No set positions. All out attack. Entertainment as a top priority. Joint top of the league. It’s Scottish coaching, but not as you know it.
While football fans in this country are still reeling – and more than a little angry – about the negative approach of the national side at the European Championship which yielded no tangible reward as compensation, there is a Scottish manager out there who is showing that another way is possible. It’s just a shame he had to leave Scotland to get his opportunity to do so.
Stevie Grieve will be a name familiar to many football fans, if not quite at the household level. Yet. The 37-year-old has been coaching since he was 16, and has never been afraid to up sticks in search of opportunities to prove his chops.
He has been a TV analyst and something of a celebrity pundit in India. He has coached in Switzerland and Canada. He has been an opponent analyst at Dundee United, and head of scouting at St Johnstone and Forest Green. But it was always all building towards the day when he would strike out on his own, and lead a club as head coach in his own right.
That opportunity finally arrived in Finland in May, and he has grasped it with both hands. His team, SJK Seinäjoki, are currently tied with two of the country’s more storied clubs, KuPS and HJK Helskinki, at the top of the Veikkausliiga.
The obvious question then is just how he, and they, ended up there?
“I applied for the first team assistant head coach job about three or four years ago and just kept in touch with the technical director [retired Welsh footballer, Richie Dorman] ever since then,” Grieve said.
“When the B team coach moved on, he asked me how I saw football, and I told him, ‘All-out attack, no positions, try and overwhelm the opponent, score as many goals as possible, and entertainment first.’ I had to sell that idea.”
Sell it he did, and he was duly placed in charge of the club’s B team, SJK Akatemia.
“I came here last April, and he then saw it in action with the second team,” he went on.
“We got to within 20 seconds of promotion and we were causing absolute chaos.
“Then in November I got moved up to the first team because the previous coach [Joaquin Gomez] went to Saudi.
“The style of play has evolved. I don’t know if we could do what we do here in Scotland, which sounds weird. But we play with almost no positions.
“It’s going really well. You can experiment with different ideas and players are really open-minded. The way of playing and seeing the game here is more pro-risk, even though Finland itself is quite a conservative country.
“You can experiment a little bit tactically, so for me, it’s a great starting point as a first-time head coach.”
Let’s back up a minute. What exactly does Grieve mean when he says SJK play with ‘almost no positions?’ Coming from a country where defensive organisation and positional rigidity is often prized above all else, it feels like an alien concept.
“It’s not that Scottish players are not receptive to new ideas, I think most would be, and most are, they just don’t get the chance to be,” he said.
“I think Scottish players would be receptive to something like playing with no positions. If you’ve got two centre-backs who have got a position, the striker has got a position, one midfielder has got a position and the rest float around, I think they would go for it.
“Even then, our two central midfielders, you’ll see one of them overlapping on the left wing while the other one is playing centre half. Somebody else fills in their position, and it is how I believe the game should be coached, encouraging players to be free in their positions.
“The players at the start will ask ’should I go here?’, and if that is where the space is, then we tell them to go and get the ball.
“We started off with things like the right winger coming off the right wing to get the ball off the centre backs. Will the left back go with him? Generally not, so now we have an extra player.
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“You’ll sometimes see our right back underlapping our left back and putting the ball in the box, or the two full backs in the centre of the pitch playing a one-two with one another while the centre back is out on the wing.
“It looks mental, and it sounds mental, but it’s within the flow of the game, it’s quite natural. It’s just about gravitating towards the space, getting the ball, passing it and keep moving. If you run then somebody else fills your space, we do a lot of practices that then make it natural.
“There’s a basic structure and principles, and a positional structure within it, but everyone is allowed to be free.
“I think Scottish players would take to it.”
At least one already has. Lewis Strapp has recently joined up with Grieve at SJK from Morton, and has relished being given some responsibility over and above shelling the ball up the wing from left back.
“Lewis keeps talking about how much of a change this is, and how much he is enjoying it,” he said.
“He will say, ‘Normally I would just get the ball and stick it in the channel’, but here he might go and play number 10 for 30 seconds because that is where the space is. He can go in and somebody else will fill in his space, and he doesn’t have to think twice about it, everybody just rotates.
“It’s refreshing, but it takes a bit of time to get used to it. But if the goalie pings the ball out from the back and we lose it 45 yards from goal, there’s no reaction from me. They are expected to play.
“It’s not positional play. It’s not ‘you stand there, and I pass there’ and all that scripted nonsense. I’m not interested in that.
“Go and get the ball, pass it, play one-twos, go third man, rotate, do what you want. As long as we win. And I said to the players, I think you will enjoy it.”
