Wanderers, Rovers & Rangers: The Modern British Football Coach Around the Globe

Published by Ockley Books Limited, Huddersfield, England

First published August 2018

All text copyright of the identified author, the moral right of John Duerden to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form without prior permission in writing from the author,

John Duerden ©, and the publisher Ockley Books ©

ISBN 978-1-910906-163

eBook ISBN 978-1-912643-868

Layout & design by Michael Kinlan, edited by David Hartrick

Printed & bound by:

Biddles Printing, King’s Lynn

TO MY MUM AND DAD, WITH LOVE

Thanks go to David Hartrick at Ockley books for his enthusiasm and Roger Domeneghetti for making it all read better. The book obviously could not exist without the coach interviews. So many thanks to all those British coaches who gave their time and opinions and I just hope that I have done them justice. Thanks also to the people behind The British Coaches Abroad Association. Their website — britishcoachesabroad.com — is not only fascinating but is obviously a labour of love.

CONTENTS

PROLOGUE

THE STORY SO FAR

THE WHYS AND THE WHERES

THE BRITISH DISEASE

LEARNING THE TRADE

THE UPS

UP AGAINST THE ODDS

EBOLA, EARTHQUAKES, LAWSUITS AND REPLAYS

WORKING FOR THE MAN

STARS, SCRIBES, SUPPORTERS…

BRITS EVERYWHERE IN INDIA

BACK TO BLIGHTY

PROLOGUE

It is still a privilege to be a British football writer in most parts of the world. The respect is perhaps not as high as it once was but hailing from the home of the modern game helps you make a good first impression. In 2008, I attended Shanghai Shenhua’s last training session before the new season kicked off, not to watch it as such, but to talk to coach Wu Jinqui, one of the nicest guys in Chinese football, who was fired by the club’s ruthless owner, Zhu Jun, shortly after the season began in the same week that his mother died (though he came back to succeed Gus Poyet in 2017). As training finished, Wu turned to me and asked me what I thought of the session. He seemed genuinely interested and it was a question he would not have asked a local journalist. I mumbled some inanity about how the set pieces were great and how Hamilton Ricard was looking sharp in the new system. The former Middlesbrough striker was to be less happy on the final day of the season when he missed a penalty that cost the club the title, although at least Kylie Minogue shared the blame, as her concert at Shenhua’s usual stadium prompted a move to an unfamiliar arena.

Rightly or wrongly, when it comes to football, the British media is by far the most influential around the world when it comes to setting the international agenda. The English language helps of course. Most Chinese journalists can read at least enough English to understand your bog-standard transfer rumour. Doing so in Italian or German is a much less common skill. As well as the appeal of the English Premier League, the relative ubiquity of the language means that in many countries journalists are getting all their European football news from the English media. If you are writing for one of the country’s best-known media organisations then you will usually be welcomed with open arms and anything you say be heard by open ears.

If only the same could be said of Blighty’s coaches. At one time, you could find Brit coaches in clubs such as Barcelona, Ajax and AC Milan. The odds of such a thing happening in the near future are long. In coaching terms, the reputation of the country is not as high as it used to be and while there are many sons of Albion abroad earning a living, the destinations are these days are not quite as glamorous in football terms though often a lot more exotic and interesting. This book is about these men and their stories, why they came overseas, how they were and are seen, their owners, players, fans, media and lives, and what it is like these days to be a British coach overseas.

The idea for the book came in two stages. The venue for the first was a nondescript hotel on the eastern side of downtown Bangkok on 3rd September 2010. There was tea, lots of tea, as three Englishmen – Bryan Robson, Bob Houghton and Steve Darby – talked of football and life overseas. I was there too, just enjoying the tales of job offers from Tehran, life in Bangkok under military curfew, and summers in Cape Town. It was fascinating. Robson, the best known of all three, was just months into a spell as the head coach of the Thai national team. For the former England captain, working abroad was all new and still full of wonder, and the frustration at the way things sometimes worked, or didn’t, was equally fresh.

