Howie
02-26-2006, 12:36 AM
The Big Interview: Paul Jewell
The irrepressible Wigan manager hides a razor-sharp footballing brain behind his quick-witted quips, writes Joe Lovejoy
When Paul Jewell went to Wembley with Wigan Athletic for the Freight Rover Trophy final in 1985, they won a minibus that the club ran into the ground over the next 10 years. Without Jewell’s messianic management, they would still be using it.
Wigan’s progress under their Scouse revivalist is more celebrated than that folly of a pier, and their mode of transport is very different these days. Jewell and his team travelled to Cardiff for this afternoon’s Carling Cup final not by bus but by chartered plane, and their opponents are not Brentford but mighty Manchester United, who are favourites in every sense bar one. Wigan are firmly established as the football fraternity’s “other” team, and the uncommitted will be squarely behind them in their quest for a first major trophy.
Understandably, the final has been billed as a clash between the haves and have-nots. United were winning everything in sight when the Latics were still a non-league club (they did not attain league status until 1978). Sir Alex Ferguson can pay £30m for a player when Wigan’s record outlay is £3m, and the average attendance at the JJB stadium of 21,000 would hardly constitute a quorum at Old Trafford.
Where it counts, however, in the Premiership table, the difference is just 14 points, and an upset this afternoon would be less of a surprise than, say, Chelsea’s defeat at Middlesbrough or Arsenal beating Real Madrid.
As characters go, they come no bigger and no more interesting than Jewell, a genuine working-class hero who had Trotskyist tendencies as an angry young man. He grew up on the mean streets of Merseyside. His father, Billy, was a shop steward who regularly took him on union marches. “My dad had his principles,” Jewell says. “For example, he wouldn’t work overtime while others were unemployed. He wouldn’t stop others, but he wouldn’t do it himself. I admired him for that.”
Billy was to become his best mate, and it is the greatest regret of this worker- turned-boss that, having died 10 years ago, the old boy was not around long enough to witness his son’s managerial career. “He’d have been so proud,” Jewell says. “Still,” he adds, never maudlin for long, “my ma, Theresa, will be at the game . . . Mother Theresa, eh? That should bring us luck!”
BILLY JEWELL was a Liverpool supporter. Having inherited that, as well as his politics, it was difficult to tell who was the more “made up”, father or son, when Paul became an apprentice at Anfield on leaving school. He cleaned Kenny Dalglish’s boots, but was never good enough to fill them, and moved on to Wigan in 1984 without getting a chance in the first team. A burly striker lacking in pace, he was an ordinary player, and admits no amount of success in management can compensate for that.
He was always destined to be a manager, although none of the clubs he played for would have guessed it. At Liverpool, and again at Wigan (35 goals in 137 appearances) and Bradford City (56 in 269) he was always enthusiastic, but never applied himself with the confidence or diligence he demands from his charges now. “I underachieved as a player, and I want to stop my lads doing that,” he says. “There are two paths you can go down. One is the short cut that I wanted to take; the other is harder and takes a bit longer, but at the end of it lies success.”
Management always appealed to him, and as a player he would spend many a night off sitting in the stands at non-league Marine or Southport, studying the game from the managerial perspective. His break came at Bradford, midway through the 1997-98 season, when he was promoted from reserve-team coach to replace Chris Kamara.
“I’d been no more than an average player there, and the supporters weren’t too enamoured when I got the job,” he says. “When Chris left, the chairman (Geoffrey Richmond) called me in and said he was going to give me a contract to the end of the season. We were playing Crewe the next day, and he added, ‘Provided we don’t lose 5-0 tomorrow, of course’. We both laughed. What happened? We were 4-0 down at half-time and I could see my chances of the job slipping away by the minute. We actually lost 5-0, but the chairman stuck with me, much to the annoyance of the supporters.”
