Steve McClaren has given a lot of thought to who he is, what he is and what he does. “For me,” he says. “Life is like a football match. Sir Alex Ferguson always used to say, ‘Stay in the game, fight for 95 minutes’. We have a setback, we recover and we go again. I’ve had a lot of ups and a lot of downs, but I’ve always felt I’ve got to stay in the game, come back, fight back. I’ve done it a few times. I’m doing it again.”
McClaren looks fit and sounds relaxed, comfortable with himself. Sitting and chatting in a restaurant in Yarm, North Yorkshire, close to his family home, he feels “re-energised” after five months in Israel, assisting Jordi Cruyff (son of Johan) at Maccabi Tel Aviv, the latest outpost in a peripatetic, inquisitive, turbulent career. He is now ready for “a proper job”, laughing as he says it, but it is how he feels.
“I’m a No 1,” he says. “I want to be out on the field, working with players, building a team. I need competition, I need that winning feeling, even that losing feeling, although it’s horrible, to keep myself motivated. Problem-solving, taking decisions, being the decision-maker, making 1,000 of them a day. Fergie said that if you get seven out of ten decisions right, then you’re a decent manager. I like that. I want that.” To his core, he knows he is good at it. “It’s what I do,” he says.
Last summer, the phone trilled. It was Cruyff. “Jordi had been sporting director at Maccabi for five years but was taking over as coach and said he needed someone to help him. Would I come over?” McClaren says. “I was a bit reticent at first. I talked to Kathryn, my wife, and she said, ‘Well, we’re not going there. It’s a war zone.’ I said, ‘Look, I’ll go for four days, have a scout around, report back and we’ll make a decision.’ ”
Reticent, perhaps, but McClaren has never shied from the unknown; after being England head coach, he reconstructed himself at Twente, winning the Eredivisie, moving on to Germany and Wolfsburg. So he found his passport, filled a bag. “I got out there and it was 30C,” he says. “Tel Aviv was beautiful. Modern, but with history, too. Mediterranean. Multicultural, fantastic restaurants, great beach, the job looked interesting.
“I came back and said to Kathryn, ‘Honestly, I felt safe, secure. I think this might be a good idea.’ She still didn’t want to go. I said, ‘I want to work, I’m going to work, let’s try it.’ So she stayed, but two of my boys came over and had a great time. ‘Go mum, go.’ She came over for a week and was blown away by it. She ended up returning three or four times.”
The experience was revelatory. “I visited the Dead Sea, Jerusalem, Nazareth at Christmas — fascinating. I saw the Western Wall, the Church of the Holy Sepulchre. It’s got that feeling of spirituality, whatever your beliefs. It’s the epicentre of three religions and all of them believe God will descend in that one spot. And they call Tel Aviv a country within a country because it’s different to the rest of Israel.” He checks himself. “I could be an ambassador for the Israeli Tourist Board . . .”
His role was another adventure. “It started off as consultancy, helping Jordi adapt to becoming a coach,” he says. “It ended up as full-time assistant, sitting on the bench, working on the field. He had a Spanish staff, a Spanish philosophy. He’d said, ‘It might be interesting for you, help us but learn from us’. So it was an Israeli team, Dutch coach, Spanish philosophy . . . and an English lunatic on the sideline!
“And it was difficult in the beginning. Jordi was finding his feet. We made the breakthrough after three months, we won the League Cup. We’d qualified for the Europa League and it was fantastic; Villarreal, Slavia Prague, Astana in Kazakhstan. But I always felt it would be short-term and the thing missing is that it wasn’t my team.
“I was five hours away from England and there were two or three opportunities that I missed out on because I wasn’t there, so I couldn’t just nip up the road and speak to people. It was time to come back.” That itch. That unreachable itch called management. “I just said to Jordi, ‘I need to go home . . .’”
He has questioned it, questioned himself. After his joyless, bitter experience at Newcastle United — a club he joined believing that it was his chance “to rebound and make a mark”, and soon discovered that it was cold and loveless, divisive and divided, that his position was compromised — he wondered if it was time for something else. If he was someone else.
“I thought long and hard about the future after Newcastle,” he says. “It was very, very difficult. I felt . . . there are certain things you can control, but there were too many things I couldn’t control and that was frustrating. I asked myself, ‘Have I done enough?’ I’ve never fallen out of love with football, but with that job? It was the same after England. It took me a long time, eight or nine months, to recover. It was about needing a break and exploring other things.”
McClaren began to study for a sport directorship Masters degree at Manchester Metropolitan University. “You’re a player, then a coach, then a manger and the next step is to be a sports director or a technical director,” he says. “Louis van Gaal has done it, Dick Advocaat, Johan Cruyff, loads of people. So maybe I’ll have a look at it, I thought. It was a great course, terrific and I was exploring.