Darby and Houghton may sound like a firm of High Street solicitors, but they are old international hands. Darby, a native of Liverpool, has been in Southeast Asia for decades and, at the time, was Robson’s assistant, just as he had been Peter Reid’s assistant with Thailand not long before. Houghton has been all over. The Londoner took lowly Malmö to the 1979 European Cup final before working in North America, China, Saudi Arabia, India, Uzbekistan, to name just a few.

When we sat down for chat and chai, he was in charge of India and in the Thai capital for a friendly. He had braved the terrible traffic that constantly chokes the buzzing metropolis for the pre-match Press conference. Held around one of those long rectangular tables in an upstairs conference room, it was a low-key affair as this was a game between two nations that found themselves with nothing to do on a FIFA match day, although India were preparing for a rare Asian Cup appearance four months later.

Houghton was, not exactly annoyed, but obviously a little frustrated at the questions that were asked as soon as the floor was open. They came from both local and visiting journalists, and focused on the nationality of the two coaches. Just two months after Spain had thrilled much of the world and lifted the ultimate global prize with a kind of football that seemed light years ahead of anything coming from England, the questions reflected concerns as to what spectacle we would be treated to at the Muang Thong Stadium the following evening.

‘Are you going to play 4-4-2?’ ‘Will India and Thailand play the long ball?’ The questions were variations on the same theme. In a summer when La Roja were sexy, England were looking old, predictable and a little on the ugly side. Houghton wearily promised, in his laconic style of speaking, reminiscent of ex-Clash frontman Joe Strummer – another internationalist – that India was not looking for a team of six-footers and would not treat the fans to a version of 1980s Wimbledon. OK, the team kicked off with a long, diagonal ball towards the corner flag to win an attacking throw-in in an advanced position, but this was largely an entertaining game between two technically minded teams trying to play decent football.

After full-time and the post-match Press conferences, Robson returned to downtown Bangkok for a few beers in the Manchester United bar around Sukhimvit, where what you pay for a pint of Stella is not that different to the prices at home. Local journalists munched on the squid that had been grilled outside, talking about the 90 minutes just witnessed. ‘Thai or English, we still play the same,’ smiled one. ‘Still can’t score.’ The taxi driver on the way back to the city said much the same thing, lamenting 1980s hero Piyapong Pue-On, who scored goals for fun and, so the legend goes, turned down moves to big English clubs.

There are plenty of other far-flung technical areas ploughed by British feet and quite a few tacticians out there broadening horizons, their own and hopefully those of others. In football coaching, we may have a reputation for insularity and simplicity that may only now be starting to change after the twin World Cup wins of 2017, but this is not the full story. There are lots of stories from these tactical travellers – many of which had to leave home as they were not getting a look-in at British clubs – and I hope that this book is able to recount just a few.

Much has changed since 1966. The English national team were on top of the world back then, and an Englishman, Denis Neville, was in charge of the national team of the Netherlands. Not only that, Neville gave Johan Cruyff his international debut before returning home to take over at – wait for it – non-league Canvey Island.

THE STORY SO FAR

The late nineteenth century must have been a wild time at Britain’s ports. It was the peak of the imperial epoch, time for empire-building in more ways than one. British sailors, soldiers, engineers, businessmen, traders and missionaries and plenty of others went far and wide, and plenty took a ball with them. Soon they were bouncing merrily along the paths forged by ever-growing business links between the first industrialised nation and the rest of the world.

Take South America, for example. By the late-1800s there was a huge number of Britons in Latin America – as many as 40,000 in Argentina alone, mostly concentrated in Buenos Aires. In their leisure time many of these expats played sport and formed clubs, and in 1867, Yorkshire-born brothers William and Thomas Hogg founded the first football club in South America, Buenos Aires FC. The indigenous elite also began to play football due to the social cachet afforded by its links to Britain and within a decade the sport had spread to the masses, a process replicated across the continent.

