I don’t want to die in the dugout!
But Warnock keeps coming back for more as he targets Premier return for Boro
I cried my eyes out... after that it was always about proving people wrong
NEIL WARNOCK sits in one of the public lounges at the five star Rockliffe Hall hotel in the countryside outside Darlington and watches as some of the staff bring in fresh flowers for every table. He smiles. He is getting used to a bit of luxury in his old age. He says the facilities at the Middlesbrough training ground next door are the best he has ever seen. ‘The only thing they don’t provide for the players in the changing room is a pair of carpet slippers,’ says Warnock.
It is a long time and a different world since Warnock started out in management, collecting the subs and washing the kit for his players at his local Sunday league team in Todwick, just outside Sheffield, more than 40 years ago. He opened a greengrocer’s when he was a player at Barnsley and when he took over at Gainsborough Trinity soon after, he combined the manager’s job with a chiropody practice. Even when he managed Sheffield United in the Premier League, he still liked to dabble in his old profession. ‘I worked on Mikele Leigertwood’s ingrowing toenail today,’ he told an interviewer at Bramall Lane in 2006. ‘I was always good at ingrowing nails and Mikele’s got two.’
He does not need any of that any more. No more sidelines. He’s made it. He will be 72 later this year and he drives a nice sports car with a soft top, he has a lovely home in Cornwall where he walks the dogs, talks to his ducks and collects eggs from his chickens and he and his wife, Sharon, have just bought a holiday place near Lake Maggiore in northern Italy. But he still can’t let go of football.
When he took over at Middlesbrough with eight games to go at the end of last season and steered them away from relegation from the Championship, it was the eighth job he had taken since he left Sheffield in 2007 and the eighth time he had told the media that this would definitely be his last job. But every time he thinks he is going to turn his back on the game, it pulls him back in.
‘I don’t want to die in a dugout,’ he says. ‘Do I need it psychologically? I honestly don’t know. I toss and turn at times. I don’t want to be carried out. I’d like to see one or two places around the world but at the moment you can’t see anywhere.
‘At the moment, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything and Sharon isn’t missing out on going anywhere. I don’t feel like I am cheating her out of something. I didn’t want to come for the sake of it. I don’t need the job, do I?’
He always finds a reason to come back. This time, he told everyone that part of it was that it would give him the chance to complete 1,500 games as a manager. The landmark will be reached in Middlesbrough’s home game with Barnsley at the beginning of next month, he says. He has already won a record eight promotions down the decades and he would like to make Middlesbrough number nine. That’s another reason.
But there’s something deeper, too. Something that belongs to the very beginning of this long life in football, a moment that scarred him, a moment before the nice houses and the nice cars and the changing rooms where they have everything but carpet slippers. A moment that created in him the motivation shared by so many successful people: a fear of rejection and a desire to please.
It came in the summer of 1969 when Warnock was a 20-yearold winger playing at his first club, Chesterfield. He had been at Saltergate for a couple of seasons, trying to cling on in English football’s basement division, working for a hard, gruff taskmaster of a manager, Jimmy McGuigan. He was at his two-up-two-down terraced house in Youlgreave Drive in Frecheville, Sheffield, when the call came. He remembers every detail. ‘I was at home and the phone went about half eight in the morning and it was a day off and it was my mate Terry Rose,’ says Warnock. ‘He said, “Oh, Neil, I’m ever so sorry to hear about your release” and I was gobsmacked because I didn’t even know. I started filling up but I put on an act and I said: “Oh, it’s no problem, I expected it, I’m coming in later, I’ll see you then”. And then I put the phone down and cried my eyes out like I’ve never cried before.
‘And it was in the Derbyshire Times on a Friday morning, all before McGuigan told me to my face. I learned that early: always tell a player to his face if you are dropping him or releasing him. Tell them to their face. It nearly broke my heart that, picking the phone up and my mate telling me I had been released.
‘So I think I have to prove people wrong. That’s been with me since I was given that free transfer from Chesterfield. I felt bitter when that happened and I thought, “Right, I’m going to show you” and I went to Rotherham and played for them and moved on again. Everywhere I’ve been, I’ve had that in me.
‘So when I got eight games here at the end of last season, it suited me perfectly. I’ve always wanted to show the chairman here, Steve Gibson, how good I am. Maybe that goes back to Chesterfield, too. I want to impress him because I like him. When I was a manager at other places in the past, he always had time for me. He always went out of his way to speak to me after a game.
