Always Managing: My Autobiography (35 page)

And Jim was a funny guy. He had these stories about working with Robert Maxwell that would crack me up. He said that when Maurice Evans was manager of Oxford United, first match of the season, a member of staff came out to see him: ‘Mr Maxwell is on the telephone, he wants to speak to you,’ he said.

‘I can’t speak to him now!’ Maurice exclaimed. ‘The game’s going on. Tell him we’ll speak afterwards.’

The man went away, then came back. ‘Mr Maxwell insists he speaks with you. He says it’s important. I think you’d better come.’ So Maurice left the dug-out and took the call. ‘It’s the team photograph on Monday,’ said Maxwell. ‘Make sure the players wear the away kit – the
Daily Mirror
logo stands out better.’

Compared to that, maybe Rupert Lowe wasn’t so bad, after all. If a young manager is lucky enough to have employment options, Sir Alex Ferguson always advises them to pick a chairman, not a club.

After Jim went, to cut costs, our chairman revealed another reason why he may have wished to clear the decks. He appointed Sir Clive Woodward, England’s World Cup-winning rugby coach. Clive had announced his wish to work in football having achieved all he could in rugby, and Lowe had been considering the idea of involving him, even before I arrived. What I would say, though, is that for a club looking to save money, Clive’s brand of expertise doesn’t come cheap.

People have always made a big thing of it, but I didn’t really have a problem with Clive. It would make a better story if I said we were arguing all the time, but it wasn’t like that at all. We never had one minute’s problem. We made a deal early on that we would never undermine each other, and we stuck to it throughout. In fact, he was a really interesting guy, and I had nothing but respect for him. It wasn’t as if he came in and started telling me who to pick. We ended up sharing an office, a bit like
The Odd Couple
, but I certainly wasn’t dismissive of Clive, and I hope he would back me up on that.

I admired him greatly as a rugby coach, because his England team had won the World Cup. I was preparing Portsmouth for a Monday game against Fulham that morning, and we put back Saturday training so we could watch it. I knew what Clive had achieved, but trying to transfer those ideas from rugby to football was complex and I don’t think he received proper guidance from above on what they wanted him to be. He was left on his own, to just get on with it, with no outline of what we were to do with these ideas, how much was theory or what should be put into practice. There wasn’t a clash of personalities, more a clash of cultures. Clive was feeling his way in football and thinking long term, meanwhile we had Saturday, Wednesday, Saturday, Wednesday matches to win. He might have had a good idea, but we didn’t have the time to implement it.

Clive did all he could to help. He would come out and film the players striking the ball, looking at technique, because he had worked that way with Jonny Wilkinson and it was obviously successful. I think if we had been more open to his thinking, it would have worked at Southampton, too – but we didn’t have the hours that Clive had with England to put his plans into action. Play Saturday, Sunday off, Monday, Tuesday training to prepare for a Wednesday game. We had to work on set pieces, team play, patterns of play, study the opposition. We didn’t have a schedule that allowed players to sit down and go through two hours of volleying videotape with Clive. And even if we did, changing technique comprehensively is a long-term project. It could be counter-productive if the players were thinking about how they should strike a ball during a game, rather than acting instinctively. Yes, volley technique can be coached, and we all try to improve
players’ performance in training, but I got the impression Clive’s ideas were bigger than a tweak here or there.

He couldn’t understand why Rory Delap took all our long throw-ins. I could see his point, to some extent. If Delap has to make his way from left-back to the far right touchline, wipe the ball and then make his throw, the opposition has time to set up. Clive believed everyone at the club should be able to throw like Rory. He saw it as a matter of achieving upper body strength and working on technique. He thought that the moment the ball went off, any Southampton player should be able to launch it back on as Rory did, before the opposition had a chance to regroup. It’s a good idea, obviously – except we had no time to put it into practice. We couldn’t abandon proper training for months on end to teach this specific skill; and even if we could, it would not always be of use. It wasn’t just the defenders that got into position for Rory’s throws; our team needed time to get into the penalty box, too. A bit pointless the nearest player launching the ball Delap-style before our players could get on the end of it. In the end, all we could do is suggest Clive put the idea to the academy coaches to see if they wanted to develop it with the generation coming through. They had the time to work on throw-in technique – we didn’t.

Clive and Rupert also thought they had found this wonder coach, called Simon Clifford, an ex-schoolteacher who taught a Brazilian method of training called
futebol de salão
, which was talked up as radical and new, but actually dates from South America before the Second World War. He seemed a nice enough guy and Clive had great belief in him, but when I watched one of his sessions there really wasn’t much that was ground-breaking. He would put lots of different drills on, but he never seemed to correct
what was going wrong. Players would be volleying the ball, but if it flew off awkwardly, he wouldn’t step in and say, ‘Bend this leg, fall away, get your foot up high.’ There was no great technical instruction happening. Some of the stuff we had been doing with Ron Greenwood at West Ham in the sixties. In fact, if you look at the way young Frank Lampard strikes his volleys for Chelsea even now, you can see Ron’s training techniques. We called it the West Ham volley. Ron taught it to Frank’s dad, and he passed it on to his son. There is not a huge amount going on that is completely new, and it is useless having a million drills if the instruction isn’t present. That’s why it’s called coaching. Clive thought Clifford was the best, and tried to get him involved in the youth team, but the youth coaches were not up for it, either. Simon left and tried to claim that his ideas were too progressive for us but, if anything, a lot of them were old hat. Visionaries are no use if the basics are not right. I heard all sorts of talk about offers he had received from Premier League clubs, but then took over as manager of Garforth Town. He said he would make them a Premier League club in twenty seasons. The last time I looked they had just been relegated to the Northern Counties East Football League. Rupert Lowe was the club chairman.

