Gregor ROBERTSON
FOOTBALLER TURNED JOURNALIST
Afew weeks ago, a colleague interviewed the Reading manager, Rubén Sellés. “Forget England,” the headline read, “Meet the manager with football’s impossible job.” The Spaniard described how he had dealt with a transfer embargo, starting the season with seven players, working unpaid, supporter protests on the pitch and a total of six deducted points, but still managed to guide his side out of the League One relegation zone. “We learned we can cope with a lot of things if we focus on the football,” Sellés, right, said.
Earlier that week, I’d interviewed Ashley Westwood, who in November became manager of, wait for it… Afghanistan. Westwood, 47, is a former Bradford City and Sheffield Wednesday defender, who also had a spell as player-manager of Kettering Town in 2012. He told me a remarkable tale (via Zoom, from Saudi Arabia) that included a visit to Afghanistan’s capital, Kabul, where he was greeted by two guards with massive machine guns; an 18-player boycott due to alleged corruption by the Afghanistan Football Federation; piecing a team together from disparate refugees; dodgy passports; and the ordeal of booking 350 flights for his players and staff to converge for a World Cup qualifying double header last month.
Remarkably, a few days later they registered their first ever win against India, ranked 41 places higher than Afghanistan (who are ranked 158) in Fifa’s world rankings. “‘I don’t want any caviar,” the headline read, “I just don’t want to get blown up”. Now, football management throws up some, shall we say, unexpected, challenges these days. And the reason I mention these two hardy characters is because they would, indeed, be high up on any list of managers with the “hardest job in football”.
Yet if you ask me, there’s another manager whose achievements tops them all. Amanager who has dealt with more adversity than any I can recall in my 20-plus years playing and reporting on football, and yet still managed to achieve something extraordinary this season, and that is Southend United’s Kevin Maher.
At the time of writing, despite everything, Southend go into the final game of the season against Rochdale, before a sell-out crowd at Roots Hall, with hopes – however slim – of reaching the National League play-offs still alive. Without their ten-point deduction for failing to clear an HMRC bill before a deadline imposed by the National League, of course, Maher’s side would be fourth, five places higher in the table, their play-off berth already safely secured.
Celebration
It’s an astonishing feat when you consider how many times the club has come close to going out of business. All the familiar hallmarks of a spiralling club have been there: unpaid
