‘THERE IS GOOD CHANCE HERE TO BRING SUCCESS’
WHEN Richie Wellens says he was badly affected by Covid-19, he isn’t talking about physical symptoms.
So far as he knows, the 41-year-old has never caught the virus. No, Wellens is talking about empty stadiums, budget cuts, and the seismic impact they had on his burgeoning managerial career.
In March 2020, when the pandemic struck, the former Leicester City midfielder was in charge of a Swindon Town side flying high at the summit of League Two.
What followed was brutal even by the cut-throat standards of an industry where the average manager lasts less than 12 months.
Having quit the Robins to join hometown club Salford City, a clash with director Gary Neville - a former team-mate at Manchester United - saw Wellens depart just days after hoisting the EFL Trophy.
A disastrous stint at Doncaster Rovers was then terminated after 199 days, meaning Wellens had collected two trophies and two dismissals in the space of just 18 months.
Three months on, and freshly unveiled by League Two strugglers Leyton Orient, how does he reflect on that period?
“I made mistakes,” he admits. “I definitely learned a lot. But, overall, I’d say so much of what happened comes back to Covid.
“When I took over at Swindon, they were getting 5,000 fans every week and there was a lot of discontent. You turn that around. You start to build a really good club.
“By the time Covid hit, we were getting 13,000 through the gate. The atmosphere around the club was fantastic.
“My first two home games in League One, after we got promoted, we beat Burton 4-1 and Rochdale 3-1. The place should have been absolutely bouncing, but there was nobody there.
“Then you go to Salford and never manage a game in front of supporters. It had a huge effect on me - I’m not going to lie about that.
“Partly, it’s about enjoyment. When you’re a manager, your adrenalin rush comes from pleasing those supporters on a Saturday.
Belief
“But it’s also about the team. When you play pressing football, as soon as you win the ball back, the crowd gives you a lift. If you continue doing that, they give you the belief and the adrenalin to keep it up for 90 minutes.
“When nobody is there, it just goes flat. If the ball goes into the stand, nobody is there to throw it back. If somebody presses a defender, there’s no roar of appreciation. Everything slows down. Everybody reacted to it differently and I take my hat off to all the people who had success during Covid.
“If you look at Morecambe, for example, they won promotion last season by sitting deep, frustrating the opposition and being really good defensively. If you’ve got no supporters, you can do that much more easily because you’ve got no home fans urging you to go and attack. Derek dealt with the situation well. I didn’t, and I hold my hands up about that.”
Wellens is less candid about his time at Salford, who are coowned by many of the Manchester United players he idolised as a boyhood Red. “I can’t say too much because you sign a contract with privacy clauses,” he explains. “But when I look back and reflect, I could have dealt a bit better with Gary and the pressures that brings.”
Was he overawed by the former England right-back? “I wouldn’t say overawed,” insists Wellens, who won 11 of his 30 games at the helm. “I wanted to get my style across and I wouldn’t say I was fully supported in that.
“The one transfer window I had, we only got three loans in, whereas the backing that the previous manager got was a hell of a lot.
“I felt a little bit frustrated that I wasn’t given all the tools to be successful there but - again - I absolutely could have managed upwards better. It’s a big part of the game now, and something any young manager has to learn.”
Doncaster was altogether more bruising, a relentless cavalcade of defeats that saw Wellens spend his entire 26-game reign in the relegation zone. Did his confidence suffer?
Better
“Honestly, not really,” says Wellens, who was sacked at the start of December. “Because I looked at every single team sheet that I submitted, then I looked at the opposition team sheet. And every time, they had better players than us.
“The recruitment team at Donny had already handed out contracts to certain players before I got there. Then when I was trying to sign players, we missed out on first, second and third choices. Purely because the finances weren’t there. If
you get a table of budgets and lay it side-by-side with a league table, you might get a few surprises either way. But, in general, they’ll correspond. The team who pay the most will be at the top and the teams who pay the least will be at the bottom.
“That’s what happened at Doncaster and, if I’m being brutally honest, it’s a job I shouldn’t have taken.”
Wellens had rejected an approach from Orient’s director of football Martin Ling in preference to taking charge at Donny, citing his emotional attachment to the club he’d represented 200 times as a player.
Ling subsequently appointed former Wolves and Millwall boss Kenny Jackett.
“I actually sent Martin a message to congratulate him on the decision,” says Wellens.
Sadly for Jackett, a 13-game winless run saw Orient plummet from within four points of automatic promotion to within four points of the relegation zone. The 60-year-old was sacked, Wellens approached, and he was not about to make the same mistake twice.
Successful
“All any manager wants is a chance to be successful,” he says. “To say ‘I can do something with this club, I can do something with this team’. I’ve got that here.
“This is a well-run club, Nigel (Travis, chairman) has done a fantastic job. We’ve had some new investment, it’s forward-thinking and the good thing is that the people I work for are passionate about Orient and genuinely love football. That’s half the battle.”
None more so than Ling, a veteran of almost 500 games in the dugout at Swindon, Cambridge and Orient, whom he guided to promotion from League Two in 2005-06.
“Martin’s been in the job, he knows the difficulties of it.
He can be a real support mechanism for me,” adds
Wellens.
“All of these people can talk, they can all say this and say that. But until you’ve been a manager, until you’ve smelt it and felt it and done it every single day, you can’t really offer advice.
“So to have someone there who has been through the same things as you, it’ll be much easier to have those honest conversations.”
Long-term, Wellens believes Orient can target promotion. For now, though, the aim is simply staying out of Non-League.
“I’ve got absolutely no idea what’s gone wrong because I wasn’t involved at the club before this week,” he says.
“And you don’t manage for as long as Kenny has without being very good at your job. He’s had success at big football clubs, won multiple promotions.
“My job is to go in and find out what’s gone on, and to fix it. First and foremost, I want to put smiles on faces because anyone’s confidence would be dented by the run they’ve had.
“What’s been before, you let it go. All you can do is bring your own brand of football, your own standards.
“I think we have certain players who are very good for this level, so I fully expect us to improve.
“If we can do that in sufficient time then we can start to build for next year, but my only focus for the next six weeks will be staying in the division.”
I think we have certain players who are very good for this level, so I fully expect us to improve
Richie Wellens