WARNOCK AT 70
‘I was my mum’s little boy really... she always said ‘I don’t have to worry about you Neil, I know you’ll be good at whatever you set your heart on’
GET beneath what must be the thickest skin in football and it is surprising what you find.
Neil Warnock is used to brushing off chants and insults, bile and vitriol.
But over an early-morning coffee in the run-up to his 70th birthday tomorrow, the bluff Yorkshireman is in surprisingly sentimental mood.
“I was my mum’s little boy really,” he said, wistfully revealing that side to him which few of the haters bother to look for. “I used to sit in front of her wheelchair and she used to play with my hair. It were lovely.
“She always said to me, ‘I don’t have to worry about you, Neil, because I know you will be good at whatever you set your heart on.’
“But she would not have quite believed how it has gone for her little boy. I love my mum. Even now I talk to the grandkids about my mum as if she was still here.”
Sadly Gladys Warnock was released from what her youngest son describes as “the horrible disease of multiple sclerosis” when Neil was only 13. It left a huge hole in his life.
“My dad was a macho man and of an era where he would never tell me that he loved me,” Warnock explained matter-of-factly. “And because he didn’t tell me, I thought he didn’t love me.
“I regret we did not get the chance to tell each other how we felt properly. I used to tell him when he fell ill just before he passed away, but he was not really aware then. That’s why I tell my own kids I love them 10 times a day. “
William Warnock had been working 16-hour shifts to provide for his ill wife and three children by driving a crane in a steel mill that was slowly killing him.
“When I left school, Dad got me a job in the office,” Warnock recalled. “I had my nice white shirt and tie on but by the time I had walked through the bar mill to the office, I looked down at my shirt and it was absolutely covered with black specks. My dad was coughing all the time and he died in the early 1960s. I thought I can’t live like this.”
A brief spell working as a coach at a ten-pin bowling alley ended when he taught the wife of a Chesterfield player who encouraged her husband to give the young winger a trial.
When a playing career that was largely unremarkable ended, Warnock turned to chiropody to earn a living while juggling his day job with non-league management at Gainsborough Trinity.
Some 15 clubs and a record eight promotions later, Warnock has been as busy as ever this week preparing for the visit of Wolves tonight.
“I think the football is keeping me young,” said Warnock. “It frightens me what will happen if I don’t have it any more.
“It is the humour keeping me so alive.
“My boys are my life, really, in football.
“I have given them the opportunity to play at the top level and I want to see them repay me by enjoying it.
“The day-to-day buzz is the main thing.”
Warnock’s wife Sharon has previously been diagnosed with breast cancer and he said: “Sharon tells me we’ve got places to see and things like that.
“But whenever I have been out of work I would collect the eggs from the chickens, take the kids off to school, then wonder how many coffees you could have out in one day and how long you could walk the dogs for.”