull it off? “Gritty basically organised us — set pieces, the way we played,” Baird says. “Steve was very methodical. I’ve got to give him a lot of praise. By nature, Steve is very dour, but as a manager he was good. Boring!

“On a Thursday, fucking hell, we used to train for about three-and-a-half hours. It was stop-start, but in the end, it got the just rewards. Jeff Wood was brilliant, the court jester.”

Baird began the following season with a three-match ban for that red card against Doncaster — a blessing in disguise in some respects.

Knight’s takeover had finally been completed, but Brighton would be ground-sharing for two years at Gillingham, which meant a 150-mile round trip for home games. Twelve years followed at the Withdean Stadium athletics track in Brighton, but it would be 14 years without a permanent home until the Amex Stadium opened in 2011.

Baird did not see out those two years of “home” games on Kent’s north coast. “I got sent off again, against Chester away, stupidly, for an off-the-ball incident,” he says. “I head-butted the centre-half! He came through me and I told him if he did it again he was having it.

Advertisement

“I nutted him away from the linesman, but the other one saw it. Terrible, isn’t it, embarrassing. Steve pulled me in on the Monday and said, ‘I’m taking the captaincy away from you’. He said, ‘You can’t keep getting sent off’.

“We had a bit of a fall-out, but he was right. He had to make an example of me.

“In the November, I had to have another knee operation. The surgeon said I had to pack it in. I was insured, I had six months left on my contract, we came to an agreement and that was it, I finished in the December.”

Baird scored 14 goals in 41 appearances for the club across 16 months of mayhem.

“At least we kept Brighton up,” he says. “There were a multitude of problems, it was a weird period, but it was a big thing.

“It just goes to show what’s been made of it now.”

(Top photo: Stu Forster/Allsport)