DUTCH OF CLASS
Was Fergie wrong to get rid of me? Of course he was... But at least I know how to treat players as a manager now!
JAAP STAM is chuckling at the memory. If you played in front of Peter Schmeichel and behind Roy Keane you became used to somewhat forceful verbal interventions when something went wrong.
‘And even when it was their mistake, they were still blaming you!’ he recalls. ‘Pete was like that. Every time he was behind us, screaming at our backs, telling us what to do. If anyone had a shot on target he was giving us the F word and everything. And Roy was the same. Roy wanted every ball and if you gave it to someone else and they lost it, Roy was shouting, “Why didn’t you give it to me?” ’
It is just over 15 years ago that Stam was drummed out of Old Trafford, ejected by Alex Ferguson in one of the most brutal player departures of the manager’s 26-year career. Stam was informed by Ferguson that he had been sold to Lazio on the forecourt of a petrol station as he was preparing for the 2001-02 season, having been unaware that his manager no longer rated him.
It seems extraordinary that Stam played only three seasons at the club, so synonymous does he seem to be with United. When he returns there as Reading manager in the FA Cup third round next Saturday for one of the most intriguing ties of the round, he will receive a rapturous welcome. It is partly because he won everything there, being a central part of the club’s high-water mark, the 1999 treble. And the fact that in each of his three seasons, United won the Premier League. Stam had embedded himself in the club, which was why his exit was so traumatic.
This will be the first time he has returned to Old Trafford for a competitive fixture. The ‘Yip Jaap Stam is a big Dutchman’ song will doubtless reverberate around the ground again. He is still well loved among United fans.
‘I loved them as well,’ says Stam. ‘I’ve been back before with charity games. But this is different, because of all the United fans who will be at the game. I still follow United. I still love the club. But now I need to play against them.’
And therein lies the most significant point about Stam today. This is neither a charity visit nor a romantic day out for a lower-league minnow. Stam has transformed Reading from Championship relegation fodder to a team pushing for the Premier League; he has done so amid an ongoing ownership takeover and without big transfer funds. Reading are contenders to make grounds like Old Trafford a regular date.
‘It’s going to be a great atmosphere but now we need to do something against them as well,’ says Stam. ‘You always want to have results, though we are quite realistic about the quality they have.’
For Stam is that rare commodity, a top-class former player who has worked his way up the coaching ladder over seven years. He was at PEC Zwolle, his first professional club as a player, and then Ajax, in roles ranging from assistant manager to defensive coach and coach to the second team.
But when he joined Reading in the summer, it was his first foray into taking full responsibility for a professional first team. Thus far, it has gone rather well. Reading are third in the Championship with nothing like the budget of some competitors. Tomorrow they take on Bristol City and it is games like that — rather than those at Old Trafford — where Stam will ultimately be judged.
‘When I stopped playing I always said I didn’t want to go into management,’ he says. ‘I knew from my previous managers the stress if you’re not performing. The first season I stopped playing, I said, “I’m not going to do anything”. But after five or six months, my first professional team phoned me up to help on the pitch because they had certain difficulties. So I said I would do it a couple of days a week. Then everything went rolling, because I liked it, the players liked it, the team were improving. So it’s grown on you.
‘You get a certain feeling with it as well. There’s nothing better than being on that pitch as a player. It’s the best thing. But to be a coach or a manager, it’s second best. It’s not for everybody. A lot of the time when a player is (talking) on television, it looks like he can talk very interesting, but it’s still a different job to pronounce it to the group and make the group better and the player a better player. I worked for seven years as a coach, so by stepping up for that before I went into management, you get experience in doing all those things.’
Still, it was a gamble for both Reading’s Thai owners, led by Narin Niruttinanon, and for Stam when he was appointed in the summer. He was an unproven manager; starting in England, he might have been a very high-profile failure. ‘I met with the owners. They told me their story, what they expect from me; I told them what they can expect from me. And, of course, you know that if you go into management, especially over here, people watch you because you have had a certain career. So there is a lot of attention as well on how you perform.
‘The ambition of the owners was very important. Because I have ambition to go up eventually to a different level. Hopefully we can do that with Reading. But the club, the people within the club, they need to have ambition as well. I really want to go to the Premier League if it’s possible. So we spoke about this.’
He is also dealing with what is now