‘You’d have to be an idiot to come here – but I am’: Warnock on Huddersfield job
His Are You With Me? live shows are still booked for May and June, taking in dates in Portsmouth, London, Scunthorpe and Nottingham, but at 74 Neil Warnock is back in football management with Huddersfield.
“It’s a great challenge really,” he said. “I always thought if I came back in it’d be the end of February. I only want to work 10 weeks a year, if I’m honest, and it was always going to be a club I love like Huddersfield, QPR or Cardiff.”
Warnock returned to West Yorkshire on the say-so of his wife: “In this particular case Sharon said: ‘They need some help, why don’t you?’ It was a clear run really.”
He had come straight from Heathrow, disembarking a red-eye landing at 11am after an American holiday in a Trump hotel, heading north having missed Wednesday night’s 3-0 defeat at Stoke that left Huddersfield 23rd in the Championship, four points from safety.
“I’ve seen the players as a priority; I said to them I was sorry I couldn’t be with them last night but I was at a jazz club in New York and it was a better evening,” he said, soon hitting his stride as the master wisecracker and espousing the negronis on offer at Dizzy’s on the bottom edge of Central Park. “I’ve watched the last two games and it’s going to ask a lot to get in the playoffs.”
Warnock returns to a stage he previously departed in 1995. Before he spoke at Huddersfield’s training complex on the same Leeds Road that hosted their former ground, a photo montage depicted celebrations of the Second Division playoff win over Bristol Rovers that preceded a shock exit days later.
“I look at the stadium and think I helped to build that,” he said. Warnock was the manager who led the club into the former McAlpine Stadium, nowadays known as the John Smith’s. “I used to take the players at the old stadium to the building works and sit in the concrete of the main stand and say: ‘This’ll be here next year.’ It brings back good memories.”
Warnock becomes the club’s fourth manager in nine months, and their third of the season after Mark Fotheringham was sacked last week after just four months in charge. From losing the playoff final last season, and manager Carlos Corberán, it has been a season of decline, though Warnock is relishing the challenge. “They’re great fixtures,” he said. “You look at the fixtures and you’d have to be a bloody idiot to come here, but that’s what I am thankfully.”
Where Fotheringham had experience of coaching at Hertha Berlin, Warnock can boast 18 spells as a manager in English football and a record 1,603 professional games in management, his career beginning with Gainsborough Trinity in 1980-81 before taking in eight promotions. The conclusion of his last assignment at Middlesbrough in November 2021 was supposed to return him permanently to farm life in Cornwall, restricting him to his £65-a-ticket concert-hall appearances, his media career and an unlikely passion for social media. “I do enjoy Twitter. I never thought I’d go on it – I used to rollick the lads for it.”
A friendship with Huddersfield’s long-term owner, now major shareholder, Dean Hoyle opened up Warnock to attempt to repeat the rescue job he performed when keeping Rotherham in the Championship in 2016 after taking over in February, an achievement he ranks among the finest of his career. Alongside him as assistant will be “Rocket” Ronnie Jepson, the star striker of that previous Huddersfield tenure.
“Ronnie rollicks me every time we go back in time, because he was convinced we could have gone into the Premier League if I stayed here.” Warnock, though, fell out with the chairman and left. “That’s me really,” he said.
Such bad blood is forgotten under a different ownership. “I should have come to Dean when I went to Leeds but I thought I could conquer Ken Bates unfortunately,” said Warnock, reminiscing on an ill-fated move to Huddersfield’s local rivals in 2012.
For now, for three months, the focus is Huddersfield. “I’ve got goose pimples talking to you now and I want the fans to be excited,” he said. “We’re odds-on favourites to get relegated. But we’ve got to try, give the fans something to shout about and win games.”
Can Huddersfield stay up? “I don’t really think about things like that. If they get relegated I won’t be blamed, will I? It’s a piece of cake really. But all my career, other managers don’t like to play my teams, I don’t think.”