Ex- QPR Manager Ian Holloway Reflecting

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Long-since passed are the days of wishing for Ian Holloway's QPR return or arguing the merits of whether or not Chairman Paladini was right to remove Holloway as manager. His perspective is still of interest to some.

The Times - Leader preaching an unlikely gospel
Beneath the exterior of a sometimes stand-up comedian, the Plymouth manager has wide-ranging concerns about the state of football and the world as a whole
undefined - Tom Dart

Perched high on his barstool, Ian Holloway talked about balance. “Everybody needs a little bit of a break at times to just look at the sea,” he said.

“This anger management fella told me he’d never met anyone coming to the end of their life – and he’d met a few – who actually said: ‘I wish I’d spent more time at work.’ Every one of them says they wish they’d got the balance right and wish they spent more time at home with their wife and their kids because that’s what it’s all about.”

You are not supposed to talk about stuff such as work-life balance if you are a football manager. You are supposed to be chained to the table of football’s 24/7 buffet until it makes you sick or some ruthless chairman takes your plate away.

Holloway is not enslaved by the game, yet he is famously one of its most passionate and intense managers, as well as one of the best. From his new house in central Plymouth, it is a short distance to the Hoe, where he gazes out at the blue infinity. It is the seaside spot where Sir Francis Drake played that legendary preArmada game of bowls.

Drake excited extremes: fêted by the English, hated by the Spanish. No balance. Which is what Holloway fears about the top flight and is why it is, at once, like Drake, hero and villain, dream and nightmare. As manager of Plymouth Argyle, the middling Coca-Cola Championship club, his mission is to reach it. But the longer you stand still, the farther away it gets.

“Basically, you need a rich person to be pouring money into a big hole, trying to get that money back in the end by getting to the Premiership,” Holloway said. “Normally you’re trying to win so you can lose every week [in the Premiership], because that’s the madness of it. There’s a huge gulf and what you can do to change it, I don’t know. Where it’s going it’s a little bit alarming, to say the least. Look at Man City. All of a sudden they’ve spent nearly £50 million. It’s earth-shatteringly boggling, when you think about it.”

The new £2.7 billion three-year television deal will result in the Barclays Premier League contributing 1.2-2.4 per cent of the money to the Football League. Before the Premier League existed, the bottom three divisions received 50 per cent. The arrangements bring a windfall of at least £30 million for each top-flight club per season, allied to parachute payments of £11.2 million for each relegated team. It could create a schism between the yo-yo clubs and the rest.

“We need to get up there because you get an awful lot of money for failing these days,” Holloway said. “That is the scariest thing about this division this year. You can already see it, there’s some crazy buys. All of a sudden it’s like the house market going mad – someone offers you three times what your house is worth. You’re going to take it, but that escalates everybody else’s value. There’s been some terrible inflation this summer. It’s the maddest I’ve known it.”

In transfer fees alone, Premier League clubs have spent £350 million of the £900 million they are due this season. “Take Michael Chopra [who moved from Cardiff City to Sunderland]. Last year he was £500,000, now he’s £5 million,” Holloway said. “Where is it going to stop?”

When clubs go bust? “That’s what I think’s going to happen. I’m glad the League are doing what they did to Leeds [deducting them 15 points because of their financial problems]. And our division’s worse because ours is the one with the big prize. I think there’s going to be all sorts of pressure on all sorts of managers. It could spell disaster for some clubs.

“I think, unfortunately, that film Seven, about the seven deadly sins, is true. Greed is definitely one of the biggest problems on this planet and people are still dying in this world today through governments’ greed and people’s greed. It never ceases to amaze me how civilised we claim to be now. How we can let one person die of starvation on our planet? It doesn’t make sense. How can one footballer be worth 36, 38, however many millions? How can that be? That is what perplexes me. I love football, but I love my family more, I love my children more and I love the world more. I’m asking for a bit of sanity here. It probably won’t happen.”

Holloway carved out a career as a hard-working midfield player, reaching the top flight with Queens Park Rangers. “I learnt as a very young person that you can gain so much as a human being by being part of a team. I realised I wasn’t the most outstanding person, but I had a value. I think we’re all here to reproduce and pass on to our offspring how to survive and the most important thing you can give your offspring apart from education is self-esteem. That’s what I am trying to get through to all the young players we’ve got.”

Although he has not taken charge of a Premier League club, Holloway is one of the English game’s most familiar figures, thanks to his Bristol brogue and his habit of taking a cliché and stretching it so hard that it snaps and something hilarious and original falls out.

Promotion for QPR in 2004: “Every dog has its day and today is woof day. Today I just want to bark.”

Defeat by Watford in the FA Cup quarter-final last season: “We threw everything at them. The kitchen sink, golf clubs, emptied the garage and threw it at them. Unfortunately, it was not enough, but at least my garage is tidy.”

It is his interest in the interplay between football and normal life surfacing via absurd soundbites and it creates the impression that he is a sort of stand-up comedian. His autobiography, which is out next month, should be funny, but there is a deep seriousness beneath everything. Holloway has realised through painful experience that the only mind games that matter are the ones he uses on himself. Having to care for three deaf daughters as well as manage QPR, a basket-case of a club off the pitch, he struggled to deal with bouts of rage until he was treated on the BBC programme Stress Test.

“I’ve had five-year contracts whipped away from me,” he said. “At QPR I’ve had a long-term plan that suddenly went to a short-term plan and I was on gardening leave. And I’m not trained to be a gardener. It’s a funny old life, you never know what’s round the corner. Good job you don’t, sometimes. But you never find me complaining. I’m loving it.

“Every day I go out and try and learn, try and be a better me by the end of it. But I do start off these days looking in the mirror and saying, ‘I’m all right, warts and all.’ Then if I do make a mistake, it’s a genuine mistake. I’m trying to encourage myself like I try and encourage my players. I learnt that in the anger management. I wasn’t doing that. I wouldn’t put up with me making mistakes – I wasn’t allowed to. But I got that wrong. So every day I try and analyse what I’ve done, how that went.

“I welcome anything that happens in my life. I wake up every morning with a new zest. I’m happy my eyes have opened again and I’m happy that I’ve got another chance to enjoy another 24 hours. And that’s genuine. Even this morning. My wife’s gone off to take her mum on a hospital appointment because she’s battling with breast cancer but I’m still here with loads of enthusiasm. I think my old man, Bill, takes credit for that. He said to me years ago, ‘Live every day as if it’s your last, then one day you’ll be right, son, but you won’t have wasted one second of your life.’ ” Bill died of a heart attack aged 59, when Holloway was 24. “I lost him 20 years ago and it’s still tough today, but he helped me immensely and I carry him with me every day of my life. It’s about enthusiasm, encouragement. As a manager it’s difficult to get my players to believe we can get to the Premiership when it’s getting as it is and when you do get there the likelihood is you’re going to come back down, but that’s the challenge for me.”

He suddenly reaches a cogent conclusion, perfectly weighting idealism and realism, work and entertainment, football and the world beyond it. “The beautiful thing about my business is that it gives some people their balance,” he said. “That’s their recreation, their life, their dream, and we are helping them live their dreams. We should all have dreams. Hopefully through your football club in a fairer structure, in a fairer system, it will be a little bit easier for all of us to do that.”

And he is away, to a meeting of managers, to discuss how the offside law is being implemented this season. But you know that even in the thick of an intense debate about on or off, active or passive, he can still see the sea. It is his triumph of balance, as a manager and a human being: he is convinced of football’s utter triviality and its absolute importance. The Times