Ian Holloway: ‘If you can’t hear other people, you are isolated from the world’

Ian Holloway on his hearing aids: ‘It might cost me a bit of vanity and someone might tease me, who cares? It’s hardly going to ruin a face as bad as this’. Photograph: Ottr Works

Ian Holloway is talking about one of the telltale signs, away from frontline management, that led to him wearing hearing aids. “I became more and more aware how loud I was having to put the volume on the telly,” he says, before delivering the punchline. “My neighbours must be delighted.” The other giveaway came courtesy of his wife, Kim. “How often I had to say: ‘Sorry? Pardon?’ It started to really annoy both of us. At first I thought I was just deliberately not listening after 37 years of marriage.”

This Saturday, when his Swindon side visit Crawley hoping to maintain their League Two promotion push, Holloway, who turns 63 this month, plans to wear his hearing aids at a game for the first time. “Unfortunately ageing happens to all of us – your body does deteriorate – so put the ego down and get the best hearing you can. I want to be the best I can be for as long as I can be.”