I didn’t agree with Clive about Clifford, but that doesn’t mean we were at loggerheads. Maybe some of the football people shut their minds when he spoke, but I didn’t, and I found him eager to learn and very keen and willing to both give and take advice. I thought he had a lot to offer on the fitness side of the game. With the right people around him, bridging the gaps, I’m sure it would have worked. Given more time he could have added to the training plans, and he is a great organiser and facilitator. I think
we all struggled with his role, and how it was meant to fit into the routines of a football club. What was he supposed to be doing? Was it about now or later? That was the problem – and I don’t think Rupert Lowe knew what he wanted, either, to be frank. I was falling out with Rupert quite a lot by then. At first he didn’t even make it plain whether Clive was on the staff, or just coming to gain experience. It was only later that I heard he was well rewarded.

But Clive certainly didn’t cut across my position. I was the manager, and that was never in doubt. If anything, all I resent about his time with me at Southampton is the suggestion that I just wanted a cosy little cabal of coaching pals around me, and could not handle anyone who might challenge my opinions. Bottom line: I’m there to win football matches. If there are people that can help me do that, I will listen to them, and it doesn’t matter who they are. I will bounce ideas off everybody, but at the end of the day I have to make my own mind up. It’s not a case of feeling threatened by Clive or Velimir Zajec, more that a manager has to completely trust the opinions of those around him, and it takes time to build that relationship. You can’t just parachute a guy in and the manager takes his word as gospel. He might not know what he is talking about.

Joe Jordan, who I worked with at Portsmouth and Tottenham Hotspur, was a manager; so was Jim Smith – and Dave Bassett, who came in at Southampton during the second season. At Queens Park Rangers, I brought in Steve Cotterill, who is a young coach with management experience. If I start losing, I’m going to get the sack anyway, and at Bournemouth, West Ham and Portsmouth I was replaced by a member of my staff, so the idea that I surround myself with unthreatening individuals is nonsense. I don’t see
Arsène Wenger offering Pep Guardiola the assistant manager’s job at Arsenal – and Guardiola isn’t looking to be a number two anyway. That isn’t how football works. I am prepared to work with players that are hard to handle, and my coaches are certainly not yes men.

I think part of the difficulty for Clive was that rugby was very much behind football in terms of technical progress. Some of the improvements that were considered quite radical in his old sport had been going on for years in his new one – specialist coaches, specialist training, some of the advances in fitness and nutrition. Guys like Sam Allardyce have been working with everything from acupuncturists and Chinese herbalists to sports psychologists for years, and football had been using specialist position coaches for decades. We didn’t have goalkeeping coaches when I was a player – Ernie Gregory used to be a goalkeeper, but he never worked with them at West Ham – but that changed as the game progressed. Goalies didn’t just go in goal during training. They went away with a great coach like Mike Kelly and worked on the specifics of their game. I cannot remember anyone saying a word to the goalkeeper at West Ham during my playing days, even if he let five through his legs – but football has moved on, just as English rugby did under Clive.

Clive left Southampton in August 2006, but by then I had already departed, too. A chance meeting between Frank Lampard Senior and Milan Mandaric in the directors’ box at Fratton Park was about to get my south-coast roller-coaster ride moving again.

26 November 2005. That was the day my return to Portsmouth became a reality. Chelsea came to Fratton Park and Frank Lampard Senior sat in the directors’ box watching his son play. I think by then, both Milan Mandaric and I were regretting our decision to part the previous season. I had only been gone a year but he had already appointed, and sacked, two managers, and Joe Jordan was his caretaker. As for me, I hadn’t been able to keep Southampton up and I knew I wasn’t suited to another year with Rupert Lowe. We were increasingly falling out over even the smallest thing. Sure, I argued with Milan, too, but it felt different. We were mates and all forgotten the next day. The mood at Southampton just didn’t feel right.

I had brought in Dave Bassett, the old Wimbledon manager, to start the new season. People might have seen the styles of our teams as very different, but I have always liked Dave. He’s a
common sense guy, someone who has strong opinions and isn’t afraid to share them. I didn’t want to change the way we played, but I thought Dave might be able to give us a bit more grit and organisation around our set plays. You need to mix it up a little more outside the Premier League, I think. Dave didn’t really take much in the way of salary. He was happy to help out and he brought Dennis Wise, who was a class above in that division. I suppose Dave was more sceptical of Sir Clive and his ideas, though, which looking back wasn’t helping harmony among the backroom staff.

After relegation, you look at everybody in a new light, to try to see what they will bring to the team in fresh circumstances – particularly players. A lad that looked out of his depth in Premier League football, might suddenly find his level and be very effective in the second tier. A physically strong player who lacked a little finesse, might now not be at a disadvantage. One guy we had our eye on was Kenwyne Jones. He had spent the previous season out on loan at Sheffield Wednesday and Stoke City, who were both outside the Premier League, and, at Wednesday in particular, had looked terrific. He had only played a handful of matches for us, and hadn’t been too clever, but we thought perhaps this level would suit him.

We got our first shock in pre-season training when we did a bleep test and Kenwynne was beaten by Kevin Bond. Bleep tests are gruelling, but they are the best measurement of fitness. A player has to run between two points in a certain time – indicated by a bleep noise – speeding up as he gets more exhausted. It allows coaches to assess maximum oxygen intake. Kevin would have turned 50 the year he outran Kenwyne. He just pulled up, like a tired old racehorse. ‘Keep going, Kenwyne, what have you stopped for?’ I shouted.