Warnock’s Scottish sanctuary
NEIL WARNOCK EXCLUSIVE
NEIL WARNoCk has a routine for the fifth hole of the Blairmore and Strone Golf Club in Dunoon. Clutching a water bottle from his bag, he takes the weight off his feet, gazes out at the Holy Loch and seeks guidance from within.
Players, job offers, the best way to cope with his wife’s cancer diagnosis. on the fairway of the fifth, nothing is out of bounds.
‘There’s only nine holes,’ he tells Sportsmail. ‘But the number of decisions I have made on the fifth hole of that golf course is incredible.
‘The fifth hole is right up at the top. It overlooks the Holy Loch and the Firth of Clyde and so on.
‘It’s a beautiful view. And whenever I play there is very rarely anybody else on. I’ll take my drink up there and just sit. I take it all in.’
It was there, in 2006, that he made a decision worth £50million to his boyhood club.
‘Sheffield United were going for promotion and having some ropey results. And I had spent money on two strikers, Geoff Horsfield and Ade Akinbiyi,’ continues Warnock.
‘But I had another striker, a bit overweight, called Neil Shipperley.
‘We had spent a million quid on the other two — but the team wasn’t good enough with them in it. ‘I had to clear my mind. ‘So I came up to Dunoon during an international break for a week and went on the course every day.
‘I made the decision to bring Shipperley in on the fifth hole.’
Shipperley finished the season as the Blades’ top scorer with 11 goals. Sheffield United were promoted as Championship runners-up.
‘I couldn’t have reached that decision anywhere else,’ notes Warnock. ‘I would have had everyone in my ear. But up there, on my own, I just knew I had to do what I thought was right.’
From the fifth hole he can just about see the outline of a new build, detached stone villa. His wife worshipped at an old church in the village of kirn as a child. When the church was demolished, the Prince of Promotion salvaged the ruins to build a palace. As we speak, builders lay down decking at the front of the house overlooking the Loch.
At 67, preparations for retirement are now in full swing.
‘My boy William is 15 and loves outof-bounds experiences, so we would love to get him a job in Ardentinny out of bounds centre or somewhere,’ says Warnock. ‘He’s into that.
‘He fancies moving up here. We all do. But we can’t do it full-time for two years until the A levels are out of the way.’
Dunoon has been his retreat from the pressures of management since 1990. After seven promotions, Warnock has become a footballing Harry Houdini. An escapologist who, last season, ripped up the chains weighing down Rotherham and floated them to Championship safety.
Five or six times a year he seeks his own escape from the naked commercialism of English football. He took Notts County, Sheffield United and QPR to the Barclays Premier League, but never felt comfortable amongst modern, metrosexual, millionaire footballers.
‘I haven’t enjoyed Premier League players because the money is almost immoral,’ he admits. ‘I prefer handling a bunch of nettles.’
Mixing with impossibly wealthy footballers on Jumeirah Beach holds little or no appeal. ‘I hate that,’ he grimaces. ‘I’m opposite to everybody else.
‘I love the people up here in Scotland. They remind me of people in Yorkshire, grounded.’
He grew up in Sheffield sleeping top to tail alongside his sister Carol as older brother John claimed the single room.
His father worked 16-hour days on a crane while his mother coped with the debilitating impact of multiple sclerosis.
This may explain why he revels in simple, old fashioned pleasures. Fishing, cycling, fresh air.
‘In my job in England you speed up and down motorways, going here and there,’ he adds.
‘You never really see anything. Your mind is going all the time, you don’t actually see it all.
‘But here in Dunoon I find I never drive any faster than 30mph.’
Police Scotland claimed otherwise once. Against his boyhood instincts Warnock bought himself an Aston Martin; a conspicuous mode of transport on the streets of Argyll and Bute.
‘The personalised number plates did me, I think,’ he says.
Stopped and breathalysed after a single glass of wine, he was invited to travel to the local station for an electronic test.
‘I felt like I was in a goldfish bowl,’ recalls Warnock. ‘They were all coming in to have a look at the big football manager.
