The life of a caretaker manager: You feel youre on trial every single game

June 06, 2024

The wording will differ but the meaning is pretty much always the same – they’re in temporary charge.

Frank Lampard is caretaker manager at Chelsea, Cristian Stellini is acting head coach at Tottenham Hotspur, Adam Sadler and Mike Stowell are first-team coaches leading Leicester City… all helping out in a club’s transitional period but also all potentially on trial for the top job themselves.

In some ways, it can be a thankless task, minding the fort while your bosses try to find someone else to permanently manage the team. But in other cases, it can be a springboard to a full-time managerial post.

Caretakers have led clubs to silverware. Roberto Di Matteo won the Champions League and FA Cup with Chelsea in 2012, three years after a much more established manager in Guus Hiddink had also led the Blues to win an FA Cup with Chelsea.

Stewart Houston took Arsenal to the European Cup Winners’ Cup final in 1995 three months after his long-time boss George Graham was sacked (although Houston also oversaw six defeats in seven league games, which left Arsenal briefly flirting with relegation).

Cup finals are a rarity. Some temporary managers end with relegation on their CV and a managerial career over before it’s properly begun, like Trevor Brooking at West Ham or Alan Shearer at Newcastle, two men who took on ultimately thankless tasks out of love for their clubs.

There have been high-profile caretakers with substantial football CVs like Duncan Ferguson (Everton), Joe Jordan (Portsmouth), David Pleat (Spurs), Phil Thompson (Liverpool), Eddie Gray (Leeds) and Attilio Lombardo (Crystal Palace), or lesser-known coaches who have stepped up to the spotlight, in some cases reluctantly. Eric Black (Aston Villa), Eddie Niedzwiecki (Stoke City), Frank Burrows (West Bromwich Albion), Billy McEwan (Derby County) and David Kerslake (Cardiff City) came, did their duty and slipped back into the background without leaving an indelible mark.

West Brom caretaker Burrows took on Mourinho’s Chelsea in 2004 (Photo: Getty)

The majority of these examples involved existing staff at the club taking over from a sacked or departed manager and often the people in question don’t really have a choice when asked/told to step up to the dugout.

“Sometimes you can’t do anything about it because you’re under contract at that club and you’re not going to walk away from that contract,” John Carver tells The Athletic.

Carver has plenty of experience in the caretaker role having done it a couple of times at Newcastle, once at Leeds and once at Sheffield United.

While it may be tempting to become the top dog in demeanour as well as title when stepping up from a backroom role to the big seat — ie show the players, the club and the fans who’s boss — Carver says the players you’ve been working with would see straight through the facade. He has spoken to Sadler at Leicester (the pair know each other from working together at Newcastle) to impress that point.

“You cannot change who you are and that’s so important,” he says. “Perhaps it’s different if you’re stepping up from the academy having not had much contact with the first-team players, but in general you can’t change your personality.

“But you do have to try to take yourself away from that role as an assistant when you’re close to the players and a link to the management. Now you’re having to make those big decisions and leave players out. You have to be as normal as you were before but still command authority. It’s really not easy.”

In the 2010s, Neil Redfearn was the go-to man in a crisis at Leeds. And that happened a lot.

He was caretaker for four games in 2012 after Simon Grayson was sacked, then one game in 2013 after Neil Warnock departed, another at the start of 2014, four more in mid-2014 post-Dave Hockaday and then he was finally given the job permanently in late 2014 until the end of the season, when he was replaced by Uwe Rosler and left to later take charge at Rotherham.

“One of the things that goes in your favour is that lads who haven’t been playing suddenly think they have a chance again,” he tells The Athletic.

“It’s a new broom, even if it’s only for a short while. I’m not daft about that. You can only pick 11 to start and every manager, me included, has players they rely on more than others. But you can harness the fact some players might feel a bit more motivated by the change. It might come as a relief to them and you know that even if they don’t expect you to be in charge for very long, someone else will be coming in before long — and they might have an eye on things.”

Redfearn has had several spells in caretaker charge of Leeds (Photo: Getty)

Redfearn also believes his history as a player helped earn the respect of the players.

“This sounds crass and it’s wrong, but it helps if you’ve played the game before,” he says. “That’s how I felt anyway. You get a little bit more respect more quickly. I had the advantage, too, that I’d been in the academy a while so by the time I was doing the caretaker job for the third or fourth time, I was seen as a safe pair of hands, someone who could handle the hysteria.”

Carver didn’t have that advantage as he wasn’t a top-level player, but his work at Newcastle over many years meant the players already held him in high regard.

“Normally you’ll have that respect if you’re good at what you do,” he says.

“If you’re working with these guys every single day, you automatically get their respect anyway. The majority of the time you know it’s a short-term appointment; you’re keeping the seat warm for someone else coming in.

“The players you have a problem with are the guys not in the team. you have to make them feel — which I learned — more important than the XI you pick every week. Give them hope they can get into the team if they impress you.