Alexander Watson Hutton arrived in Buenos Aires in 1882 to teach at the Saint Andrew Scottish School but he fell out with the board over their lack of a sporting programme, so two years later he started the English High School, where he taught the pupils football. In 1893 he helped establish the Argentine Association Football League, becoming its first president, and he is acknowledged as ‘the father of Argentine football’. The Scots had quite an influence on football in that country and José Luis Brown, who opened the scoring in the 1986 World Cup final, was a direct descendant of James Brown, a Scot who went to Buenos Aires in 1825.

Then there was Charles Miller, born in Brazil in 1874 to a Scottish father – who was one of around three thousand British railway workers in South America – and a Brazilian mother of English descent. A decade later Miller was sent to school in England. In Southampton, he started playing football and played on the left wing for St Mary’s, the club that became Southampton FC. In 1894, he returned to South America with two balls (some say one, and a deflated one at that) and a copy of the rules of the game. The story is told in Futebol: The Brazilian Way of Life, Alex Bellios’s marvellous book about Brazilian football. When Miller returned to Brazil, his father, waiting to meet him and spying the balls, said, ‘What is this, Charles?’

‘My degree,’ came the answer.

‘What?’

‘I’ve graduated in football,’ came the explanation.

When Miller arrived in Sao Paolo, he saw that nobody was playing – though the fact that it was the cricket season may have had something to do with the lack of action – and resolved to do something about it. He organised a game on a piece of wasteland on the edge of the city where apparently mules that pulled Sao Paolo’s trams grazed. The game spread like an internet meme of Steven Gerrard slipping over. In 1904 Miller wrote a letter explaining that he had been asked to referee a boys’ game and talking of 1,500 people attending the match and thousands of balls being bought up and down the country. Brazil had fallen in love.

Yet the game had already arrived in many other corners of the world. It came to India early and the Durand Cup, which is still contested on the subcontinent, was first held in 1889, third in age only to the cup competitions of Scotland and England. British sailors first played football around the Odessa Sea in Russia in the 1860s, although the game only really caught on there about three decades later, and they subsequently introduced the sport to Japan in 1875 and then Korea seven years later. The two countries had hitherto had minimal contact with Europe but football was soon spreading across Southeast Asia. The army introduced the game to South Africa and the first match in the country was recorded in 1862. With much of the continent under, or soon to be under, European rule, football quickly spread. The French brought it to North Africa and as imperialism continued to spread, so did the sport.

With the British so active in the spread of football, it was natural that the home country would be a significant source of coaching and managerial know-how in those early decades. Dozens of clubs had British managers in their formative years; early pioneers with grand moustaches and grander dreams – Victorian adventurers, businessmen or just people who found themselves overseas with a little time on their hands. Take M. D. Nicholson, for example; hired by the Viennese office of travel agents Thomas Cook in 1897 and president of the Austrian Football Association less than a decade later. William Townley was born in Blackburn, played for the mighty Rovers before heading to coach in Germany in 1911. He helped to set up SpVgg Greuther Fürth, one of the early powerhouses of football in the country, and introduced the club to a Scottish-style passing game. He led the team to its first title in 1914 and, following the First World War, was in charge of Bayern Munich. Bob Glendenning played for Bolton Wanderers and Barnsley but is better remembered in the Netherlands for his 15-year spell managing the national team. Aged just 37 when he took charge, his tenure was only ended by the outbreak of the Second World War. In between he took the Dutch to the 1934 and 1938 World Cups, although neither campaign was successful, with both leading to first-round exits.

