Pulis POWER

West Brom boss on Napoleon and management

TONY PULIS is talking about great leaders. Chelsea are visiting The Hawthorns today but even though Pulis is a great admirer of Jose Mourinho, he is not thinking about him. Actually, he is talking about Napoleon. ‘I do like Napoleon,’ he says.

The West Bromwich Albion manager is fascinated by leadership. He says that if he could invite four people to a dinner party, it would be his parents ‘because I have lost my parents and they could also reassure me that there is a God up there waiting for us’, Napoleon and Winston Churchill.

He prefers Napoleon to Churchill, though. Churchill came from the English Establishment. He had advantages. Pulis, one of six children born to a steelworker from ‘down the docks’ in Newport, south Wales, is a man who sees his life in football as ‘a relentless voyage’. He can relate more to Napoleon.

‘I’m interested in great leaders and people who have risen from the ashes and come from nothing,’ says Pulis. ‘Napoleon is a great example of someone who was born on a small island — he wasn’t even French — and then he takes over and runs one of the greatest armies that has ever fought through Europe. He was a little Corsican. How did he get there?

‘What he achieved, what he didn’t achieve. What he was like as a person, collecting art, trying to put social practices into place in every country he went to. How did he do it? How did he achieve that, what did he do? When I finish in football, it would fascinate me to go to different battlefields and see how he set up and find out a lot more.

‘I would love to talk to Napoleon or Churchill about how they reacted in very, very difficult circumstances and how they kept themselves going because that’s the other thing people forget: management can be a very lonely place at times and you spend a lot of time by yourself trying to work things out when things don’t go well. You take all the pressure yourself.

‘Anything to do with history, anything to do with people who have been involved in leading men or taking charge and running things, it just sparks a little bit of a fire in me. I do try and glean something from how they treated the people who worked for them and died for them. That’s important. Of course, Napoleon was always very close to the battlefield, especially early on in his career.

‘Especially in the initial battles where he had to win favour with the soldiers, he was at the front so you can see how he built up his reputation and how the soldiers admired him because he was actually one of them. The greater he became, the more detached he was from that front line but he was still controlling it and he controlled it in a wonderful way.’

IT IS hard to imagine Pulis ever becoming detached. From anything. He is the epitome of a driven man, a kid who took a one-way ticket out of south Wales as a 17-year-old aspiring footballer, determined that he would never look back.

Some people soften with age. Some people slow down. Pulis is 57 now but he is not showing many signs of either. He is in the gym at 6am most days. Apart from his commitment to his job, he likes to test himself with one physical challenge after another.

There is something of the Lieutenant Colonel Kilgore about him, the bluff general in Apocalypse Now who does not flinch when bombs explode around him. Pulis climbed Kilimanjaro and did not suffer from altitude sickness. He rode from John O’Groats to Land’s End and loved every minute. And last summer, the day after West Brom’s last game of the season against Arsenal at the Emirates, he was part of a 12-strong team who rowed a small boat across the English Channel from Tower Bridge to the Eiffel Tower. Two hours on, two hours off for seven days. Sleeping on a bench on deck when he could. ‘It took me out of my comfort zone,’ says Pulis, beaming.

The warmth of his personality inspires loyalty in those around him. His energy is infectious. On Friday morning, he is out on the training pitch with his lieutenants, Gerry Francis and Dave Kemp, half an hour before the players arrive.

The players do a few short-sided games and drills first, under the guidance of the coaches. Pulis watches on, grinning, loving every minute. ‘This is their entertainment before they come to me,’ he says.

He delegates a little. But not a lot. Before the session starts, he pushes one of the goalposts up to the 18-yard line to shorten the playing area, barking instructions to his players, warning them of the dire consequences of losing possession to a team of Chelsea’s quality in their own half.

‘Don’t worry about what your team-mates are doing,’ he shouts out when he stops play for a few seconds. ‘You’ve got to do your own jobs. You’ve got to trust everybody.’

West Brom have had a difficult start to the season. They were taken apart by an impressive Manchester City side in their opening game and laboured to a goalless draw with promoted Watford last weekend.

But just as Pulis derides the idea that Chelsea are in crisis because they have failed to win either of their first two games, it would be misguided to underestimate Pulis’s drive to restore optimism at the Hawthorns. This is not a man who is easily discouraged.

It took him 15 years of hard, hard graft as a manager in the lower leagues at Bournemouth, Bristol City, Gillingham and Portsmouth before he got his shot at the Premier League by getting Stoke City promoted.

Recognition, respect and success at the top level came to him relatively late in his career but now he is revered as a saviour of struggling sides. He turned Crystal Palace around so spectacularly in 2013-14 that he won manager of the season.

