ALEXANDER THE GREAT
Former Scotland star Graham is proving an iron man at Scunthorpe
AS ONE of the 56 managers sacked in England last season, Graham Alexander’s behindthe-scenes visit to British Steel to greet workers where the materials for Scunthorpe’s long-term £25million stadium plan are housed might be considered excessively optimistic.
Back at Glanford Park, the former Scotland international’s story says that his relationship with this club is built on foundations durable enough to dispel such cynicism. Hard hats are requisite attire for any dugout within firing distance of a directors’ box these days. When Alexander donned his, it was only to take his players on a fact-finding mission around the plant at the very heart of the town.
The only reason the 45-year-old won’t be around when the project comes to fruition is if his managerial talents shine too obviously once again and he is poached from his first professional football love.
Scunthorpe’s streak to the summit 21 games into League One, on the back of a bold but unsuccessful late bid to gatecrash the play-offs following his March appointment, sees Alexander boast the best win percentage of any boss in the UK and steal a march on sleeping giants Sheffield United and Bolton.
Chairman Peter Swann wants his club to be an established force in the
Championship to tie in with playing at the Lincolnshire Lakes development. Thanks to the recruitment of Alexander, freely available thanks to his hurtful dismissal by division rivals Fleetwood and rejection by Kilmarnock, Scunthorpe are ahead of schedule.
As well as being grateful for those decisions, ‘The Iron’ can be pleased Alexander’s thought process does not follow the haphazard form of some of the blizzard of boardroom decisions taken around the leagues.
His designs of self-improvement might only be detailed in pen on a whiteboard at home but his determination to carry them out mean they might as well be etched on a girder that’s booked for the framework of the new ground.
When asked if he is a different manager to the type fired at Fleetwood — the club he guided to promotion in 2014 — the 40-times capped Alexander explained: ‘Not vastly so — because you are what you are, you can’t turn into something completely different. But it does give you a clarity of thought.
‘I know I made mistakes. I didn’t come out of there thinking I was God’s gift and that they were idiots. It was a case of: “What could I improve on if I get the opportunity again?” You don’t see it all at the time because you’re in it. I came out of it and I sat there in a room at home.
‘I got all the Fleetwood stuff out and went back over it to see what I could have done better or differently. I was honest with myself. I had a whiteboard in front of me — I noted them down. I try to stick to them if I can. Some I haven’t stuck to. But I think you have to try, don’t you?’
Alexander waged a fairly frequent battle with the all-consuming nature of the job in his first manager’s post when Fleetwood charged the ex-Burnley and Preston hero with the task of taking them through the Football League tiers following a nifty clamber through non-league.
‘I get reminded of this because one of the top ones on the whiteboard was: Work/Life Balance,’ he revealed. ‘And my wife reminds me of those words sometimes on the phone.
‘When I got the sack at the end of September, I said to my wife I wouldn’t work until after Christmas.
‘I was determined to take the time. You throw yourself into the job and don’t look after your health as you probably should. I’d never had a family Christmas because I’d always been in the game. So I did that and had a great time. Then I was absolutely desperate to get back.
‘It’s a bit easier because I live in Scunthorpe most of the week, work first thing in the morning to last thing at night. Get all that done. Then I get back home for a day or two off.
‘Before, it was one big jigsaw for me to solve, basically. Living so close to work, all the days were the same. This doesn’t work all the time but it’s given me a better balance in my life. I can really throw myself into work, but completely switch off when I’m with family, which is important.’
There could be no more fitting place than Scunthorpe for Alexander to try out enhancements for a happier family life with wife Karen, son Callum and twin daughters Kaitlin and Eden while plotting out a successful career curve.
For this was a homecoming in itself. Here was where Alexander arrived as a 16-year-old from Coventry, setting out on what was to be a playing career into his 40s and more than 1,000 games.
In March, his interview with the chairman was no such thing. ‘Four of five hours, we just chatted, it flew by,’ said Alexander. ‘We both got parking tickets. Take my connection away from the club, I’d still have applied for the job. The chairman had plans for the ground and where he wanted to take the club.
‘Any manager is ambitious and wants to work at the highest level. There’s a process, though, you have to keep improving and I see I can improve as a manager here. And, hopefully, improve Scunthorpe at the same time.
‘This ground was brand new when I was an apprentice. I virtually cleaned every bit of it, worked in the ticket office and club shop. Those seven years gave me the grounding for the rest of my career, the taste of professional football and living away from home.
‘I came round the corner and it just felt like I’d been here all the time, a strange one.
‘You see familiar faces straight away and it gives you a perspective of what a club means to people. Graham the groundsman, the chef Simon.
‘The restaurant is shared between players and the local people for lunch, so it’s easy to get to know folk quickly. It can have its drawbacks if things don’t go well but I think it’s good to have that rapport.’
Yet Alexander rather felt he was part of the Fleetwood fabric before the rug got pulled by chairman Andy Pilley. He earned promotion from League Two 18 months into a job where he had established an infrastructure for the full-time leagues and achieved 10th place in the third tier at the first attempt.
Two September points from a possible 18 in season two of League One was the trigger point for the dismissal. Seeds sown by the employment of a director of football, Stuart Murdoch, and then technical director Gretar Steinsson eventually altered Alexander's role somewhat.
There is a whiteboard at home and I noted down everything I could improve on
‘My responsibility had diluted a bit,’ he said. ‘There was a lot of change in the space of six weeks over the summer, so to hit the ground running in the season was hard. For whatever reasons, people come into clubs, if it impacts on the most important thing — the football side — that can be damaging. And I felt at the time that was possibly the case.
‘But I’m not going to moan, I got on with it, tried to adapt. I know there are clubs that work well with such systems in place. So I wanted to learn off it. But it didn’t work out. And I don’t think it was given the time to work out. But I don’t believe in walking around with grudges and as a bitter man.’
Budget cuts, a drive to make the club self-sufficient plus a demand to force the average age of the squad to under 23 in one close season were sweeping changes. Another was Alexander’s style of managing. A costly mistake, flagged up by the whiteboard.
‘Before it was about winning, let’s get up to the next league,’ he stressed. ‘With the changes, the age of the squad, I may have changed my focus to developing younger players and producing what the chairman wanted.
‘So, yes, I was softer. The expectation of what the team could do probably dropped. I don’t think I should compromise on the expectancy of success and what’s needed — that was the biggest thing I learned. It was a shock. It disappointed me a lot.
‘If you take the last two to three weeks out the job, I’d done pretty good. I was as confident as I could be that people would see that. I’m fortunate enough that Peter Swann did. And I’m back in a happy place again.’
I have softened a bit. But I don’t think I will ever compromise on the expectancy of success