THE TIME LORD
ONLY WENGER’S BEEN IN HIS JOB LONGER THAN PAUL TISDALE
THERE is nothing hot about Paul Tisdale’s seat. In a number of senses it might even be the comfiest chair in football.
‘It’s a Swedish gravity chair,’ he says. ‘It’s worth about £2,000 but I found it in a junk shop for £150. That was a good buy. It’s designed to help bad backs like mine.’
Exeter City’s manager reclines i nto his seat, a l arge rocking contraption that goes some way to filling the wooden office he shares at the training ground with director of football Steve Perryman, a 61-year-old who knows a thing or two about longevity.
He played a club-record 665 games for Tottenham and was given the all-clear by doctors after a heart problem left him in a coma last year. ‘ I’m still in football,’ Perryman says. ‘That’s not always an easy thing to do.’
It’s what we’re here to discuss. It’s been seven years since Perry-
“I won’t tell the boys to waste time or dive”
man i nvited Tisdale to a j ob interview and realised he had so much in common with the deep thinker across the table. Tisdale is still there which, remarkably, makes this 40-year-old the second longest serving manager — behind Arsene Wenger — in the top four divisions of English football.
There have been two promotions, a relegation, the tragedy of Adam Stansfield and offers of far better paid jobs from Swansea City (twice) and Southampton, among others. There is also the name of Troy Archibald-Henville, notable in these parts because his £50,000 transfer from Tottenham in 2010 remains the only time in the past 10 years that Exeter were able to pay a fee for a player.
Life in League Two can require some serious lateral thinking and for Tisdale, one of the game’s more f ascinating characters, that’s something that comes naturally. ‘I was always a bit different,’ he says. He is wearing training kit today, but on the touchline he often goes for a cravat, flat cap and tweed jacket. His best friend is Ray Kelvin, the multi-millionaire founder of Ted Baker. He adds: ‘I was a bit of an oddity.’
The reference is to his playing days, an occasionally ‘unhappy time’ spanning a few games in the Premier League as a midfielder with Southampton and spells in Greece and Finland. ‘I was a dream to manage,’ he says. ‘I did what I was told, I was very respectful.
‘Perhaps that was my downfall — maybe I wasn’t assertive enough in fighting my corner. Like I say, maybe a bit of an oddity.’
As a manager, he seems to have found a more natural vocation. Statistically and in the eyes of the fans, he is Exeter’s best manager, arriving in 2006 when they were in the Conference and taking them to eighth in League One in 2011, before relegation in 2012 when the finances finally told.
Not that he ever saw himself as a manager. ‘I never wanted to do it,’ he says. ‘It was an industry I never felt I could be inspired by when I was a player. I stumbled into coaching after having a deteriorating back condition. It wasn’t the offer of coaching that did it — it was the opportunity to build, to create the business. I talk about that stuff every day with Ray.’
The opportunity came at Team Bath, the university side he led to the first round proper of the FA Cup in 2003 — the first university side to get there since 1881. He stayed for five years, on a remit to recruit rejects from other clubs. He built Team Bath from scratch, won four promotions in six years and sent more than a dozen players back into the professional game. ‘We also had guys who got first- class degrees and work as doctors and in finance,’ he says. ‘The job had a lot of appeal. It gave me that blank canvas that I like.’ It’s what Perryman was offering when Tisdale was called in for interview in 2006. ‘Steve offered me the chance to create something. More importantly, he had the same values.’
Tisdale is referring to ethics, the cornerstone of this supporter trust-run club and the key reason why he has not left. ‘I don’t want to sound preachy, but for me a club has to be run the right way. For me, it means doing things properly. I want people to be courteous to other people, from the dinner lady to Steve.’
That attitude was borne out when Stansfield, his star striker, died of cancer aged just 31 in 2010. Tisdale, along with Perryman and CEO Julian Tagg, insisted on paying his family the full amount for the remaining two years on his contract, rather than the much lower sum required by law.
He adds: ‘On the pitch, I’m not going to tell the ball boys to timewaste, or for the guys to dive or pinch a yard at a free-kick. We must behave appropriately.’
Perryman recalls the day he interviewed Tisdale. ‘It was like he was interviewing me,’ he says. ‘His main question was, “Do you have to win at all costs?” I knew then this was the right man to run the club.
‘But do not, under any circumstances, see that honesty as a weakness. He wants to win so badly, and that must be hard for him because we are maybe twothirds of the way down the League Two table in terms of wages. You look at the results he has got here, the promotions, and you’ll see how special he is.’
Twice Swansea came in for him, in 2009 and 2010, and twice he turned them down because he had given his word that he would not go before he had completed a fiveyear plan to stabilise the club.
‘I had a project and a goal in mind, I’d given my word to Steve, and I wouldn’t have been able to live with myself if I left before 2011,’ he says. ‘I felt I had to achieve what I said I would achieve. Maybe I am a romantic and deluded but I do think I will go on to reach the higher levels of the game. It might happen soon or it might take a long time, but when it happens I will have more to look back on.’
In the meantime, he is very comfortable in his chair.