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Swindon Town have been on an upward trajectory since Ian Holloway’s arrival in October, his first managerial job in nearly five years - Tom Pilston
Ian Holloway is sitting in the sports hall at the Swindon Town training ground, talking about spectral matters.
Soon after he arrived at the club last autumn, he claimed that the place was haunted, jokingly suggesting that the ghostly presence might be the cause of the team’s slump.
The ensuing headlines led to a flurry of cancelled bookings of the facility and he had been politely asked by the management of the municipally owned centre not to talk about it. This, though, is Ian Holloway, not someone easily silenced. And he is soon detailing to Telegraph Sport the place’s unexplained visitors.
“There are some things here,” he says. “Staff have been in here working at night and they’ve heard things. A window smashed from inside. Doors opening. An apparition walking through a wall. They’ve got it on camera. They got the CCTV footage.”
His wife, he says, was particularly intrigued by the goings-on. “She loves those ghost programmes on TV. Watches them for hours. Mind, I call it Nothing Ever Happens TV.”
But did he really think supernatural forces were responsible for Swindon’s league form? “No,” he grins. “We were just playing rubbish.”
Still, even if the uninvited night-time users are still taking advantage of the extensive facilities, something has changed around these parts. Not least Swindon’s league position. The club that had been in the Premier League 30 years ago had suffered decades of decline, of ownership issues, of financial problems. Since 2020, eight managers had failed to stem the downward flow. Things reached a nadir last autumn when they hit the bottom of League Two. Eviction from the Football League seemed a real possibility.
Not any more. Since Holloway came to the club in October, the trajectory has been entirely upward, they have risen from rock bottom to mid-table security, some of their more optimistic supporters sensing they might even be in for a late charge for the play-offs. “Actually, can I correct you there?” Holloway says. “We hit rock bottom after me being here for four weeks. Fact is, at first I made it worse.”
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Holloway, shouting instructions from the touchline, has overseen a transformation in Swindon Town’s fortunes after some home truths were shared shortly after his arrival - PA/Nigel French
It was, he says, after they lost at home to Morecambe in November that he realised drastic action had to be taken. He convened a meeting of all staff – including the club’s Australian owner Clem Morfuni.
“It was in this hall and some truths came out,” he recalls. “I felt we had a blame culture. And I told the chairman it was down to him. Afterwards, this lady came up to me and said she was the chairman’s mother. I apologised for some of the language I’d used, but she said ‘nobody speaks to my son like that. It’s about time they did. Well done, young man’. I liked the young man bit.”
From that moment, what Holloway instilled about the place was an atmosphere of positivity.
“Over the last 15 years they’ve got a bit fed up here. I don’t blame them. They had some good times here under Ossie Ardiles, Glenn Hoddle, some wonderful people. Since then, there’d been an awful lot of negativity. I’m not about that. I’m about trying to share how great this is for me. Hopefully, whoever is around me gets that and it spreads.”
So what did he do to change the culture?
“I’m really strong about this, you need encouragement. Feel the goodness about a situation and that will raise you out of what is going wrong. I never got encouragement as a player. It was always ‘you did all right … but’. I spent half my playing career waiting for that ‘but’ to arrive. And when it did, it would go on and on. Well, there’s no ‘buts’ here.”
Holloway has set the tone. Relentlessly upbeat, full of bonhomie and enthusiasm (“I’m like Tigger, top’s made out of rubber, bottom out of springs”), his good nature has proved infectious. It is not just results that have improved. As the players wait for the manager to complete his media issues and address them ahead of the weekend’s match, the noise from the lounge where they have gathered is a booming crescendo of camaraderie and good cheer.
“Because my daughters are all profoundly deaf, I’ve come to realise how communication is a gift,” he says. “If you are able to talk and listen, do it. Not just on the pitch, but off it too. I tell the players: talk to each other, tell us what you’re thinking.”