When British fans think of the influence their country had on Italian football, the fact that the famous black-and-white shirts of Juventus come from Notts County springs to mind. Yet the East Midlands city has an even greater claim to Serie A fame in the shape of the portly pioneer of Italian football Herbert Kilpin. Born in 1870 above a butcher’s shop on Nottingham’s Mansfield Road (a shop that eventually became an Italian restaurant), Kilpin played a – or perhaps the – major role in the establishment of AC Milan. When he was just 21, Herbert, who had become involved in the lace industry that Nottingham was famous for, went to Turin in Italy and started working for textile merchant Edoardo Bosio. The Italian-Swiss founded Internazionale Torino in 1891 and Kilpin, who played football in England for Notts Olympic, was soon playing for the team, believed to be the first ever Italian club.

In 1897, Kiplin moved to Milan. However, the problem that existed then was that the locals did not play football. So, in 1899, at a bar with five other expats, he established a football and cricket club that would become AC Milan, originally set up to give Kilpin and his mates a place to play. Play they did, and there are pictures of the moustachioed man, cigarette in hand, sporting the red-and-black kit that has become famous across the world. Kipling himself had designed the kit, saying, ‘We are a team of devils. Our colours are red as fire and black to invoke fear in our opponents!’ Within a decade, Kilpin had captained and coached the team to three Italian titles. He also earned a reputation for liking a drink, in keeping with the team’s boozy origins, apparently keeping a bottle of whisky around the pitch for a quick dram to drown his sorrows when the opposition scored.

Luigi La Rocca, a historian of AC Milan, told a BBC documentary in 2009, ‘In Italy, he was a champion. He was the first to teach football in Italy. He was a fantastic man and I feel he was the number one at the time in Italy. He’s the real first father of Italian football.’ But in 1908, Kiplin’s career was over as foreign players were banned by the Italian authorities. He stayed in Milan and died in 1916, at the age of 47. In the 1990s, after considerable research and searching, La Rocca found Kiplin’s unmarked grave in Milan’s Municipal Cemetery and led a successful campaign to have the Englishman’s remains re-interred at the city’s Monumental Graveyard, with the club paying for a headstone.

Another Englishman who had a huge impact on Italian football was James Richardson Spensley. A doctor from North London, he arrived in Italy in 1896 ready to treat British sailors working on coal ships but got sucked in to the burgeoning football scene. A year later, he opened the football section of the Genoa Cricket and Athletics Club. The club had serious success and by the time Spensley stepped down in 1907 they had won six of the first seven Serie A titles. It remains the club’s best ever period. Unfortunately, Genoa is now stuck at nine, the last coming in 1924, so remains one short of being able to wear the coveted gold star that ten-time Italian champions are allowed to wear on their shirts.

While Kiplin and Spensley had an influence of football in Italy, Jimmy Hogan left a lasting legacy in several countries, leading author Jonathan Wilson, in his history of football tactics Inverting the Pyramid, to label him the most influential coach ever. Born in East Lancashire in 1882, Hogan almost became a priest and then an accountant but embraced the beautiful game instead. An average player, he actually thought about the game and believed that controlling the ball was the key to success. This was not an ideology widely shared in Britain at the time, where the prevailing belief was that if players rarely saw the ball during the week in training, they would be all the hungrier for it when Saturday rolled around.

After a tour of the Netherlands in 1910 left him impressed with the desire of the locals to improve their technique, in contrast to practices in Britain, Hogan vowed to return one day to teach them how to play and put his ideas into practice. He did just that and impressed during a short spell in the Netherlands. In 1913, he called time on his playing career and was put in touch with Hugo Meisl, the president of the Austrian Football Association, and the pair started working towards the 1916 Olympics that were due to be held in Berlin. The outbreak of war meant that those games never happened, though for Hogan there was a bigger problem: he was an Englishman who suddenly found himself inside enemy territory, heading for internment. Baron Dirstay was the British vice-president of the Hungarian club MTK and gave Hogan a job. The Englishman took the team to the 1917 and 1918 league titles before peace enabled him to return home. All but labelled a traitor by the FA for working in enemy territory during the war, Hogan returned to the continent, managing in Switzerland and Hungary, and became involved with the national team of Austria, helping it to become the Wunderteam of the 1930s. He also toured Germany, giving lectures that had such a powerful influence that the country’s football association was moved to send a letter to Hogan’s son at the time of his death in 1974, calling Hogan senior ‘the father of modern football in Germany’.

