PE TEACHERS TELL SIR CLIVE: WE’VE PINCHED YOUR BIG IDEAS
Lincoln’s brilliant management duo, Danny and nicky cowley, appeared on Garry Richardson’s
Sportsweek programme on BBc Radio 5 live yesterday with World cup- winning coach sir clive Woodward — one of their inspirations. This is an abridged version of that interview.
Garry Richardson: When you woke this morning, did you think it was a dream?
Danny Cowley: it’s felt like that for a while now, it’s been about eight weeks of a dream. We beat oldham in the second round, a league one team, then we beat ipswich over two games and then Brighton to get the opportunity at Burnley, so it’s been a crazy period.
Garry Richardson: What’s the secret? it’s going tremendously well at lincoln. How do you do it?
Danny Cowley: Relentless hard work. We try to give the very best version of ourselves from the moment we wake up until the moment we go to bed. We have high standards for ourselves and high standards for people around us. We expect to be successful and we love football. When you come through non-league it’s not always that romantic — we have the opportunity to do something we love, day in day out, we really cherish this opportunity and really value it.
(lincoln’s rivals at the top of the national league — Dagenham and Redbridge and Forest Green — both lost on saturday.)
Danny Cowley: The league is a lifechanger for us, we’d love to be Football league managers come May. lincoln were relegated five years ago and it’s a fantastic football club which hasn’t finished above 13th since it was relegated. it’s kind of drifted and lost its way a little bit, like it was in mourning. We’ve come in and have an enthusiasm and a focus. We’ve got some great people, some fantastic people around the club and we’ve inherited some good players which we’ve added to. They’ve been a credit to us and to the club.
Sir Clive Woodward: Huge congratulations to you both. it must be an amazing position to be in.
Danny Cowley: Thanks so much. it’s a huge honour to speak to you, we have so much respect for you and read all your books and followed your England career. As PE teachers we love our rugby and you did such a great job for English rugby, inspiring all those young children. We were PE teachers in 2003 and we went from having to drag kids in to play rugby to all of a sudden having 50 or 60 on the school field desperate to play the game. We took a lot of your ideas — and we still use a lot of those today; the business model you used to run that England rugby team... we love stealing ideas.
Nicky Cowley: Another idea we stole from you, clive, is coaching our players individually and putting them in moments they would be in during game situations…
Sir Clive Woodward: i don’t think it’s any coincidence you guys are PE teachers. i’m a PE teacher, i’m very proud of the fact my background is in education. i think a lot of sports coaches could learn from this. You have the knowledge in your sport but teaching it is a different thing. Teaching is coaching so to get qualified as a PE teacher gives you a great basis for coaching at the very top level. it amazes me that a lot of top players don’t do this loop and for any coaches listening, you have to be a great teacher to be a great coach.
Danny Cowley: Teaching has really broadened our skill set and we’ve used a lot of our teaching skills. Being a PE teacher means you have to teach across a wide range of sports and we try to steal ideas from them. We use game calls from rugby for our restarts and set pieces, we use moves from basketball to get the ball in play…
Garry Richardson: clive, how far do you think they can go in their careers? Sir Clive Woodward: The secret, if there is one, is concentrate on your next game because it can catch up with you very quickly. lose on Tuesday (at north Ferriby) and the whole shine will be taken off. You have to keep your feet on the ground. if you do that you can go anywhere in the game. i’m very keen on English managers doing well in football, but you have to have the ambition and be ‘ next game, next game’ and not get ahead of yourself. i’ve never planned my career, it’s just happened, but what i’ve been good at is looking at the next game.
Garry Richardson: How will you two handle things now? You know that in the coming weeks you will be linked with this club and that club. What will you do?
Nicky Cowley: i just think we will be ourselves which is down to earth, humble and honest, hardworking lads, really. Any message we send in the media, our first thoughts will be our players and what they’re reading. All of our players, if we look them in the eye, would want us to be focused on the job ahead and at the moment i’m not looking any further than Tuesday. i’m sitting here with Danny now thinking about the players we are going to select.