“The thing I don’t like is you feel you’re on trial every single game. Every match is an interview. And then you’re being asked about it before and after every game: ‘Do you want the job?’. You might be saying you don’t want it, but there aren’t many opportunities to work at the top level in football, so it’ll always be hard to say no.”

Not that Carver, now assistant to Steve Clarke at Scotland, would do it again. When Alan Pardew left West Brom in 2018, assistant Carver wasn’t interested in temporarily taking up the reigns.

“I wanted to leave and not hang around, I’d done it so many times,” he says. “It’s a very difficult situation and I would never do it again. You’re on a hiding to nothing. Everything is geared around just winning your next game. At Newcastle now, for example, Eddie (Howe) is in a run of three successive away games, he might say he’ll take six or seven points from that, but when you’re a caretaker it’s just about winning your next match, it’s all or nothing. Not many caretakers get the stability of a few games or weeks to really get to work.”

John Carver had caretaker spells at Newcastle, Leeds and Sheffield United (Photo: Getty)

Yep, a thankless task. That’s certainly how Terry Connor felt when very reluctantly taking the Wolves job towards the end of their doomed 2011-12 campaign. Connor had been assistant to Mick McCarthy for a few years and the pair have since worked together at Ipswich, Ireland, Cardiff and now Blackpool.

McCarthy was sacked in February 2012 and Wolves embarked on a fruitless task to find his replacement, either turning down or being rejected by Alan Curbishley, Walter Smith, Neil Warnock and Steve Bruce. With basically no one left, Connor was asked to take the team.

“My desk was cleared, same time as Mick, my black bag was done and I was out there with Mick, but the club didn’t have a successor so they asked me to look after it for two days,” Connor later said.

That turned into a week, then he was asked to prepare the team for their next game, then he was asked to take the job until the end of the season.

“The first person I called was Mick just to make sure he was OK with everything. He knew what had happened from the day he got sacked and that it wasn’t a case of me ever wanting the job or canvassing for the job, it was a matter of having to do something at the club until I was told to leave.

“It made me a better assistant when we worked at Ipswich. I understood more of the stuff managers have to do that they don’t really get a chance to explain, or they have to keep it within themselves… I was exposed to that. I made better decisions in the (coming years) because of that.

“Managing upwards, they call it in your courses, you’ve got to deal with chief executives, chairman, you might have to do a board meeting, all those things I was never privy to.

“The chairman wants to understand what’s going on, chief executives will come at you with figures, you’ve got the squad, medical people come and give you their input on players, commercial people want a piece, media want to talk to you, suddenly you have to step up and do it.

“It’s a fantastic experience. I tried my level best to put things right inside the dressing room with the team, but by that point… if Mick and I couldn’t do it, it was almost impossible to ask me to do it on my own and expect to be successful.”

Terry Connor’s spell in charge at Wolves ended in relegation (Photo: Getty)

Connor failed to win any of his 13 games in charge and Wolves finished rock bottom of the Premier League.

He never wanted the job full-time and Redfearn says that wasn’t a priority for him either.

“The premise for me was always the same,” he says. “I was most interested in seeing the academy lads develop and come through, so as the caretaker opportunities came, I saw it as an opportunity to give them a proper chance and let them shine, which they really did. If it swims it swims, if it sinks it sinks.

“Even when they went for Darko (Milanic) over me (in 2014), I was fine with that. Cellino wanted me to go in with Darko, to be one of his assistants, but he didn’t know me, I didn’t know him and the last thing he needed was someone being forced on him. It wouldn’t have been fair.”

As Connor states, there are aspects of the job you are not exposed to as an assistant, such as dealing with the media. And there’s a lot of that to do.

“You have to be guarded,” Carver says. “I’m quite open, honest, straight and I shoot from the hip. If I had any advice for the guys doing it now, I’d say be yourself but play things down and, obviously, you have to try to be positive.”

Redfearn adds: “Some of it you’ve got to tip-toe around. You don’t really need an opinion because you’re there to hold the fort. That doesn’t mean you don’t know what’s been going on or that you don’t actually have an opinion on it because a lot of caretakers are assistants or academy coaches, so they’re close to it.

“You get loads of politics at football clubs and there was always plenty at Leeds, but I felt that it would be a mistake to get involved in it. If you didn’t like the previous guy, that’s between the two of you. I’m just here with my ideas and the only agenda is to look after things and, hopefully, make things better until the next coach arrives.”

While caretakers often have little choice but to take the reins, it does come loaded with risk in that the job you’re leaving behind may soon not be available. For anyone with managerial ambition, the rewards arguably outweigh that risk.

“By taking that job you can lose the job you’re already in — and lose it very quickly if you get sacked quickly — but so much in football is down to circumstance,” Redfearn says.

“And if you’re ambitious, or if you back your ability, then obviously there’s a part of you that would like a crack at the main role. But I don’t think it helps to start out as a caretaker with that on your mind.”

(Top photos: Getty Images)

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