ROUTE ONE? WITH JAY-JAY IN THE SIDE!

MANAGING in the Premier League really isn’t that different to managing in League Two. People are still people, whatever they are paid. When I was assistant to Sam Allardyce at Bolton, we had Ivan Campo, Jay-Jay Okocha. A World Cup winner in Youri Djorkaeff. Kevin Nolan was an 18-year-old boy, but he was just as outspoken and just as difficult to manage as any of them. You can have problems and tough personalities at every level. Those Bolton years were such an important learning curve for me. We had 13 different nationalities, all with different languages, cultures and religions. It was a real eclectic mix, but we all had a common goal to qualify for Europe and it unified the dressing room. What a team it was, too. Sam had to put up with so much criticism, people calling him a long-ball merchant and such like. But someone like Jay-Jay Okocha was a world-class player, one of the greatest entertainers the Premier League has ever seen. He could do anything with a football, and usually did. To say we were one-dimensional with someone like Jay-Jay in the team… it was ridiculous.