Richmond was to have handsome vindication, and the fans soon changed their minds. In Jewell’s first full season in charge, Bradford were promoted to the Premiership for the first time, with Lee Mills, Robbie Blake and Peter Beagrie rattling in more than 50 goals between them. At 34, Jewell was the youngest manager in the Premiership — younger than some of his players — but he was learning fast and he kept Bradford in the top flight. The discerning majority thought he had done well to avoid going straight back down with a make-do-and-mend team in which the archetypal journeyman Dean Windass was leading scorer with 10, but the chairman begged to differ.
Richmond told him it had been a bad season. The short-fused Jewell replied that if he really thought that, he could stick his job, and quickly decamped to Sheffield Wednesday. It was a classic case of acting in haste and repenting at leisure. At Hillsborough he walked into a viper’s nest of wily old pros who were resistant to every change he wanted to implement. They had him out in eight months.
“The day I walked in, I knew the writing was on the wall,” he says. “In my first game, against Wolves, the keeper (Kevin Pressman) was sent off after 13 seconds, and it was downhill all the way after that. But in that eight months I learnt a lot, about myself and other people. The players just didn’t want to be there — not all of them, but a large majority had no soul and the team had no heartbeat. Look at the number of managers they’ve had there since: Peter Shreeves, Terry Yorath, Chris Turner and Paul Sturrock. Somewhere along the line they’ve got to realise that the problems extend further than the manager.
“I had the usual hurdle to get over: people wanted a big name. I was a young manager in only my second year, and I remember Carlton Palmer going on TV, saying I’d done all right at Bradford, but that Wednesday were too big for me. In the end it was a relief when I got the sack, because I was banging my head against a brick wall every day.
“There was one international player there (Wim Jonk) on big money who played 1½ games for me in the eight months. He took his shinpads off one day, said he was sore, and never played for me again. He had a big contract, part of which guaranteed him £5,000 per match, whether he played or not. I called it ‘disappearance money’.
“Another player (Gilles De Bilde) came to me and said, ‘I want to play in the Premier League’. I fixed him up with three months on loan at Aston Villa, but when I called him in to tell him, he said, ‘I’ve got a problem. I’ve got nobody to look after my dogs if I go there’. I said, ‘Give us your house keys, I’ll feed the bloody dogs’. That was the sort of thing I was up against.”
Wednesday’s loss was Wigan’s gain. Four months later he replaced Steve Bruce at the JJB, and the rest is the stuff of legend. Mind you, if the Wigan board had been as quick on the draw as Wednesday’s, it might have been different. “The day England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich (in September 2001), we dropped to the bottom of what I still call the Second Division (League One). We didn’t have a game, so I’d gone to Cambridge, to watch Dave Kitson. Other results went against us, so as I drove home we were bottom.
“In October we went to Wrexham and lost 5-1 in the LDV Vans Trophy, then in November we were beaten 1-0 at home by Canvey Island in the first round of the FA Cup and the word on the street was that I was going to get the bullet. I was at my wits’ end. At eight o’clock in the morning I went to see the chairman (Dave Whelan) and said, ‘Look, this needs major surgery, have I got the time?’ He said, ‘Do you want me to have a word?’ I needed all the help I could get, so he came down to the dressing room and told the players, ‘He’s staying. Anyone who doesn’t want to play for him can f*** off’.
“After that, he came out and told me, ‘This year, make sure we stay up. Next season I want to be in the top six at Christmas, otherwise you’ll be out’.
That Christmas we were four points clear at the top.”
What is it like, working for an ex-pro who played at the top level (Whelan broke a leg in the 1960 FA Cup final, playing for Blackburn)? “The chairman doesn’t interfere with the way I run the football side of the club’s business,” Jewell says, before grinning mischievously and adding: “I send him to a match sometimes to watch a player for me. He knows the game to a certain extent, but what he doesn’t know is that I send my own scout as well. To be fair, he’s not a bad judge. I’ve never signed a player on his say-so, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for somebody who’s putting up the cash to go and see what he thinks.
