If you stand still, you are going to get hurt
Chris Wilder is trying to ignore all the plaudits for Sheffield United’s outstanding season
NORWICH CITY already know their fate. They fell into the Championship early. Late this afternoon, a group of three desperate clubs will engage in a grim battle to avoid being relegated from the Premier League, too. At the start of the season, a lot of people paid good money to wager that Sheffield United would be one of them. A lot of people lost their shirts.
Chris Wilder does not blame them for placing their bets. He understands that most football fans are so preoccupied by the Premier League that they do not pay much heed to the work that clubs and their managers are doing in the second tier. ‘Our media day in the Championship was Radio Sheffield, the local paper and a couple of the nationals,’ s ays Wilder. ‘ This season, we were all going into the unknown. Me, too.’
Last summer, Wilder bought players from Preston and QPR and Swansea as well as Sander Berge from Racing Genk. ‘ We tried to recruit smart because we understood we were going into new territory,’ says Wilder. ‘ We bought players that had played in the Championship because if it went the way that the majority of people thought it would go —- which was relegation — then we would come back stronger.’
Except that was not how things turned out. This season has not been a battle against relegation for Sheffield United. They have spent most of the season breathing down the necks of the top four, not looking over their shoulder. While Watford, Bournemouth and Aston Villa fight for their lives this afternoon, Wilder and his team will be playing at Southampton, knowing that whatever the result, they will finish in the Premier League top 10.
IT was only last week that they gave up chasing a place in Europe. It was only after the lockdown ended — and the odds were stacked higher against them by the introduction of the five substitutes rule — that the prospect of making it into the Champions League slipped away. It is hardly surprising that even in this season when Jurgen Klopp’s Liverpool have swept all before them, many of his colleagues in the Premier League believe Wilder is the Manager of the Year.
Wilder feels a degree of satisfaction about that but if you are looking for an orgy of self-congratulation, you have come to the wrong man. There is a sense of professional fulfilment that he has mixed it with managers of the pedigree of Carlo Ancelotti, Klopp and his managerial idol, Jose Mourinho, and held his own. And, yes, he is pleased for his coaching staff and his players for the part they have played in proving so many wrong.
But this was never going to be a portrait of a man at rest. ‘I am not a comfortable manager,’ says Wilder. He repeats that phrase several times during the course of the conversation. He means that he does not spend much time smelling the roses. He works and he works and he works. And he fears what would happen if he stopped. ‘I know the pitfalls of taking your foot off the gas and thinking you have landed,’ he says.
So do not think that he is any way sated by the success he has had this season. The best managers are never sated. They always want more. They are always looking to the next challenge. They are always thinking about how to improve t heir t eam. They are al ways worrying about carrying the club along with them in matching their ambitions.
‘I believe we have taken confidence from what we have done this season but I do know how the game is,’ says Wilder, 52. ‘I want more from myself and the players and the football club. It’s been brilliant to manage against Mourinho and
Ancelotti. Ancelotti has managed Real Madrid and AC Milan and won everything in the game but he is still humble, which I really admired. The Premier League has been everything I hoped it would be.
‘But I am not a comfortable manager. We have climbed a mountain but we have not come this far to only get this far. We all know the hard work has to continue. In the last few weeks, the players have played against Kane, Son and Moura, and then Jimenez, Jota and Traore and then Pulisic, Tammy and Willian. Brilliant experiences for us all and ones we want more of. Not being comfortable is the biggest thing I have to drill into the players because it has happened at a lot of football clubs.
‘Maybe it’s a northern attitude. Or maybe it’s just an attitude. It’s an attitude that says we’re here to play, we’re here to compete and we’re here to win, regardless of what you’ve got and who’s stood next to you and what I’m up against.
‘We’re here to fight. We are in the ring and we know we’re up against it. It’s obvious we are up against it every week but it does not mean our fight is diluted. It is still a fight we are enjoying.’
Now and again, he mentions ‘ sliding doors’ moments in his managerial career, moments that led to the breakout success he has enjoyed this season. He chuckles at the idea he has not exactly been an overnight sensation. He has not been offered any short cuts. ‘I haven’t had a leg-up,’ he says. He managed Halifax Town, in the Conference, for six years. He spent six more years at Oxford United.
‘It has taken its time for me to get here,’ he says. ‘I’ve always been hugely ambitious but I think sometimes it has been sliding doors moments and you need that little break to happen for you, whether it’s investment in the club or getting the opportunity to manage.
‘When I left Oxford for Northampton, everybody thought I was off my rocker but I knew the chairman at Northampton was going to back them. The timing was right.’
WILDER enjoyed his encounter with Mourinho earlier this month as much as any of his Premier League experiences. Wilder’s side beat Mourinho’s Spurs 3- 1 and after the match, Mourinho not only congratulated him warmly in front of the television cameras but shared a couple of glasses of wine with him in the manager’s office at Bramall Lane. ‘Class act, by the way,’ Wilder said to the television cameras, after Mourinho had stopped to offer his congratulations.
