FIREMAN SAM’S IN A BLAZE OF GLORY
CRAIG EDWARDS is a manager, who, somehow, always ends up being the man charged with rescuing clubs from disaster. For 24 years he has been the Non-League Fireman Sam, lurching from one seemingly unsavable calamity to the next – and doing a fine job at it.
Perhaps, then, it is appropriate he is now settled in at ambitious Cheshunt, an Isthmian League Premier club with aspirations of moving further up the pyramid after Edwards took them to promotion in 2019.
But naturally he’s quick to remind that it wasn’t all plain sailing when he took over the previous year.
“When I walked in there, they were six points adrift at the bottom of Isthmian Division One,” he said. “But this is a club where there’s progression. My team off the pitch is lightyears ahead of what it was when I first went there. We’ve got a physio, analyst, goalkeeping coach, everything is being done more professionally.
“It’s an attractive club to play for, it’s not a hard sell. I’ve been at clubs where I’ve had to take them down the high street to sign them instead of the ground. I had to sell them the team and everything else rather than the ground! With Cheshunt it’s a totally different thing.” Edwards turned to football management having boxed professionally for almost nine years, at one time being under the wing of top promoter Frank Warren, after his football playing career had stalled. He won three promotions at Barkingside, one at Barking after lifting them off the bottom of the table and kept Grays Athletic up and led them to historic FA Cup and Trophy runs.
Then came two years at Ford
United, who renamed Redbridge, where he took over with the club bottom of the Ryman Premier with eight points from 14 games. Edwards kept them up, of course, and then won promotion to Conference South the following year before the budget was cut and he resigned. “Invariably the jobs I’ve always got is when a team is in the bottom three and I’ve had to get them out of trouble,” he said. “Then the following year we really build on it. A big part of the job I have to do is building a new team. It’s always a great challenge, my players know, to be fair, that I’ll always get a team together. “The biggest challenge I ever had was when I was at Ford, we were eighth in the Conference South and I got called in by the chairman on a Tuesday, he’d cut the budget completely.
Reputation
“On the Thursday we had three players at training, we were playing Newport away on the Saturday. I signed all these young boys to get a side out, we went there with 12 players. One of them who started was awful and I had to take him off after 15 minutes.
“How we did it, I don’t know, we beat them 3-2. I had a Sunday morning goalkeeper who did ever so well. We celebrated like we won the World Cup.
“A few weeks later we went to Lewes, they were third, and after 20 minutes we were 4-0 up. Steve King, their manager, came over to me and said, ‘I don’t know how you do it’. I thanked him and then he said, ‘Don’t get a reputation for doing it on the cheap’. They were the truest words anyone’s ever said to me. A lot of the time I think I’ve gone to clubs and done jobs but they had more money than they gave us.
They would do that because they knew I could do a job regardless.” It’s a reputation Edwards has formed which he sees as a hinderance but also a trait that has helped him get back into the game quickly. “There’s been a few clubs I’ve been at where they get someone in and they offer them a budget which is more than what I had, it’s happened too often to be a coincidence,” he said. “Yet on the flip side I might not have got a job if I didn’t have that reputation.
“I hated being out of football, there were jobs, perhaps in hindsight, I would have been better off saying no to or ‘if you want me to do it, I’ll do it for this amount’. “When you’re out of football you can get forgotten about and then it’s harder to get back. I’ve been pretty harshly treated over the years but I’ve loved basically every moment of managing.”
Edwards is rarely out of the game long. After Redbridge it was keeping Chelmsford City up, then it was saving Dulwich Hamlet before joining Billericay Town, in 2010, where he stayed for seven years, his longest job to date.
Mudheap
He won the Ryman Premier title in 2012 and just when it looked like the club was heading for better things, he stepped down when Glenn Tamplin made himself joint manager.
“You could literally put your foot through the stand, the metal was so rusty,” said Edwards. “We trained on a mudheap out the back, I don’t think we got any new equipment in seven years. Ironically, when I left, they came into bundles, it’s been like that a few times but I don’t regret it, it is what it is.” Cheshunt are second but it looks unlikely they’ll ever get to prove whether they would have won promotion this season. Edwards is missing football like crazy but knows he has built another team capable of fighting at the right end of the table.
“We had some fantastic results and you get a feel for your side,” he said. “I felt every game the boys turned up feeling they were going to win, they was no fear.
“This year was the first time I’ve virtually kept the whole squad from the year before. We’ve never been in that position before.”