SAY IT WITH FLOWERS
Ex-Moors boss Tim ready to go again
TIM FLOWERS has issued a ‘come-and get-me’ plea as he looks to repeat his Solihull Moors feat – but go one better.
The former England goalkeeper, a Premier League title-winner with Blackburn Rovers, has been out of management since his surprise departure from Moors in January.
Flowers had turned the Midlands club from strugglers to promotion contenders the previous season when they finished runners-up to Leyton Orient only to miss out in the play-offs.
The 53-year-old has had a break but, in an exclusive NLP interview, has laid out his ambition to return as soon as possible.
Flowers said: “I’ll be out and about watching games and I’m looking to get right back in there. I know what’s needed in the National League and above.”
TWO England managers. Three European champions. One legend of the game. During a glittering top-flight career, Tim Flowers worked for the cream of British football.
“The list is endless,” says the 53-year-old, who won the Premier League title with Blackburn Rovers in 1995, the League Cup at Leicester City in 2000 and, at £2.4m, was once the most expensive goalkeeper in Britain.
“Kenny Dalglish and Roy Hodgson at Blackburn Rovers. Martin O’Neill and Harry (Dave) Bassett at Leicester. Kevin Keegan at Man City. Then there were people like Peter Taylor and Micky Adams. I took leaves from so many books.”
Yet it is Aidy Boothroyd, under whom Flowers worked as a coach at Northampton Town, that the former England stopper regards as his greatest inspiration.
Boothroyd, now 49, was just 35 when he led an unfancied Watford side to the Premier League in 2006.
Widely touted as a rising star, relegation dented his reputation and subsequent stints at Colchester United, Coventry City and Northampton saw Boothroyd increasingly derided as a long-ball dinosaur.
Only recently, as a progressive and trusted component of Gareth Southgate’s England set-up, has the stigma been shaken off.
“Aidy was very, very impressive,” says Flowers, who retired in 2003. “When you mention his name, people always talk about long balls, direct football, whatever you want to call it.
“But, look, we could spend a week on the phone talking about styles of play, systems and philosophies. What matters is that you get the ball into the net, whether you pass it out, mix it up, go long. That is how you are judged.
“Take Kenny. A legend of the game. A World XI player. But our system at Blackburn was very simple. We had height. We had power. We had lads who got into certain areas.
“Where are you effective? Where do you attack the box from? Ray Harford, God bless him, used to talk about a magic square.
“That was where the crosses came from. Hit that square, everybody moved in the box. We won a title doing that.
Detail
“Now you have to have 16 passes inside a square three yards before people think you can play football. It just isn’t the case.
“The fact is Aidy got Watford into the Premier League on a shoestring. At Northampton, he took over a poor side, completely turned them round and got into a play-off final at Wembley.
“His attention to detail – setplays, restarts, etc – was phenomenal. Better than anything I’d ever seen before.
“I watched and listened to what he said, and I found it really interesting. Because my playing career was more at the higher end. Someone like Alan Shearer knew how to play. You sent him out and that was pretty much that. Lower down, you need to do more – and Aidy did.
“He got a team structured, organised, everybody knew what they had to do and what everybody else would do. I took a lot from that when I came to Non-League.”
And how. A former goalkeeping coach at Leicester City, Man City, Northampton, Nottingham Forest and Fulham, as well as assistant manager at Coventry City, QPR, Hull City and Kidderminster Harriers, Flowers’ entry to the NonLeague game came as assistant to Mark Yates at Solihull Moors in 2017.
“I’d put my CV in at the last minute,” explains Flowers. “I went for an interview. Two days later, they rang me up and said ‘We can’t decide between you and Mark – would you be up for working together? Me and Mark had a chat, agreed to split it 50-50 and that was that.”
At the time, Moors were six points from safety at the foot of the National League with just 11 points from 19 games. By the end of the season, they were six points above the drop zone.
“We were massively adrift,” says Flowers. “Going down. The conversation I had in my interview was that we had to prepare for two scenarios.
“We went from training two nights to three mornings a week
which allowed us to get fit. We got in good staff like Gary Whild. We worked incredibly hard, but it was a miracle we stayed up.”
When Yates was subsequently poached by Macclesfield Town in the summer of 2018, Flowers was thrust into sole charge with a simple brief.
Ambition
improve “I was on told last by the board ‘Try to year if you can’,” he recalls. “They said ‘Don’t get relegated, and if you can finish in the middle of the bottom half, that would be great’.
“We were trying to get to 50 points, basically. I was expecting that to come in April but we got organised.
Grew as a team. We actually got to 50 points around Christmas.
“Darryl Eales, the chairman, pulled me in and said ‘Should we re-evalute here?’. We brought in Lee Vaughan, Nathan Blissett and Terry Hawkridge. The budget went up. After that it was like ‘Wow, what can we do?’.”
The answer was a second-place finish, an agonising three points shy of champions Leyton Orient.
Yet defeat to AFC Fylde in the semi-finals would prove Flowers’ only shot at the EFL, despite a bright start to the subsequent campaign. A point behind leaders Barrow after beating Stockport 4-1 in late November, Solihull won just one of the next 13 games in all competitions and Flowers departed by mutual consent.
“After we beat Stockport, Jim Gannon came out and said ‘You’re looking at the league winners tonight’,” says Flowers.
“A week after that, we played Rotherham at home in the FA Cup. We were 3-0 up and playing like a Championship team. They brought players off the bench that we couldn’t match, we ran out of gas and got done 4-3.
“But that’s how short your life is. We were doing fantastic, and even when I left we were ninth, two points off fifth with two games in hand.
“I can’t say too much but I was surprised by what happened because we had a five-year plan at the start of 2019-20. But it is what it is. At the end of the day, I think what killed me was doing so well the year before.”
Flowers, though, has no doubt that new boss Jimmy Shan will fulfil Eales’ ambition of a place in the EFL.
Structured
“I’m proud of what we did there,” he says. “And the club is in a sensational position, with a real strong squad. The lads on contract are quality. They’ve just signed Adam Rooney. I’d fancy them massively to get promoted next season.”
Flowers, meanwhile, is looking to leap straight back on the managerial wagon when lockdown is over.
“Once it gets going, I’m looking at everything,” says the former Southampton trainee, who boasted a win record of 48 per cent at Damson Park and a points-per-game ratio of 1.68. “I’ll be out and about watching games and I’m looking to get right back in there. I know what’s needed in the National League, and the two above.
“Because, to me, there’s very little difference until you get to the top of the Championship. You need to sign good players, get a club structured and organised. That’s what I did at Solihull and that’s what I want to do again.”