Going into the weekend, from Tuesday night were there any injuries or is anyone back and available?
Obviously, Evo’s (Antony Evans) suspended. We’ve got a few knocks and niggles but I think they’re going to be alright to be selected so we’ve got a decent group to select from. Obviously, the lads who had to play with a numerical disadvantage are feeling the effects of that a little bit, far more than normal. But they’re in fine fettle and we’ve got 8, 9, 10 days in the season so there’s a break coming up for them and we’re going to empty the tank in these last few games.
We spoke this morning, we know the toughness of the challenges ahead of us with two teams chasing a play-off berth but we’ve got our own mini-targets. We’ve got an opportunity to finish the best of the newly-promoted teams which, for us, would be a step in the right direction and it’s going to be tough but we want to hit our targets ourselves.
In terms of looking at this season, goals scored - you’re up there with a lot of the teams above you, it’s the goals conceded where there’s nobody above you in the table. Is that a concern in terms of looking at your recruitment and how are we going to get from where we are to where we want to be?
Absolutely. That process has already started, you can see from the rubbings on the board. We’re thinking how we’re going to improve the group and get better and obviously that’ll start to accelerate once the games have finished and you’ve tidied up the back-end of the season and people know where they stand.
We’re in the business of getting better and improving but I’m not going to sit here and say, ‘we want to get promoted next season’ but we’ll be better next year than we were this year. If that’s by a point or a goal, we’ve got some factors. We need to score more goals and concede less goals. We’ve lost 19 games this season, we can’t lose that number next season if we want to improve.
We’ve won 14, lost 19 still with three to play and the challenge will be for the boys to come back and be better next season. And, if we do that, season on season, lo and behold you’ll get a promotion out of the division. I intend to spend no longer than two more years in League One. For me, I’ll either go and play golf or something. I’ve done four years in League One now, if I can’t get out of League One in the next two years I’ll probably try something else.
When you’re at a big club and can spend ridiculous amounts of money, it’s not “easier” but it gives you that advantage. Do you have to be smart in identifying young talent in nurturing it in order to compete with sides who can spend more money?
I think you just have to see what the market presents. If you’ve got a few more shilling you can bully the market a little, you can make things happen, you can force teams to sell their best players. But I would imagine there are 91 teams who don’t want their best players to leave.
We’ve got Aaron Collins who will no doubt generate interest in the summer but, again, we don’t want him to leave because it leaves a big hole in our team; 16 goals, 11 assists - replacing that isn’t straightforward. But, also, market forces dictate if somebody comes and offers you money and a salary for Azza, it’s going to be difficult not to make good business practice and finding a deal that works for all parties.
From our perspective, when the season starts next year the fans won’t care what we’ve banked, they’ll be looking at the team on the pitch and making sure they’ll be performing for the quartered jersey.
From our perspective, we’ve got a lot of work to do but if you stand still in this game you get worse and you regress and nothing’s going to change if you’re in this profession for the next 30 years, every window, every summer’s going to be the same because the name of the game, if you want to progress, is getting better.
Peterborough this weekend, they’re the kind of team who have been there or thereabouts, towards the top of the table, quite a few years yo-yoing; is that where you want to take this club, realistically?
I think they’ve got their business model, Darragh MacAnthony and Barry Fry have been brilliant - promotions, always at the top end of League One and pushing into the Champ. They had a couple of seasons up there.
They’ve always traded players at a premium, found gems all over the football pyramid and polished them up and kept their football club sustainable with really good business practice. So, of course, you naturally look at those teams and you take some examples. They’re really good in some departments, but also we’ve got a slightly different business model.
I think I’d struggle if my chairman was as active, and vocal, and opinionated and knowledgeable as their chairman but, again, it works for them. They changed from Grant McCann to Darren Ferguson and vice versa and it works, you can’t knock it, it’s produced results for them and they’re in a position again to challenge for promotion.
When you look at the teams that sit above them you have to say they’re a little bit of an outlier, and the reasoning for that is really good understanding of what they’re football club’s about and how they can get productivity. In a really competitive market they do superbly. Lots of clubs at our level could learn some lessons from them.