“We have a good relationship, but he’s a ruthless guy who’s not frightened of making changes, and I’m not taking anything for granted. I don’t think you should ever feel comfortable as a manager. The only certainty is one day you’re going to get sacked, or walk out.”
IN 2002-03 Wigan finished as champions of the third tier at the end of a barnstorming season in which they also reached the fifth round of the Worthington (League) Cup, beating Manchester City and Fulham in the process. After that, 2003-04 was spent gathering strength for the big push last year, when they gained promotion to the Premiership for the first time. Sages warned that it wouldn’t happen in the Big League. Little old Wigan, with their tiny crowds and budget to match, were going back whence they had come.
So much for conventional wisdom. The sceptics, this one included, are due a diet of humble pie, rather than the meat-and- potato variety for which Wigan is famous. Charitably, Jewell says: “I never had a problem with anyone saying we’d go straight back down. If I’d been a reporter, looking at the history of teams coming up and the size of Wigan as a club, I’d have thought the same. My only issue is with those people who said certain things about us without taking the trouble to find out what we’re all about. I like to think we’ve gained their respect.”
In their first match among the elite, an impressively organised and adventurous team was unlucky to lose 1-0 at home to Chelsea, the defending champions, but when they were beaten again in their second game at Charlton there were told-you-so looks from “experts” everywhere.
“Relegated by Easter” was the popular forecast. Instead, Jewell rallied the troops, who won eight and drew one of their next nine in the league, and were running second until they hit the buffers in November, with successive defeats by Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United.
That sequence speaks volumes. For all their unexpected success, they have yet to beat a top team, which hardly augurs well for this afternoon. “We do have a problem there, there’s no doubt about that,” Jewell acknowledges, but adds: “I think we made a start on laying that one to rest at Tottenham last week, when we deserved to win. That was the first point we’d taken from anyone in the top five. The final is different, a one-off, and anything can happen. We are second- favourites big-time, but so were Wimbledon when they played Liverpool (in the 1988 FA Cup final, which they won 1-0).”
The suggestion that United are having their problems, especially in midfield, draws a smile and a typical quip. “Yeah, they’ve definitely slipped. They’ve gone from being the richest club in the world to the second-richest, so that should make it easier . . . No, they’re all top-quality players, and every one of them would get in our side.”
Wigan are not without quality or experience of their own. There have been 11 new signings — 13 if loans are included — since promotion to the Premiership was assured, and it is to Jewell’s great credit that all of them have been good ones. The spending spree — only £8m, these things are relative — was largely financed by Nathan Ellington’s departure to West Brom. Last season’s leading scorer wanted a bigger, more rewarding platform. How do you feel today, “Duke”? Of the summer signings, Pascal Chimbonda, the charging, goalscoring full-back from Bastia, is the one who has really caught the imagination. “He’s pretty much the face of Wigan, and a bit of a cult figure here,” Jewell says. “We set our sights high here, and going for Michael Owen was no publicity stunt. That one was the chairman’s idea. We were struggling to get players and he said to me one day, ‘What about Owen?’ I said, ‘Yeah, and see if you can get me Ronaldo while you’re at it’. But he said, ‘I’m serious, do you want to call his agent?’ I blinked and told him, ‘No, this is the big one, you call the agent’.
“It wasn’t as daft as it sounded, and we got pretty close. Michael wanted to come back to Liverpool, that was his dream. So the chairman put a deal to his agent whereby we’d buy him from Real Madrid for £11m, and if he wanted to go to Liverpool in the January window or at the end of the season, he could, as long as we got our money back. It definitely had its appeal for both sides. We were getting there when Freddy Shepherd (the Newcastle chairman) came in and blew us out of the water. But the fact that we were serious shows the extent of our ambition.”
They also have to be realistic. “We signed Chimbonda for £300,000 with a clause in his contract that if a bigger club came in for him, he could go for £1.5m,” Jewell says. “We’ve now given him a new deal and taken that clause out because he’s done exceptionally well.”
