‘Alexa, stop,” Steve Evans says, sitting at his kitchen table, shutting off the Motown playlist as he reflects on Stevenage’s superb start to the season, hours after victory preserved their perfect home record. It is a summer’s day in Rutland, the sun blasting in from the garden that doubles up as a football pitch for him and Joseph, his eldest grandson. Evans spent the morning strimming the hedges and mowing the lawn and is at ease as he looks back on a colourful career in the dugout. It all began in the 90s, a few minutes down the road at Stamford AFC where he won two of his eight promotions and the management bug gripped him, but much has changed since then.
The rhino skin remains – it is a necessity to last this long in the game – but Evans insists the caricature of the uncensored character who would overheat and berate officials on the touchline is out of date. So does he feel he has mellowed? “Without a shadow of a doubt,” says Evans, 60 next month. “I’ve think if you’ve seen me 10-15 years ago, it could be the most blatant goal-kick and I’m appealing for a corner, and if we lose it’s not my fault because I got the team or the shape wrong, it’s the referee’s fault because he didn’t give us the right throw-in on 74 minutes. I had to change, for health, and because we’re getting to the stage where grandsons are coming to the games. Joseph comes and he’s like: ‘Pops, pops!’ You have to be a bit careful, do you know what I mean?
“You only need to look at Jürgen [Klopp] on the sidelines. That’s me 10 or 15 years ago. That’s pressure. But when there’s 50 or 60,000 there, people forget about Jürgen and they’re more concentrated on the pitch. It’s pressure to win. Do I still have that burning thing to jump up and appeal for a decision, have a go at the ref or players at times? Absolutely. That will never go out of me. Look at the [All or Nothing] documentary with [Mikel] Arteta. I’ve been in Mikel’s company and he is the nicest and most placid man in the world. You look at some of the documentary and my wife says: ‘You said he was really nice?’” Evans laughs. “I think over a period you learn to do it in a different way.”
The former Crawley and Gillingham manager smiles upon being told that another Scotsman with a hot-headed reputation is directly behind him, a Gordon Ramsay cookbook perched on a stand. On Wednesday Evans had his annual League Managers’ Association medical screening. “Well, you don’t need to see me properly to know I’m overweight,” he says, before detailing how four years ago a consultant allayed fears that a tight chest might spell problems. “He said: ‘Does your weight vary?’ I went: ‘Yeah every couple of years, bosh, I’ll lose three stone and then put it back on.’ He said: ‘Because your arteries are as clear as anyone who has come in here who is a super-fit proper athlete.’”
It is clear Evans cherishes his eight months in charge of Leeds – he remembers tears streaming down his face on the A1 on the day he was sacked – but arguably the most memorable image of Evans at Elland Road came while he was in charge of Rotherham. Evans was so happy at securing Championship safety in 2015 that he promised to turn up for the final game of the season wearing a sombrero, raising more than £30,000 for charity in the process. “It is somewhere in this house. My daughters have kept it so every so often it comes out. I’ll walk into the lounge and my grandson will have it on – he runs about with it and thinks it’s great. I’ll never forget my players coming on to the [team] coach and seeing me with the sombrero on the table, terrible shorts, an old green T-shirt and flip-flops.”
Evans left Rotherham for Leeds and received a call from managerial royalty upon taking charge. “José [Mourinho] rung me,” Evans says. “‘Hey coach, I understand you are the new coach of Leeds, congratulations.’ It wasn’t a ‘Hello buddy!’ It wasn’t one of them. I only knew José from coaching courses in Scotland, so perhaps somebody like Craig Brown, who was a mentor of mine, gave him my number. I couldn’t say: ‘Where did you get my number?’” Evans also received a congratulatory message from Sir Alex Ferguson, whose testimonial he attended, and counts Arsène Wenger among his contacts, having spoken to him to arrange Emi Martínez’s loan to Rotherham from Arsenal in 2015.
Evans’s west Highland terriers, half-brothers Archie and Hugo, potter around the patio and bask in the afternoon glow. Archie later tries to wrestle a ball from Evans’s feet. Evans has kept match balls from Rotherham’s Wembley playoff final win over Leyton Orient in 2014 and his first home win in charge of Leeds but those mementos do not carry much weight with Joseph. “I’ll take them outside for him but he won’t play with them. He wants his Cocomelon ball. Kids change your life, grandkids change your life.”
It is world away from the Glaswegian wincing at footage of himself reaching boiling point on the sidelines. “Sometimes I look at the reaction to a decision where I’m like screaming,” he says, screwing up his face, “and my wife would never have to say [anything]. She would just look at me and she’d see me drop my eyes. I’d roll my eyes and say: ‘What am I doing?’ There’s now a complete balance; I have more empathy for referees in the last five years than I’ve ever had.”
When Evans took charge at Stevenage in March they were 22nd in League Two, three points above the relegation zone, but they won four of their final seven games to ease to safety. They host Harrogate on Saturday hoping to extend their 100% home record and return to the automatic promotion spots. Evans is seen as a pantomime villain, win-at-all-costs manager but Stevenage fans are the latest to see another side. He concedes it is very easy to judge a book by its cover and he rewinds to the poignant words his father, James, delivered on his deathbed. “‘If you don’t know my Steven, you don’t like him,’” he says. “‘If you know him, you love every bit of him.’”
