Sunday Times/Paul Kimmage February 14, 2010
'What did you do today, Daddy?'
Neil Warnock, anyone? Thought not. You’ve had enough of his boorish behaviour, right? You’ve grown weary of his constant badgering of referees and all that screaming and profanity and rage. We meet on a Monday evening at his home in south London and have hardly shaken hands when he’s cuffing me around the ears with the usual nonsense.
The bitterness pouring out of him about the summer of 2007 and Sheffield United’s demotion from the Premier League: the bitterness pouring out of him about West Ham and Carlos Tevez; the bitterness pouring out of him about Graham Poll and Rob Styles; the bitterness pouring out of him about Rafa Benitez and Sir Alex Ferguson . . . the bitterness.
Surf the web and our fatigue with him is obvious. Graham from Sheffield: “He’s the Marmite man of English football.” Eddie from Maidstone: “Hate him, always have, always will.” Jim from Coventry: “He has a chip on his shoulder the size of the Grand Canyon.” I hear you, brothers. I know exactly what you were thinking when you opened the page: “Oh no! Not another bloody interview with Neil Warnock!”
But wait ... what’s that sound coming down the stairs? Who’s the sweet little boy sweeping across the carpet in his pyjamas and into the ogre’s arms? We have read about this boy in Warnock’s weekly column in The Independent but there is something about the way he cradles his father’s head.
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“Goodnight daddy,” . . . that knocks you back on your heels.
William Warnock loves his dad because of the way he laughs when they watch Scooby Doo. William Warnock loves his dad because they ride on the Runaway Mine Train at Alton Towers together. William Warnock loves his dad because he gave him a pet chameleon called Elvis. William Warnock loves his dad. So ask yourself one question, brothers, before passing judgment . . .
Can an eight-year-old boy possibly be that wrong?
The interview has entered its second hour. His wife, Sharon, has brought him a mug of tea and we have peeled back all the layers and reached the very core of him.
The year is 1961. He is 12 years old, the youngest of three. Home is a two-bedroom semi-detached in the southern outskirts of Sheffield. His father smokes 50 John Player a day and drives a crane for the English Steel Corporation. His mother has multiple sclerosis and has just started using a wheelchair.
It’s a pleasant summer’s day. He is pruning the privet hedge at the front of the house. Neighbours are walking by. “How’s your mum?” they ask. “She’s all right,” he replies. “She’s only just inside the door there. She would love to speak to you if you’ve got a couple of minutes.” But it’s as if the poor woman has leprosy. They all carry on by.
She dies a year later at the age of 46. He is standing in the front room staring into her coffin. A candle flickers on the table. His Auntie Edith is whispering that his mother is happy now and that God will look after her. He doesn’t want to know about God: “What kind of God would put my mum through so much pain?” he asks. He confronts some of the neighbours: “Why didn’t you come to see her when she was alive?” he cries, then storms outside. It’s bitterly cold. The wind is blowing his hair. He closes his eyes and decides he will never set foot in a church again. “How can God do this?” he wonders. “How can he take my mum away from me when all the other lads have got their mums?” The injustice eats away at him.
In the weeks and months that follow, his love for football fills the void. Joe Shaw, the Sheffield United midfielder and defender, is his idol; Bramall Lane, his temple of worship. “Just to go and stand outside that dressing room and smell the liniment [was wonderful],” he smiles. “And to watch these lads coming out all showered and immaculate . . . We were the underdogs in Sheffield and I always supported the underdogs.” Warnock has spent more than 40 years in football playing for or managing unfashionable teams. It started in April 1968, when he made his league debut for Chesterfield at age 19. “I was a brainless winger,” he smiles. “They used to say, ‘Open the gates and Warnock will run out’, and that’s how I was. The ambition was always to play for Sheffield United but I realised pretty early that I wasn’t ever going to be good enough. I always got a club and made a living out of it for 10 years but my ambitions were higher as a manager.”
He was in his second season at Hartlepool and staring out the window of a digs in Seaton Carew when the notion of being a manager first took root. A group of scruffy-faced kids were playing football on the green and had asked him to take them training once a week. He formed a team and entered them into a local league but the surprise was how good it made him feel.