With the obvious exception of Chimbonda, Jewell tends to do his scouting at home, rather than abroad. “If you open a Rothmans (football yearbook) and ask me about any player who has played a decent number of games, for Brentford, Wycombe or whoever, there’s a fair chance I could tell you all about him,” he says matter-of-factly, as if such knowledge should be routine, which it certainly is not.
This afternoon’s final, and Wigan’s season in general, will help him to attract better players to the club. With a knowing smile, he says: “There’s no doubt about that. The January transfer window was interesting from that point of view. I was getting calls from agents who wouldn’t return mine in the summer.”
REGARDLESS of the outcome today, Wigan will not be remembered as losers in 2005-06. “Without getting all soppy about it, we’ve been a great story for football, haven’t we? If we were a book in a bookshop, we wouldn’t be filed under fact, it would have to be fiction. What we’ve done just doesn’t happen. So whatever the result in the final, and regardless of the fact that I say we’re going there to win it, there can be no negatives now for this club this season. Whatever happens, we’re safe in the Premier League.
“To be honest, I never thought we’d be in a cup final, unless it was the Freight Rover, or in the Premiership, but we’re there because we deserve to be, for our consistency over the past two years and because the players have honesty — and some ability as well.”
What of his own ability, as the most coveted young manager in the country? At the start of the season he signed a new contract which has 2½ years to run, but there is a get-out clause that allows him to go to any alternative employer prepared to pay Wigan £500,000 for his services. Newcastle are aware of it and are known to be sniffing.
And England? “It’s not going to happen for two reasons: (a) I don’t think they’ll ask; and (b) it has never crossed my mind because I like the day-to-day involvement of club management.”
What a pity. A “Trot” as England manager is quite a thought.
Source: The Sunday Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2093-2058693,00.html)
See also Jewell relishes lead role (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2006/02/26/sfnwig26.xml&sSheet=/sport/2006/02/26/ixfooty.html) in the Telegraph.
The irrepressible Wigan manager hides a razor-sharp footballing brain behind his quick-witted quips, writes Joe Lovejoy
When Paul Jewell went to Wembley with Wigan Athletic for the Freight Rover Trophy final in 1985, they won a minibus that the club ran into the ground over the next 10 years. Without Jewell’s messianic management, they would still be using it.
Wigan’s progress under their Scouse revivalist is more celebrated than that folly of a pier, and their mode of transport is very different these days. Jewell and his team travelled to Cardiff for this afternoon’s Carling Cup final not by bus but by chartered plane, and their opponents are not Brentford but mighty Manchester United, who are favourites in every sense bar one. Wigan are firmly established as the football fraternity’s “other” team, and the uncommitted will be squarely behind them in their quest for a first major trophy.
Understandably, the final has been billed as a clash between the haves and have-nots. United were winning everything in sight when the Latics were still a non-league club (they did not attain league status until 1978). Sir Alex Ferguson can pay £30m for a player when Wigan’s record outlay is £3m, and the average attendance at the JJB stadium of 21,000 would hardly constitute a quorum at Old Trafford.
Where it counts, however, in the Premiership table, the difference is just 14 points, and an upset this afternoon would be less of a surprise than, say, Chelsea’s defeat at Middlesbrough or Arsenal beating Real Madrid.
As characters go, they come no bigger and no more interesting than Jewell, a genuine working-class hero who had Trotskyist tendencies as an angry young man. He grew up on the mean streets of Merseyside. His father, Billy, was a shop steward who regularly took him on union marches. “My dad had his principles,” Jewell says. “For example, he wouldn’t work overtime while others were unemployed. He wouldn’t stop others, but he wouldn’t do it himself. I admired him for that.”
Billy was to become his best mate, and it is the greatest regret of this worker- turned-boss that, having died 10 years ago, the old boy was not around long enough to witness his son’s managerial career. “He’d have been so proud,” Jewell says. “Still,” he adds, never maudlin for long, “my ma, Theresa, will be at the game . . . Mother Theresa, eh? That should bring us luck!”
