From the brink to champions

We were managing a crisis within a crisis.

It was pre-season with Wigan Athletic, before the start of the 2020/21 League One campaign. The club had been relegated from the Championship, and the administrators were in. At half-time during a game, a player I had ready to come on for the second half came up to me.

“Listen, I’ve got to go and meet somebody in Manchester. I can’t play. A deal has been done with the administrators and the buying club. I’m leaving.”

I’d had plenty of experience in coaching. I’d been involved in winning titles with Chesterfield and Portsmouth as well as Wigan, and had steered Accrington Stanley to safety from relegation from the Football League. But this was a whole new situation. Staff and players would turn up on a daily basis, knock on my door and say: “I’ve been offered a job. I want to leave.”

The year before, we had turned down a multimillion-pound bid for one player. He ended up walking out the building for less than 10 per cent of that. You just couldn’t stop it.

It all happened quite quickly, but the hardest thing to manage was the players who were left. They had seen friends and teammates leave for different clubs, at a level they thought they should still be at. Instead, they felt left behind, in a situation they didn’t want or deserve to be in.

The situation the club had found itself in the season before had not been our fault. For us, it quickly became a case of fight or flight. If the culture isn’t right, it’s all too easy to say: “Right, well somebody else is responsible for this, so let’s turn the lights off and quit.” It was a challenge to manage that, but a challenge we had to embrace.

We had to instil a mindset where we could still be successful even in the most challenging of circumstances. We wanted to bring everyone together – in a siege mentality, so to speak. No matter what the situation, you can still set yourself goals or aspirations.

"i have no doubt in my mind that we would have been a top-six team the following season"

I set out by letting everyone know that our doors were always open, whether personally or professionally. This was people’s lives we were talking about, and it was the not knowing that made things so hard. Not just for the players, but also the whole staff in and around the stadium, from groundsmen to the canteen. People we had been around for a long time, and who had invested their lives into the football club.

On the pitch, the previous season, we had been building a good and youthful team. Antonee Robinson (below), Jamal Lowe, Sammy Morsy, Kieffer Moore, Joe Williams, Cédric Kipré, Josh Windass, Joe Gelhardt, to name but a few. They all left that summer. I have no doubt in my mind that, with even two more good additions, we would have been a top-six team the following season. I believe we would have had a chance to emulate the likes of Sheffield United and Leeds United, and get promoted to the Premier League.

That summer, the manager made the decision to come out of his contract and leave the club. Somebody had to lead, and I had vast experience in management and high-intensity situations, when keeping Accrington Stanley in the Football League some years before.

I stayed on as caretaker, but I think the administrators feared I could be gone any minute. They had various approaches from other clubs. As well as that, the previous manager, Paul Cook, and I had a strong and successful working relationship. When he took another job, they were aware he could make contact and look to take me with him.

They wanted to put somebody in place to make sure that, if that happened, they had someone to lead the club. John Sheridan came in, but he left for Swindon two months into the season.

By the time I took over as caretaker again, in November, the team was bottom of League One. The club was trying to survive financially, but doing so in the middle of a worldwide pandemic. Managing at the elite end of sport is tough enough; managing a club in administration in the midst of a pandemic is more or less impossible.

The reality is that we had gone from a functioning football club, looking to reach the pinnacle of English football, to one where the mantra quickly became: “Can we get through today?” Every time we sold a player, the focus was on whether people were going to get paid. More importantly, would the club even still be here in two months?

"we picked up players who had been discarded by other clubs, who were maybe a bit scarred from previous experiences"

At the start of the 2020/21 campaign, the staff and players weren’t sure what was going on. They had never experienced anything like this before. Some wanted to leave, some didn’t want to play in case they got injured, and some just weren’t mentally able to play. I think we promoted 15 academy graduates to play in the first team that season. To make your debut in a professional game is really hard. To make your debut in such a tough, challenging environment is even harder.

Some careers could have started and finished within such an environment. Under that pressure, it was important to manage each individual with the right detail. We had to create a culture in which they could not only survive, but also flourish and grow as professionals.

