Hard-working Paunovic is a man on a mission
LIVING in a hotel room overlooking the M4 just outside Reading for weeks on end would not be everyone’s lifestyle choice.
Add in the complexity of making new friends thousands of miles from your family, in a country speaking a foreign language, as the nights draw in and a global pandemic rages.
Most of us would need to be paid handsomely to endure an equivalent living arrangement.
That is what Veljco Paunovic is coping with right now.
As he told me during a lengthy chat earlier this week, he is quite used to hardship, growing up in war-torn Belgrade in the 1990s.
The new, and so far extraordinarily successful, Reading manager has plenty of time to watch videos of up-coming opponents, review his team’s performances and digest the league table. He adamantly denies so much as glancing at the Championship standings, with 42 games remaining, but he ought to enjoy watching back the wins against Derby County, Barnsley, Cardiff and Watford.
There has been a revolving door approach to Reading managers over the last three years.
Paunovic will be aware the average tenure is just six months, so will not be troubling any Reading estate agents just yet.
He says he is quite happy living life cooped up in a hotel room for now, and that Covid-19 makes renting accommodation tricky.
Besides, he strikes me as a workaholic, intent on using every waking hour to improve his chances of winning Championship points.
Life in Serbia in the Balkans war was grim, as it was across the whole region. Having made a couple of trips and lots of friends in Kosovo and Albania at the tail-end of the conflict, I have never missed an opportunity to quiz anyone living in the region at the time about their experiences.
Paunovic was reluctant to talk politics and those dreadful years in his late teens and early 20s, but it clearly had an impact.
Like Novak Djokovic, he is someone who used the hardships that came during that period to drive on towards greatness.
“Missing organised football” was the biggest disruption to his life, he says, but it must have shaped his mentality.
He had to walk for hours to training, there was limited practice, matches were behind closed doors and the nation’s attention was firmly on more important matters than football.
He has had two weeks to tidy his hotel room, go running and watch videos of Neil Warnock’s Middlesbrough. Warnock vs Paunovic is what the Championship is all about – different approaches, backgrounds and stages of their career, but both doing the same job. It will be fascinating.
Like Brian McDermott, who was the last manager to shift Reading up from the Championship to the Premier League, Paunovic plays the guitar.
More relevantly, he is disciplined to the point of obsessive about focusing solely on the next game, rather than sharing his longer-term dreams.
If he nails the latter we might just see him doing the former in a Reading bar at a big promotion party next May – but right now promotion parties, in fact any parties, seem a long way off.