Dave Bassett was the right man at the right time.
A top manager, at the peak of his powers. I'd say he was well ahead of the game when it came to innovation and using new technology, and although some people say that his tactics might have been crude but they was ultimately tactics that won football matches, and he would have his players running through brick walls for him. It was common knowledge that players were expected to run through brick walls for Bassett. Back in 1988 we was a club in the doldrums, the board was a disparate bunch with Brearley looking to sell, and around the time we had crooks like Woolhouse and Hinchcliffe involved with the club, we had sub 10k attendances every week, and was bound for the third tier. What Bassett did was cut his cloth accordingly, build his own team with some savage butchery of the squad he inherited and brought in his own players who he knew would do a better job, and in the space of two years he dragged the club kicking and screaming out of the backwaters of Division Three where we had been in severe danger of becoming just another set of provincial, lower league also rans, in to a force to be feared in the top flight.
Ultimately it went wrong for Bassett for 2 reasons, and both of them non footballing reasons. The first was the Paul Woolhouse fiasco where he disappeared after being unable to pay for the club, and taking a lot of revenue out of the club, which lead to the return of Reg Brearley who pushed through the sale of one of the finest centre forwards in the country in Brian Deane, and didn't allow Bassett the right money to rebuild the club which it needed after the sale. Some money was used to bring in Tuttle, Falconer and Flo in the summer of 1993 but that wasn't enough to be stay up and remain competitve with the new money in the top flight, and we signed Nathan Blake a few weeks to late. Secondly when Mike McDonald took over the club, Bassett and United had been paying the price of years of boardroom unrest, with a three sided ground and a squad who had then began to pay the rise of chronic under investment and was in grave danger of dropping out of the second tier.
Football is often a game of ifs and maybes, and in the case of Bassett that much is very true. If the board hadn't sanctioned the sale of Brian Deane and found the money to enable Bassett to keep us in the top flight we could have gone from strength to strength in the top flight, and if MacDonald had kept Bassett instead of deciding that he wanted his own man in charge, then i think Bassett would have done what Kendall failed to to, and that was build a side to take us back to the top flight. In 1995 Bassett himself had grown weary of the boardroom troubles, and still remained a top manager as he still subsequently enjoyed a lot of success in his managerial career. He might not have been to everyones taste, but like Warnock and like Wilder appears to be now, he was very much the ideal man for United, and if things had panned out differently he could potentially have done a lot longer here and brought a lot more success than we have had during the 20 last years.