Towards the end of my playing career, I studied for a degree in social work. As part of that, I spent two years volunteering for the Leeds Youth Justice Service. I worked with kids who were in and out of school, and young people in and out of prison. That involved various roles, ranging from mentor and appropriate adult to engaging in education programmes.

Within that environment, I worked with some really strong-minded individuals with unbelievably strong mindsets, despite the issues and everyday problems they faced. That time was priceless. It has been pivotal in shaping me as a person and a manager. It has given me a certain skillset and made me want to always be available for players – to care for them as both people and professionals.

This definitely helped as we worked to prepare so many young individuals for the challenge of entering a collective, professional enviroment in which you need to win. We’re not talking two or three, either. We had a really big handful of young pros making their debuts, being educated every day, having to take on an enormous amount of detail.

They had to grow not just individually but collectively, as a team with a winning mentality. And they were then expected to go into places like the Stadium of Light, Fratton Park and Hillsborough, and play alongside mates who were also experiencing it for the first time. As a leader, you have to make sure expectations are levelled. You need to make sure they are able to perform to be the best version of themselves.

We also picked up professionals who had been discarded by other clubs. One example was Will Keane, who was struggling to find a club. So we signed him on a four-week contract, which was within the constraints of the administration. That is mind-blowing, looking back, because he is flying in the Championship and has played for the Republic of Ireland.

Others were trying to get their careers back up and running, too: Viv Solomon-Otabor, Curtis Tilt, who went on to play for Jamaica, Joe Dodoo. Players who were maybe a bit scarred from previous experiences. Senior players like Jamie Jones, Lee Evans and Gavin Massey brought a shift in mentality. We brought them all together and, with the young academy players, we built a very good, expansive team.

"the club had been days from going out of business. now, i had a blank canvas in front of me"

During this period, I had had various opportunities to leave and progress my career at higher levels. By this point, though, things had gone too far at Wigan. I felt that the players’ mentalities had shifted. Their personal aspirations of wanting to leave had been replaced by wanting to go on a journey with us and be successful. We wanted to achieve something new, by stopping a club in administration suffering a further relegation.

From a personal point of view, I wanted and needed to see it through. Every day, I wanted to make sure the club didn’t go down again, so that it would have a solid foundation to build from in years to come. You have to have a genuine belief in your work, but also in everyone who comes on that journey. Staying in League One that season is, I think, my biggest achievement as a coach or manager – even above multiple championships. The survivals are the ones you cherish most, because you know what they mean to both the fans and the community. Everyone knew what another relegation could potentially lead to.

That summer, I presented to the new ownership. They were ambitious in a good way, and they matched my ambition as manager. But I was honest about the enormity of the task ahead.

Ahead of the 2021/22 season, the first team consisted of four players and myself – and two of those players were young academy graduates. There were no functioning departments: no recruitment team, no sports science team, no medical department, no coaching staff. No goalkeeper coach, assistant manager or first-team coach. There was nothing. To go into a full campaign, facing the likes of Sunderland, Portsmouth and Sheffield Wednesday, with no real structure was an enormous challenge. But it was a challenge I relished.

I had a massive emotional attachment to the club after everything that had happened over the previous six years, but especially the last 18 to 24 months. It had been days away from going out of business. Now, the positive, as I saw it, was that I had a blank canvas in front of me. With that came an opportunity to write anything we wanted on it. It gave us a platform to implement a philosophy and strong culture through the whole football club.

We more or less started from ground zero. I knew what was coming through from our youth system: Callum Lang, Thelo Aasgaard, Charlie Hughes, Chris Sze, Sam Tickle. I knew they would be a big part of the club moving forward, but I needed to complement them with good senior players to help them thrive in that environment. We needed players with the level of personality to be able to peak Saturday, Tuesday, Saturday. But we also needed strong functioning departments with good staff running through the club.

We added the likes of Max Power, who I'd worked with before, and James McClean. Never mind the football or the talent; as people, they were both fantastic. Unbelievable professionals, and I knew the affinity they both had for the club and the fans. We also added the likes of Tendayi Darikwa, Tom Naylor, Jack Whatmough and Charlie Wyke. We made decisions on about 20 players that summer, and I’d say we got 18 of them right. It was important that we brought the right character for the culture we were building. With that in mind, a lot of work went into the recruitment that summer.