‘I had to exchange pleasantries about football with people while sitting in the police station ‘ ******* myself.
‘That hour was frightening. I don’t drink and drive and was thinking: “What will my wife say?”.’
What the wife will say informs most of his decisions.
Steve Bruce describes Warnock as footballing marmite. A man who inflames opposition fans and endured run-ins with everyone from Joey Barton to El-Hadji Diouf. Relaxing at home, he carries all the combat skills of a domesticated cat: ‘My wife says I’m not very clever at anything other than football.’
When Sharon was diagnosed with breast cancer last December, he resolved — not for the first time — to retire. To give up the cut and thrust of football salvage jobs. It couldn’t last.
‘Sharon was having chemotherapy and the nurse was in,’ he continues. ‘Rotherham had been on the phone and I said to them: “No it’s too far from Cornwall where we live, sorry”.
‘Then they came back in February asking if I had changed my mind.
‘I said: “Sorry, Sharon is having chemo and I need to be here”.
‘So I go back inside and I’m sat there and she’s telling the nurse: “Well he is getting under my feet a bit and washing the pots with water everywhere. It’s like a flood and he never fluffs the cushions”.
‘So I said: “Tell you what, Rotherham have just rung me an hour ago asking me to help till the end of the season. Should I go and get out from under your feet?”.
‘She said: “Yeah, I wish you would”.’
Her blessing was everything. The decision was a sound one; helping both to cope with a traumatic situation.
They spoke five times a day on the phone and, when time allowed, took the red ferry across the Clyde for rest and healing.
I prefer handling nettles to top-flight footballers
‘Sharon loves it here in Dunoon,’ admits Warnock. ‘During the illness this place was therapeutic.
‘When she is here you can see how relaxed she is.
‘She loves the dogs and goes out for a long walk. Everywhere you walk there is a view.
‘Cancer is a horrible illness and I’m sure every family has someone they know who has suffered.
‘The thing is, I do get under her feet.
‘Sometimes people cope better with illness on their own so long as the support network is there.
‘You want to be on your own with the dogs and so on. ‘And I found that helped Sharon. ‘I was never too far away and wasn’t in the club every day because I had good staff.’
In football, mild misfortune is dramatised. Setbacks are an agony or a tragedy. Rotherham took it badly when the manager who kept them up walked away after three months, but the Warnocks no longer regard football as life and death. These days it’s a therapy.
The money is no longer important. Warnock’s drive comes from a desire to become the first manager to win eight promotions in English football. He couldn’t see it at Rotherham, but admits to misting up when Sharon wrote an open letter to the club’s supporters offering thanks for ‘something to focus on during this hiccup in my life’.
‘She did that in the middle of the night when I was up in Rotherham,’ he adds.
‘She did it by email at one in the morning and I didn’t know it was coming.
‘But when I read it I thought how many people would relate to that.’
In the letter Sharon described herself as ‘ridiculously proud’ of the way her husband manages football clubs. There is no question, for now, of a final retirement.
Talks have taken place with Nottingham Forest, but Warnock suspects the job will go — as so many do now — to an overseas candidate.
‘I have spoken to them, it would be a great job and a great club, but I’m not going to just rush into anything,’ he claims.
‘Rotherham offered me a fortune to stay on.
‘But I am in a fortunate position where I don’t need the money and if I had stayed on I would have felt I was doing it for the wrong reasons. Just for the money.
‘I have seven promotions and nobody has eight.
‘There must be a club that can give me the chance of the record.’
He hankers for a chance to try Scottish football. Morton is closest to Dunoon and the Warnocks bought bricks in the Cappielow wall with their names on.
But he fancies a crack at Europe. Possibly even international football, though he laughs at the prospect of becoming the first Englishman to manage Scotland.
‘Don’t say that to Gordon Strachan…’ he protests. ‘I’m a big fan of Gordon.
‘It’s the guys who phone you when things aren’t going so well you remember most. Gordon was one of them...’
He gives thanks for that on the fifth green at Blairmore. For the good times and the bad.
Entering his 50th year in professional football, Neil Warnock has much to be thankful for.