This is an extract from Chapter 7 of my life story which has the working title “In My Life”.
I am posting this because I think it may be of interest to some RAWKites and may give a little insight to Mr. Shankly’s attitude toward the FA Coaching School of that time.
I had just arrived in Calpe on the Costa Blanca, Spain. My brother Derek had been living there since 1973 and had been a massive help to me, finding me somewhere to live and introducing me to both his English and Spanish friends, one of whom became a very good friend to me, Joaqine.
So here is the extract;
Through Derek, Joaqine had learned something of my football history (no doubt exaggerated a little, my brother was my biggest fan) and one morning Joaqine knocked on our door and told me he had been to see the Mayor of Calpe about the possibility of me becoming a football coach at the local club, Calpe CF. Apparently the coach for the “Infantiles” (12 to 14 age group) had retired and they were having difficulty finding a replacement.
An appointment was made for me to meet the directors of the club, it wasn’t so much an interview, more like a piss up and the evening ended with everybody agreeing that I was the man for the job. I was told to start the very next training night.
The thought of becoming a coach had never entered my head but I must admit I was rather taken by the idea, although I didn’t have any coaching qualifications, the obvious problem for me was that my Spanish was crap but I knew that I could demonstrate any ideas I wanted to get across to the boys.
I spent the night before my first training session trying to remember the training methods used at Melwood and getting them down on paper in some sort of sensible sequence. I didn’t want to look a complete prat in front of the boys.
I took heart from an occasion I remembered, I was sitting in Mr. Shankly’s office at Anfield and as usual we were talking football and drinking tea. His secretary knocked and entered, she had a pile of letters and put them down on Mr. Shankly’s desk and left. We carried on talking while he started to read them, some of the letters he put on the desk and some he put in the bin; this bothered me a little because I thought that they were fan letters.
I asked him if they were fan letters and he laughed, he said “No son, we have a vacancy for a youth team coach, the letters on the desk I will read later, the ones going in the bin have FA Coaching badges”.
I arranged the training sessions just as I remembered them at Melwood.
© 2006 V. Gill
I was wondering if anybody here on RAWK had heard anything similar about Mr. Shankly's attitude to FA Coaching qualifications.