Really interesting article from The Athletic about Clive Woodward's short time with us... ‘I wanted us to lift Peter Crouch up at a corner like a second row in rugby’ – Clive Woodward at Southampton Dan Sheldon Jul 31, 2021 please log in to view this image 76 please log in to view this image “On the back of the local paper the day I joined Southampton there was one of my all-time favourite cartoons. “There was a corner kick and two guys were lifting Peter Crouch like a second row in rugby. My immediate thought was, ‘Can you do that? Can you actually lift someone up?’. Nobody has been able to answer me to this day. “I’m thinking that if we had a guy who was as good as Jonny Wilkinson at taking a corner and we could get a touch off someone like Crouch who we would lift in the air, then we are going to gain an advantage. This all came from a cartoon that was taking the piss out of me. But I’m sat there thinking it could actually work.” Sir Clive Woodward’s reaction to this comic ribbing sums up his dramatic switch from coaching England’s rugby team to taking a year-long role at Southampton. He was ready to challenge traditional truths of football and wasn’t too fussed about the stick But was football ready for such a dramatic appointment in 2004? History would suggest not, but it would also show Southampton as being one of the first professional clubs to try and make such a high-profile transfer work. And if Woodward was thinking about lifting Crouch at a corner on his first day, his maiden trip to St Mary’s perhaps took him back to reality. “I was sitting with Jane, my wife, in the directors’ box and there was a lot of noise about me being there,” Woodward tells The Athletic. “They gave me a big title and I don’t think being called ‘Sir Clive Woodward’ helped. It was a tag that didn’t hang well in football. “(Chairman) Rupert Lowe was three rows in front of me with his family. A chant went around the stadium encouraging people to stand up if they wanted Rupert out of the club. “I grabbed Jane and said, ‘Whatever you do, don’t stand up’. I had never seen anything like this before and it was really quite venomous. Rupert was amazing with it. He just sat down and didn’t bat an eyelid. “Jane then whispered in my ear, ‘It’s not Twickenham, is it?’, and I said, ‘No, this definitely isn’t Twickenham!’.” Before leading England to victory over Australia in the 2003 Rugby World Cup final, Woodward had represented both his country and the British & Irish Lions during a successful playing career. But it was his achievement, the grandest of them all, as a leader 18 years ago that has seen the visionary immortalised in English sporting folklore. But anyone who assumes the 65-year-old’s first love was rugby would be wrong. Woodward had dreamed of being a professional footballer — in fact, that passion was so strong it saw him moved between schools. Teachers had complained to his father, a pilot in the Royal Air Force, that he was spending too much time playing football and not focusing on the classroom. This led to Woodward being sent to HMS Conway Naval School in Anglesey, Wales, where football was out of the equation. As the World Cup-winning coach put it during his interview with The Athletic, the boarding school played three sports: “Rugby, rugby and rugby.” Even though he didn’t start playing rugby until he was 14 years old — and twice ran away from school to highlight his love of football — Woodward went on to be capped more than 21 times for England and went on two Lions’ tours. Woodward admits that the relationship he shared with his father never quite recovered from him being taken out of school and sent elsewhere, which ultimately ended his dream of becoming a footballer. His love for the game never went away, and it eventually led him to Southampton via an offer he couldn’t refuse from the Football Association (FA). “Mark Palios was the chief executive of the FA — he approached me in 2004 and he knew I had an affinity with football,” Woodward tells The Athletic. “I met him three times and he wanted to put me in as the performance director of the FA with Gerard Houllier as the technical director. “That was awesome. It was groundbreaking. I met with Gerard and got on really well with him. I then went to Palios and told him I wanted to do it, but suggested I should do a year in football first. I wanted to go to a club, do my coaching badges and then take the performance director role.” To facilitate this, Palios contacted David Sheepshanks, the chairman of Ipswich at the time, to see what he could do. Sheepshanks, a good friend of Southampton’s Rupert Lowe, called his counterpart to see if he could help. Lowe duly obliged and said Woodward was more than welcome to spend a year at St Mary’s, where he could complete his badges and learn the ropes, before joining the FA as their performance director. please log in to view this image Lowe (left) opened the door for Woodward to move into football (Photo: Getty) Everything was mapped out. “I met with Rupert and he was fantastic,” says Woodward. “He is much-maligned at Southampton, but I thought he was a visionary. “He offered me an amazing job and was paying me a lot more than I was earning in rugby. I wasn’t doing it for the money though, I wanted to spend