1,000 GAMES but it still kills me if I lose one!
Tony Pulis joins exclusive club with a frank admission
THERE is a room in Tony Pulis’s Bournemouth home which probably explains why he will today join the elite band of 24 managers who have taken charge of 1,000 games.
Pulis hates losing. The son of a Newport steelworker, brought up in a family of eight in a three-bedroom house, he has spent a 42-year career in football believing that only winning games would preserve his escape from what he calls ‘real life’. Even after all that time, first as a player then a manager, the feeling of devastation a few hours after the final whistle has blown on a defeat won’t go away.
‘You still get just as disappointed,’ he says. ‘Losing a game of football, even when you have played well, kills you.
‘I’ve got a little room which I just go in. There is a just a television in there and my wife brings my food in and a glass of wine. Then she leaves me till the next morning. I usually get over it by then. It’s just the way it has been. She knows when I’ll be sociable and when I won’t. Sometimes if we lose a big game she will see that’s best.
‘It must be a nightmare for the wives of football managers, putting up with us.’
Debbie Pulis knows all about that. They have been together since he was 18 so she’s shared every weekend, good and bad, from his first match as a manager of Bournemouth, a 1-1 draw at Preston in August 1992, until today’s landmark game. Ironically he will be taking his West Brom side to Stoke, the club where he finally moved from the shadows of the lower leagues to the spotlight of the Premierat in tion’sthere Pulisthe addingthe League1,000will League.hardhis be club. name bursting Managers’way. And to he the with Associa-has others pridegot
Normanthatfor At 12 Bournemouthhis monthsclub Haywardcar rather had his was than been chairmanjust furious taxedsix. At ground.doing Gillinghamall ‘Formy shapethe he first had and no month pattern trainingI’m of play were for peoplethe new walking season throughand therethe middlewith theirof the shopping, players, a old fella ladies with his ‘You dog. go, “Excuse me”, and they say, park “Listenfor 40 yearsson, I’ve and walkedI don’t carethis what you are playing, I am walking this park”. You just go, “OK, fine”.’
It’s not a coincidence, he believes, that apart from Sir Matt Busby and Sir Bobby Robson, all the others on the LMA’s list began their management careers with clubs near the bottom of the football ladder.
‘I learnt most things in the lower leagues, and what I got from there I’ve just taken on,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be clever enough to learn.
‘People say about me and my style of play. I tell you what I do, I go into clubs, try and find out what system suits those players and try to get the damnedest out of the players. If you don’t get time to change it then you have to
get results. ‘That’s what I’ve done everywhere I’ve been. If I’ve got a load of centre halves who can’t pass water, never mind the ball, do you really want them to play out from the back?’ It’s a philosophy that’s not fashionable, but he thinks the armchair critics — especially the ex-players who have never had a go at managing but stick to the safety of the TV studio — don’t understand. ‘I remember one day when I was Bournemouth captain, Harry Redknapp was the manager, and he kept changing his mind. ‘I had to hand in the team sheet at 2.30, and it was full of crossings out. He wrote another name, crossed that out, and wrote another, then crossed it out again and went back to the name he started with. ‘We sat there and Harry said, “Do you think this is the right team?” When he walked out John Kirk the physio said to me, “One day you will be a manager and you won’t realise the pressure you are under until you sit in the seat”. He was right. Until you have been on that touchline and everything, good or bad, is down to you, you can’t know how you will deal with it.’
Pulis has certainly embraced modern technology. The walls in the room at West Brom’s training ground in which he is reminiscing are covered in stats about who ran furthest, hardest, delivered most crosses, played most passes, and all the detail of last week’s game when his side put four past West Ham.
But he’s old school too. He says: ‘I got to know Alec Stock. He was in a nursing home in Wimbourne and if I had an hour during the week I’d try and go and visit. I sat with him one day, and one of the things he said was, “Tony, believe your eyes, never go away from that. You are at the front of it and always, irrespective of what they say, what they do, always believe your eyes”.
‘There was one pre- season at Stoke, I decided we wouldn’t use heart monitors and somebody asked, “How can you know if they are working properly?” ‘I said, “I know, because if they are sweating and moaning they are working”, and that was my motto.’
His side will work again today at Stoke, trying to help their manager make his 1,000th game an occasion to relish rather than end up in that room at home for another night.