BILLY JEWELL was a Liverpool supporter. Having inherited that, as well as his politics, it was difficult to tell who was the more “made up”, father or son, when Paul became an apprentice at Anfield on leaving school. He cleaned Kenny Dalglish’s boots, but was never good enough to fill them, and moved on to Wigan in 1984 without getting a chance in the first team. A burly striker lacking in pace, he was an ordinary player, and admits no amount of success in management can compensate for that.
He was always destined to be a manager, although none of the clubs he played for would have guessed it. At Liverpool, and again at Wigan (35 goals in 137 appearances) and Bradford City (56 in 269) he was always enthusiastic, but never applied himself with the confidence or diligence he demands from his charges now. “I underachieved as a player, and I want to stop my lads doing that,” he says. “There are two paths you can go down. One is the short cut that I wanted to take; the other is harder and takes a bit longer, but at the end of it lies success.”
Management always appealed to him, and as a player he would spend many a night off sitting in the stands at non-league Marine or Southport, studying the game from the managerial perspective. His break came at Bradford, midway through the 1997-98 season, when he was promoted from reserve-team coach to replace Chris Kamara.
“I’d been no more than an average player there, and the supporters weren’t too enamoured when I got the job,” he says. “When Chris left, the chairman (Geoffrey Richmond) called me in and said he was going to give me a contract to the end of the season. We were playing Crewe the next day, and he added, ‘Provided we don’t lose 5-0 tomorrow, of course’. We both laughed. What happened? We were 4-0 down at half-time and I could see my chances of the job slipping away by the minute. We actually lost 5-0, but the chairman stuck with me, much to the annoyance of the supporters.”
Richmond was to have handsome vindication, and the fans soon changed their minds. In Jewell’s first full season in charge, Bradford were promoted to the Premiership for the first time, with Lee Mills, Robbie Blake and Peter Beagrie rattling in more than 50 goals between them. At 34, Jewell was the youngest manager in the Premiership — younger than some of his players — but he was learning fast and he kept Bradford in the top flight. The discerning majority thought he had done well to avoid going straight back down with a make-do-and-mend team in which the archetypal journeyman Dean Windass was leading scorer with 10, but the chairman begged to differ.
Richmond told him it had been a bad season. The short-fused Jewell replied that if he really thought that, he could stick his job, and quickly decamped to Sheffield Wednesday. It was a classic case of acting in haste and repenting at leisure. At Hillsborough he walked into a viper’s nest of wily old pros who were resistant to every change he wanted to implement. They had him out in eight months.
“The day I walked in, I knew the writing was on the wall,” he says. “In my first game, against Wolves, the keeper (Kevin Pressman) was sent off after 13 seconds, and it was downhill all the way after that. But in that eight months I learnt a lot, about myself and other people. The players just didn’t want to be there — not all of them, but a large majority had no soul and the team had no heartbeat. Look at the number of managers they’ve had there since: Peter Shreeves, Terry Yorath, Chris Turner and Paul Sturrock. Somewhere along the line they’ve got to realise that the problems extend further than the manager.
“I had the usual hurdle to get over: people wanted a big name. I was a young manager in only my second year, and I remember Carlton Palmer going on TV, saying I’d done all right at Bradford, but that Wednesday were too big for me. In the end it was a relief when I got the sack, because I was banging my head against a brick wall every day.
“There was one international player there (Wim Jonk) on big money who played 1½ games for me in the eight months. He took his shinpads off one day, said he was sore, and never played for me again. He had a big contract, part of which guaranteed him £5,000 per match, whether he played or not. I called it ‘disappearance money’.
“Another player (Gilles De Bilde) came to me and said, ‘I want to play in the Premier League’. I fixed him up with three months on loan at Aston Villa, but when I called him in to tell him, he said, ‘I’ve got a problem. I’ve got nobody to look after my dogs if I go there’. I said, ‘Give us your house keys, I’ll feed the bloody dogs’. That was the sort of thing I was up against.”
