Hat-trick got me a caning off Boot Room
EXCLUSIVE INTERVIEW
PAUL JEWELL sat in the Liverpool dressing room following a clash with Sheffield Wednesday’s reserves, and basked in the afterglow of a job well done.
He’d just scored a hat-trick alongside Kenny Dalglish, who was working his way back from injury, and was chuffed to bits, although not everyone was happy.
“We came in and Ronnie Moran, Roy Evans and Joe Fagan were looking at me funny,” said Jewell.
“‘You, you little **** , yes, you, I bet you think you’ve done all right tonight, you got a hat-trick…’ “And they absolutely caned me. “What they were saying was, ‘You got a hat-trick but everything else you did wasn’t good enough to get in the first team.’
“It was tough love and now that’s changed a bit. I still think there’s room for it but all I needed was to be in the team on a Saturday.
“I didn’t need the manager to put an arm round me but what I didn’t realise when I became a manager is that people are different.
“Good managers know every player is different and that’s something I didn’t do very well as a manager. I found it difficult to put my arm round players.”
As Swindon’s director of football, Jewell is now passing on to boss
Richie Wellens (below) advice on the things that worked well and those that didn’t during his days in management.
Jewell left Liverpool without making a senior appearance but went on to play more than 400 games for Wigan and Bradford and then spent
14 years in charge of Bradford, Wednesday, Wigan, Derby and Ipswich.
His vast experience was why Swindon owner Lee Power wanted to recruit his former Bradford team-mate in December 2018 after sacking Phil Brown.
Jewell didn’t fancy the job but after recommending Wellens, with whom he’d worked for a month as assistant manager at Oldham, he agreed to go in as, in his words, ‘a helper’. “I don’t see myself as director of football,” said Jewell, “that’s just a title.
“It sounds really good and fancy – the pay doesn’t reflect it,” he added, laughing. “When I came out of the game I just thought I had all this experience I could share with younger managers.
“There’s no situation Richie is going to come up against I haven’t been in so I’m there to help him if he wants my help. “You have to make some mistakes to learn from them but I’m just trying to be there for the unavoidable ones.”
While Jewell is no longer the main man, he is adamant he still gets the same buzz at Swindon, who are top of League Two, that he used to get going up against Sir Alex Ferguson, Jose Mourinho, Arsene Wenger and Rafa Benitez. He added: “At Bradford, we played United on Boxing Day at Old Trafford, so I’m thinking they had another game two days later, they’ll rest a few – I worked all week on that assumption.
“So I go into the referee’s room with my captain and Fergie is walking towards me with Roy Keane. That is the first bad sign.
“You swap team-sheets and I see Stam, Neville, Keane, Scholes, Sheringham and Solskjaer.
“Normally I’d go through the opposition team on a clipboard, their weaknesses, this time I just went, ‘F ****** good luck!’
“But the team I feared playing most was Arsenal, they could really hurt you.
“If we had a corner, I’d just tell my players to kick it out because their goalkeeper would come out and it’d be like the Red Arrows.”
...ON PEP GUARDIOLA “I tried to sign him for Wigan – he was 34, I was told he wanted to leave Brescia, so I rang him and, fair play, he rang me back.
“Pep (left) knew all about our team – Jimmy Bullard, Graham Kavanagh – and said, ‘I like the way you play’. “In the end he went to Qatar and I get it: Wigan or Qatar.”