“I can see it [our first game] as clearly as yesterday,” he beams. “We worked a corner kick which we had practised in training — a run and a clip to the far post — and scored. I went running up the touchline and all the kids came running over and I felt brilliant. It was like a drug. These lads hadn’t got anything but I had made them feel so good.”
He started making mental notes and thinking about his managers; Jimmy McGuigan at Chesterfield had taught him the art of defending and attacking set-pieces. Jimmy McAnearney at Rotherham had emphasised the importance of a player’s technical ability. But it was the Hartlepool manager Len Ashurst who traced the blueprint for the manager he would become.
“I didn’t want to go to bloody Hartlepool to play football,” he says, “but he made me feel I was good enough to play for England! He had this fantastic ability to make everybody feel confident and that’s a real gift when you’re a boss at a football club. He taught me more than anybody about man-management and about being strong and having guts and believing in yourself and how far that could take you.
“I used to listen to a lot of my managers and think, ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about’. They used to applaud players for nutmegging, even if they lost the ball. I couldn’t understand this. Why would you be happy that your player had lost the ball just because he had nutmegged somebody? Or he could keep the ball up? We had all these lads who were full of skill but they had no bollocks! And right from the start it got me thinking, ‘If I was a manager, I’d want bollocks any day rather than somebody who could nutmeg a player’.”
After an 11-year playing career with Chesterfield, Rotherham, Hartlepool, Sc**thorpe, Aldershot, Barnsley, York and Crewe Alexandra, he began the next chapter of his life as a greengrocer and then as “Neil Warnock MSSCh” — a Member of the Surgical School of Chiropody.
The year was 1979. He had been married to Sue for seven years, had two children and he was earning £15 an hour, treating corns and ingrowing toenails at a rented premises — his “surgery” — in Tinsley, south Yorkshire. He was also managing a team in the Sheffield and District Sunday league where his duties included collecting the subs, washing the kit and clearing snow from the pitch in winter.
No job was too demeaning for a man who loved his craft. His application never wavered as he began his march on the summit from Gainsborough Trinity to Burton Albion in the Northern Premier League, to Scarborough in the Conference and then to Notts County in Division 3, where he achieved successive promotions and fulfilled his lifelong ambition to cross swords with the best in 1991. The first game was a 2-0 defeat by Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford but he outgunned his rival at the post-match press conference.
“Was there anything that had brought it home that you had arrived in the big time?” a reporter inquired.
“Yes,” he replied, “when I walked out on to the pitch before the game and saw a warning sign that had been put up for the supporters.”
“What sign?” they said.
“Keep off the grass.”
“What was so strange about that?”
“It was written in 15 different languages,” he said.
He shared several memorable lunches with Brian Clough that season. Ken Bates offered him the manager’s job at Chelsea; Bob Murray was interested in taking him to Sunderland. He was making friends and influencing people but there was a price to be paid.
His son and daughter had grown up before he had noticed. His marriage to Sue had started to crumble. And when County were relegated after his second season at the helm, the phone stopped ringing and he was out of a job.
The month was February 1993. Torquay United were bottom of the fourth division and looking for a miracle to keep them in the league. His friends told him he was crazy for taking their call and warned him not to consider it. It was professional suicide.
Nobody in his right mind moved from a top-flight club to a club that was slipping out of the league. But Warnock wasn’t in his right mind. His divorce was pending. He had started a relationship with Sharon. He needed to get as far from Nottingham as possible and Torquay fitted the geography.
Their penultimate game of the season was a trip to Carlisle. He prepared the team as if they were playing the FA Cup final, knowing that a win would secure league status for another year and after a 1-0 victory he stood in the dressing room and addressed the players with tears in his eyes. He told them that they were “bloody good lads” and had given him all of the effort he had wished for. He told them that they had restored his faith in football and renewed his love for the game. This was the essence of Warnock, he always gives his all. This was the essence of his success, his players had responded.
He joined Huddersfield that summer and had spells at Plymouth, Oldham and Bury before returning to his favourite dressing room in December 1999. The scent hadn’t changed. He was back at Bramall Lane getting high on the liniment and the fairytale was complete, six years later, when they returned together to the Premier League. But there are no fairytales in sport.
