Gillingham manager John Coleman insists he and his assistant Jimmy Bell are more than a ‘roll your sleeves up and get stuck in’ management team.
Coleman, 62, and Bell, 60, have managed well over 1,000 matches and won four promotions at former club Accrington, but the new Gills manager has dismissed the notion that they are “old school.”
While Coleman brings a determination to instil hard work into his players, he insists they are as much students of the game as their younger counterparts.
He said: “I’m always looking to educate myself. I’m always looking at new ways and I’m always studying, not only self-help books to enlighten my own learning but I’m a big studier of the game, patterns of play and how I can change, how I can counter teams when they play different formations but if old school means that I want to win games and I want to work hard well then yeah, I’m old school.
“I just look back to my education and the hours I’ve put in educating myself, not only on my pro licence but also the diploma of football and then my postgrad in strategic leadership that I graduated from in December with a distinction.
“People don’t see that, people just see the fact that I’m 62 and I’ve come from a non-league background.
“Myself and Jimmy have played some unbelievable football over the years that probably hasn’t got the credit it’s deserved.
“The title-winning (Accrington) team, which finished above Luton, Coventry, and Wycombe six or seven years ago, doesn’t get the credit it deserves. It was a freak, it should never have happened, for the team with the lowest budget to absolutely decimate a league playing scintillating football.”
Coleman and assistant Bell put plenty of effort into studying Fleetwood before the weekend game was postponed, something they’ve always done. They will now re-focus for Doncaster Rovers’ visit this Saturday.
He said: “Myself and Jimmy have built a good professional career, studying the opposition and coming up with a plan to beat them. People haven’t seen that. We don’t get the acknowledgement for that.
“People think it’s all about, ‘roll your sleeves up and come on’ but it couldn’t be further from the truth.
“The planning that we’ve done over the years, minor details, fine margins, that can be the difference between winning and losing. We love that.
“We love the strategic element of it, the game of cat and mouse, the game of chess, or battleships. It’s trying to exploit their weaknesses and trying to defend against their strengths.
“A lot of it will be about us, and sometimes you are better off just focusing on yourself but we never, ever take our eye off the opposition.”
Assistant boss Bell has been with Coleman for well over two decades, back together now at Gillingham having left Accrington in March last year.
Bell went on to manage non-league Clitheroe but left them in mid-December after seven months in charge of the Northern Premier League, West Division side.
Coleman’s glad their back together and described his right-hand man.
“Jimmy’s a very forthright person,” he said. “He wears his heart on his sleeve.
“He’s very passionate about the game. He’s a very, very good coach. He doesn’t get the credit for that.
“People don’t see how hard he works for a football club, they don’t see him spending hours on his laptop analysing opposition, analysing our own team and ways that they can improve and ways that we can beat the opposition.
“We didn’t have an analyst at Accrington so we had to do most of that ourselves. We had to get all the clips together and going back years ago we used to have a VHS video and I’d sit there every Sunday and do tick-charts to present to the players on a Monday.
“That took a long time. We’ve got the facilities here that we can use but I know Jimmy works hard on that anyway.
“He’ll still analyse the opposition with the analyst but as coach, I’ve seen him develop as a good coach over the years.
“Earlier on in our career I did all the coaching, now I can take a step back and put it into his hands and I can watch and tweak things here and there.
“When I do go in and speak, it has much more of an effect because it’s not often that the players will hear me talk, so when I do talk they tend to listen.
“He was delighted with the opportunity (to come to Gillingham) and he realised how big a club it is and he realised what a big opportunity it was for both of us.”
The pair will be in the Gills’ dugout for the first time this coming Satuday when they take on Doncaster at Priestfield.
