NLP editor Matt Badcock spends the day by the sea with top boss Steve King
Talent scout Steve is baying for a return
ON A day such as this one, you could forgive Steve King for taking some time out of Non-League football and sitting back watching the world go by while he recharges his batteries.
At the harbour near the former Welling United manager’s Eastbourne home, people are enjoying lunch, hopping on boat trips and basking in the summer sunshine.
But, after we’ve finished talking, charismatic King will be off to his 23rd game of the season. There is, he believes, no substitute for putting the hours, and miles, in.
“I probably go to about 150 games a year – at all levels,” King, who is determined to maintain his encyclopaedic knowledge of football at this level, says. “Because if someone recommends a player to me and I don’t know him, I’m upset about that. You reap what you sow.”
King is currently out of work, a perhaps surprising situation considering his Welling side reached the National League South promotion final last season after finishing third in the table.
A 1-0 defeat to Woking, who they finished two points behind, proved the ending to a season that had seen the Wings stay in the promotion hunt until the last despite a mid-season budget cut. Five players departed and he was regularly running with 14 players from Christmas onwards, an illustration of the obstacles they overcame to reach the final.
King departed Park View Road proud having won over the fans emphatically – Wings owner Mark Goldberg, the former Bromley manager now in charge of the team , admitted in a recent interview he had the management itch again, and took over the reins from King.
“It was a good honest group that gave everything – with some talent that could win matches on their own,” King says.
“We had a group that worked for each other. There was no magic formula. It was a group together, churning out win after win.”
In some ways that was overlooked with only winger Nassim L’Ghoul, now at Dover, voted in the National League South’s Team of the Year.
“Nassim didn’t play from New Year’s Day until the last day of the season because he ripped his hamstring against Dartford,” King says. “So he got in the team of the year for the first half of the season when he was unplayable.
“He would have gone to the Championship, 100 per cent, if he hadn’t got injured. But football changes, he should have got a penalty in the fihad and compensation was payable to the club. Dover came to an agreement.
“There were so many players who could have been in that team. Jack Jebb was outstanding before he ripped his knee ligaments. He would have been in Team of the Year and got a move. Brendan Kiernan should have been too. He scored 15 goals from wide areas and is now full-time at Harrogate. Thierry Audel was the best centre-half in the league by a country mile. No other centre half scored 12 goals in that division! He was like a Rolls Royce.
“We had a good solid spine and just kept finding a way. We beat Chelmsford in the semis. Rod Stringer’s teams are always hard but we just felt we had their number that year. And Woking probably felt the same about us.”
Welling took 50 points from 60 at home as King made it ten top five finishes in a management career that started in Dulwich Hamlet’s youth set-up and led to him landing the Lewes job.
Money-spinner
There he won three titles, taking the Sussex club to the top tier of Non-League football for the first time in club history – despite being denied promotion because of ground grading two times – before he won his fourth championship, the Southern League, in his first season at Farnborough. That was immediately followed by finishing runners-up to Braintree in the Conference South.
King was later in charge of Macclesfield, taking them into the fourth round in the FA Cup for the first time. Macc’s a job he still feels he wasn’t allowed to finish when he was let go with seven games remaining and the Silkmen joint-seventh in the table.
The cup run was a money-spinner in itself, let alone selling Colin Daniel, Arnaud Mendy, Ben Mills and Ben Tomlinson for a combined total of more than £100,000. Of that squad, an unprecedented 17 went onto play in the Football League.
King has had huge success in unearthing players and giving them the chance to shine in his attacking teams. In all, around 30 have moved up – including Brighton’s Solly March as well as Cardiff City midfielder Joe Ralls and Millwall’s Jed Wallace, who both played for the 51-year-old at Farnborough.
Like March, Jason Puncheon played under King at Lewes where Andy Drury, now at Havant, also resurrected his career.
“He (Drury) was on the JCB diggers, he was going to give up on football,” King says of the Havant midfielder, who played in the Championship with Ipswich. “I went and met him and said, ‘Jukebox, come on, I’ll help you love football again’. He was recently on a podcast with Kent Online and he said I was the right manager at the right time for him.
“I used to go up and see him at Ipswich and we still speak now. He’s got a dry sense of humour and he’s a good, good lad.
“I still speak to Leon Legge. I took him from Hailshnal, am, county league, and he went onto Brentford in the Championship. We had Ian Simpemba and Steve Robinson at Lewes then, Leon was like the junior and they trained him. He’s captain of Port Vale now.”
Perceptions
It’s where we come back to King’s determination to be ahead of the curve.
“Identifying talent is a talent and seeing further than your nose,” King says. “I know a lot of scouts, I have a lot of friends in the game, and they go and watch a player again, and again, and again.
“I believe you can see a lot of quality that first time. Yes, you can watch them again and see flaws – but you’ve seen that quality and you can nurture the other side.
“What are you watching and watching for? For them to fail so you can say no? If you feel, ‘Wow, he’s got something’, go with it.
“Russell Martin is another. Scotland captain – he was at Lewes in the U18s, went to Wycombe and went on from there.
“There’s loads of talent out there. League One, League Two, National League, National League South – the line is so thin that a top player in the South has got the potential to play in any of those levels. I believe they are all getting closer.”
King shares the same thoughts as many that U23 and academy football is too sterile and doesn’t always equip young footballers with the tools they need to have good careers in the professional game. Competitive football with three points on the line has been key in many currently plying their trade higher up the Pyramid.
Should he be higher too? King’s record – which amounts to two points per game throughout his whole career – stacks up against anyone in Non-League. As well as his titles, no one has more play-off finishes in the South and his teams, Farnborough, Whitehawk and Welling, have fallen on the wrong side of the result in three finals.
He’ll no doubt be back in the dug-out soon with a club that wants to progress and he’s self-aware enough to know it could mean continuand ing to try and change percepk tions.
“I think people perceive
I’ve had money,” he says. “I haven’t had money – I’ve been OK. I haven’t had the best, I haven’t had the worse.
“My strength is buying into players, them buying into me, and managing their personalities. Street kid, posh kid, council estate kid – I can deal with them. You have to be different levels with all of them.
“I’ve dealt with them out of football, helped with their
personal lives.
You become, not just their manager, but a different animal for them.
“You’re like a social worker. I love that. I love to give advice. Players would often follow me – it’s because we had a good relationship and, first and foremost, my expectations are high.
Showreel
“I said it at the end of season speech at Welling, ‘I know you didn’t want me at the beginning, but I hope I’ve gone a long way to changing your mind’. To which people shouted out, ‘We love you Kingy!’ That was nice.
“People perceive you in a certain way but when they get to know you, they realise you’re not like that.
“I’ve not sipped a drink in my life, I wouldn’t know what alcohol tastes like. But I love fashion, I’ve always been like that – Paul Tisdale
at MK Dons, I love the way he dresses on the line.
“I’ve always been my own person. I love fashion. Me is me and I’m not shy about that. But what you do get with me is a hard-working manager who leaves no stone unturned.”
King works tirelessly at his knowledge, but he’ll never stray away from what the eye sees.
“You can do that (use technology),” King says. “But there’s nothing like going to see someone play the game in real life.
“I could put up a showreel of myself putting one in the top corner. You never get a bad showreel! You don’t get the winger going up the wing and crossing it out of the ground, do you? You put the one where it’s crossed and the striker has headed it in.
“So I think you’ve got to see people in real life and I believe if you put the work in you will get the rewards.”
Identifying talent is a talent in itself, and seeing further than your nose Steve King