Neil Critchley: The Blackpool manager giving fans their club back
“You come to Blackpool for excitement, for entertainment so you want the team to reflect the area and people of the town. That’s what we’re trying to do here.”
Neil Critchley is busy discussing the rebirth of Blackpool Football Club and, while owner Simon Sadler is working his magic off the pitch despite the crippling effects of the pandemic, the manager he appointed to help usher in a bright new era is doing similar on it.
Unbeaten in 15 matches, Blackpool will move to within three points of third placed Sunderland, with a game in hand, if they beat the Wearsiders at Bloomfield Road on Saturday and boost their hopes of promotion from League One. Not bad for a team that were hovering above the relegation zone in late October, even if a slow start to the campaign seemed inevitable after a turnover of 34 players in the summer.
“It’d be massive to get this club back into the Championship,” Critchley says. “The biggest thing is giving the people of this town their club back.”
One of Critchley’s predecessors as Blackpool manager, Terry McPhillips, once suggested there was no better metaphor for the reviled 31-year reign of the Oyston family than a seagull that was left decomposing for six months on botched paving by the foot of the statue of club legend Jimmy Armfield outside the ground.
It is over two years now since a High Court-appointed receiver removed the Oystons at Blackpool and, slowly but surely, the club has been reclaiming its identity and reconnecting with a fanbase who, for four years, protested against the disgraced former owners by staging boycotts on matchdays.
In a cruel twist, those same supporters now find themselves shut out of Bloomfield Road again due to the coronavirus crisis but feelings of deep frustration are at least tempered by the knowledge that the club is again going places.
Sadler and his team, led by chief executive Ben Mansford, have overhauled Blackpool’s Squires Gate training ground while they search for a site to house a new base to rival Fleetwood’s Poolfoot Farm and also serve the local community. And there are plans to redevelop the East Stand of Bloomfield Road, now unrecognisable from the woefully neglected stadium whose faded tangerine seats were barely visible in some parts for years of hardened bird muck.
Yet the most immediate signs of revival are on the pitch where the former Liverpool Under-18 and Under-23 manager Critchley - the man who helped to shape the early careers of Trent Alexander-Arnold, Curtis Jones and Neco Williams at Anfield - is teaching old dogs new tricks on the Fylde Coast at the same time as cultivating younger talents like top scorer Jerry Yates.
You only need to listen to what goalkeeper Chris Maxwell and striker Gary Madine, both 30 and between them veterans of 840 games spanning 18 clubs, have to say about Critchley to appreciate the influence he is wielding.
“The way he does things has been completely different to everything I have experienced in my career,” Maxwell says. “I go back to a conversation I had with Gary in pre-season and we said we feel like we’ve been taught how to play football wrong for the whole of our careers.”
A modest, humble man who has little interest in the limelight, Critchley almost seems faintly embarrassed when Maxwell’s remarks are put to him but he is pleased to see his message is getting through.
“I’ve always said that I think a lot of players play the game but don’t know how to play the game and that’s a big difference,” Critchley, 42, says. “It’s uncomfortable because it sounds like I’m talking about myself but it’s the way I’ve been educated as a coach.
“But you need players who are open minded to that. If not, it doesn’t work. It certainly helps when you’ve got senior players who believe in what you do because they can be a big influence on the other people in the dressing room.”
Critchley’s impact is all the more impressive given that he was appointed just 11 days before the pandemic ended Blackpool’s season and it would be another five months before he got to work with his players but it was time he put to good use. “I was watching loads of football every day,” he recalls. “I remember some days I was watching six or seven games a day.
“I was able to go back right to the start of the season. You’re not watching the games in isolation - I was able to build up a picture of the experiences the players had to get an understanding of what they were thinking. Maybe some were surprised by how much I knew about them.”
What did Critchley’s wife, Janine, say? “Not a lot, because I didn’t see her!” he says, chuckling. “I’d occasionally pop downstairs for a cup of tea, mumble a few words and then quickly scarper back upstairs before she gave me any jobs to do!”
Danny Murphy, Robbie Savage and Neil Lennon were some of Critchley’s contemporaries as he rose through the ranks at Crewe Alexandra. But he demonstrated a natural aptitude for coaching and, in 2013, was brought to Liverpool by Brendan Rodgers, spending four years as the club’s Under-18 coach before taking over the Under-23s and having the benefit of learning from another top manager in Jurgen Klopp.
A friend of McPhillips and another former Blackpool manager, Gary Bowyer, Critchley had heard plenty of stories about the Oyston regime from afar and counts himself fortunate to be working under an owner in Sadler, a Blackpool fan and local boy done good, who shares his vision for the club.
“Some of the situations people were put in and the decisions they had to make, it must have been soul searching for them at times,” Critchley says. “Things have changed now because Simon’s sole interest is making the club better. That’s so inspiring. It makes you feel like you’re part of something special. It gives me an enormous sense of pride and a feeling of great responsibility.”
Mansford, formerly chief executive at Barnsley and Leeds United, gave up a job with then Israeli champions Maccabi Tel Aviv to join Sadler’s revolution. “For the first year, Simon must have dreaded another phone call from me because it was one issue after another,” Mansford says. Plans are starting to take shape now, though, despite the financial challenges presented by the pandemic, and Mansford is excited about the future.
“There was this view that Blackpool was the last club you’d go to - you’ll get rubbish money, you won’t get paid what you’re owed, you won’t get your kit washed or any lunch,” Mansford says. “Now we have two physios, two sports scientists, the latest GPS. Instead of being the last place people wanted to go, Simon wants Blackpool to become a destination again.”
“The difference in the club is extraordinary - we’ve literally gone from one extreme to the other,” says Christine Seddon, of the Blackpool Supporters’ Trust, who was an instrumental figure behind the “Not A Penny More” boycott but now has regular dialogue with Sadler and the club. Being unable to watch the team in person has, Seddon admits, been agonising but she is one of 4,000 fans who have bought season tickets despite games being played behind closed doors.
“We’ve made a good start but there’s still so much to do,” Mansford says. “We lost a generation of fans that we must engage with.”
Every now and then, Critchley will go for a run along Blackpool’s beach front and longs for the day when the town, not just the football club, is a hive of activity again. “It’s a surreal atmosphere sometimes,” he says.
“It’s normally hustle and bustle but it’s been like a ghost town. It’s not the Blackpool that everyone visualises.
“Hopefully we can come through this period and if we do I know the supporters will be back here in their thousands and it will be an emotional moment when that time comes.”