Wilder chuckles at the idea Mourinho has become some sort of mentor to him. Others might indulge it but Wilder’s not that sort. ‘I’ve only met him once before we played them this month,’ he says. But nor does he make any secret of the fact that of the current crop of managers, Mourinho is the one he admires
‘I NEVER WENT INTO A GAME WITH DAMAGE LIMITATION ON MY MIND’
most. ‘From a distance, as a football man,’ he says, ‘I’m in awe of what he has achieved.’
At the end of August, Wilder’s side fought back from being 2-0 down to get a draw against Chelsea at Stamford Bridge and after the match, Wilder saw Mourinho, who was out of work at the time, sitting in the bar of the hotel where the Sheffield United manager was staying. He engineered a conversation with him.
‘I caught his eye,’ says Wilder. ‘I was desperate to catch his eye. And I had a minute with him. He gave me the old tap round the head, which he gives a lot of people. And he just said “Well done, keep it going” and that’s the only time I’ve met him before we played Spurs. What a manager, though. He is an absolute serial winner.
‘For me, the two are always Sir Alex Ferguson and Mourinho. Mourinho has done it in a different way, going from club to club. Sir Alex kept reinventing teams and moving it on. They know how to win games of football. The players need to mould to Mourinho. It shouldn’t be a case of him moulding to the players.
‘He wins, he’s intelligent and he drives his club forward and he never looks to me as if he has lost his hunger or eye of the tiger at all. He’s not a mentor or someone I pick the phone up to but if there was a result to be had by anybody, if it were the last result in the last game of football ever played, I would have him manage the team all day long. He just wins.’
WILDER worked hard to prepare himself and his players psychologically for what was going to be thrown at them when the season began. ‘Get ready,’ he told them. ‘Get ready to be judged and get ready for everyone to have an opinion about you.’
He talked to experienced managers about the tests he and his players should expect and the storms they would have to walk through.
‘We were expecting a fight against relegation,’ he says. ‘You’ve got to be. I spoke to managers who have been in the Premier League who talked to us about losing 4-0 or 5-0, who talked to us about losing five or six games on the spin, talking about playing well but not getting anything out of the game. You listen and respect those opinions.
‘But I look at everything as a challenge. I never went into a game this season thinking about damage limitation. Sure, you are 2- 0 down against Liverpool at Anfield... and are thinking “I’ll take 2-0 here” and you are hoping things don’t get ugly and you don’t want to get beat five or six because of the psychological damage.
‘But getting a good start this season was key. We got a late equaliser in the first game at Bournemouth and that did us the power of good. Then we won our first home game, against Crystal Palace. And we kept getting a series of boosts along the way: drawing at Chelsea, only losing narrowly to Liverpool at Bramall Lane, beating Arsenal, drawing with Manchester United.
‘ We have not had long losing streaks. We have nurtured a tough group of players. It’s Premier League football, it’s a tough environment and mentally these boys have got to be strong. We have really enjoyed it. We have enjoyed the intensity. We’ve enjoyed the battles and the challenges.’
Wilder’s success has wider implications for English football, too. More than half the managers in the Premier League now are British. A reputation is being restored: Wilder has defied expectations, Frank Lampard has seized his opportunity at Stamford Bridge, Brendan Rodgers has had an outstanding season at Leicester, David Moyes cleaned up the mess Manuel Pellegrini left at West Ham, Sean Dyche has overachieved again at Burnley and Steve Bruce survived predictions of doom at Newcastle.
‘Frank deserves a lot of credit for the job he’s done at Chelsea,’ says Wilder when I ask his ideas on who would be his manager of the year. ‘Going into a new club with little experience, getting to the FA Cup final, putting young players in, first time in the Premier League and it’s not like there’s a huge support system around him. He’s not a puppet out there.
‘I think there has been a snobbery against British managers. I worked under Dave Bassett and people still talk about him as if he was back to front, back to front.
‘He was a lot more than that. He had video analysis guys in, he had sports psychologists in, he had conditioning guys in before anybody else had it. He had to bridge the gap in quality to the bigger clubs somewhere else and he did that. And Sam Allardyce. The perception of
Sam and the people he had in his staff was wrong. He had worldclass players like Okocha, Djorkaeff and Hierro, and they are not playing for him and he is not getting those results for Bolton — Bolton, by the way — and qualifying for Europe if he is a one- trick pony.
‘It winds me up really because of how he is perceived. Back in the mid-Nineties, what Sam was doing, what Howard Wilkinson was doing, what Harry Redknapp was doing, these are really intelligent managers and I find it frustrating that a lot of their work was overlooked.’
Wilder is, at least, getting some of the credit he deserves for what he and his team have achieved this season. Not that it will affect him.
‘Just because we have finished in the top 10, that doesn’t guarantee us anything,’ he says.
‘It is such a cut-throat division. If you stand still, you are going to get hurt. This has to be a foundation for us to establish ourselves in the division. I am not a comfortable manager. This has whetted the appetite. I want more of it.’
‘WE’RE HERE TO FIGHT AND IT’S A FIGHT THAT WE ARE ENJOYING’