Dave Hockaday is a self-confessed loner, teetotal and his last job was in non-League... but is he the man to rescue Leeds United? - Mail 1/8/14
Former Forest Green Rovers manager opens up in an exclusive interview
56-year-old admits he understands the scepticism over his appointment
Hockaday refuses to reveal exactly how he became Leeds manager but says he is humbled to get job and promises to give his all
Hockaday denies Leeds players had to do their own laundry
By MATT LAWTON
Quite how Dave Hockaday came to be the head coach at Leeds United remains something of a mystery.
Even after more than an hour at the club’s Thorp Arch training ground he is reluctant to reveal much detail. He refuses to name the person who alerted Massimo Cellino to his existence. He won’t even name the London hotel where he first met the eccentric Italian. ‘It’s irrelevant,’ he says sharply, explaining only that ‘someone in footballing circles had been asked to source a good English coach’.
Hockaday does appear to have enjoyed some success as a coach and soon has you wondering why it is only now, at 56, that he has risen to prominence. He is passionate, professional and, judging by his academic achievements, exceptionally intelligent.
But there are moments in this interview that might explain why he has not made a more rapid ascent of football’s career ladder. For instance, when we shake hands at the end, he insists that we repeat it and that, this time, I make what he considers to be proper eye contact. ‘I always tell my players to make eye contact,’ he says with a slightly unnerving stare.
He does come across as rather intense but he can be disarmingly honest, too. ‘I appreciate I’m not a big name so I understand their misgivings,’ he says of the Leeds supporters alarmed by his appointment.
The description he offers of himself is nothing if not candid. ‘I’m not in anybody’s gang,’ he says. ‘I’m a loner. I like to think most people in the game know of me and I’d like to think most people would respect the work that I’ve done. I don’t have a big agent to represent me. I get my head down and work hard. That’s what I do.’
The line of not being in anybody’s gang is one he revisits two or three times. ‘Because I’m not,’ he says. ‘All the jobs I’ve got have been off my own back. I haven’t been anybody’s mate.’
I suggest he sounds resentful. ‘I’m ultra-realistic,’ he says. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I love my wife (Geraldine). If I’m not working I want to spend time with my wife. I’m not a lad. I can go out with the lads but I don’t need a group of lads to feel comfortable. I’ve never had alcohol so I’ve never missed it. I can’t even have a sherry trifle.’
And yet within two-and-a-half hours of meeting him at that secret London location, Cellino had decided Hockaday was the man. The one-time manager of Forest Green Rovers had convinced the president of Leeds that he should join an illustrious list that includes Don Revie, Brian Clough, Howard Wilkinson, George Graham, David O’Leary and Terry Venables.
‘That’s history,’ he says of that group of former Leeds managers. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that. I have been given this great opportunity and the man who has given me it has looked me in the eye and said, “I believe in you”.
‘And that is humbling. That puts a lump in my throat, and I’ll give him, the players, the staff and the fans everything I’ve got.’
Does he deserve it? ‘He feels I deserve it,’ he says. Does he feel ready? ‘Yeah, I’m ready. I’m better than ready. I’m prepared.’
When he went to that first meeting in London, at the time out of work, the identity of the club had been kept from him. ‘I went to meet an Italian voice,’ he says. ‘But when I went there the president was there. In five hours all we did was talk football. We had salt and pepper pots, ashtrays. We had a couple more meetings but we hit it off immediately.
‘He knew more about football than any president or chairman I’d met in nearly 40 years in football.’
Hockaday would appear to know quite a bit too, and not just about football. After his father escaped the harsh realities of a North East mining community to become ‘a successful electrical engineer’, Hockaday was educated at Bede Hall Grammar School in Billingham, County Durham.
He wasn’t just bright, he was super-bright, joining an accelerated class that saw pupils sit their O Levels and A Levels a year early. He earned ‘numerous O Levels’ and, at 17, four A Levels in ‘English, maths, history and general studies’. ‘I had been accepted by five universities to study business studies,’ he says. ‘I was planning to go to Sheffield because they also had a good football team. But then I was offered the chance to sign with Blackpool and that was that.’
Not that a move into professional football would mark the end of his studies.
‘I was a professional for 20 years but in that time I studied cost accounting, business studies, quarry engineering, civil engineering,’ he says. ‘I needed to satisfy that as well as the football. I always thought I might need something to fall back on if I got injured.’