a year there to find out about football. It all came via Mark Palios.” Yet when Palios was pressured into resigning from the FA after it was revealed he had a brief relationship with secretary Faria Alam, and was replaced temporarily by Trevor Brooking, the plan was scrapped. “Trevor Brooking said, ‘This idea with Palios is gone. I don’t think football’s ready for you’,” recalls Woodward. “I had a call from Gerard Houllier and he was really disappointed. He thought it would have been brilliant for football because he has the technical abilities and I had the performance abilities. He thought we could change football, and I think he was right. The Palios saga left Woodward, who had resigned from his role at the RFU to pursue a career in football, up the creek and without a paddle. He approached Lowe and it was agreed that he would stay on at Southampton. And with the performance director role at the FA no longer an option, the Rugby World Cup-winning coach set his sights on management. And this is where his story in football really begins… At the time Woodward agreed to join Southampton, Steve Wigley was in charge. The pair had met and it was made clear to Wigley that the former rugby chief wasn’t arriving to undermine his role as the manager, nor was he interested in taking his job. But relegation wasn’t factored into the discussions, with Southampton struggling towards the bottom of the Premier League throughout the 2004-05 season, having been comfortably mid-table over the previous four years. With the threat of relegation growing, Lowe sacked Wigley in an attempt to maintain his side’s top-flight status. The Southampton chairman didn’t look too far when making his next managerial appointment, with Harry Redknapp, who had recently quit Portsmouth after a disagreement over the appointment of director of football Velimir Zajec, being the preferred candidate. Redknapp made the move short move down the M27, which led to one of the most unlikely partnerships in modern football. Having agreed to spend a year shadowing Wigley — whom he described as a “young and progressive coach” — spending as much time in his office as possible, Woodward had to start from scratch with a new manager at the helm. “There was a consensus that this didn’t sound like Harry Redknapp’s idea at all,” David Prutton, a Southampton player at the time, tells The Athletic. “The players were intrigued from a footballing point of view about what it could be like and if we were being slightly mischievous, we were all intrigued to see how the dynamic would work between Clive and Harry.” With Southampton’s squad and watching football world already paying close attention to see how this would pan out, Woodward prepared himself for his first get-together with Redknapp. “We had this great meeting at the start where he said, ‘You and I come from different sides of the street but let’s shake hands and say we won’t fall out over this’, and we never did,” says Woodward. “We had some interesting conversations, but we never fell out. “He literally sat me opposite him and showed me everything and how he did it all. It was a brilliant six or seven months and I would never say a bad word against him. There were lots of things I thought we could do better, but he didn’t have to let me sit in his office.” please log in to view this image Despite perceptions, Woodward and Redknapp say they got on well (Photo: Getty Images) The admiration was a two-way street, with Redknapp also respectful of Woodward. “I had a great deal of respect for Clive,” Redknapp tells The Athletic. “He had won the World Cup, he was an incredible rugby coach. He wanted to get into football, so I didn’t have any problems with him.” Although Woodward says the pair never fell out, sources indicate that tensions started to grow during their time together. “He wasn’t as hands-on as we all thought he would be, so it wasn’t quite the car crash of a mix-up people might have expected,” adds Prutton. “I don’t know whether he thought he was going to have more time with the lads. “He didn’t come steaming in all guns blazing, saying everything was bollocks. If he came in and told Harry how to do his job, that would only have ended one way.” Although first-team coaching was left to Redknapp and his staff, Woodward was involved in the coaches’ meetings and would have the opportunity to suggest where performance could be improved. Redknapp has, often unfairly, been characterised as a manager set in his ways and not particularly open to change. His track record, which includes hiring the now highly-regarded Michael Edwards as a performance analyst at Portsmouth in 2003, indicates it’s a cheap assessment. But Woodward, on the other hand, was seen as a visionary who had led England to the most dramatic of victories in a World Cup final. One exchange involving the pair, according to Woodward, led to the former Portsmouth and Tottenham manager having those present in the meeting room unable to contain their laughter. The topic of penalties had been raised and the former rugby coach, who knew a thing or two about kicking from his previous job, came forward with a suggestion. “I can’t remember what I said but I could tell he didn’t agree with me,” says the 65-year-old. “He looked at me and said, ‘Do