"what we all saw when charlie collapsed was a hugely momentous experience in all of our lives"

It was certainly another exciting season. We lost our first league game, away at Sunderland, but that wasn’t a surprise. There was still a spillover from administration, and we had a lot of young lads in there who were still finding their feet and learning on the job. The team started to grow and evolve, though, and we won six of our next seven.

Fast-forward to a Monday in November. We were doing a light session before a trip to Cambridge for a game on the Tuesday night. Four days after that, we faced another long journey to play Plymouth. Charlie Wyke had had a few issues some weeks before, but he’d had loads of tests, come back, trained and played extra-time in an FA Cup game the week before. During the session, he walked over towards me. He was grimacing.

As the manager, I’m thinking: “No way, all the prep is done, now he’s going to tell me he’s done his groin.” He said “Gaffer”, and then he collapsed.

Thankfully, only two weeks before, we’d had a session with the team doctor, Jonathan Tobin. We wanted to make sure everyone felt a part of the team, and he had been trying to get all the staff in for a couple of weeks for a medical course. We had a busy schedule, but I finally took my football hat off for long enough to realise that this was important, so we got all the staff in. Jonathan began, and showed us the footage of when Fabrice Muamba collapsed at White Hart Lane in 2012. He had been one of the doctors who saved Fabrice’s life that day, so he had all our attention.

So when Charlie collapsed, that session was fresh in my mind. I began to put the things we had learned only weeks earlier into practice. You go into auto-pilot, really, and I can only describe it as on out-of-body experience. Many people did some amazing things that day; thankfully we were able to bring Charlie round with CPR.

The paramedics came and got him into the ambulance. The atmosphere around the training ground was very fragile, to say the least. After a period of time we were able to stabilise things, at which point Charlie sat up in the ambulance. “Cambridge away? Plymouth away?” he said. “F***ing not for me, lads!” It gave everyone hope, and a bit of peace of mind. That’s exactly the type of person he is.

I got the players together, told them what Charlie had said, and gave them two choices. Either we postpone the game, which considering all the emotion I’d have been fine with, or we get on the bus to Cambridge.

“If you want to cry, cry,” I told them. “If you want to laugh, laugh. To be honest, I don’t know what to do. I’ll probably laugh and then cry, but don’t feel anxious about anything. If we travel, Charlie has told us to make sure we go down there and beat them. He will be back with us soon.”

That was possibly one of the hardest situations, if not the hardest, I have ever had to manage – with a group of players who didn’t know what to do with their emotions, but still had to go and compete.

"the last 10 games of a season are different. people can get anxious, habits can change"

We got on the bus. Perhaps as you’d expect, we started slowly at Cambridge. We were 1-0 down at half-time, but the teamtalk delivered itself. We went 2-0 down, but fought back to score twice in the last 10 minutes and get a draw. Then we went to Plymouth and scored a last-minute winner.

The days following Charlie's collapse, and those two results, were pivotal to our season. Those two long trips were probably the best thing that could have happened for us. What we all saw when Charlie collapsed had been a hugely momentous experience in all of our lives. Spending so much time together in the days that followed brought us all closer. It felt like something special – magical, even – had come out of such a horrendous, worrying situation.

As the season continued, it felt like we became the team to beat. The likes of Rotherham, MK Dons, Sunderland and Sheffield Wednesday pushed us hard, but I never felt for one minute that we wouldn’t get promoted. We were very flexible, but we dominated possession from our usual 4-2-3-1 shape in most games. In some games, we would build with a back four but defend with a back three; for others we’d go 3-4-3. It’s a long season, and teams were changing to play us. I didn’t want us to get frustrated, so we worked hard to give the players a platform from which they could find different ways of winning.