He says he had plenty of injuries but played ‘more than 650 games’ as a full back for Blackpool, Swindon, Hull, Stoke, Shrewsbury and Cirencester Town.
It was at Cirencester that he established what he says was the first football academy in this country, joining forces with Cirencester College in 1996 to establish a model that provided the blueprint for the modern professional game.
‘I blazed a trail,’ he says. ‘I was asked by Cirencester to set up a youth system and with one or two other people I created the Cirencester Football Academy. It was our aim to get the players into the best leagues we could while also producing players for Cirencester Town.
‘For four or five years we won everything. We were the Manchester United of college football.
‘Howard Wilkinson and Don Howe came down on behalf of the FA and elaborated on what I started in Cirencester. On the back of Howard and Don coming down I did a lot of work for the FA. Glenn Hoddle got to hear about me when he was England manager. He would take our lads a couple of weeks before an England game, and practise with us what they had planned for the England team at Bisham Abbey.’
Graham Taylor got to hear about Hockaday and, in 2000, the then Watford manager lured him to Vicarage Road. He started as Under 18 coach, with Ashley Young among his apprentices, and ended up as first-team coach to Aidy Boothroyd. He helped Boothroyd guide Watford into the Premier League, with a play-off win over Leeds, only for Boothroyd to dismiss him midway through a Premier League season that ended in relegation.
Why? ‘Football is a strange business,’ he says. ‘I thought we had enough in our locker to stay up. It was in the balance but at the end of January the decision was made. There was nothing I could do about that.’
He joined Martin Allen at MK Dons, the first of three brief spells — the other two coming at Leicester and Cheltenham — alongside the infamous ‘Mad Dog’. ‘We’re different,’ says Hockaday. ‘I’ve got a long fuse, longer than Martin. But Mad Dog certainly ain’t mad. There is a raw intelligence with Martin.’
Hockaday took another academy job at Southampton, working briefly with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, but left amid the upheaval at the club in 2009, a casualty of ‘the Dutch revolution’ there.
In September 2009 he applied for a job for the first time, for his first job in management at Forest Green. He had four seasons there, narrowly avoiding relegation twice and finishing no higher than 10th despite the biggest budget in the Conference Premier. Even so, Hockaday believes his side played ‘the best football ever seen in that league’.
His first month in the job at Leeds has, he admits, been ‘crazy, brilliant and everything in between’. There was a pre-season tour to Italy featuring a match memorable only for the fact that their Romanian opponents didn’t show.
There were reports of players being told to bring their own food to training as part of Cellino’s cost-cutting measures. It was said the players had to do their own laundry, while one report suggested goalkeeper Paddy Kenny’s future at the club was in doubt because Cellino has a dislike for the number 17 and Kenny was born on May 17.
‘Some people have been having a bit of fun at Leeds’ expense,’ says Hockaday. ‘The president has come in and has seen Leeds United as fat and lazy. So what he’s done is really shaken the tree to get rid of the dead wood, and now he will start fleshing it out again.
‘Yes, on the first two training days the players were told to bring their own food. But then we go away to the Dolomites to a five-star hotel and we’re treated like royalty. I also believe he’s bringing in an Italian chef.’
He denies the players had to do their own laundry and says food is back on the menu. But he has to go through various cupboards to find himself some lunch on this particular afternoon, and the reception area to the training ground — a complex that had to be sold in 2004 and is now rented for a staggering £600,000 a year — is unmanned and in darkness.
In fairness to Cellino, he has inherited a financial mess. Hockaday certainly believes that and is happy to work within the boundaries Cellino sets, just as he is happy to let his employer buy and sell the players.
‘I’m a coach,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to get involved in the financial side of things. I don’t want to get involved in negotiating contracts. My expertise is on the training pitch and on match day.’
Self-promotion would not seem to be a strong point. ‘It doesn’t interest me,’ he says. ‘I probably could have made more money if I’d studied for that business degree.
‘I have a brother who’s a partner in a law firm, another who began in quantity surveying and is now a project manager. My youngest brother is pretty much on the board of a multi-national chemical company.
‘Then there’s me, kicking a ball around. But I’m happy with the career I’ve had. I am what I am and confident in my ability. I appreciate a lot of people wouldn’t have heard of me, so I would have been a shock to a lot of people. I’m not daft.
‘Halfway through the five-hour meeting with the president he said, “Do you know what I’m asking you to do?” I said, “Yes, but do you know what you’re asking me?”