not bring your Jonny Wilkinson stuff down here’. It was a great line, and even I burst out laughing.” Even though Southampton’s players were seemingly more interested in seeing how Redknapp and Woodward would work with each other, there was also an element of intrigue into what he would bring to St Mary’s. After all, they had witnessed his achievements with England’s rugby team and realised they were going to be able to pick his mind and find out what it takes to reach the summit of sport. And Prutton, a big fan of rugby, was particularly determined to gleam all he could from Woodward. “He had a stratospheric coaching career having climbed Everest with the rugby team,” Prutton says. “It was glorious to delve into that and the personalities involved and I was fortunate enough to be able to have those conversations with Clive. Hearing it was just ****ing spellbinding. “But directing that towards a group of players in the position we were in, and being partnered with a manager who was maybe a little set in his ways, made it difficult. “But Harry had had success over a very long period of time, so I’m sure his point of view was, ‘Well, why the **** would I change now?’. The thing with Harry is that the group of players he had at that time needed help, coaching and a lot of work doing to them.” There was, however, often a clear gulf in what Woodward was trying to teach and the capabilities of the players at his disposal. Prutton remembers one meeting where Woodward broke down some footage from their most recent game, which left many of the squad wondering if he was aware of their limitations. But Woodward’s mindset was to start by working out what winning looked like, and working backwards from there. “I have a picture in my head of us in the canteen going through statistical analysis of the Norwich game,” Prutton recalls. “There was a certain moment where he questioned why a midfielder didn’t, off a throw-in, hit a 60-yard diagonal pass to the opposite winger who, in this particular shot, was completely out of the midfielder’s eyeline. “It would have been an unbelievable Xabi Alonso arrow-like ball. There was a nod of, ‘Yeah, that’s an option’, but we were all thinking something along the lines of ‘Well, if that player could hit that pass, I don’t think he’d be playing for Southampton’. “Strategically, you could totally see what he was seeing. The execution of it… I don’t think it would have been viable.” please log in to view this image Southampton’s players in training during 2004-05 (Photo: Getty Images) Stereotypically, England’s rugby players are privately educated and football is viewed as a working-class game. It was suggested that Woodward may struggle to move from one environment to the other and have the same impact when delivering his message. Yet, while this may not have been the case, he does admit there was a stark difference in how footballers and rugby players communicate in certain surroundings. “Whenever I was coaching, the school someone went to never meant anything to me and that was the same in rugby,” he says. “What I found in football was that during meetings, players wouldn’t say a word. They didn’t want to be seen putting their head above the parapet. In the modern language, that’s called ‘psychological safety’. “If you want to be a top coach or manager, you have to create an environment in the dressing room that allows players to feel confident enough to speak up and disagree with the manager. That is totally healthy. I was able to deliver that in rugby, but I never saw it in a football team. The players didn’t want to say a word. “I remember Theo Walcott and his parents came to my house for dinner and you couldn’t shut them up. Stick them in a dressing room with other people and they go quiet. A few years ago (then-Bournemouth manager) Eddie Howe invited me down to speak to his team, which was fantastic, and I was hoping for loads of questions. But I hardly got any. Nothing has changed.” Realising that people within football would remain sceptical because of his background, Woodward knew he had to earn his stripes in the club’s academy. This is where he spent most of his time and got to know future internationals such as Walcott, Gareth Bale and Adam Lallana. One person he bonded with early on was Simon Wilson, Southampton’s head of performance analyst at the time and now director of football at Stockport County after leaving his role as director of football services for Manchester City’s umbrella group, City Football Group. Wilson found himself aligned to Woodward’s different way of thinking. “He would look very much at those marginal gains before Dave Brailsford championed that saying — he would turn things upside down,” says Wilson. “What he could do was think really big, and mobilise people towards that goal. He had an intolerance for anyone that would apply glass ceilings to anything. He wanted to start from what great looks like and work back from there.” Evidence of Woodward thinking outside the box could be found before he had even started working in football. To prepare for his new role, he travelled to Sao Paulo, Brazil, and spent three weeks at Santos. The trip was organised by the sportswear company Nike and led to one of his grandest ideas at Southampton — as well as a new hire at St Mary’s. It was in South America that Woodward came across futsal, the variation of football played on a smaller pitch with a heavy ball that encourages players to pass at speed and along the ground. After falling in love with futsal, Woodward was convinced that it should play a huge part in developing Southampton’s players. He even went to Lowe and asked him to build a court at the training ground. Lowe agreed, but it never got built. It also led to Simon Clifford, known for his Brazilian-style soccer schools, arriving on the south coast. “I developed these soccer schools, which had been based on futsal and an increased emphasis on fitness and condition,” Clifford explains to The Athletic.