HE lifted West Brom out of trouble last year, too, dragging an uneven squad away from the relegation zone. It is what he has become known for. It has become his speciality, although his goal now is to point West Brom upwards again.

‘From my background,’ says Pulis, ‘I am always striving to make sure that I don’t want to fail. There is always that determination to push on and push on and push on. I am never one to look back at things. I am never one to pat myself on the back and say “Didn’t I do well here”.

‘I think it’s a relentless voyage and you have to be relentless to stay where you are otherwise there are so many people who can take your place that you will get left behind.

‘That relentlessness manifests itself in all sorts of ways. To have done what I have done and to have done it the way I have done it, you have to be very single-minded and driven and I haven’t lost that.

‘I have still got that drive to get up early every morning, to get to the gym and do work in the gym that

clears my mind for the day ahead. I will do that every day. I’m an early bird. I’ll be in the gym until the canteen opens.

‘I think you have a place in life. There is always a level you find yourself at. My level and what people have employed me to do over the last 10 years has been to get the maximum out of what’s there. That’s my level.

‘People expect me to come in and squeeze the pips. And keep squeezing those pips. And I enjoy doing it. It’s not a problem for me. Sir Alex Ferguson said a couple of years ago “You can’t keep doing what you’re doing because it will drive you insane”.

I understand where he is coming from but I am clear on what I want to do here given the chance.

‘The chairman, Jeremy Peace, has built a wonderful football club here. Financially, it is so solid. This is a massive year for the club. Last year was as good an achievement as I have ever done for reasons I don’t really want to go into.

‘We need to change the football club in lots of ways and there needs to be change for this football club to push on. If we get it right — and it’s going to be difficult — the club will push on.

‘I’ve managed to do it at other clubs. If I can do it here, then hopefully the two years after this year we will enjoy. We will be able to see the light and there will be a much more solid base and backbone at the club that it can grow from.’

Pulis’s West Brom team is beginning to take shape. You can see it in the excellence and the character of players such as Darren Fletcher. You can see it in the ambition of the signing of new record buy Salomon Rondon from Zenit St Petersburg. And in the pursuit of targets such as Spurs’ Federico Fazio.

Pulis is evasive about whether Spurs target Saido Berahino will stay or go but Fletcher is the core of the side now, a wonderful player revelling in the responsibility of regular games and the old school guidance of Pulis. Pulis smiles when you call him ‘old school’. He takes it as a compliment.

‘Old school means good traditions, discipline, respect,’ he says. ‘We have moved away from that a little bit and I don’t think we should have done as a nation. I respect the players and I hope the players respect me. I will always try and be as straight and as honest as I can with them and you expect that back.

‘The biggest issues are the social media and everything that surrounds the lads’ lives. Now you get phone calls about this person having said this and this has happened or Johnny’s done this. With experience, you are surprised if nothing comes up.

‘But you know what, I have never fallen out of love with football. It’s in your blood. What age that goes on until will be determined how well I do here. If it all finished tomorrow, there is no way in a million years I would think anything but what a great career I have had and what a great life I have had.

‘When you look back, you never stop laughing. The managers who never work in the lower leagues, you know what, they miss out. There have been some really tough times but those tough times have been good times.’

Pulis has never considered releasing an autobiography. He says he has a wealth of wonderful memories in his mind so why should he commit them to paper. He is happy to share one from the late Nineties, though, a fond reminiscence of the fun he has had on the journey.

‘I had a terrific player at Gillingham called Dennis Bailey,’ he says, his face lighting up. ‘One Saturday, we were playing Bristol Rovers, who were managed by Olly [Ian Holloway] at the time, and Dennis turned up with yellow boots.

‘It was the first time I had ever seen yellow boots and I told Lindsay Parsons, who was my assistant at the time, to tell Dennis that my players don’t wear yellow boots.

‘Dennis was a fantastic kid and he said to Lindsay “I haven’t brought any other boots”. Lindsay said to him: “Well, you better find a pair because he’s not messing about”. Dennis was the best player in the team. He said: “I’ll be all right”.

‘We get close to kick off and Dennis does the warm-up with the yellow boots. So they came in after the warm up and I said: “Den, seriously, you’re not wearing yellow boots, mate, you’re not wearing them”.

‘He just laughed. Big grin. “I haven’t got any other boots,” he said. So I turned to one of the other players. “Billy Manuel,” I said, “you’re playing.” We got another sub. We told Olly Dennis had hurt his hamstring in the warm-up.

‘Olly was pleased as punch because Dennis had been our best player that season and now he wasn’t playing. But we won 1-0 and Dennis never wore yellow boots again.’