‘Because I’m not a name. And it will get bumpy.’
56-year-old admits he understands the scepticism over his appointment
Hockaday refuses to reveal exactly how he became Leeds manager but says he is humbled to get job and promises to give his all
Hockaday denies Leeds players had to do their own laundry
By MATT LAWTON
Quite how Dave Hockaday came to be the head coach at Leeds United remains something of a mystery.
Even after more than an hour at the club’s Thorp Arch training ground he is reluctant to reveal much detail. He refuses to name the person who alerted Massimo Cellino to his existence. He won’t even name the London hotel where he first met the eccentric Italian. ‘It’s irrelevant,’ he says sharply, explaining only that ‘someone in footballing circles had been asked to source a good English coach’.
Hockaday does appear to have enjoyed some success as a coach and soon has you wondering why it is only now, at 56, that he has risen to prominence. He is passionate, professional and, judging by his academic achievements, exceptionally intelligent.
But there are moments in this interview that might explain why he has not made a more rapid ascent of football’s career ladder. For instance, when we shake hands at the end, he insists that we repeat it and that, this time, I make what he considers to be proper eye contact. ‘I always tell my players to make eye contact,’ he says with a slightly unnerving stare.
He does come across as rather intense but he can be disarmingly honest, too. ‘I appreciate I’m not a big name so I understand their misgivings,’ he says of the Leeds supporters alarmed by his appointment.
The description he offers of himself is nothing if not candid. ‘I’m not in anybody’s gang,’ he says. ‘I’m a loner. I like to think most people in the game know of me and I’d like to think most people would respect the work that I’ve done. I don’t have a big agent to represent me. I get my head down and work hard. That’s what I do.’
The line of not being in anybody’s gang is one he revisits two or three times. ‘Because I’m not,’ he says. ‘All the jobs I’ve got have been off my own back. I haven’t been anybody’s mate.’
I suggest he sounds resentful. ‘I’m ultra-realistic,’ he says. ‘I don’t drink, I don’t smoke, I love my wife (Geraldine). If I’m not working I want to spend time with my wife. I’m not a lad. I can go out with the lads but I don’t need a group of lads to feel comfortable. I’ve never had alcohol so I’ve never missed it. I can’t even have a sherry trifle.’
And yet within two-and-a-half hours of meeting him at that secret London location, Cellino had decided Hockaday was the man. The one-time manager of Forest Green Rovers had convinced the president of Leeds that he should join an illustrious list that includes Don Revie, Brian Clough, Howard Wilkinson, George Graham, David O’Leary and Terry Venables.
‘That’s history,’ he says of that group of former Leeds managers. ‘There’s nothing I can do about that. I have been given this great opportunity and the man who has given me it has looked me in the eye and said, “I believe in you”.
‘And that is humbling. That puts a lump in my throat, and I’ll give him, the players, the staff and the fans everything I’ve got.’
Does he deserve it? ‘He feels I deserve it,’ he says. Does he feel ready? ‘Yeah, I’m ready. I’m better than ready. I’m prepared.’
When he went to that first meeting in London, at the time out of work, the identity of the club had been kept from him. ‘I went to meet an Italian voice,’ he says. ‘But when I went there the president was there. In five hours all we did was talk football. We had salt and pepper pots, ashtrays. We had a couple more meetings but we hit it off immediately.
‘He knew more about football than any president or chairman I’d met in nearly 40 years in football.’
Hockaday would appear to know quite a bit too, and not just about football. After his father escaped the harsh realities of a North East mining community to become ‘a successful electrical engineer’, Hockaday was educated at Bede Hall Grammar School in Billingham, County Durham.
He wasn’t just bright, he was super-bright, joining an accelerated class that saw pupils sit their O Levels and A Levels a year early. He earned ‘numerous O Levels’ and, at 17, four A Levels in ‘English, maths, history and general studies’. ‘I had been accepted by five universities to study business studies,’ he says. ‘I was planning to go to Sheffield because they also had a good football team. But then I was offered the chance to sign with Blackpool and that was that.’
Not that a move into professional football would mark the end of his studies.
‘I was a professional for 20 years but in that time I studied cost accounting, business studies, quarry engineering, civil engineering,’ he says. ‘I needed to satisfy that as well as the football. I always thought I might need something to fall back on if I got injured.’
He says he had plenty of injuries but played ‘more than 650 games’ as a full back for Blackpool, Swindon, Hull, Stoke, Shrewsbury and Cirencester Town.