Wednesday’s loss was Wigan’s gain. Four months later he replaced Steve Bruce at the JJB, and the rest is the stuff of legend. Mind you, if the Wigan board had been as quick on the draw as Wednesday’s, it might have been different. “The day England beat Germany 5-1 in Munich (in September 2001), we dropped to the bottom of what I still call the Second Division (League One). We didn’t have a game, so I’d gone to Cambridge, to watch Dave Kitson. Other results went against us, so as I drove home we were bottom.
“In October we went to Wrexham and lost 5-1 in the LDV Vans Trophy, then in November we were beaten 1-0 at home by Canvey Island in the first round of the FA Cup and the word on the street was that I was going to get the bullet. I was at my wits’ end. At eight o’clock in the morning I went to see the chairman (Dave Whelan) and said, ‘Look, this needs major surgery, have I got the time?’ He said, ‘Do you want me to have a word?’ I needed all the help I could get, so he came down to the dressing room and told the players, ‘He’s staying. Anyone who doesn’t want to play for him can f*** off’.
“After that, he came out and told me, ‘This year, make sure we stay up. Next season I want to be in the top six at Christmas, otherwise you’ll be out’.
That Christmas we were four points clear at the top.”
What is it like, working for an ex-pro who played at the top level (Whelan broke a leg in the 1960 FA Cup final, playing for Blackburn)? “The chairman doesn’t interfere with the way I run the football side of the club’s business,” Jewell says, before grinning mischievously and adding: “I send him to a match sometimes to watch a player for me. He knows the game to a certain extent, but what he doesn’t know is that I send my own scout as well. To be fair, he’s not a bad judge. I’ve never signed a player on his say-so, but I don’t think it’s unreasonable for somebody who’s putting up the cash to go and see what he thinks.
“We have a good relationship, but he’s a ruthless guy who’s not frightened of making changes, and I’m not taking anything for granted. I don’t think you should ever feel comfortable as a manager. The only certainty is one day you’re going to get sacked, or walk out.”
IN 2002-03 Wigan finished as champions of the third tier at the end of a barnstorming season in which they also reached the fifth round of the Worthington (League) Cup, beating Manchester City and Fulham in the process. After that, 2003-04 was spent gathering strength for the big push last year, when they gained promotion to the Premiership for the first time. Sages warned that it wouldn’t happen in the Big League. Little old Wigan, with their tiny crowds and budget to match, were going back whence they had come.
So much for conventional wisdom. The sceptics, this one included, are due a diet of humble pie, rather than the meat-and- potato variety for which Wigan is famous. Charitably, Jewell says: “I never had a problem with anyone saying we’d go straight back down. If I’d been a reporter, looking at the history of teams coming up and the size of Wigan as a club, I’d have thought the same. My only issue is with those people who said certain things about us without taking the trouble to find out what we’re all about. I like to think we’ve gained their respect.”
In their first match among the elite, an impressively organised and adventurous team was unlucky to lose 1-0 at home to Chelsea, the defending champions, but when they were beaten again in their second game at Charlton there were told-you-so looks from “experts” everywhere.
“Relegated by Easter” was the popular forecast. Instead, Jewell rallied the troops, who won eight and drew one of their next nine in the league, and were running second until they hit the buffers in November, with successive defeats by Arsenal, Tottenham, Liverpool, Chelsea and Manchester United.
That sequence speaks volumes. For all their unexpected success, they have yet to beat a top team, which hardly augurs well for this afternoon. “We do have a problem there, there’s no doubt about that,” Jewell acknowledges, but adds: “I think we made a start on laying that one to rest at Tottenham last week, when we deserved to win. That was the first point we’d taken from anyone in the top five. The final is different, a one-off, and anything can happen. We are second- favourites big-time, but so were Wimbledon when they played Liverpool (in the 1988 FA Cup final, which they won 1-0).”