You mentioned in the week about wanting 12 players, I appreciate not every player is the same but if that is the number, what is missing in terms of characteristics and attributes that you would like to bring in over the summer?
We need to concede less goals. When I look at some of the goals we’re conceding, they’re naive. There can be an individual mistake or whatever but I would say, there are about 20-25 per cent of our goals conceded that are a product of inexperience or naivety.
If you use the top three as an example. Go through the Plymouth backline from the other night - 32-year-old Joe Edwards, 34-year-old James Wilson, 27 and 26 Dan Scarr and Macaulay Gillesphey, even the keeper was 26 - there’s just a bit of nous in there.
Now they’ve got their way of doing it and from my perspective we’ve gone a different route into that, it’s a longer to medium term strategy in terms of getting younger players in our group and allowing them that space to develop.
I spoke to the lads this morning, when you recruit players, you should only recruit people who are better than the people you’ve got or you think could be better than the people you’ve got. Otherwise, it’s much of a muchness.
So, for me, January wasn’t an ideal window. Jarell Quansah was a prospect but we weren’t going, ‘okay, he’s better than Bobby Thomas and going to hit the ground running’. I think you can make an argument for the others, Grant Ward was a bit more advanced than Zain Westbrooke at the time, and he’s proven that in the games he’s played.
But on the whole, if you trade five players you want every one of them to be an upgrade. How realistic that is, I’m not 100 per cent sure.
I said to the lads this morning that I’m looking at every single player in our starting XI going, ‘okay, I need to get a better player than you’, because that is progress. The lads don’t want to hear that because they believe they’re the best. But as a manager you’ve constantly got to be looking to improve. That’s not just the playing staff, that’s also the coaching staff.
Tuesday night after the game, I couldn’t sleep until about half four in the morning because all I’m thinking about is the team; where we are, progress we’re going to make and how we’re going to build for next season. Your brain starts whirring: ‘get rid of everybody and we’ll start afresh’. Then you realise, ‘settle down, it’s not that bad’. We’ve been poor over the last couple of weeks because the lads have made poor decisions or been a bit naïve.
But we’ve got some really good components here, really good people. Not everyone is going to come on the journey because it’s not realistic to think everybody is going to improve at the level necessary to get better. So, some are going to go. Naturally, with the loan cycle, some are going to go. Some are going to go because they’re out of contract or the level has gone up, and we’re going to get new people into our building and that is exciting.
But also, sometimes in the aim of trying to progress, if you’re not careful, you can regress, so we have to get that balance right and make sure players who leave in the summer window are the correct players to leave, and some of those lads might be fans favourites, that’s the nature of the business.
But if we’re all truly serious about improving the football club and one day being in a position to get Championship-level football for our team, we’re going to have to make some tough calls and my job as the manager is to make those decisions. If it’s the right decision for the group, as the manager, you’ve got to do it. You’ve got to put your sentiment to one side in the name of progress.
I was disappointed with January because I don’t think we made a real move forward but when I look back at it now, we definitely improved the group but it didn’t improve our level because we didn’t spend like Plymouth or Ipswich did - we didn’t have those ready-made, experienced bodies to come in.
Is it fair to say then you’ll have more experienced players targeted this summer?
We’ll certainly look into that because losing Couttsy out of the dressing room, losing Glenn Whelan, Anssi, Rodders (Alex Rodman) - those types of senior figures. There are still a lot of young men in there.
We’ve got Scottie Sinclair in there and Sam Finley, but they need a hand because you need four or five of those lads. If Scottie and Sam have an off-day and don’t feel like talking so much, we’re at a low ebb. So we do seriously need to look at that but the flipside of that is they cost a premium, to get really good players.
There are lots of players in the ether now, and you’re going, ‘he’s not playing there, maybe we could get him’ but it’s the motivation to get the boys down to Bristol; we’ve got to improve the training ground, the ground has got to be improved because you’ve got to bring them in and say, ‘this is going to be your home for the next 12 or 24 months’.