Football as enjoyment? A concept that will never catch on here, all you cynics out there may say. And, you may also say, that coaches such as Grieve with no playing background at the top level will also never be given a fair shake of it in Scotland, as the likes of Ian Cathro found to his cost.
Particularly, he tells me with all candour, from a hostile media, though he senses a softening from the fourth estate towards such appointments, perhaps in part due to the success of the likes of Will Still at Stade de Reims, and now Lens.
“I would say that the media has changed over the past 10 years, so it is easier for people who have not got that playing background to be given more of a chance,” he said.
“I think it is probably better than it has ever been. But we are a country that jumps on failure more than we jump on success. So, if the preconception of something is that it isn’t trusted as the right thing to do, as soon as there is an opportunity to be proven right about it then it is jumped upon. And success takes a lot longer than failure.
“I don’t want to name names, but there have been a few guys given jobs in the Scottish Premiership that were probably never going to succeed no matter what, but they get more and more time because they are liked, and people want them to succeed.
“But if there are people given a job where everyone expects failure, as soon as there is a slight hint of potential failure, they jump on it.
“That might be because how friendly you are with the media, your background and experience perhaps, but I get all that. It’s something you just have to navigate if you aren’t from that background, and that’s fair.”
Grieve, then, is as self-aware as he is fully cognisant of the Scottish football landscape. He doesn’t sneer at ex-pros being given opportunities ahead of him, realising they possess qualities and experience that he does not. And vice-versa.
“I’m doing my pro-licence just now with Naisy [Steven Naismith], David Gray and Scott Brown, guys that finished their career and went straight into coaching,” he said.
“The difference between those guys and me is that they have been in that professional environment for 20 years, they know how players think, how they feel, they know what the daily routine is going to be, they read the room really well.
“I did two internships at Feyenoord in their academy, but it’s not the same experience as what they have lived, so they have got the mental aspect of the job, what every day should look like and how the players should feel about it. They have a feel for that, and I have to learn that through experience.
“The difference I’ve got is that I’ve got 20 years on the pitch as a coach, as a teacher, as an educator, and all of those things give me a different advantage. So, what it fundamentally comes down to as a club is what do you hope a certain coach will bring?
“Back when I started there was only maybe Jose Mourinho and Arrigo Sacchi, a handful of high-level coaches who hadn’t been players that were given a chance. Now, more and more people who haven’t been players are being given opportunities.
“So, it doesn’t frustrate me, it’s just part of the industry, and the ones who are good enough and are talented enough, have the social competence to work within a staff, understand what football players need and want from you in various moments, they will get there anyway.
“That is the industry I work in, that is what I chose 20 years ago, and it is now more open than it has ever been, so it fills me with some hope and optimism for the future.”
What of that future, then? It is early days in his managerial career, but already, people elsewhere are starting to take notice of what Grieve is doing at SJK.
In the short term, his loyalty lies with the club that ‘stuck out their neck’ to give him his big opportunity, and he wants to repay that faith.
“When I got the job, qualifying for European competition was a big thing for the club, because we’re not in Europe this year,” he said.
“Financially for the club, it’s good to be in Europe, so that is obviously a priority for us. The two ways to do it are to try and finish in the top two or top three to get into the playoffs, or to win the Finnish Cup.
“We’re in the Finnish Cup semi-final, and we’ve got a difficult draw against KuPS who are generally in the top two in the league every year, but we beat Vaasan in the derby 5-1, we beat Oulo 2-0 and we won 4-2 away to Ilves, who are arguably the best team in the country, so we have done really well in the cup.
“If we can win the cup, that would be massive for the club. But finishing in the European places at the end of the season is our target, so that is our focus just now.”
It isn’t just about Grieve, or SJK, though. The strings that may one day eventually pull him back to his homeland are more personal than professional.
“My wife and kids are still in Scotland, so obviously I would like to be closer to them,” he explained.
But what further complicates the picture is the fact that there are only a few select clubs in Scotland that he feels would be receptive to his approach, and where he would be comfortable working.
“The type of job I would accept in Scotland, there are only a handful of jobs that I would even consider,” he said.
“Those are not easy ones to get, so it’s not in the front of my mind. There were a few jokes recently that if we keep this up, Stevie is away, but last season the team that were top of the league at one stage ended up losing the last 10 games, so it can change very quickly.
“If we win the league and win the cup, then I would expect that somebody might give me a phone call, but I’m not looking for it.
“I would like to coach in Scotland and make a difference within Scottish football. I’d love to help Scottish football and Scottish players, I would like to do that.
"If the opportunity comes, fantastic, I will look at it, but for me right now I would like to be here until the end of the season, and then the club still have another two years on my contract, so it’s out of my hands.
“I’m just trying to do the best I can in my first top division coaching job, and we’ll see what happens in the future.”
His own position, has never been stronger.
