Sir Bobby Robson is the only Englishman to have managed more Champions League matches than TNS boss Craig Harrison.
Harrison is yet to progress further than the second qualifying round as he plots the latest campaign in European football’s elite club competition for the Welsh Premier League champions. But whatever happens when TNS face Swedish champions Hacken later this month, it’s fair to say the 45-year-old is already a winner.
Twenty years ago, Harrison turned his back on the game after a promising playing career which saw him force his way into a Middlesbrough team that featured Paul Gascoigne, Paul Merson and Juninho was ended at the age of 24 by a devastating injury. Like Gascoigne and Merson, he was plunged into a battle with depression after suffering a double stress fracture of his left leg - until football offered salvation.
“It took me about 10 years to come to terms with it,” recalled Harrison. “I had left Boro to join Crystal Palace because I was behind Christian Ziege and Dean Gordon. And I asked to play in a reserve game against Reading one Tuesday afternoon because I wanted to build up my fitness after dislocating my shoulder.
“Little did I know how it would change my life. It was a bad tackle. But I had just done the other lad with a bad one. The difference was I ended up with a broken tibia and fibula. After that, I didn’t want anything to do with football.
“It had broken my heart. It took me two or three years before I could even watch a game on TV. The dream I’d shared with all the lads I grew up with in Gateshead was over - and I started a new career buying and renovating houses.”
Harrison added: “I was in a pretty dark place when my wife, Danielle, arranged a 30th surprise birthday party for me and one of the guys playing in the band she’d hired was the former Welsh international Gareth Owen.
“Gareth was manager of Airbus UK in the Welsh League and just happened to be looking for an assistant. Again, it was fate - and the rest is history. Deep down, I still feel that old regret. I don’t think it will ever go away.
“But getting back into football relit the desire and enthusiasm for the game that made me the person I was when I was 24. I didn’t get the chance to be the best I could as a player - but as a manager, I’m in the Champions League. There aren’t many Englishmen who can say that.”
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The first leg against Hacken will be Harrison’s 17th in the Champions League. It’s a tough ask, given the Swedes boast a team good enough to finish above beaten 1979 European Cup finalists Malmo and Euro stalwarts Helsingborgs.
It would have been more had he rejected the chance to end his first six-year reign with TNS in 2017 to return to his north-east roots with Hartlepool just months before the chairman decided to pull his money out of the club. Harrison returned to Park Hall last summer - and added a seventh Welsh title to his CV.
He has managed close on 450 games and can call on his experience of playing under managers like Bryan Robson, David Moyes and Steve Bruce. When he was taking his UEFA coaching he shared lecture rooms and training pitches with names like Mikel Arteta, Patrick Vieira, Tim Sherwood, Les Ferdinand and Craig Bellamy.
Harrison added: “It goes without saying that what I went through made me a stronger person. There is no way I would now be a manager. I’m only in the game because I feel I’ve got some unfinished business with football.
“I look at some of the issues Gazza and Merse have had to deal with and I know I’m lucky to come out the other side with something still to offer. I can still remember the day Gazza decided to drive the team bus at Middlesbrough and ended up taking the side of it off on a brick wall. Even then, with bits hanging off it, he still tried to turn the bus around! Typical Gazza.”