The suggestion that United are having their problems, especially in midfield, draws a smile and a typical quip. “Yeah, they’ve definitely slipped. They’ve gone from being the richest club in the world to the second-richest, so that should make it easier . . . No, they’re all top-quality players, and every one of them would get in our side.”
Wigan are not without quality or experience of their own. There have been 11 new signings — 13 if loans are included — since promotion to the Premiership was assured, and it is to Jewell’s great credit that all of them have been good ones. The spending spree — only £8m, these things are relative — was largely financed by Nathan Ellington’s departure to West Brom. Last season’s leading scorer wanted a bigger, more rewarding platform. How do you feel today, “Duke”? Of the summer signings, Pascal Chimbonda, the charging, goalscoring full-back from Bastia, is the one who has really caught the imagination. “He’s pretty much the face of Wigan, and a bit of a cult figure here,” Jewell says. “We set our sights high here, and going for Michael Owen was no publicity stunt. That one was the chairman’s idea. We were struggling to get players and he said to me one day, ‘What about Owen?’ I said, ‘Yeah, and see if you can get me Ronaldo while you’re at it’. But he said, ‘I’m serious, do you want to call his agent?’ I blinked and told him, ‘No, this is the big one, you call the agent’.
“It wasn’t as daft as it sounded, and we got pretty close. Michael wanted to come back to Liverpool, that was his dream. So the chairman put a deal to his agent whereby we’d buy him from Real Madrid for £11m, and if he wanted to go to Liverpool in the January window or at the end of the season, he could, as long as we got our money back. It definitely had its appeal for both sides. We were getting there when Freddy Shepherd (the Newcastle chairman) came in and blew us out of the water. But the fact that we were serious shows the extent of our ambition.”
They also have to be realistic. “We signed Chimbonda for £300,000 with a clause in his contract that if a bigger club came in for him, he could go for £1.5m,” Jewell says. “We’ve now given him a new deal and taken that clause out because he’s done exceptionally well.”
With the obvious exception of Chimbonda, Jewell tends to do his scouting at home, rather than abroad. “If you open a Rothmans (football yearbook) and ask me about any player who has played a decent number of games, for Brentford, Wycombe or whoever, there’s a fair chance I could tell you all about him,” he says matter-of-factly, as if such knowledge should be routine, which it certainly is not.
This afternoon’s final, and Wigan’s season in general, will help him to attract better players to the club. With a knowing smile, he says: “There’s no doubt about that. The January transfer window was interesting from that point of view. I was getting calls from agents who wouldn’t return mine in the summer.”
REGARDLESS of the outcome today, Wigan will not be remembered as losers in 2005-06. “Without getting all soppy about it, we’ve been a great story for football, haven’t we? If we were a book in a bookshop, we wouldn’t be filed under fact, it would have to be fiction. What we’ve done just doesn’t happen. So whatever the result in the final, and regardless of the fact that I say we’re going there to win it, there can be no negatives now for this club this season. Whatever happens, we’re safe in the Premier League.
“To be honest, I never thought we’d be in a cup final, unless it was the Freight Rover, or in the Premiership, but we’re there because we deserve to be, for our consistency over the past two years and because the players have honesty — and some ability as well.”
What of his own ability, as the most coveted young manager in the country? At the start of the season he signed a new contract which has 2½ years to run, but there is a get-out clause that allows him to go to any alternative employer prepared to pay Wigan £500,000 for his services. Newcastle are aware of it and are known to be sniffing.
And England? “It’s not going to happen for two reasons: (a) I don’t think they’ll ask; and (b) it has never crossed my mind because I like the day-to-day involvement of club management.”
What a pity. A “Trot” as England manager is quite a thought.
Source: The Sunday Times (http://www.timesonline.co.uk/article/0,,2093-2058693,00.html)
See also Jewell relishes lead role (http://www.telegraph.co.uk/sport/main.jhtml?xml=/sport/2006/02/26/sfnwig26.xml&sSheet=/sport/2006/02/26/ixfooty.html) in the Telegraph.