It was at Cirencester that he established what he says was the first football academy in this country, joining forces with Cirencester College in 1996 to establish a model that provided the blueprint for the modern professional game.
‘I blazed a trail,’ he says. ‘I was asked by Cirencester to set up a youth system and with one or two other people I created the Cirencester Football Academy. It was our aim to get the players into the best leagues we could while also producing players for Cirencester Town.
‘For four or five years we won everything. We were the Manchester United of college football.
‘Howard Wilkinson and Don Howe came down on behalf of the FA and elaborated on what I started in Cirencester. On the back of Howard and Don coming down I did a lot of work for the FA. Glenn Hoddle got to hear about me when he was England manager. He would take our lads a couple of weeks before an England game, and practise with us what they had planned for the England team at Bisham Abbey.’
Graham Taylor got to hear about Hockaday and, in 2000, the then Watford manager lured him to Vicarage Road. He started as Under 18 coach, with Ashley Young among his apprentices, and ended up as first-team coach to Aidy Boothroyd. He helped Boothroyd guide Watford into the Premier League, with a play-off win over Leeds, only for Boothroyd to dismiss him midway through a Premier League season that ended in relegation.
Why? ‘Football is a strange business,’ he says. ‘I thought we had enough in our locker to stay up. It was in the balance but at the end of January the decision was made. There was nothing I could do about that.’
He joined Martin Allen at MK Dons, the first of three brief spells — the other two coming at Leicester and Cheltenham — alongside the infamous ‘Mad Dog’. ‘We’re different,’ says Hockaday. ‘I’ve got a long fuse, longer than Martin. But Mad Dog certainly ain’t mad. There is a raw intelligence with Martin.’
Hockaday took another academy job at Southampton, working briefly with Alex Oxlade-Chamberlain, but left amid the upheaval at the club in 2009, a casualty of ‘the Dutch revolution’ there.
In September 2009 he applied for a job for the first time, for his first job in management at Forest Green. He had four seasons there, narrowly avoiding relegation twice and finishing no higher than 10th despite the biggest budget in the Conference Premier. Even so, Hockaday believes his side played ‘the best football ever seen in that league’.
His first month in the job at Leeds has, he admits, been ‘crazy, brilliant and everything in between’. There was a pre-season tour to Italy featuring a match memorable only for the fact that their Romanian opponents didn’t show.
There were reports of players being told to bring their own food to training as part of Cellino’s cost-cutting measures. It was said the players had to do their own laundry, while one report suggested goalkeeper Paddy Kenny’s future at the club was in doubt because Cellino has a dislike for the number 17 and Kenny was born on May 17.
‘Some people have been having a bit of fun at Leeds’ expense,’ says Hockaday. ‘The president has come in and has seen Leeds United as fat and lazy. So what he’s done is really shaken the tree to get rid of the dead wood, and now he will start fleshing it out again.
‘Yes, on the first two training days the players were told to bring their own food. But then we go away to the Dolomites to a five-star hotel and we’re treated like royalty. I also believe he’s bringing in an Italian chef.’
He denies the players had to do their own laundry and says food is back on the menu. But he has to go through various cupboards to find himself some lunch on this particular afternoon, and the reception area to the training ground — a complex that had to be sold in 2004 and is now rented for a staggering £600,000 a year — is unmanned and in darkness.
In fairness to Cellino, he has inherited a financial mess. Hockaday certainly believes that and is happy to work within the boundaries Cellino sets, just as he is happy to let his employer buy and sell the players.
‘I’m a coach,’ he says. ‘I don’t want to get involved in the financial side of things. I don’t want to get involved in negotiating contracts. My expertise is on the training pitch and on match day.’
Self-promotion would not seem to be a strong point. ‘It doesn’t interest me,’ he says. ‘I probably could have made more money if I’d studied for that business degree.
‘I have a brother who’s a partner in a law firm, another who began in quantity surveying and is now a project manager. My youngest brother is pretty much on the board of a multi-national chemical company.
‘Then there’s me, kicking a ball around. But I’m happy with the career I’ve had. I am what I am and confident in my ability. I appreciate a lot of people wouldn’t have heard of me, so I would have been a shock to a lot of people. I’m not daft.
‘Halfway through the five-hour meeting with the president he said, “Do you know what I’m asking you to do?” I said, “Yes, but do you know what you’re asking me?”
‘Because I’m not a name. And it will get bumpy.’
