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| Nigel Clough interview | Page One - Page Two |
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| Was
it a bit of a culture shock when you first arrived at the club, coming from
crowds of 20-30,000 at Manchester City, to 500-odd for your first match in
charge here against Grantham Town? "Not really. Having started in non-league quite a few years ago you don't forget everything, so we knew it would be a few hundred in comparison, but it's not necessarily about the standard or whatever, it's the people you're working with... and those 500 have now grown to 1,500." |
| Have there been
times when you've been at some slagheap of a ground on a cold Tuesday night
for a Birmingham Senior Cup match and thought 'What am I doing
here??'" "Yes, but you used to think that when you were in Manchester City reserves or somewhere like that as well. Whatever level it's at you will go to places and think 'What am I doing here?', but we always manage to have a good laugh about it and enjoy it." How much time does your job as a manager take up on a daily basis, and what else do you fill your time with? "It takes up the majority of the time, doing phone calls and interviews... A few business interests and the kids take up the rest of the time. It's always pretty hectic - people think it's part time and so on, but it can be more difficult because everyone is part time here so you get to do a bit of everything." You recently signed a new three-year contract, with a year still remaining on the old one. Was this partly an attempt to try and stop some of the media speculation linking you to other clubs? "We can't stop that - all the media attention. No matter how much you deny it people still come up with it and there's nothing you can do about it. All you can keep doing is turn up week-in, week-out. Everyone knows contracts these days aren't worth an awful lot in football but I would like to think that it's nice to honour contracts these days." |
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Does
the media speculation annoy or amuse you? "It's amusing more than anything but you just try and ignore it and hope the supporters don't take too much notice of it." Do you have any idea now, in your own mind, when you feel the time might be right to move on to another club? |
| "No. One agreement..
it's not even agreement, one thing I say when I have a chat with the chairman
is that I won't apply for other jobs, behind his back or whatever... We have
a very good working relationship." Is a good relationship with the chairman important? "Yes I think so, [but] it's not just the chairman, it's everybody within the club, creating the right sort of atmosphere where people want to come and enjoy playing football. [Pointing to club kit manager Ray 'Rocky' Hudson'] Rocky might come in and enjoy doing the kit, the boots. If he's not looking forward to coming in he's not going to do his job as well as if he is loking forward to it." How does your relationship with Gary Crosby work in terms of sharing the responsibilities? "On a matchday he takes care of a lot of things. If I'm playing, it's so important to have somebody like him off the pitch, who you can trust and who sees very similar things. He'll do the talking at half time sometimes, and we just share the workload accordingly. [Also] Andy Garner's now taken over the reserves and they're doing very well - they won the league and the cup last season so they've won the double as well." You obviously felt that the UniBond was a league you could win, but were you surprised by how many points clear we finished in the end? "Yes, we were a bit surprised at the margin but I think that shows how far we've come, not the change of leagues. I thought we'd improved sufficiently, and but for a very, very good season by Margate the year before, we'd have won the Dr. Martens - we finished 23 points clear of the third placed team. A couple of managers we've bumped into from the Dr. Martens said 'You'd have won this one as well', so that's always nice to hear. What's been your best moment as manager? "When the final whistle went at Vauxhall and we knew we'd won the league." How did that compare to winning trophies as a player? "[It was] more important. You can only live in this time for what's important now. Everything's comparable, but for this time in our lives, and in our careers, that meant more than anything." And your worst moment as manager? [Long pause]. Probably not winning the league the year before or getting done 4-0 in the semi-final of the Trophy, when we should have been in with a chance of getting through to the final, which would have capped it off. We'd nearly got the league in the bag, so it wasn't a case of saying 'everything's got to be concentrated on the league', so we really should have done a bit better down at Yeovil, and we could have sneaked through to the Trophy final maybe." Will the FA Cup and Trophy assume a higher importance this season, given that we're not expected to challenge for the title? "Yes. It's funny because we've done so well in them in the last few years without [having] concentrated on them and given them our top priority. So this season if we're comfortable in the league, then there's a chance we can turn our attentions [to the cups], and maybe even rest lads for a league game, ready for a big cup game, rather than the other way around. Do you set yourself targets, for Burton Albion or for your career in general? "No, no. I think that puts pressure on the players and everybody if you start setting targets. When we first came [to the club], the chairman's brief was to be challenging for a place in the Conference, and we did that for three years. We didn't make it for the first two or three seasons, but at least we challenged. We had two runners-up [places] and we were building all the time. "Now it will be just to survive in the Conference and progress from there, and within a season or two, hopefully we might get a squad together to try and get in the play-offs." What about your own career? Would you like to manage in the Premiership one day?
"[I have] no plans and
no set ambitions like that. I don't give it too much thought to tell you
the truth - [I'm] too busy concentrating on what we're doing here to think
too far ahead." |
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