The surprised player found himself in the awkward situation of offering advice on the club's financial future mere hours before pulling on his team shirt and running onto the pitch. One day Tranmere's directors walked into Palios' office looking for advice. Mark Palios playing for Tranmere the night they beat Arsenal in 1973. "She tolerated my doing this, but it wasn't a pleasant time for her," Osterman admits. "I know he was speaking English but I couldn't understand a word!" Osterman's family came too, although his wife found herself excluded from men-only areas such as the boardroom and team coach. "I used to go to sportsman's dinners for people who had shares in the club, and I was usually the brunt of the after-dinner comedian," Osterman remembers. There was occasionally a language barrier with the distinctive Merseyside accent. Having staved off the club's short-term woes, Bruce Osterman showed up at Tranmere for a few weeks at a time, a few times a year. There wouldn't be a foreign manager until Jozef Vengloš arrived from Czechoslovakia to join Aston Villa in 1990. Foreign players like Tottenham's Argentine duo Ossie Ardiles and Ricky Villa were still a novelty. English clubs were banned from European competition because of hooliganism throughout the 1980s. Today's game is full of players, managers and owners from other countries.
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