Neil Warnock is back in football
One last job; always one more job. Retirement tomorrow, or the tomorrow that never comes. One last Warnock mission, like a gruff, tracksuited Jason Bourne.
Middlesbrough this time, who broke the glass in a case of emergency and dialled up English football’s Ronseal manager.
The instant reaction from supporters of the clubs around them: “Well, that’s Boro’ staying up”.
Warnock is closing in on 40 years as a football manager. He has managed 12 per cent of the 92 clubs in England’s leading four leagues, and long ago lost interest in pretending to be something he is not and forgot to care what people thought about it.
The football might not be entertaining, but they have grown accustomed to that on Teesside anyway.
The only options now are Championship safety or financial ignominy. Middlesbrough have eight games to save themselves, or be saved. Nobody does it better.
Neil Warnock is a pensioner
This is supposed to be his decade of short walks in the morning sun and long, lazy afternoons, of weeks permeated by calls from family members and subsequent worries of their health and happiness.
Fun, excitement and trepidation all become consciously rationed; time flies when you’re having them, but who wants time to fly in their 70s? You work for 50 years and then spend the next 20 – if you are lucky – wondering where the time went.
But to hell with “supposed to”. Football is a great equaliser of age, where wide-eyed teenagers can embarrass wizened old pros and a 71-year-old can wear sports casual without eyebrows being raised. Warnock is old enough to be the father of 70 of his 91 peers.
Middlesbrough play Hull next Thursday in an unspeakably important fixture. Grant McCann, Hull’s manager, was born in the same year that Warnock took his first managerial job. Warnock will hope that experience pays, but he has seen too much to rely upon vague notions of false privilege.
Neil Warnock is Colin
The anagrammatical nickname, for the few that do not know, is not intended as a compliment. And yet Warnock treats it so. Not everybody can be popular. Not everyone needs to be loved. Some find joy – not just mere acquiescence – in ruffling feathers. Warnock has roughed up an entire aviary. Scorn is his fuel.
Were he widely liked, Warnock would surely have retired happily by now to sit in an easy chair and absorb the glowing endorsements as if reading his own obituary. Instead he delights not in straying close to the line but demonstratively standing beyond it until someone dares to ask why he is trespassing.
If that loses friends and alienates people, who needs friends when you are happier running your own race?
Warnock’s views on pretty much everything can be distilled to his views on Brexit: “To hell with the rest of the world”. So bring on the abuse.
It is when the patronising platitudes begin that you know your race has run.
Neil Warnock is successful
And there is the crux. Like him or loathe him (and there is little middle ground), Warnock has made it work.
His managerial career has spanned the introduction of three points for a win, the backpass rule, a foreign revolution, the commercial explosion and the rise of player power.
Warnock remains emphatically obstinate, a statue to Yorkshire stubbornness. He was also as successful in his last job as any other in his career.
For all the aggression, Warnock retains an innate ability to inspire players to see their potential and pursue it unwaveringly.
The bottom line is hard to argue against: no manager has gained more Football League promotions (eight). His first and most recent were achieved 31 years apart.
Neil Warnock is a football addict
The greatest pleasure comes when the warmth of familiarity meets the cold rush of unfamiliar experience. Warnock knows the drill by now: new players, new personalities, new challenges. But all still new.
Football management is not all Warnock has known, but it is all he has ever wanted to know. More than half of his life has been spent in charge of a club or waiting to be.
Over the last seven years, he has been unemployed almost as much as he has been employed, but he is never off.
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Being out of work becomes a part of being in work, two elements of the same process.
That process has created dependency. In full flow, a flame burns within Warnock that can never go out.
That flame is protected by the brashness and autonomy that allow the slings and arrows and long hours and messy divorces to wash over him. And then there is the rush: another phone call, another club panicked into breaking the emergency glass, another black eye to dish out. You can never retire from football; football retires you.
The end of the road will come. Maybe this will be his last firefighting mission. Even Warnock cannot jab a finger and a few choice expletives at Old Father Time and get him to back down.
When he leaves the game there will be no huge fanfare nor grand epitaphs, at least not straight away. You shuffle out of a side door while the audience applauds your replacement and the far-off dreams they weave.
Most football managers are fondly remembered but very few avoid being quickly forgotten.
But, for now, Neil Warnock is happy again. Neil Warnock is back in football. He would not have it any other way.
from Football – inews.co.uk https://ift.tt/3810Vc6
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