Steve McClaren: Scorched by the flames
After his exit as England coach Steve McClaren is reinventing himself in rural Holland

Jonathan Northcroft
Times Online
Monday 14 July 2008

Outside FC Twente’s training ground in the town of Hengelo lies a sleepy lily pond. A lazy heron ambles along its banks. Dangerous wildlife is far away. “This is a good place to work, without your hyenas and piranhas,” says Eddy van der Ley, Dutch journalism’s “Mr FC Twente”. He is talking, of course, about the English press. Here, in a less hunted environment, Steve McClaren hopes to rise.

“Sometimes you have to go through the fire,” reflects McClaren on his 15 months as England manager. “You go through and come out the other side.” A club in provincial Holland is not a typical place for a British coach to go and start again, but typical of McClaren. Before the England circus caused us to lose sight of who he was, McClaren’s identity had nothing to do with umbrellas, but was that of an innovator. A man never afraid to try new things, from the time he was a novice experimenting with Oxford United’s youth team using ideas from American sports, to when he was assistant manager at Derby County and Manchester United, pioneering the now ubiquitous ProZone system, to making a psychologist his No 2 at Middlesbrough.

“I never reached the heights as a player and when I coached I wanted to be a bit different. Nine times out of 10 it’s worked and I was successful. It didn’t work out with England. I’ve paid the price. I’m dealing with the consequences and getting on with life, saying ‘what's next’?” he says with a smile.

“I could have stayed in England and repeated what I’d done before but I always wanted to coach abroad. Sir Bobby Robson [who managed PSV Eindhoven] said, ‘You’ll love Holland because all you are is a trainer. You don’t have the press, the mail-bag, the outside things you do in England. Your sole responsibility is the players and Saturday’. And I was saying maybe it’s time English coaches started experiencing, started getting off the island. Do you know there are more than 100 Dutch coaches working abroad in Europe? I thought, why not be the first Englishman for a while? I don’t think it’s a gamble, I think it will be great for my education.”

McClaren has come on his own, eschewing the comfort blanket of an English assistant. “I didn’t want to come here and change a successful staff. From Erik Ten Hag, my No 2, to the fitness guys, I tell you, these are very switched on.” He has yet to decide about moving his family, so he is living in a hotel alone. There are no bright lights in Hengelo or neighbouring Enschede, where FC Twente play, to provide a getaway from work, and that is rather as he wants it. He laughs when I report what Peter Spit, his club’s financial director, said: “We wanted a coach who plays an attractive system, gives youth a chance . . . and he must be crazy about football and work long hours.”

McClaren says, “That sums me up. It’s 24/7 now because it’s preseason and I’m engrossing myself in the culture, but that’s football and what I missed. During my time out . . . you can kill a day, but what you do in a day at a football club would absolutely amaze people. Your day can be a week in some people’s lives. Always problems to solve, always firefighting to stay on top. Great”.

Between being sacked by England in November and joining FC Twente last month he coached, lectured in the US and visited Espanyol, Barcelona and PSV. “I’m more comfortable in the thick of it than on the golf course,” he says. “Everything was about recovering and preparing for the next job. After England I felt I still had the passion. I could have worked the next day.”

He talked to Blackburn, but they were interviewing other candidates, and FC Twente’s offer was on the table. With his salary one third of the £2.5m he got with England, his decision to accept was not motivated by money. FC Twente won a playoff with Ajax to finish Eredivisie runners-up and claim a place in the Champions League final qualifying round. Meeting Joop Munsterman, the club’s dynamic chairman, left McClaren with “good feelings”. Like Fred Rutten, his predecessor, who left for Schalke, McClaren’s job comes with a place on FC Twente’s board.

Down at the stadium, being renamed the Grolsch Veste arena thanks to a 12-year sponsorship from the local brewing giant, it’s not hard to feel FC Twente’s lure.

Cranes loom, construction work clangs. Capacity will leap from 13,250 to 25,000 and there are plans to increase the size of the stadium further, to 31,000 in 2009 and 43,000, should Holland bid successfully for the 2018 World Cup. “Our ambition is to be a great club,” said Spit. Backed by local government, banks and companies, the club is confident of exploiting the potential of the Twente region, with its booming IT and nano-technolo-gy industries and 600,000 population. It would be appropriate were Liverpool their Champions League opponents. Some years ago, fan-volunteers redecorated FC Twente’s home dressing room and repainted grey walls with club colours of red and white, adding the inscription: “You’ll Never Walk Alone.”