“My whole idea in the work I was doing was to try to enhance English football. “Clive had heard about me and then came to see me. When I met him, he had a suit jacket on with a handkerchief sticking out the pocket and I thought, ‘There is no way I’m going to get on with him’. But he had some tactical points on football that nobody else had put forward. That got my attention. “Over a couple of days, I really bought into him as a man and somebody who understood football better than many people that I’d come across who were actually in the game. I’d met lots of people, but I hadn’t met many like Clive.” At the time he joined Southampton, Clifford owned non-League Garforth Town and his desire was to take them from the 10th tier of the English football pyramid into the Premier League within 20 years. please log in to view this image Clifford (left) convinced a 50-year-old Socrates to briefly play for non-league Garforth Town (Photo: Getty) Although this now appears far-fetched, Clifford was, by his own admission, a man in a hurry and wanted to make an impact as quickly as possible. He arrived at Southampton full of confidence and ready to impart his knowledge of futsal on the first team and the academy. This, though, caused a stir among some senior players who weren’t interested in trying to develop through futsal. “Simon came across as a very confident, composed fella,” says Prutton. “And you have to be like that when you walk into a football club to a group of players who have been in the game a while and a structure that is traditional. “The more senior pros were taken for a couple of sessions. It reflects poorly on our mindset but the consensus was, ‘What are we doing? What good is this? Why are us players, with several hundred Premier League appearances between us, doing this?’. “But on the flip side, we weren’t doing very well at the time, so any little thing could have helped!” Woodward admitted that the first-team players didn’t really take to Clifford’s approach, saying they viewed futsal as a “real threat and a gimmick” and he lamented the fact it wasn’t taken seriously. Clifford was expecting a bit of resistance from some inside the club, but he wasn’t prepared for the “political element” of the game. Woodward, with his experience at the top of English rugby, had an idea of how the system worked. But Clifford didn’t have that knowledge of elite-level club sport in his repertoire. “Clive and I spent a lot of time planning everything before we got there and when you are looking at data, you try to structure things in a certain way, but you have to factor in the human element,” Clifford explains. “What struck me was the political element of football. I hadn’t anticipated it. At that point in my life, I didn’t want to waste too much time. I was in a hurry with everything. Clive said to me, ‘Let’s just sit back and see what happens’. But I wasn’t keen on doing that.” Despite struggling to get the senior players onside, Clifford drew praise from the younger contingent. Bale, Walcott, David McGoldrick and Dexter Blackstock were all on board with what he was trying to teach. But Clifford’s time at Southampton was over before it could really get started — he left after just two months. Reports at the time suggested backroom staff had grown tired of his exploits and become disgruntled over comments he had made to the media, where he challenged the traditional methods for training footballers. “I went into the changing room at Staplewood and somebody had pinned newspaper articles of me and Clive saying that football needs a bit of a change and players should work harder,” says Clifford. “They were stuck to every locker. My heart went out of me. After that, I couldn’t see a climate where it was going to work. “If I had my time again, I’d do it very differently and try to work with everybody in a far more patient way. And I’d play the political side of it differently.” As well as trying to introduce futsal to Southampton’s players, Woodward brought a catalogue of other ideas that would challenge traditional ways of thinking. But, as you’d expect, many of these thoughts, ranging from a vision coach to a kicking coach, drew criticism from figures inside the club and those looking in from the outside. “Football is essentially a very, very, very conservative business,” says Andrew Cowen, Lowe’s right-hand man at Southampton. “It has its own culture, and to a degree, it’s a closed shop. “Those who are on the inside don’t want their bed rocked. Anybody who would bring something new to the