by Stuart Hammonds
JOHN STILL has had better weeks as Luton Town manager. Three-one up at home to Carlisle turned into a
4-3 midweek defeat, and a Saturday trip to Newport ended with him returning across the Severn Bridge with no points.
One local newspaper story on Monday spoke of ‘rumours spreading online' that the 65-year-old would be leaving Kenilworth Road.
“I'm not a social media person so I can't read them,” he smiles.
Modifies
Football times change and Still modifies methods that were tried and tested at Leytonstone-Ilford, Dartford, Maidstone, Barnet, Dagenham & Redbridge and, of course, this afternoon's opponents in the FA Cup second round.
Peterborough United gave him his first full-time managerial post in the summer of 1994, but they axed him two months into the 1995-96 campaign.
“I was brought in as a Conference-winning manager, to lead a team that had just been relegated from what is now the Championship,” he says.
“They wanted me to find players lower down and turn them into good players, and we finished 13th that first year.
“I gave Mark Tyler his debut. I signed Gary Breen from Gillingham, and it was when they wanted to sell Gary that it started to go downhill. If it happened now, I wouldn't have kicked up a fuss.
“But the second season didn't start great and I was gone.”
Relations with the club as a whole were not ended, however, and Still has always pushed players the way of his one of his successors, current Posh director of football and his old youth team gaffer at Leyton Orient, Barry Fry.
“Barry was in the first team but he started coaching us kids,” says Still. “I was 17 and trying to find my way. That's how far we go back. He was as mad at 22 as he is now!
“I sold Peterborough a lot of players over the years. Your Shane Blacketts, Craig Mackail-Smiths, Scott Griffiths's and Dwight Gayles when I was at Dagenham. They've made a few quid out of them.”
Tyler is likely to be in goal for Still's current team today when he makes his first playing return to the club where he is second highest appearance holder of all time, on 486, since leaving in 2009.
Connections
Fry's son-in-law, Mackail-Smith, goes back to London Road, where he scored 99 goals in four years before being sold to Brighton & Hove Albion in 2011 and had a loan spell as recently as last Spring.
Griffiths will be at left-back, while Josh McQuoid also used be to a Posh boy.
There may be more than 50 miles between the clubs, but Still believes the connections give it a derby feel, though he knows Graham Westley has got the League One high-fliers playing some good stuff.
“At a Premier League club, players wouldn't have a clue about local derbies,” says Still while tucking into shepherd's pie in his communal office at Town's Ely Way training ground.
“Years ago, if you played for Tottenham you lived in North London, didn't you? You played for West Ham you lived in east London and Essex. Now, you're lucky if you live in the same f****** country. Do you know what I mean?
“Local derbies at the top level are for supporters, but I think this game will mean something extra for Craig, for Tyles and maybe for Scotty Griffiths. It's almost a local derby for me, so, from that point of view, I think it gives it a bit of an edge.
“If you'd said to me before the draw, ‘You're going to be away, who would you want?' I'd have said Peterborough would be about perfect.
“They are going well. We haven't hit it right for a couple. But, when I think of the cup games this season, we beat Bristol City in the Capital One Cup, we drew with Stoke after 120 minutes, we won away at Crawley in the first round of this one.
“I've looked forward to the cups this year and we've done all right in them. I'm happy with what we've done.”
Still is also happy with what he's done at Kenilworth Road in the 34 months since he inherited a team that had just reached the fifth round, equalling the best-ever run for a Non-League club, yet whose points tally was closer to the Conference relegation zone than play-off places.
They now sit six points off the play-offs in League Two, but without a win in three matches – leading some fans to become disgruntled.
Moaned
Still's response is unequivocal: “I've never worried about what other people say. With the greatest respect to all of them, they don't come here every day and see how hard we work, the way we work, the reason behind the way we work.
“They see what we produce on a Saturday and, if it isn't any good, they'll have a moan. When I first came here and we weren't very good, they moaned and moaned and moaned…but we got promotion. And last year, in our first year in League Two, we were one out of the play-offs.
“So, sometimes you set your own standards and this year they'd have thought ‘We've brought in all these players and we'll do this…'but football isn't like that, because, if it was , Chelsea would still be top of the league, Arsenal wouldn't get so many injuries and Manchester City would be scoring hundreds of goals.
“I saw the lad Costa throw his bib at Mourinho and last year he was Golden Boy, wasn't he? That's football, and management is dealing with all of those things. Sometimes, it isn't, for whatever reason, working. Well that's management. You manage it.
“For someone of limited experience, someone early in the job, I can perhaps understand them being slightly questioned. But I can't really see the reasons that people would question a Jose Mourinho or an Arsene Wenger. They've had long-term success and I'd like to think that, wherever I've gone, whatever the club has wanted to achieve, they've achieved it.
“Coming here, as hard as they'd tried before, for whatever reason it hadn't happened.
“I'm not saying we're saviours, but when I came I said ‘Look, I think we can get you up, but it's no quick fix. I have a way of working it and I can't change the way I work it'. They said ‘No, that's fine, we'll go with that'.
Achieve
“I'm telling you now that, in my time here, this club will go up again to the next level. If everyone stays with the plan, it will gradually evolve and we'll go to League One.
“Will that be this year? It might be next year. It might be the year after. It will probably need to be before then because I don't want to do it much longer!”
And, as he approaches four decades in management, will Luton be his last job?
“I'm not going to say it'll be my last job, because when people say that – and Neil Warnock must have said it 20 times – you honestly don't know. In my mind, yes, it will be. But I could be finished and sitting indoors one day and someone wants help and I fancy having a go at it.
“While I'm fit and healthy, I do want to keep working, seriously, but I also know that, as I get older, I want to get a bit more family enjoyment as well.
“You don't get enough of it in this job because it's 24 hours a day. But I think this club, with what we have and how we do it, has got another promotion in my time here. I really do.”
*This article was originally published in The FLP on 6 December.