McClaren will have to do without FC Twente’s star mid-fielders of last season after Orlando Engelaar and Karim El Ahmadi were sold to Schalke and Feyenoord. He is unlikely to be signing English replacements with £3,500-a-week FC Twente’s average player wage. However, McClaren has just signed Slobodan Rajkovic, Chel-sea’s 19-year-old Serbian international centre-back, on loan. The vast majority of his squad is young, although Blaise N’Kufo, the top scorer, is 33, and Luke Wilkshire, who McClaren managed at Middlesbrough, is a familiar face. Preseason form has been good. “Rutten did a magnificent job and overachieved, but the one thing the president said is there are no great expectations,” says McClaren. “We can’t compete with the money of PSV, Ajax and Feyenoord and the club (Holland’s seventh richest) see themselves in the fifth-to-ninth place bracket, able to finish fourth (their 2007-08 preplayoff placing) in a great season. All I’m here to do is continue the development.”

He could talk all day about the technique and work ethic he has already seen from players in training. England is a less appealing subject. The positives and negatives he took? “A thousand of each. It’s too long to say. It’s in the book,” he says, referring to a private journal he wrote after his dismissal. “I went in the cave, as they say. Somebody said, whatever the experience, go into the sanctuary afterwards and write down all your thoughts and then move on. That’s what I did.” The Wally with a Brolly headlines? “Not important. New culture, new job. The past is the past. I can’t say I enjoyed it [his media treatment] but I knew it was coming, this cliche and that cliche. I’d seen it with Sven. I’d say I’m not the personality that was portrayed but you can’t project it all. Sometimes I don’t want to tell the whole truth and nothing but the truth, which of course you all want, because my priority is protecting my players. I didn’t want to be a big character with a big profile, I just wanted to do my job.”

Is he altering his management style? An England criticism was his lack of distance from the players, his chummy references to “Stevie G”, “JT” and “Becks”. He sighs. “Nah. That [it mattered] is a myth. Is [using nicknames] not life, wherever you go in business, in work, the shipyards and building sites? That’s man management. All the top managers get on well with their players. Jose Mourinho [who also called John Terry “JT”] is exactly the same.”

McClaren smiles again, drains his cup of tea and glances at the window. There is nothing out there but a heron prodding the lilies and a football man here inside.

Enschede stars with British links:

Scott Booth
The Setanta Sports pundit started his career as a striker with his hometown club, Aberdeen, before joining Borussia Dortmund in 1997. In 2000 FC Twente gave him the chance of a fresh start. Booth stayed for four years, collecting his only winner’s medal when Twente won the Dutch Cup after a penalty shootout

Andy van der Meyde
The right-sided midfielder, currently out of favour at Everton, spent one season on loan at Twente from Ajax before signing for Internazionale in 2003. He joined Everton in 2005

Arthur Numan
The Dutch fullback was captain of Twente and Holland’s Under21 side when he was signed by PSV in 1992. His impressive performances prompted Rangers to sign him and Numan played 176 times for the Ibrox club until he retired in 2003

Arnold Muhren and Frans Thijssen
The two Twente midfielders pioneered the road to English football for Dutch stars when they signed for Ipswich Town in 1978. They were part of the team that won the 1981 Uefa Cup.

Muhren then joined Manchester United, with whom he won the FA Cup in 1983 and 1985, before returning to Holland with Ajax. Thijssen also played for Nottingham Forest before moving to the Vancouver Whitecaps. In 1984 he returned to Holland to play for Fortuna Sittard, FC Groningen (1987-1988) and Vitesse Arnhem (1988-1991)

Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink
Celtic’s Dutch striker was with Twente for five seasons, scoring 59 league goals before moving to PSV in 2001, where his scoring exploits – 90 goals in 187 matches – earned him a transfer to Parkhead in 2006

Martin Jol
Hamburg’s former Tottenham coach was a midfielder with Twente from 1979-82, winning his first Holland cap at the club. He moved to England in 1982, joining West Bromwich Albion and then Coventry City, before returning to Holland in 1985

Rob McKinnon
The Scottish defender played for Newcastle United, Hartlepool United and Carlisle United in England and for Motherwell, Hearts and Clydebank in Scotland. He spent two years at Twente from 1996 after signing from Motherwell

Billy Ashcroft
The Scouse striker played for Wrexham and Middlesbrough before moving to Twente in 1982. He made 77 league appearances before signing for Tranmere Rovers in 1985

Luke Wilkshire
The Australian World Cup midfielder spent five years at Middlesbrough before joining Bristol City in 2003. His displays for the Socceroos in 2006 earned him a move to Twente