He still has nightmares about that final day of the season . . . Danny Webber through on goal and the ball hitting the post . . . The joy in the West Ham dressing room at Alex Ferguson’s team sheet . . . The penalty given against them in the opening game of the season . . . The penalty given against them when they played at Old Trafford . . . Rafa Benitez’s team sheet against Fulham . . . Carlos Tevez sending them down . . .
“Why the hell did they let him play?” he asks. “It shouldn’t have happened. It was an absolute disgrace. It wouldn’t have happened to anybody else. They wanted Sheffield United to go away and shoved it under the carpet. We went down with 38 points by one goal! There’s nobody got 30 [sic] points since and got relegated.”
He resigned as Sheffield United manager the next morning. A week later, he took William to the Chelsea v Manchester United cup final at Wembley. They were high up in the stands among the Chelsea fans and while waiting for the game to start he called a friend in Sheffield and decided to place a bet.
“It was a double,” he says. “I had a big bet on Chelsea to win the cup and Milan to win the Champions League final. I thought, ‘If there is any justice in this world I will win this bet’. And I won! Chelsea beat United and Milan beat Liverpool and I loved every minute of it, which I suppose is a bit bitter.”
The bitterness consumed him for weeks. “It was poisonous,” he says. “You take the kids to school and try and do other things but it keeps grinding away at you. I remember the first day of the season, sitting on my tractor in Cornwall and feeling absolutely lost. Since 1967, I had never missed the first day of the season but then you stop feeling sorry for yourself.”
He returned to management two years ago at Crystal Palace and he has started going to church again but the miracles he has performed this season have little to do with divine intervention. A few weeks ago, on the eve of a game at Newcastle, he was told the club had gone into administration. The team cook and masseur hadn’t been paid for months. The players and staff hadn’t been paid. The coach driver who had dropped them at the hotel had just handed him a bill. This was not a job for Roberto Mancini . . .
“I got all the players together and said, ‘This is how I see it. I don’t want us to be like Portsmouth. I don’t want us to drop our standards. I want you to play for the fans, for yourselves and for me. You are all going to get paid through the PFA. This is not Afghanistan or the war in Iraq. We’re playing football and we’re going to play with pride’.” A week later they knocked Wolves out of the FA Cup. Today they continue their pursuit of the trophy in the fifth round at home to Aston Villa.
His team are underdogs again. He likes the sound of that. “The pressure is on them. Martin [O’Neill] will be desperately wanting to win it and he’ll be going ballistic on the bench with me but after the game we’ll have a drink. I love him. I think he should have had the England job.”
“What about you?” I ask. “What does the future hold for Neil Warnock?”
“Well, I’m not getting any younger,” he says, “and the only chance I have of getting into the Premier League is if I take a club up but the bug is so strong now. I want to manage at Premier League level again. I want to have another go at them.” He starts laughing.
“What’s so funny?” I ask.
“Did you see the joke in my column this week?”
“Remind me.”
“Neil Warnock, Arsène Wenger, Rafa Benitez and Alex Ferguson are in the pub. Warnock gets a round in; Wenger gets the next round, then Benitez, then Ferguson. Then Warnock goes to the bar, buys himself a pint and sits down. Wenger, Ferguson and Benitez ask him what the hell is going on. Warnock replies, ‘This is the fifth round, lads, and you are not in it’.” The dog’s had his day.
NEVER A DULL MOMENT: WARNOCK’S UPS AND DOWNS
Born: December 1, 1948, in Sheffield.
As a player: A speedy winger who begins at Chesterfield before signing full-time professional contract at Rotherham. Career ends at Crewe Alexandra in 1979 with relegation in his 345th game.
As a manager: First full managerial job comes in 1981 with Northern Premier League side Gainsborough Trinity. Wins the Football Conference with Scarborough in 1987. Successive promotions take Notts County into the top flight in 1991 but he leaves in 1993 after relegation.
Achieves promotions through the playoffs with his next two teams, Huddersfield and Plymouth. Appointed manager of his boyhood team Sheffield United in December 1999 and leads them into the Premier League after finishing Championship runners-up in 2005-06.
Resigns in May 2007 after United are dramatically relegated on the last day of the season. Takes over as Crystal Palace manager in October 2007 and guides them to the playoffs at the end of the season.
www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/football/football_league/article7026218.ece
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