I always think that you have to recruit above the level. If you’re recruiting from below the lads you’re asking lads to do something they’ve not done before. You might take the odd one or two of them but, as teams have found out (it doesn’t always work). If you take lads above the level, and then if you take a couple from below the level, it allows them the time to stabilise and, if they surprise you, great.
So we’re looking to recruit lads from above our level. So when we were in League Two, we’re recruiting League One; the training ground is lovely, the ground’s okay - that’s fine. Now we’re trying to recruit from the next tier. I know from my Fleetwood days, to show them a really nice training ground is important because that’s where you’re going to be, you spend more time there then you are with your family, so you have to improve your standards there.
This is great, and it’s been great from league Two to League One but it needs to improve. The players need to come back and go, ‘okay, these are serious. Everything is moving in the direction that we’re getting better’. If you come back and it’s the same, then you get the same.
So I spoke to the lads really in depth about it. What’s been accepted this year will not be accepted next year, because we want to get better. And it would be stupid to think if we do the same things we won’t get the same result.
But that’s across the board, we’re incrementally moving towards being a serious football club and it’ll take time. If we keep doing the right things and we keep nudging it, then the rest takes care of itself and eventually you’ll be in a position to progress.
Plymouth, I use them as an example. There are lots of teams doing different things but to sit top of our league, with the budget they’re on compared to the teams that are chasing them. But, again, they’ve had a bit of stability - Lowey (Ryan Lowe) going in there, infrastructure improvements, they suffered a relegation and built back from there incrementally and now they’ve got themselves in a position to get into the Champ and that’s a blueprint for anybody with aspirations for turning a League One or League Two side into a Championship club
On Jonson Clarke-Harris, am I right in saying he came to see you after the game in November?
He was sound. My full debut for Burnley was Rotherham away on a Friday night and Jonson was playing in the game and we were chatting during the game - he was a baby then, and I was in my 30s - I remember having a good chat with him, you read a lot about people, but I took him at that value - I’d met him and he seemed a decent enough lad.
Obviously, we all do mad things but I’ve always watched his career just because you remember stuff like that. My observation was, I’m looking at him going, ‘you’re better than what you’re showing’.
He came here, there were the horror stories - not just him, Josh Barrett was in the same category, the standards had slipped in the place - and I think people like that type of personality, they need a bit of structure and someone getting after them to get the best out of them.
Clearly Fergie (Darren Ferguson) and the lads at Peterborough have done a good job with him because he’s consistently scored goals, but I had a chat with him and just as player to player I said, ‘just if you do, this, this and this, you’ll improve, and don’t just settled for being top scorer in the division'.
Don’t just settle for being how you are at 30. I remember Steve Black used to say to me, ‘if you can’t get better then you may as well give up; stop playing, you’re wasting your time, you’re not getting out of bed with any motivation’.
For me, I think he’s better than what he’s currently showing. I spoke to Josh Windass, who was at Rangers with me, about the same thing, Barry Bannan - you shouldn’t be in this division.
I never played in League One. If you’re a top player, it should embarrass you to have League One on your CV. Some lads get caught up in contracts, and you can’t get out of them because nobody is going to give you more money up a division, I get lads get tied into it. But if you’re a Championship or Premier League-level player, you’re doing yourself a disservice to be dropping down and playing against players you’re clearly above.
Tiger Woods doesn’t drop down to the Korn Ferry Tour to win tournaments; he’s Tiger Woods, he plays at The Masters. Whether he can win it or not is a different equation, but he challenges at that level because that’s where he sees himself.
There are teams at our level who are having themselves, massively, massively, and I’m like, ‘lads, settle yourselves down - you shouldn’t be here some of yous, the fact that you’re here is an embarrassment to you and the standards that you’re prepared to be playing at this level.'
You should be so much better than this because you’re a good player and you’ve got so much more quality. That’s how I see it and I’ll never stop chasing people, who I think are receptive.
Loads of people I know don’t care what I’ve got to say but I know Jonno has great respect for me, as I know from my early run-in and I know people read my press because it’s refreshingly honest and they’ll wonder what mad thing I’ve said. I’ll just say it as it is and if it impacts him for the positive then great, because I think he’s got more to give.
