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THE GUARDIAN
Southampton curtain lifts on timidity at the top
by Jeremy Wilson
08-09-06
Nice Clive finish last
Sir Clive Woodward, whose new job of masterminding success across 35 Olympic sports will require strong and decisive leadership, has been criticised for being too timid to take on Harry Redknapp and Dave Bassett at Southampton. Simon Clifford, Woodward's right-hand man at the club, has revealed what went on behind the scenes at St Mary's, saying Woodward preferred to avoid confrontation.
"From all the things Clive was saying to me in private, I was thinking I love this guy, he's like Brian Clough," said Clifford. "But the reality was that he was not that strong. He had sold himself on a manifesto of radicalism but it was far, far too moderate because he wasn't prepared to be at war with these guys. I was all for this idea to change football, but when we got there we were pussycats."
Woodward left Southampton last week and will begin work this month as the British Olympic Association's director of elite performance. Clifford felt Southampton's old guard of the manager Redknapp and his first-team coach Bassett were resistant to new ideas.
Bassett has admitted he felt it was wrong for Woodward and Clifford to take on an advanced coaching role given their lack of experience in football.
According to Clifford, Woodward considered taking the Southampton manager's job, despite having no experience of working full-time in football, immediately after leading the British and Irish Lions' tour to New Zealand. "It was February or March 2005 and Southampton had just had a particularly bad result. Clive rang me urgently and said, 'I think we may go for the nuclear option. Rupert [Lowe, then Southampton chairman] has been on the phone and he is going ballistic. He thinks we are going to go down [from the Premiership] and he is not willing to have Harry at the club in the Championship. He wants you and I to take over if we go down. How do you feel about that?'"
Clifford said he had to persuade Woodward and Lowe to wait another season before giving them their start in management. In the meantime they began coaching some of the club's younger players.
Redknapp's contract expired at the end of the 2005-06 season and, says Clifford, Woodward persuaded Lowe to keep him on so that the manager's job would become vacant after he himself had accumulated a year of experience.
"Rupert said to us, 'When this time comes again in a year there isn't going to be a question; if you are both as good as you say you are then you are just going to do it,'" said Clifford. "Rupert threw other names at me - George Burley was one, Jean Tigana was another. But what Clive ended up saying was that he had started to build some sort of relationship with Harry - there was a feeling that Harry wasn't really a threat to our plans because he had said he was on his way to retirement."
Everything went awry when Redknapp unexpectedly returned to Portsmouth in December 2005. Clifford had already walked out and returned to non-league Garforth Town, which he owned. His departure left Woodward isolated and the board decided an experienced manager was needed to lead them back into the Premiership. Burley was appointed and any lingering chance of Woodward becoming Southampton's manager was ended with Lowe's resignation this summer. Lowe and Woodward have since declined to comment on their time at Southampton.
"There are only three people who knew what we planned to do," says Clifford, "and that's me, Clive and Rupert Lowe [the former Southampton chairman]. We were going to change football, we believed that we could take on Jose Mourinho and all the rest."
By introducing new training regimes and specialist coaches, which would see players work much harder on their individual skills, they believed they could take Southampton back into the Premiership. "Hard work takes you a long way, we would have been the fittest team in English football and we would have worked on technique to a level not seen before," says Clifford.
That all came to grief, as Clifford recounts, following resistance by the coaching staff to their new ideas and the reluctance of Woodward and Lowe to confront the manager Harry Redknapp and key members of his coaching staff. "I thought me and Clive were coming in to run the club," says Clifford, who was given the title of head of sports science.
"I wasn't then prepared to come in and stand in a corner. At one stage Clive said 'Let's just sit tight for two years'. I wasn't going to sit tight for two years, I can't sit still for one day."
Woodward chose Clifford to be his right-hand man with a view to turning traditional football practices on their head and he was shocked by what he found at Southampton. "When I witnessed the coaching and the way they worked, I was horrified," said Clifford. "I was more organised running under-nines."
As well as the vision expert Sherylle Calder, Woodward had hoped to involve others who previously worked with him in rugby, including the kicking specialist Dave Alred, his England and Lions rugby team manager Louise Ramsay, the motivational guru Humphrey Walters and an Israeli graphologist, Yehuda Shinar. Woodward also spoke to Matthew Le Tissier, although the former Southampton and England striker turned down the chance to return as a forwards' coach.
"The plan was to get the reserves working two or three times a day, to get them far fitter than the first team," says Clifford, who along with Woodward was given licence to coach some of the younger players. "I wasn't prepared to get to the end of the year and take over the first team without doing the reserves. But Stewart Henderson [the reserve-team manager] had a problem with giving up the reserve team. I wasn't allowed in the dressing room, I wasn't allowed to talk to players.
"I went mad at Clive but he said 'Just be patient'. I said 'There will be blood on the floor at some stage, let's just do it now'. We would go to the games and be stonewalled by the coaching staff. In the end, we decided to get the players to Clive's house and then have a debriefing on the ProZone." Henderson says he was never asked to stand down as Southampton's reserve-team manager.
According to Clifford, Redknapp only found out that it was planned for Woodward to succeed him through another manager. "Eventually it got back to Redknapp," he said. "It wasn't the right way for Harry to find out."
The relationship between Redknapp and Lowe became so fractured that the former Darlington midfielder Jason St Juste, who had graduated through Clifford's Brazilian Soccer Schools, was signed without the manager's full knowledge. Things continued to degenerate when, according to Clifford, he had a run-in with the goalkeeping coach David Coles. "One day someone threw their bag on the floor, which nearly hit me, and spat," he said. Coles dismissed this account, saying: "I wouldn't do that to anyone."
The tensions at the club came to a head in November last year when members of the coaching staff tried to ridicule Clifford by pinning up articles in the dressing rooms in which he had made bold predictions about what he would achieve in football. "I could live with someone putting the articles up, but I wanted something done," he says. "Whoever did that should have been sacked, but nothing happened. The last morning was a Tuesday and it got to 8.15am and none of the lads were there [for Clifford's training session] - someone had told them not to turn up. I just thought 'eff that' and I was on the next flight back to Leeds."
With his appointment as director of elite performance at the British Olympic Association, Woodward's hopes of being a top football manager effectively ended. Clifford still applauds Lowe's bold vision - and hopes he will return to football - but is not surprised that Woodward has moved on. He also feels Woodward will do well in his new job as he is suited to working with Olympic athletes. "Clive will be perfect for this role, he is completely unique. Football may not have been ready for him but he will thrive in this job."
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