KEV COPPED IT
KEVIN NICHOLSON LOOKS BACK ON A CAREER OF HIGHS AND LOWS
Torquay United legend Kevin Nicholson reveals his rather unusual Wembley memories
TORQUAY UNITED had just won promotion to the Football League at Wembley but Kevin Nicholson wasn’t celebrating in the dressing room with his teammates.
Instead, he was in a small room in the bowels of the national stadium with a drug tester desperately trying to provide a sample.
“It was about 80 degrees at Wembley and I was dehydrated,” Nicholson recalls of that May afternoon in 2009. “There are all these pictures of the lads in the dressing room popping champagne and I’m not in any of them because I’m downstairs with a bloke looking at me trying to have a pee.
“They have to literally watch you do it. It’s hard enough to pee with someone watching you whether you’re hydrated or not. So I was down there, downing bottles of water, desperate to get back up with the lads and couldn’t. By the time I did they’d all got ready and gone to see their families. My dad came to the game but I didn’t get to see him because I’d been so long he’d had to shoot off !”
Until then it had been all business for the Gulls. A year earlier they’d had a good season that had “come apart” in the play-offs against rivals Exeter City. Their bid to put a shine on the season also slipped by when they lost to Ebbsfleet United in the FA Trophy final. This was about redemption.
“We were really, really good for that level,” says Nicholson, now head of coaching at Exeter. “Paul Buckle put together a team whose biggest strength was its mentality. The bulk of the squad was at its peak and he peppered it with lads with a bit more experience who could steady the ship like Chris Hargreaves.
“Then younger lads coming through like Elliot Benyon, who were good young players but not yet mature. Sometimes you have that dynamic and belief in each other. We were just a team that never gave up.
“We weren’t the prettiest in the world. We were the kind of team that would batter you physically for 80 minutes, hit from a corner, hit on the break from something else, and then in the last ten minutes we’d pass the ball about a little bit and everyone would say we played good football.
“The reality was that we won most of the games through hard work, organisation, determination, good set-plays. It was exciting for fans because they always knew we’d give it a go.”
But they were also desperate to see their team return to the Football League. Driven by the heartache, 12 months after the disappointment they put it right.
“The loss to Exeter in the play-offs and the Trophy defeat were two big driving forces,” Nicholson says.
“We wanted to prove we should have been up the year before. It was a real siege mentality. ‘We messed up last year, we’re not going to go through that feeling again’.
“The Wembley final when we lost to Ebbsfleet, we made a week of it. We went up two nights before, trained at Arsenal’s old training ground, had two or three days in the hotel, nice food – all that kind of stuff.
“We got suits for the day – albeit cheap Marks & Spencer’s suits but we still got them – and it passed us by a bit. It was a great experience but we didn’t win.
Tracksuits
“At the time it felt like we were really preparing for it and making a special effort. But when you look back, we had one of the best away records in the league, and we’d done the same every week.
“We’d travelled up on the Friday, gone to the game in tracksuits, prepared right and got results. The one time at Wembley – and I get it because how often do you play at Wembley – we probably lost sight of what was important.
“The following year Paul Buckle was never going to let that happen again. We beat Histon in the semis and it was really quite subdued in the dressing room. Bucks basically said: You’ve not done anything. We know how this can go. Get yourself ready.
“We watched on telly that Cambridge had beaten Stevenage in the other semi and they were popping champagne. It felt like: We’ve got them.
“We travelled up on the Friday, went to Wembley in our tracksuits, prepared like any other game and we professionally saw them off. Two really good goals, an all-round performance – which is what we were about – and we put the season before right.”
For Nicholson, now 39, it was some of his happiest days as a player. Starting out at Crewe and Sheffield Wednesday, the defender also attended Lilleshall alongside future England internationals Scott Parker, Francis Jeffers and Alan Smith.
But it was at Notts County and then Scarborough where he really became an established first-team player who would go on to make more than 600 professional appearances.
Nicholson’s highlights include captaining England C in Grenada and Barbados having won his first caps in the Four Nations in 2007.
“I think about three leftbacks pulled out at the of the 2006-07 season,” he says. “I’d finished at Forest Green and had at least ten days off when
I got the call. I vividly remember taking my missus down to the local park and I had her feeding me side-foot volleys and headers! We must have looked a right sight on this green with her feeding me different services to try and get myself sharp again.”
Psychology
England C were an open age team at that stage and Nicholson treasures the shirts and caps. It’s also where he had an interesting insight into the psychological side of the game that has always interested him.
“You got treated like a king,” Nicholson says. “Like a Premier League player. The training was great, Paul Fairclough, Steve Burr, Mick Payne – I absolutely loved it. I really got the best of it.
“As a squad we would all have to interview each other.
We also all had a book we had to pass up and down the table and write about our team-mates in it. It was good fun and really interesting.
“We had the sports psychologist, Daniel Abrahams, come to talk to us when we were in Wales. He does a lot in golf.
“I always loved that kind of stuff. I came across different mentors as I was going through my career. The first I would class as a different thinker was a guy called Roger Spry. He came in as fitness coach at Sheffield Wednesday under Ron Atkinson.
“He’d done all his education abroad. Back then a warm-up was a jog around the pitch, stretch your calves and let’s play. He’d worked in Brazil, America, Italy, Portugal, Spain – he would do what is now common-place, dynamic stretches and things like that.
“He was big on psychology. I used to go and seen him in the summers when I was still playing up near Burton in a converted barn. There are pictures all over his house from when he was working at Porto. The president of Porto called him in the office and said, ‘We’ve got this kid, he’s exceptional but he’s really weak and we need you to work with him’. It was Luis Figo.
“They are the guys I took to in my career and the psychology side. As a young player it took me a long time to get over disappointment if I’d had a bad game – it negatively affected me. So learning how to deal with that and move on was always big.
“I’m currently writing a new psychology block for our academy. It’s one of those things that is massively under-utilised in football.”
It was natural Nicholson would move into the dug-out as he eventually did with Torquay. It was an experience that will set him up for years. Driving the minibus to away games, off-field strife, he managed to keep the Gulls in the National League and gave platforms for players like Angus MacDonald and Kieffer Moore, now in the Championship with Hull City and Wigan Athletic respectively, along with Newport’s Dan Butler and Port Vale’s Nathan Smith.
Pleasure
Nicholson then had a brief spell at Step 6 Mousehole where he was manager, coached the academy and extended his playing career.
“I remember spending time years ago with Paul Tisdale when he was manager at Exeter. He said to me, ‘Football is football and three points is three points whether you get them in Sunday League or the Premier League’. I get what he meant.
“Winning at Mousehole – once I’d become part of what it was – was just as big a thrill as winning at Torquay or Notts County. You’ve prepared all week, set the team up, and there was a real buzz about winning the game.
“I was playing, coaching, coaching some full-time players, some part-time, I was managing, running an academy – so it was a real do-everything type of job and I enjoyed it.”
That has fed into his current role as head of coaching at Exeter City, where he is overseeing the development of the coaches in the academy.
“Exeter City are an incredibly well-run football club,” he says. “Very focused, everybody
pulling in the same direction type of attitude. The first team staff have either played for the club, been in the academy or both.
“They’ve worked their way through, understand how the club works and its relationship with the academy. There’s an on-going cycle of players coming through the academy, making the first team, maybe moving on and coming back again because they understand what it means.
“More than any club I’ve ever been at, Exeter are on the same page. You see a very aligned, well focused and understanding football club full of good people. It’s a real pleasure.”