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DAILY MAIL
Clifford bites back
19-11-05
REDKNAPP'S CRONIES FEAR NEW IDEAS, CLAIM GURU
They mocked his training methods, stuck newspaper cuttings on the players' lockers to humiliate him and drove out the character they regarded as an intruder in their midst. But Simon Clifford is not about to go quietly.
Having quit Southampton this week, the former head of sports science and right-hand man to Sir Clive Woodward at St Mary's has poured a torrent of criticism over Harry Redknapp and his team of coaches.
Clifford headed for the exit after just three months, proclaiming he was dismayed by a complacent and often lazy attitude among the management; surprised by a lack of fitness among the first team squad; amazed by the absence of technical training for players and astonished by the negativity of the coaching staff to any suggestion of change.
"I soon saw that you can't really work in that kind of environment," says Clifford, the 34-year-old owner of non-league Garforth Town and a successful football coaching company. "I thought, I've only got one life and I couldn't see how anything was going to happen in the atmosphere there."
Recruited on a salary approaching £300,000 a year, Clifford was hailed by Woodward as the best one-to-one coach he had worked with when he signed in September and he was asked to introduce elements of his Brazilian Soccer School franchises into the Southampton programme.
But these initiatives were met with opposition from day one. Brash, cocky and eager to make an impact, Clifford knew the other coaches were shunning him and his methods.
"I think I won over the players very quickly and there was some jealousy about that, which is why a couple of the other coaching staff did their best to undermine me," he said.
"They were frightened of losing their jobs, frightened of what they don't know and had a fear of being embarrassed. The reason I went to Southampton is because chairman Rupert Lowe and Clive had open minds and an idea of where they wanted to take the club. But that is not shared elsewhere."
The simmering resentment at Clifford's appointment spilled over when he told a local newspaper that professional players did not work hard enough.
He says: "I said it because I believe it. But one of the coaches copied the article and stuck one on all the players lockers. I found it hard to stay from that moment on.
"The cuttings were up on the lockers for 72 hours. Now, if that had happened elsewhere to another member of staff, the chairman would have hit the roof. But because it was among the coaching staff nothing happened. To me, the fact that this kind of thing was allowed was a sign there was something wrong with the coaching culture at the club. When I asked one player why the piece hadn't been torn down, he told me he couldn't touch it because he wanted to keep his place in the side.
"But it's not as if the Southampton players don't want to learn. They say they get called a 'busy bastard' if they try to do more, and that is the opposite of how it should be."
Clifford claims the one first-team training session he was allowed to conduct went very well and had nothing to do with his departure. "It was fantastic, you could see the players were buzzing and a couple of them came up to tell me that afterwards."
But one player disputes that account: "He was doing stuff with the first team that you do with nine-year-old kids. He was trying to get professional players to control the ball with the outside of their foot, that kind of thing, and some of the squad found it insulting.
"He was never seen as a bad guy or a nasty, but they just saw him as a bit barmy and there were a few clashes with the coach Dave Bassett, too. And when Clifford said he could turn Scotland into world beaters, well, you have to cut the guy when he says things like that, don't you?"
Clifford had illustrated his credo that he could draw hidden potential from any individual by claiming he could lift the Scots into the world's top three within a decade.
Saints manager Redknapp did not disguise his scorn. "Don't let's kid ourselves we have suddenly found a load of geniuses who have changed the face of the game," he said. "Football's about good players and it's never going to be any different."
But Clifford and Woodward believe it is also about hard work, application, specific coaching programmes and an attention to detail involving diet, time management and fitness that many football coaches have yet to embrace.
That is the basis of the obvious culture clash at the club which caused Woodward and Redknapp to hold their uneasy joint press conference a couple of months ago.
Clifford says: "I was bewildered by Harry's comments. He says the way I worked was no different to the way he has worked for 25 years, but I haven't yet found anyone who works the same way as me.
"Harry has red hair doesn't he? Well, I only saw that bloke with red hair once at my training sessions. I was with the players in the evening or early in the morning. I was the first in at the club at 7am along with Clive and we'd start with the players at 8:15. But Harry didn't see any of those coaching clinics because he hadn't made it in to work by then.
"And if Bassett had any views on my coaching I'd be interested to hear them because the one time he did come along he had a mobile phone pressed to his ear throughout.
"Even when I took the first-team training - I normally make those sessions last an hour-and-a-half - after 45 minutes the players were incapable of carrying on because they were short of breath.
"This was a team that had been relegated the previous year and this season they've still been letting results slip in the last five or ten minutes of games. And technically they are a long way off. One of the exercises I do is get the players to hit a 30-yard ball to a 1.5m square. It's second nature for the kids who come through the schools, yet some players at Southampton were struggling to hit it into a 10m square.
"Right now at Southampton goalscoring is the problem, yet I did not see one player hitting a ball in a shooting exercise. If a golfer is missing putts he will practice over and over to get it right. That's the kind of repetition I'd have been doing with Brett Ormerod and Ricardo Fuller.
But the training I saw was the routine nine versus nine match that you could have seen at any club over the past 30 years and the attackers were getting just a couple of strikes on goal. How does that help them?"
Clifford insists he was starting to make real strides with the youngsters because they were so hungry to improve.
"Leon Best was coming in at 7am to do extra training and going on in the afternoon with me. So the players there want to work, but they are not encouraged. They are asked to amble in at 10:15am and take part in one session from 10:30am until noon, which is hardly intensive, even if they've had a day off. Now I'm sorry, you can say that is enough, but it's not.
"It's a crying shame for Southampton. When I look at the message boards and the local paper I see there are people in the town who are brighter than some of those employed by the club."
Although the departure has been acrimonious, Clifford has nothing but praise for Woodward: "He is a good and honest man. It is difficult for Clive because he needs to be accepted in football and get on with people, and he was a bit stuck because he wasn't in a position where he could really defend the corner. He is having to compromise and that's difficult."
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