party, particularly if they were from outside football, and even more so if what they brought may challenge traditional truths, would find it very, very difficult. “Clive Woodward is undoubtedly a gifted sportsman and leader. There are no two ways about that. You don’t win a World Cup by accident. He had a totally different mindset as to preparation and training than probably anything football had seen before.” Dr Sherylle Calder, a vision coach who worked with Woodward at the 2003 Rugby World Cup, was brought into Southampton, where a purpose-built area had been constructed containing several computers to help improve the players’ reaction speeds. A kicking coach, Dave Alred, also delivered a seminar in a bid to teach the academy players how to improve their penalty taking. “If you were a more positive and open-minded Southampton fan at the time, you’d be thinking it was a brilliant appointment,” says Prutton. “If you were a bit more cynical and used to watching a side fighting to stay in the Premier League, you’d be thinking, ‘Oh, ****. What are people going to be thinking now?’.” Many sneered at what Woodward was trying to do at St Mary’s, but one could easily look back now and conclude he was ahead of his time — and so were Southampton. “There were different things he brought from rugby that I’m sure could have been adapted,” says Redknapp.” But people close their eyes to new ideas all too often in football.” Woodward also suggested hiring a throw-in coach, to no avail, after watching Rory Delap hurl the ball towards the far post time and time again. His argument was that, if Delap can throw a ball that far, why can’t everyone else? “At the coaches’ meeting on Monday morning, I asked if we could talk about Rory’s throw-in and they looked at me and went, ‘Yeah, it’s great’, and then asked me what I thought,” says Woodward. “I told them it was ridiculous because, by the time he threw it in, he had run 70 yards to take the throw. Every member of our team knew he was going to do it, the opponents knew he would do it, 35,000 people in the crowd knew he was going to do it, five million people watching on TV knew he would do it. So, what do we do? We do it and they defend it. “Sport, football especially, is about pace. It’s not about running around like a headless chicken. As soon as the ball rolls out, I want the person closest to throw it back in quickly because you want to be quick and catch the other team out. You don’t want to give their defence time to set up. It was crazy. “I said we should employ a throw-in coach and get them to come in and work with everyone. They just laughed at me. I read a few months ago that Jurgen Klopp had a throw-in coach at Liverpool. That, to me, sums up football. I thought it was logical. I provided a totally logical answer to the problem.” please log in to view this image Delap prepares for a trademark long throw during his time at Southampton (Photo: Getty) Another suggestion put forward by Woodward was to hire an individual head of development, who would be responsible for overseeing all of the players’ training needs to improve their performance. This was music to Wilson’s ears as he believed it was the right way to go about finding an extra one per cent, which can make the difference in elite-level sport. “His idea was that you’d have team training at 10.30am until 1pm and then everyone goes home to rest, but he would ask about the players not good enough to be picked in the starting XI. He wanted to give them the platform to improve,” explains Wilson. “He changed the training diary to go from one session a day to four. We had a breakfast club that would have been 7.30am to 8.30am and then a breakfast recovery. The main session would be at 10.30am and then there would be an afternoon and evening session later in the day. “He had a big whiteboard with all the players from 16-to-35-years-old and each one had an individual schedule and their development needs. Kenwyne Jones, for example, was really strong athletically but needed some technical work, so he would be in the breakfast club because that was a technical session and then he’d do the main session. “Somebody else might have needed fitness work, so they would have missed breakfast club, done the main session and then another one either in the afternoon or evening. The evening session could be a spin class. It was just really smart and logical.” “Football was beginning to be turned into a Michael Lewis-style Moneyball game at that time,” adds Cowen. “Clive’s attitude towards trying to nudge every last odd in your favour was part of that move.” There was also the time when he met with Southampton great Matt Le Tissierand asked him what he thought was the most important skill a professional footballer needed. The answer: a great first touch. With this in mind, Woodward had the idea of taking a youth player to a squash court and placing different colours on the wall. He would then call out a colour and the academy youngster would have to hit the target, take one touch and then hit the next one. “In two minutes, he must have done around 200 first touches and it was absolutely brilliant,” remembers Woodward. “But he twisted his ankle and it got back to the hierarchy. I hadn’t told anyone I was doing it but