Should I stay or should I go? The choice for Gary with Pesch gone
ROWETT ON HIS FIRST DAYS IN CHARGE WITH BREWERS
Former Burton Albion manager has been talking about his first steps in coaching, his first managerial job, with the Brewers, and his coaching philosophy in an in-depth interview with The Coaches’ Voice website. In the first of two articles taken from the interview, he talks about how he felt about taking over from Paul Peschisolido and what the job taught him about the pressures of management.
GARY Rowett went about his coaching career with the same determination and metculousness he had applied as a successful defender in a 16-year playing career.
After starting with Cambridge United in 1991, he took in Everton, Blackpool, Derby County, Birmingham City, Leicester City and Charlton Athletic and was sold five times for fees totalling £7m.
After retiring from the full-time game early through injury, he wound his career down with two seasons in the Conference with Burton, playing 45 times to take his career tally to 454 matches.
But Rowett had already been working towards a coaching career and when the Brewers sought a replacement for Nigel Clough for their first season in the Football League, he and Paul Peschisolido were both interviewed for the role.
The Canadian got the nod but Rowett was asked if he would come in as number two and accepted. Things went well at first as the Brewers established themselves in League Two but, by March 2012, they were in trouble, sliding towards the wrong end of the table, and chairman Ben Robinson felt a change was necessary. It was a change which was to give Rowett a tough choice.
“We’d been on a difficult run, 14 games without a win, I think,” he said.
“You could feel it was going to be tough to break out of it.
“The chairman pulled me in, told me he was going to relieve the manager of his duties and that he wanted to put me and Kevin Poole, the goalkeeper
Gary Rowett coach, in charge.
“It’s a hard scenario. Do we walk out with the manager, or do we stay and try to do the best job we could – the job we were being paid to do? We stayed.
“I’d had about two-and-a-half years as assistant to Paul.
“We had a great time. Paul is a great guy and we’d had some really good periods on the pitch. We’d got to about fourth or fifth in League Two – times when it felt that, you know, if we could just take that next step… “We spoke about that a lot. We were both putting on a bit of timber at the time, spending too much time in the office, working on how to win games, so we used to go out in the afternoon and have a little jog around the pitch, talk about how if we could just do that little bit more, if we could just win a couple more games. “People forget that Paul had kept Burton in the league in his first season. If the club had gone down that year, you probably wouldn’t have seen the build that has happened since. That stability might not have been allowed to happen. “He wanted to succeed so badly. You could see the pressure he put himself under as a coach but even as his assistant I didn’t appreciate just how much pressure there is. How difficult it is to be the guy who is actually in charge.
“Once you’re a manager, that’s the one thing you learn quickly – to have real empathy with anyone going through a poor period.
“We had a tough start after Paul left, lost our first game, at home to Northampton, 1-0 in the 90th minute. The next game, we went to Wimbledon and lost 4-0.
“After that defeat, I spoke to the chairman: ‘You’ve got to do what’s right for the club. If you think someone else is better for the job, then that’s what you’ve got to do.’
“We were fortunate that he kept patience and at the end of the season he offered me the job. There are only 92 managers in the league and they are not easy jobs to get.
“Even if you doubt yourself, you have to get up the next day and be positive – to have the resilience to keep moving forward.”
Rowett had been readying himself for such challenges since he was a teenager with Cambridge, before he had even made his debut.
A decade later, his injuries made him think about it more deeply.
“I was 17 when I first asked about coaching,” he said.
“I was at Cambridge, just before I got in the first team. Gary Johnson was the manager at the time and I got to know him quite well.
“I told him I’d love to come and take the school of excellence, just help out, one night a week.
“I remember doing five or six sessions and enjoying it. It was an early indication that this was something I enjoyed.
“But it wasn’t until I hit 27 or 28 that the interest was really rekindled. Injuries were starting to take their toll. I had two or three years where I really tried to fight it but I knew I wasn’t ever going to be the same.
“By then, I had become a real learner, very open-minded about the game.
“Early in my career, I was professional but also cynical – bring in a sports psychologist and I’d think it was a load of rubbish.
“But now I wanted to learn about anything I thought could benefit me. I think it was at Leicester where the lads nicknamed me Textbook. I took it as a compliment. “I remember reading a lot about Arrigo Sacchi, Jose Mourinho in the early days, Pep Guardiola, but I didn’t just want to learn about football tactics; it was about the psychology of the player, about how people learn, how organisations function, team dynamics.
“These things inspired me, made me really want to be a manager.
“I made a conscious decision that I didn’t want to go into a job without learning from the bottom up.
“I’d seen a lot of ex-players take a job on the back of their name, without actually having taken the steps in coaching first.
“For me, that always looked very difficult, so I set about trying to learn as much as I could and that started with me walking into Derby’s academy and asking if they had any openings.
“The Under-14s job was available. It was peanuts for three or four days a week but it was about putting in the hours, trying things and making mistakes. It took over my entire life for 12 months.
“I moved on to take the Under-18s on a full-time basis and then went on to do a bit of work for the FA and the PFA, which involved tutoring some coaching courses.
“I turned up to a Derbyshire course for grassroots coaches with 30 people in a room for a week and I had to run all the seminars and coaching sessions.
“It wasn’t just about imparting knowledge, it was about understanding the people in front of me, learning about their strengths, finding out what some could do and accepting what others couldn’t.
“Developing that understanding and building the confidence to speak in front of that many people, have both really helped me as a coach.”
Look out for the second part of the article, in which Rowett describes turning things around for Burton and taking them to the League Two play-offs twice before leaving them in a strong position for a promotion push when Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink took over.
Paul kept Burton in the league in his first season. If the club had gone down, you wouldn’t have seen the build since
Gary Rowett