“But one of my heroes has always been Don Howe and I thought about him a lot. He went on for ever. When I was at Oxford United, I used to go and watch Don coach. Where did I watch him? Newbury Town. He was England coach and working part-time at Newbury. He just loved it that much. I’d go and watch and then have a cuppa with him afterwards. If the great Don Howe can coach at Newbury . . .
“One day I made a decision. I said to Kathryn, ‘Right, for as long as I can, until my legs give out, I want to be on the field’. I’m a manager. I’m 56 and in coaching terms still relatively young, especially when you see how long Sir Alex went on for, Roy Hodgson now, Sam Allardyce. People have said to me, ‘You’ve got too much to offer, you’ve proved in the past, given the right circumstances and with the right people around you, you can be successful’.”
He is younger than Hodgson and Allardyce and the same age as Alan Pardew, all of whom are working in the Premier League. Unlike them, he has won a leading trophy in England, taking Middlesbrough to what is now the Carabao Cup in 2004, as well as to the Uefa Cup final and to seventh place in the table. And then he won the title in the Netherlands with Twente, traditionally the preserve of Ajax, PSV Eindhoven and Feyenoord.
So, if Hodgson and the rest are still doing it at the top level, couldn’t he? “It’s perception, isn’t it,” he says. “And I’ve got to try and change that perception.” But what is it, that perception? “I don’t know,” he says. “You tell me.”
McClaren’s first coaching post was at Oxford under Denis Smith. He moved to Derby County, where he worked with Jim Smith and then on to Old Trafford and Ferguson. The two Smiths, Fergie; big characters, tough, football men. To thrive under their command must take personality. To put it in crude terms, you would have to be decent company down the pub, surely? McClaren must have that in him.
Yet he has always been reluctant to reveal himself, somehow. It has always felt a little forced, as if he is too eager to say the right thing, to please, rather than simply trust himself. A little later, when the tape recorder is turned off and we are walking back to our respective cars, he describes himself as “introverted” and it explains a lot, but he doesn’t feel forced now. He feels natural. He knows who he is.
The defining image of his England spell was the tumbling rain and his umbrella. In the Netherlands, there was mockery of his accent in a TV interview, but if Israel opened his eyes to things, it also offered a different perspective on his past.
“I was talking to someone over there about the England days and I said, ‘Yeah, you know, I didn’t do that well. We didn’t qualify [for Euro 2008], I took responsibility for it and I’ve had to deal with that failure’. And the guy said, ‘Failure? But you got one of the top jobs in world football. Never mind what happened at the summit, you climbed Everest’. He flipped it around.
“But I seem to get a lot more respect abroad. The perception was, ‘Oh, you’ve been successful, you’ve won trophies, you’ve been England manager,’ and that holds a lot of sway. More than it does here. Perhaps foreign coaches get the same thing in their own countries and, when they come here, they haven’t got that baggage. There’s a mystique.
“I’m not saying I have a mystique, but when you travel, you have a better reputation because they look at your CV; ‘Wow, you’ve done that, you’ve managed there, you’ve won this’. With clubs and players, I never feel I’ve had any problems, it’s just been publicly and media-wise.”
Derby still hurts. Derby sandwiched McClaren’s nine months at St James’ Park, his first spell leading to a play-off final and then a long stretch of poor results once Newcastle’s interest crystallised. The second was abrupt, leading the team away from the bottom four but dismissed after five months in March last year. It burned, but did not leave him searching. “It cemented my decision,” he says. “I’m not one to sit at a desk, meetings, the phone. I’m a coach.”
He cannot leave it like that. He won’t. “Derby is something that motivates me,” he says. “We all need drive and motivation and some things you have to charge yourself and some things are external and that was a big disappointment. What happened the first time could have been avoided and I take responsibility for that, but I felt the second time was totally unjust. What we’d planned from the beginning was, ‘Keep us away from relegation, get us safe’.”
Derby and Newcastle left him bruised, but it is not as if McClaren’s ego is fragile. After England, he helped out at Darlington and four years before he went to Israel, he had coached under Harry Redknapp at Queens Park Rangers on a short-term contract. “It’s one of the best things I ever did,” he says. “I took a step back but was still involved. Harry gave me a lot of freedom and it was great, having pressure but not the ultimate pressure and just watching another manager.”
He is still watching, still learning, trying to do what Howe did, mentoring young coaches — John Eustace at Kidderminster Harriers, Martin Gray at York City, Adam Owen at Lechia Gdansk, plenty of others — but McClaren is also certain in what he does. “I’m open to anything,” he says. He always has been. “It doesn’t matter where you work — Europe, England, Scotland, Wales . . . I just want the opportunity to manage again.”