‘It was bloody hard work to make us safe here at Middlesbrough last season. I know I’ve got nothing to prove really but maybe it comes from somewhere deep and that first rejection at Chesterfield. All my career, it’s been fighting back from adversity. After that, it was always about proving people wrong.’
If his own feelings of rejection still burn inside, Warnock has perfected
the method of making others feel wanted and at home. ‘I don’t think you play for clubs,’ he says. ‘I think you play for people. I think you play for managers. That’s what I’ve built my career around, getting players wanting to play for me. I used to take all the cast-offs and, in the majority of cases, I turned players’ careers around.’
He delves back into the past and reaches for another seminal moment in his managerial journey to illustrate that. When he was at Rotherham as a player in the early Seventies, they asked him if he would speak to Len Ashurst, the Hartlepool United manager. Warnock didn’t want to go but he agreed to listen to Ashurst out of courtesy. ‘By the time he’d finished talking to me,’ says Warnock, ‘I thought I was going to play for Real Madrid. That stuck with me, too.’
He is at it again up here in the north east already. On Thursday afternoon, he did a series of press calls at Teesside airport ahead of Middlesbrough’s Carabao Cup victory over Shrewsbury Town on Friday evening. He said how impressed he had been with his team in preseason. In one game at Plymouth, he told the media, his centre back Paddy McNair played so well it was ‘like watching Beckenbauer’. ‘I don’t think there’s any secret to the promotions I’ve managed with teams,’ he says, ‘but if you look at all of those sides, every one of them has reunions and they all turn up for them. That sums it up. They never forget that team spirit. I saw something Klopp said last week about how Liverpool aren’t the best team but they have got the best team spirit and the best desire. That’s how I feel my teams are.
‘I build the team spirit in pre-season. By being myself. I speak to individuals. We had a barbeque at our house in Cornwall when we played Plymouth. As I’m cooking sausages, I talk to a couple of players. I’m cooking burgers and I talk to a few more. We played a couple of games against Plymouth behind closed doors. It was a good week. I got to know them a bit better and they did me. Their attitude was super.
‘We beat Newcastle 5-1 and we played so well and I had to say to them, “If you’re not careful you’re going to give me a bad reputation. People aren’t used to seeing my teams play like that”. They are a good group. I wanted to bring a couple of leaders in and Grant Hall has done really well and Jonny Howson has stepped up.’
Warnock has only been able to make one signing so far in the close season and eight players have departed but he is sanguine about the transfer activity. ‘I used to worry about that kind of thing when I was a young manager,’ he says, ‘but I don’t worry about it any more. We should have someone else in next week and another couple before the first game against Watford next Friday.’
He knows that securing that ninth promotion will not be easy. Middlesbrough finished last season only five points clear of the drop zone after Warnock dragged them clear but his presence at the helm and his record has encouraged the bookmakers to name his side among the top eight favourites to climb up to the Premier League.
‘I’ve heard a few people talking about us aiming for a mid-table season,’ he says. ‘Look, I’m 71. Midtable doesn’t do it for you when you’re 71. In for a penny, in for a pound. I want to be challenging at the top. If we end up in mid-table then it won’t be for wont of trying to be up there with the leading teams in the division. It won’t be easy but I’ve got a good group of young players here already.’
His enthusiasm for the job is undimmed. Supporters warm to that. A couple of months ago, footage of him cycling home from the Middlesbrough training ground went viral on social media. It caught the public imagination because it was the antithesis of the image of the big manager in the big car. He works out in the training ground gym every day, headband on, sweat pouring off him. He likes the players to see him putting it in. ‘Never get old, lads,’ he says to them.
Even the logistics of the job are galvanising him. He has become an evangelist for Eastern Airways. ‘Whether it’s coincidence or whether it’s Him up there, I don’t know,’ Warnock says, ‘but the week I took over here, they started a service between Teesside and Newquay. I can be at home in Cornwall in under two hours. They’ve been brilliant for me.’
Optimism infuses everything he does. He’s been riding the flat countryside here on his electric bike. ‘You can say it’s cheating, the electric bike, but it isn’t because I turn it off when I can,’ he says. His weight is down. His dander is up. He is ready to go again.
‘I love that dressing room and being round the players’ he says. ‘It makes me feel so quick and so there. I love the fishing and collecting my eggs from the chickens but it doesn’t stimulate me like this.
‘I think Sharon knows. This is my 41st year. I’ve not done owt else, have I? Look, we have got a lot of promising young lads and, as far as promotion goes, nothing is impossible. It would be another miracle but we have pulled them off before.’