they found out and banned it. I had a coach from the medical department saying it was too much and that I couldn’t do it as there were too many turns and too much stress. I thought they were kidding.” During his year at Southampton, and knowing his future role at the FA was out of the equation, Woodward decided he wanted to make the move into football management. Quite simply, he had to be in charge. At no point was he ever offered the chance to take a spot in the St Mary’s dugout, even after Redknapp left to return to Portsmouth in December 2005, and says he would have turned it down even if he was. There were, however, opportunities lower down the football pyramid that caught his attention. Both MK Dons and Wycombe Wanderers had made it clear they would like him to take their respective teams forward. “I knew I had to start at the bottom,” he says. “You have to get respect from the changing room. Football and rugby are no different: you can’t bullshit the players.” Woodward, who had by this stage earned his UEFA B Licence coaching badge, had even gone as far as choosing his assistant coach. He wanted Paul Tisdale to come in and work underneath him in his first role. please log in to view this image Woodward wanted ex-Saint and future Exeter boss Paul Tisdale as his No 2 (Photo: Getty) But then his plan turned upside down. “I had these two job offers, which were great because that’s what I wanted to do. It was also the level I wanted to come in at,” says Woodward. “But then when London won the bid for the 2012 Olympics, a guy called Colin Moynihan, the chairman of the British Olympic Association, came to see me and said he was going to create a new director of sport role for Team GB and thought I had the perfect background for it. “I went home and I had a six-year contract, overseeing Beijing 2008, the Winter Olympics in Vancouver and London 2012. I was so confused because I was going to go with MK Dons or Wycombe Wanderers. “Jane looked at me and said, ‘Are we really having this conversation?’. She could see I was going to become the boss of MK Dons or Wycombe Wanderers and turn down an amazing Team GB role. “I took the Olympic role and part of me every day still questions whether it was the right decision, but I think it was.” Woodward’s year in football is unlikely to be forgotten any time soon. Being such a high-profile figure in another sport probably didn’t help his cause, with people struggling to take him seriously. But it’s clear this wasn’t something he did for publicity. During his interview with The Athletic, his love of football was clear. You could feel it and hear it in the way he spoke about his 12 months on the south coast. There is a strong argument to suggest this was a case of right man, wrong time and wrong circumstances, as he championed methods and techniques that are viewed as the norm today, but were laughed at 16 years ago. “I used to laugh at the people who told me to stick to rugby and stay away from football,” he reflects. “But I hate it when people say I failed in football. I didn’t fail in football because I never got myself in the position to be in charge of something and do it.” “It was innovative and it was the right thing to do,” adds Cowen. “I think what’s happened in football since made that a very forward-thinking appointment, and one that was probably too early for its own good.” “It always takes a trailblazer to go through the door first, and the first person always gets laughed at,” says Wilson. “There will be someone along the journey who thinks it makes sense and after three or four do it, it becomes totally normal.” Things may not have felt totally normal at Southampton during 2005-06 but history should reflect that it was an incredibly forward-thinking move by Lowe. Yes, it didn’t work out how everyone would have hoped, but you have to admire the chutzpah shown by Palios, Lowe and Woodward to challenge the norm. “I still think I could have done a lot, lot more at Southampton if we had stayed in the Premiership and Steve Wigley wasn’t sacked,” Woodward reflects. “It became really tough for Rupert because we were suddenly in the Championship and we weren’t doing that well. He has got me there and he left himself open. I hated it when people ridiculed him for what we were doing. But I was never going to stay at Southampton for more than a year. “Have you seen Ted Lasso?” Woodward asks. “My kids tell me I was like Ted Lasso. If that show had come out in 2004, I would have been him coming in from rugby…”
That was a surprisingly engaging postprandial read. I definitely see some personalities in a new light.
“Jane then whispered in my ear, ‘It’s not Twickenham, is it?’, and I said, ‘No, this definitely isn’t Twickenham!’.” Can't be just me who enjoyed this bit?
Great, isn't it! Thought it was a really interesting article all round. I never personally thought him coming on board was a terrible (or even bad) idea. It was just the timing of it.
In all honesty I'd completely forgotten about the whole thing. At the time I didn't really see why people were against it, I was completely on board with trying new things. It's an interesting thought to see how we would have got on with his ideas in the championship. Really enjoyed that article, thanks for posting it.