For all his eccentricities in speech and dress (he loves a trilby hat) it should not be forgotten that Holloway is a fine football manager. It is not so much his tactical nous (“half the managers in this league think they play like Pep Guardiola. I don’t. I play like Ian Holloway”), it is his man management. He is adept at getting the best out of young men a third of his age.
“This feels natural to me,” he says. “Observing people, that’s what a manager does really. And I can create an environment. I don’t do that at home. That’s my wife’s territory. She doesn’t need me to because she’s too good at it. If we’re out shopping and I put anything in the trolley, it’s ‘what you are you doing? We don’t need that’. And back it goes. Here, I’m in charge.”
Though sometimes being in charge, he reckons, is the hardest job in the world.
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Natural environment: Holloway at Swindon Town’s training ground, little over half an hour away from his family home - Tom Pilston
“You hear these pundits – and I used to be one and I definitely said it – saying ‘you’ve got to manage the game’. Haha. If you’ve been a manager you know you can’t. While you’re trying to manage, the other side are trying to disrupt whatever you’re doing. The way I liken it is say you’re a plumber, you have to work out how to put the central heating in. But while you’re doing it, no one’s pulling the radiators off the wall. Whereas as a football manager, the opposition are wrecking what you’re doing. You’re constantly trying to find ways to avoid the wrecking ball.”
Does that make management the impossible job?
“No, no, no. When you win it’s the best, easiest job in the world. And when you lose it’s absolutely the worst. So the thing to do is make sure you win more often than you lose.”
Which is what he is doing at Swindon. Yet, the oddity is, for all his evident abilities, he was out of the game for nearly five years after losing his job following a largely inauspicious spell at Grimsby Town. At that point he had assumed that age was against him and that he would not get another position. He was spending his time in punditry, on the after-dinner circuit and producing his rather magnificent oil portraits of everyone from Ian Wright to Stevie Wonder. Then, last summer, after a conversation with his old playing colleague Gary Penrice at a funeral, he realised his need to manage remained undimmed.
“Plus my wife told me I was becoming a right Victor Meldrew,” he says. “She said I had to get out from under her feet.”
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Holloway, in the garden of his house in Box, Wiltshire, was nudged back into football management by wife Kim, who wanted him ‘out from under her feet’ - Jay Williams
He approached an agent and asked to be put back on the market. The only stipulation was, after moving 48 times in his long marriage to Kim, he wanted it to be somewhere he could get to easily from their lovely Georgian family home in the village of Box, outside Bath. When he got the approach from Swindon, whose Wiltshire training ground is no more than half an hour from his house, it was manna.
“There’s nothing like this, is there?” he says of the job. “My brain needs the game, all of these decisions, it needs to work like this.” And he found he could slot straight back in, despite the five-year absence from the technical area.
“Data? It’s all up here,” he says, pointing to his forehead. “It’s called experience.” The biggest change from semi-retirement, he adds, is registered on his phone. When he was out of work, nobody called him. The moment he was back, it rang constantly.
“I had to give my phone to the staff here,” he says. “During the transfer window, suddenly everyone wants to talk to me. Oh, you remember me now, do you?”
Was there not, though, a danger that it might all go horribly wrong, that his last rodeo might end in ignominy, that he might be the man who took Swindon out of the league?
“There’s always that, though, isn’t there?” he suggests. “Go out the door to cross the road, you could get hit by a bus. The threat of not being here any more, that’s the thing. I want to make sure I’ve left a mark. Make sure I’ve filled up my life, enjoyed every single minute of every single day. You don’t need a long life, it’s a full life that counts. Me without this, I’m not the same. I’m loving it.”
As for the best thing about being back in management, he is unequivocal.
“My grandkids now know I’m a football manager. They used to think I was just this old geezer who hung around with their nan. Now they think I’m famous. They come running to me first rather than their nan. I’ve won. Result.”
And he jumps up, pumping the air in mock celebration, beaming with delight. Then he heads off to chivvy up his players who, the day after he has spoken to Telegraph Sport, travel to league leaders Walsall and beat them.
Of this there can be no doubt: Ian Holloway is back.
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