When you’re in with a chance of achieving something, the last 10 games of a season are totally different. People can get anxious, habits can change. I’d been through it numerous times as a player, with Bolton and Accrington, and also as a coach multiple times. As the manager, you need to be consistent in your behaviours – and not just with the players, but everyone at the club. We had a young, vibrant chairman from Bahrain who was desperate to get promoted. Managing his expectations, and the emotional energy that came with them, was a real but healthy challenge.

We had some tough games in the run-in, including both Ipswich and Portsmouth away, but our fate was always in our own hands. Going into the final day, away at Shrewsbury, I was probably less nervous than I had been all season. As they stepped out on to the pitch, it was down to the players. They had been given strong detail all season, and been consistent in their behaviours on and off the pitch. As a result, I had full belief in them. I knew how strong a group they were, how strong a unit. They were always going to win that day.

There’s a famous saying in boxing, isn’t there? Train hard, fight easy. We had trained really hard all season, from where we had started, and I was really happy with where we had taken the football club – both on the pitch and off it. I’d worked alongside the chief executive, Mal Brannigan, to recruit stadium staff, ground staff, canteen staff, chefs, everything. I felt like I had been involved in moulding the whole football club, so to end the season with that 3-0 win at Shrewsbury, promotion and a championship, was all worth it.

Football is constantly moving, always evolving, so you have to make sure you’re doing that as well. Even with five or six games of the title-winning season to go, I was starting to plan for the Championship. I knew what it looked like to get promoted and then build, so I wanted to give the ownership and chief executive my thoughts on what was coming.

"the good organisations in football – in any industry – don't make rash, irrational decisions"

We knew the level of the group we had, but as a manager it’s important that you always work to make the organisation or team better. When you get promoted, the players want new faces coming in the door as well. They want better players to play with. The really good professionals will back themselves to evolve and stay in the team anyway.

Weeks went by, though, and I felt something wasn’t quite right. The chief executive and I worked tirelessly within various parameters. We needed to be cute on timings and the type of player we added, so we could stabilise in the Championship along with the new ownership's vision.

The season was starting in three weeks, and we had made several decisions. Loans went back and we released some lads whose contracts had expired, all based on the thinking that we would be recruiting a younger, more expansive breed of player. Instead, I was informed, before the first game of the season back in the Championship, that no one at the football club would be getting paid. As you can imagine, thoughts of previous seasons came back to run through the football club.

We started the season well, though. We only lost one of our first eight league games, and I think we were only a few points outside the top three. But we had a small squad, and over October we had five or six starters out. With the 2022 World Cup imminent, we ended up playing 20 league games by November 8 with a really thin, bare squad. An experienced international manager once told me: “Often, I think a season is defined by your summer.”

Our points per game at the time was still enough to keep us pushing forward in the division. I was very surprised, then, when my tenure came to an end. It was the club’s prerogative, of course, but I still feel that they could have had the belief and trust in what we were doing – and how far the club had progressed in such a short space of time.

"i've been able to re-energise before focusing on the future and my next challenge"

If you look at the really good organisations in football – in any industry, really – I don’t think they make rash, irrational decisions. Those that have continuity and consistency, that allow themselves the time to breathe and evolve, and where expectations meet reality, are the most successful. How many times did people think Mikel Arteta was not the right man in his early days at Arsenal? Or Sir Alex Ferguson at the start of his spell at Manchester United?

It takes a period of time to build a culture and to create a philosophy at a football club. To be successful and win league titles in such a competitive industry, with so much emotion every single weekend, requires patience, diligence and commitment from everyone running through the organisation.

Through the past 14 seasons as manager, head coach or assistant, I’ve been able to gather lots of experience. I've worked with fantastic people in so many different environments, from foreign ownership and split boards to a fan-owned group and even administration.

Since leaving Wigan, the time has been really good for me. On a personal level, it’s given me an opportunity to support my family. Professionally, I’ve been able to reflect on my career, maintain what I believe in and discard some of the less important things. It has also allowed me to further my learning by observing other disciplines in sport. Importantly, too, I have been able to re-energise before focusing on the future and my next challenge.

I’m sure, when that comes around, I’ll know it’s right for me. Just as importantly, I hope they will know I’m right for them.