Justin Edinburgh: Former Tottenham man learns his trade the hard way at Gillingham

Gillingham’s up-and-coming manager has actually been in the dugout a dozen years and, he tells Glenn Moore, has faced tough times – including a player’s suicide

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When the bookies shortlisted Gillingham manager Justin Edinburgh for the recently vacant Aston Villa job many will have thought it a hyperbolic reaction to an early-season flourish by the Kent club. But Edinburgh is no overnight sensation. His 12-year apprenticeship has comprised more than 500 matches and picking up experiences no manager would want, as well as ones to savour.

The former Tottenham defender, whose team can return to the top of League One with victory at home to Bury tomorrow, has had to deal with a player in his charge committing suicide and the club he managed going bust, plus mundane matters such as organising the team coach and booking training grounds. The good days, like a Wembley play-off win with Newport in 2013, have been hard-earned.

The journey began, not in the globally televised Premier League, like his fellow Pro Licence students Tim Sherwood and Garry Monk, but in the game’s seventh tier, the Isthmian Premier League, at Billericay Town in 2003. It took a decade to reach the Football League, a status attained by winning promotion from the Conference with Newport County via Fisher Athletic, Grays Athletic and Rushden & Diamonds. “I got to the point ,” he said, “where I thought ‘I’m being labelled a non-league manager’.

“When I came out of the game, at 31, I still needed to earn a living,” said Edinburgh when we met this week, in his well-appointed office at Gillingham’s Priestfield Stadium. “Management seemed a natural progression. I progressed in my playing career and felt I could gain the same success as a manager, but it has taken me far longer. You do think, ‘Where will I get the chance?’”

The part-time game used to be a well-established route to the top. Lawrie McMenemy, Howard Wilkinson, Jim Smith, Malcolm Allison and Martin O’Neill all trod it. Now no top-flight manager has managed at that level and only three in the Championship: Steve Cotterill, Russell Slade and Neil Redfearn.

Yet the benefits are huge, as Edinburgh discussed with former team-mate Teddy Sheringham, now managing Stevenage, after the clubs met in the FA Cup last week. “Teddy won the Treble, people expect him to produce, but that is irrelevant, he’s not working with Beckham, Butt, Scholes and Giggs. He’s being scrutinised. No one knew I was manager of Billericay except the local paper and 250 supporters. I could make mistakes without many people noticing.”

The hardest adjustment, for the likes of Edinburgh and Sheringham, is to their players’ ability level. “I’m fortunate in that [since Billericay] I have always been going up, working with better material. I began working with part-time lads, lads with fantastic attitudes that some of the top players I played with could have done with. But you had to grasp quickly what you could expect of them – and it was not what I had been used to.”

Edinburgh soon realised his decade at Tottenham was less relevant than the years before and after. “I started in the Fourth Division at Southend. We used to train on public pitches. Bobby Moore was manager when I first went there, the World Cup-winning captain. He’d be climbing over fences to see if we could get into a park to train, and we’d be chased us off.

“I finished at Portsmouth. We’d be training on parks and at army barracks. I don’t think I lost a sense of reality, but you are in a bubble at a club like Tottenham. Everything is done for you. Then at Billericay you count the balls, book the coach, help out with the washing. I had no worries about getting my hands dirty. Everyone else there was a volunteer. They did everything for the club. You appreciate what it means to people.

“I might have regretted it if I’d not got to Division One but it’s been a fantastic learning curve. I’ve learnt how a football club runs top to bottom, about budgets, resources, and there’s been some life experiences.”

Chief among those are a ghastly six months at Rushden, beginning with a phone call Edinburgh took on the team coach en route to a match at Eastwood. It was to tell him Dale Roberts, 24, the club’s goalkeeper who had been suffering from depression related to injury and relationship problems, had hanged himself.

“I still go cold now,” said Edinburgh, his voice slowing and dropping an octave or two. “The call came. I was asked, ‘Can you speak?’ I found a seat on my own. I remember breaking down, then thought, ‘You have to pull yourself together’.

“I had the coach pull over then I addressed the players to let them know they had lost a team-mate, a proper friend, fantastic player and person. It was tragic seeing 20 to 25 people break down into tears and it took a lot out of me, though I didn’t really feel the effects until later.

“The players and staff had looked to me to be a leader, and counsel them. They were a young team and it was tough. For Dale’s mum and dad and family it was horrific.

“You question yourself: ‘Why didn’t I know? Why didn’t I see it? What could I have done?’ You get angry. Seeing his team-mates being coffin bearers, football becomes secondary.

“Then to cap it all at the end of the season the club went into liquidation. People lost their jobs, we all lost money. Players had not been paid for weeks. At that level some are living hand-to-mouth. You draw on it, you think if you can come through that you can deal with most things.”

Compared to that the expectation that comes with being among the League One front-runners is welcome. Despite being warned off, Edinburgh has found chairman Paul Scally, now back in Kent after living in Dubai, excellent to deal with, and a young team, in the manager’s words, is “massively overachieving. Whatever way this season goes we will have vastly more experience of what it takes,” he said. “We can draw on these experiences, me as well.”

The apprenticeship continues, and while football managers never stop learning, Edinburgh’s graduation is getting closer.

Red card and a white suit: confrontations with Savage

Justin Edinburgh’s playing career is best remembered for his appearance for Spurs in the 1999 Worthington Cup final against Leicester City. Caught late by Robbie Savage with the game goalless after 63 minutes, Edinburgh flung an arm out. He missed, but Savage went down holding his face. Edinburgh was sent off, the last player dismissed at the old Wembley.

"I raised my hands, I went to clump him, so I should have been sent off, but I didn't make contact and wouldn’t have been sent off if he hadn’t gone down,” said Edinburgh. “I was furious at the time, but he played his part to try and get an advantage for his team. Some people would say good play from him.

“I saw him a couple of years later in Portugal, with friends and family, about 15 of us. My son saw him in a restaurant. He went, ‘Dad! Dad! It’s Robbie Savage!” We looked through the window and there he was in his white linen suit. His face went a little bit red.”

Ten-man Spurs won 1-0, Allan Nielsen scoring. Edinburgh, disregarding protocol, collected his medal and was allowed to keep it.