The end of Hogan’s coaching career was spent in England with Fulham and Aston Villa, and while he didn’t achieve major success, his methods influenced future English managers. As Ron Atkinson told the BBC, ‘He would have you in the old car park at the back of Villa Park and he would be saying, I want you to play the ball with the inside of your right foot, outside of your right foot, inside again, and now turn, come back on your left foot inside and outside. He would get you doing step-overs, little turns and twists on the ball, and everything you did was to make you comfortable on the ball.’

Hogan was with Aston Villa youth players at Wembley Stadium in 1953 to watch the Hungarian team, whose development he had so influenced, inflict on England their first ever defeat on home soil. It was a huge turning point. After the game, Sandor Barcs, the president of the Hungary Football Federation, paid tribute: ‘Jimmy Hogan taught us everything we know about football. As the match was staged by the FA, we felt we could not invite him ourselves. But I would like to say that Hungary will invite Jimmy Hogan to come to Budapest next May when we meet England again, and then we will honour him. You can see how we have learnt his lessons. If I may say so, England could with advantage take to themselves some of the hints which Mr Hogan gave us. We are grateful to him and for his influence on our game.’ There was a more succinct tribute from Gustav Sebes, the coach of the national team from 1949 to 1957. ‘We played football as Jimmy Hogan taught us. When our football history is told, his name should be written in gold letters.’

At around the same time, Jesse Carver was also making waves. The Liverpudlian had a decent playing career with Blackburn Rovers and Newcastle United between 1929 and 1939, but really made a name for himself as a manager in post-war Europe. He won the Dutch title with Xerxes in 1946, which earned him a spell with the Netherlands national team. Tending to move around jobs fairly often, Carver led Juventus to the Italian title in 1950 in his first season in Serie A. He then had spells with Torino, Lazio and Roma, living a glamorous life in the capital alongside movie stars, directors and models with a wife apparently happy to take cash over the border to Swiss banks. In 1955, Brian Glanville, then working in Italy, witnessed Carver being offered the England job by Sir Stanley Rous.

‘My mind goes back especially to a meeting in the foyer of the Hotel Quirinale in Rome early in 1955, the year in which I’d last seen Carver, then manager of Roma,’ Granville wrote in World Soccer magazine in 2001. ‘At the time, I was a 23-year-old, working largely for the Corriere Dello Sport, and on the day in question he told me he was to meet the FA secretary, Sir Stanley Rous. Why didn’t I come along? It might do me some good. Rous stood there, massive and imposing, greeting Carver. I asked him if he’d had a good journey. Yes, yes, yes, he said brusquely. Who are you? and showed scant interest when I told him. Probably just as well, since in my perceived insignificance, I was no barrier to what followed – the offer to Carver of the managership of England’s team. It’s about time we brought Walter into the office, said Rous. Walter, of course, being Walter Winterbottom, first England manager, whose reign would last, remarkably, from 1946 to 1962. I cannot remember what Carver said to me about it afterwards, but he didn’t take the bait.’ Winterbottom stayed in the job another seven years.

Carver returned to England at the end of that season. He had taken Roma to third in Serie A and took over Coventry City, then in the old Third Division (south). Furthermore, he took George Raynor with him as an assistant. Raynor is a coaching legend in some parts of the world but is largely forgotten in Britain. The Yorkshireman had brief spells in Italy in charge of Juventus and Lazio in the 1950s but achieved fame due to his exploits in Sweden. His career changed for the better during the Second World War when he found himself playing alongside stars such as Tommy Lawton, Matt Busby, Joe Mercer and Billy Wright. A dodgy knee stopped all that and eventually he was sent to Baghdad as a PE teacher for Iraqi troops in 1943.