The genius of Ian Holloway

In all honesty, the 2010 World Cup was... well... boring. By and large the action was forgettable and the punditry even more so. Maybe what it was missing was a certain Mr Holloway, who shows in the Daily Mail that he is the man to brighten up the Premier League this season...

The sun is beating down on an Army field in Devon. On the football pitch a distinctive, Bristolian voice is booming out instructions to accompany the sweat and graft of pre-season training. “Show for it, play it where you want and then move on. If you don’t get it, then move again,” he calls. “Keep it, keep it, keep it,” is the constant mantra.

Then a shout of ‘stop’, and a walk through a move that just broke down. “We don’t do things wrong here, we redo them until they are right,” raps the voice again.

Welcome to the world of the real Ian Holloway. Not the funny little bloke who does the soundbites and the one-line gags, but the proper football coach who’s in his element out on a training ground. It’s the side of ‘Ollie’ that only his players normally get to see while the rest of us enjoy his quips and comedy quotes.

In just over three weeks’ time he will take Blackpool into the Premier League with the smallest and, on paper at least, most ill-equipped squad that have tried to survive there. And this is where the hard work to chase that miracle is being done. Today he’s setting out the pattern of play before a pre-season friendly match against Accrington Stanley. It won’t be any different when he is getting ready for the real thing against Arsenal.

“You ask my lads if I am a clown or a coach,” he says later, when we’re back at the hotel and the players are resting before another session later in the afternoon. “I think it’s what I do best. I had to think hard about it during the year I spent out of the game after it all went wrong for me at Leicester, and I realised how much I liked talking to players and how much more I wanted to say; how much I wanted to push myself to add to somebody’s thinking.

“At the moment I could spend all day and all night on the phone trying to find new recruits and couldn’t be out working with them. But that’s not what I want to do. I need my players to understand where we are going, how we are trying to get there and how they are good enough to do it. And the place to learn that is out on the training ground.

“If you look at any standard, the higher you get the better they are at keeping the ball,” he says. “Spain proved it in the World Cup. If your whole ethos is about keeping it and passing it, and you teach people control and movement, then that’s the way to go. It’s easy to say that’s because they are world class players. But why are they? How did they get like that? Were they born world class or were they manufactured? My argument is that they were manufactured and it just takes practice, practice, practice.

“The more you keep doing it, the more you believe in it, and the better the players become. I don’t want to be defensive. We’ll be playing teams who will be much better at keeping the ball, but I still want mine to get better with passing and keeping it and moving and that’s what we will focus on. It’s what we did last year and we won all three play-off games like it, home, away and at Wembley.

“We are the only club ever that have had to build a whole new stand and even that has hamstrung us. We’ve got to turn our first home game into an away game, so we have five of the first six away. You can normally scrub all of them off, so that’s no points from 15, but we can’t look at it like that.

“OK, we’ve changed the opposition and that’s gone in a pretty worrying dimension if you look at some of the results that some of them had. But how many times did other teams go to the big clubs and try to retain possession and move the ball from one side to the other? Or were they more worried about blocking up these people?

“When you’ve gone a goal or three down, where’s your game plan then? Our game plan, and you saw it in the run-in and the play-offs, is to outscore the opposition, so if we let a goal in it didn’t knock us, didn’t dent our confidence, to say ‘OK, we’ll outscore them’.

“We might not be good enough to outscore Mr Drogba and all those, but we’ll have a right go at it.”

Meanwhile, he’s having a go at bringing in the right recruits at a club who have never spent more than £500,000 on a player and where the current squad list is only 17 names long. He’s going through a pile of paper with lists of names.

“Take a team at random — Everton? Let’s count the numbers, one, two three… it goes on to 37. So they are double me already for numbers and then look at the names and some of them are unbelievable. Fellaini, what was he? £16million? Even the youngsters, Jack Rodwell, how good’s he?

“I’ve got to find people who will help the very good ones I’ve got, and I know there are some who might not see Blackpool as a good enough option to stay in the top flight. Well, to be honest, I don’t want those people anyway. I’d rather have somebody that I can work with, who understands what I’m trying to say long term and wants to stay, and I’ll be calm and work and give him the opportunity to do what you saw us do today.

“Nothing is expected of us, everybody will get on the back of us and think, ‘This is quirky, we’ll enjoy this, see how they get on’. But we know what we are trying to do. It’s not easy, is it? But then life never is.”