Bielsa can have his bucket, why no chair for me?
I HAD a feeling it was going to be a trying night at Barrow from the minute we had the incident with our blue chair.
We take it everywhere with us. When I’m talking to the players at half time I like to be sitting in the middle of the circle in the dressing room at their eye level. It’s something I’ve always done. There are no guarantees that you’ll find a chair when you arrive at some non-league grounds.
When I walked out to look around the stadium before our league match on Tuesday night, I realised I would need the chair for another purpose. The dugout seats at Holker Street were below ground level, providing me and my staff with a view of the players’ ankles.
Not ideal when you’re trying to manage a football team.
I got my physio, Liam Booth, to bring the seat out and put it in the technical area. I see that Marcelo Bielsa at Leeds is allowed to sit on his own bucket (above) but the fourth official said no to my chair. He told me I’d have to sit in the dugout, despite the Barrow staff sitting on seats outside their dugout. No complaints about the result. We lost 3-2 because of some bad defensive errors and losing our full- back Jerome BinnomWilliams to a red card for a poor challenge.
But the point is that there are unexpected hurdles and some of these away trips need incredible focus. There’s no overnight stay. We set off for Barrow at 1pm on Tuesday, four and a half hours on the coach, a premeal at the Holiday Inn Hotel, Lancaster, and then to the ground by 6.30pm.
It was straight home, too. We had domino’s pizza, for rehydration, delivered to the coach. We ate while we travelled south. The lights were dimmed, some quiet music was playing and it was deathly quiet.
That’s how the club’s first ever defeat in the non-league felt. And that’s a good thing. If defeat doesn’t hurt a team of mine then it’s time for me to retire.