You mentioned before about not wanting to negatively influence the promotion race by experimenting too much. With Peterborough and Bolton to come, is it fair to say it will be a mainly senior side for those matches?
We’re going to be strong anyway because we don’t have a load of kids, we don’t have a 23s group, so there are going to be senior bodies anyway. Alright, maybe the lads who haven’t played so many minutes but, ideally, I’ll pick a team on Saturday, we win and I don’t have to change it. Ideally.
But while we’re in the spot we’re in, if the lads don’t perform, I think it’s only natural to give someone else a go and say, ‘go on then, you go in and do your job’.
Chopping and changing during the season is not beneficial but I need to have a good appraisal of these lads because some of them I’m going to have to release, some of them I’m going to have to say you’re not getting a contract - all of them, seniors as well - I need to be able to look them in the eye the Monday morning after the Bolton game and say, ‘unfortunately your future’s not here and these are the reasons why’.
Nobody else at the football club does that so to be able to look them in the eye as men and tell them that, I have to have had enough water under the bridge to be absolutely down the pipe with them.
Because, that’s my job. I’ve got to see them because they’ll go, ‘you haven’t seen me play’ and they will have just cause if I haven’t. But, as it stands, there’s not many who can say that. Most are, ‘no, no, you’ve shown us’. I said to them in there, ‘don’t save anything for tomorrow, because there might not be a tomorrow’. Look at Nick Anderton. Saving it for next season or next game, no.
A lot of our lads are at that juncture in their career where if they do it right, anything is possible. The potential for some of our lads in there, it’s limitless. Sometimes you need an old grey-headed wolf to get after you and then you look back and you think.
I had it with (Kevin) Keegan. I didn’t understand why he was getting after me. I was like, ‘he didn’t like me’. Arthur Cox - he used to pin me up against the wall and threaten me. And I’m like, ‘he doesn’t like me’. And it’s only when I look back now, he was getting after me because I wasn’t doing everything I can do. And then getting after me helped me go, ‘I’ll show you’.
You don’t need that every day, or every season, but there are junctions in your life but, as men, you need other males to mentor you. By people who have been on the journey they’ve been on.
It’s great if that’s a family figure, because you’ve got that family trust. But that isn’t always the way and sometimes you butt heads with that father figure that an outside influence can give you and I see that as that’s your job - to help these young men fulfil their potential and get the maximum out of themselves. Mainly for their family and everything else that comes with it further down the track.
You said before about Josh Grant and wanting to get him back to play in these last few games. Is that still on course?
No. Josh has just had a little tweak there in his groin. It’s probably going to kill him in terms of by the time he gets back we’ll be approaching those last embers and it’ll be foolish then to throw him in.
Josh needs a really good pre-season and then that’ll give him the springboard. I’m just disappointed for him because he looked really really good out there in a short space and then felt his groin, which is a blow for him but in the scheme of Josh, it’s not the worst thing that could happen. And it’s not the worst timing.
If him and Jordy Rossiter get a really good pre-season under their belt, it’ll be like signing two brand new players next season and two really good players.
Obviously, Josh is out of contract at the end of the season. Do you plan on offering him a new deal?
Yeah, hopefully. We’re chatting to a lot of them about it now. He hasn’t signed anything yet, but Josh knows our feelings on it. That’s Eddy (Jennings, head of football operations), Tom (Gorringe, CEO), their agents and the player to sort it out.
The intention from us to have him with us. There’s no point us paying for his operation and rehabbing him for the last 12 months if he goes and signs for somebody else.
He may well do that, I don’t know. I don’t know what’s out there for him. But I’m hoping we get a chance. He’s only 23, Josh, if we can get to the bottom of these issues - and you’ve seen with Lewis Gibson, he’s played more games for us than anyone else, so clearly we’ve got an ability to get a bit of a tune out of certain lads.
Hopefully Josh has his best years out in front of him and he can look back the frustration of the last two-and-a-bit years and use that as a springboard to attack the prime of his footballing career.
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