Paul Sturrock: 'Just give me a nice, dirty win'

Hillsborough's new hope: Former Saint must beg, steal or borrow if he wants his Wednesday revolution to succeed

It was Sheffield Wednesday's last team-chief but four who suggested the club did not so much need the organisational abilities of a football manager as the emergency fire-fighting skills of Red Adair.

It was Sheffield Wednesday's last team-chief but four who suggested the club did not so much need the organisational abilities of a football manager as the emergency fire-fighting skills of Red Adair.

Three years and 10 months after Paul Jewell's departure, there is a Chubb fire extinguisher in the foyer of Wednesday's training ground, to- gether with a framed photograph of Nigel Pearson lifting the League Cup in 1991. Upstairs in the manager's office is the man who got his fingers burned at Southampton.

Paul Sturrock smiles at the invitation to reflect on his five- month, 13-match tenure at St Mary's. "Great club," he says. "Well-organised club. Good players. Enjoyed every minute of my time there."

The fixed grin is accompanied by a glint in the eye. "If I had a chance to do it again, I would do some things differently," Wednesday's manager of three weeks continues, easing off the irony a little. "But it's all a learning curve. I've left there with food for thought."

Whatever the truth about Sturrock's "mutually consented" departure from Southampton - whether it was prompted by player unrest or by the chairman, Rupert Lowe, taking exception to the Scot's dress sense or his training methods - there is no question about his hunger for football management. That much is confirmed by his very presence on the north side of Sheffield.

The manager's post at Sheffield Wednesday has become a job for a man with a big appetite. Sturrock is the sixth to hold it in the four years and seven months since Danny Wilson was dismissed in the throes of the Owls falling from their perch in the top flight. Wednesday are now in mid-table in the third flight, to put League One into true perspective, weighed down by £25m of debt and the subject of speculation about a Ken Bates takeover.

"I came in here with my eyes wide open," Sturrock says, one eye on the fax in front of him bearing Millwall's club crest. "There's no money. I've got to beg, steal and borrow - swap a boy here, loan a boy there. It's like it was when I went to Plymouth. There are three players left there of the 29 I started with.

"It's the kind of job I enjoy. The problem is, at Plymouth we were given a five-year plan. That meant we could restruc-ture at the same time as we slowly progressed.

"Here, the timescale is very different. They'll not be giving out five-year plans. It's important to get this team into the next league as quickly as possible.

"My remit is to restructure this football club from top to bottom, and there's a lot of work to do. I need to get the right players in and get the right players out. The cull, as I call it, has got to be done very, very quickly.

"I'm doing it for the sake of the players as much as for the sake of Sheffield Wednesday, because I hate watching reserve games with boys who know that whatever they do they're never going to play in the first team. We don't want that to happen.

"That's why I've got to be honest with them and tell them straight... starting when you leave. I've got one boy outside the door waiting to come in."

He might yet prove to be Wednesday's Red Adair, but for the time being Sturrock is their John Harvey Jones. In his three weeks of trouble-shooting he has introduced afternoon (in addition to morning) training sessions, hired John Blackley as a defensive coach, and given the players he inherited from Chris Turner a month to prove themselves worthy of remaining in his squad.

So what will the new manager be looking for when his team line up against Barnsley in a south Yorkshire derby at Hillsborough this afternoon? "I would just like to have a nice, dirty win," Sturrock says. "We can be absolutely hopeless and somebody has a shot that bounces in off somebody's bum and we win 1-0. That will do me.

"We're in that state. We haven't won in four games at home, and there's definitely a kind of wariness in the players when they play at home.

"It's not the fans to blame. They've been brilliant. It's a nervousness among the players that eventually wears down the fans late in games. It's the players' mindset that's got to be better."

Sturrock's mindset was never anything less than positive in his own playing days, as an elusive, guileful inside-forward. He played in two World Cups for Scotland, and in a Uefa Cup final and a European Cup semi-final for his beloved Dundee United. He spent his entire playing career at Tannadice, despite constant interest from English clubs, not least from Sunderland, where his mother was the tea-lady in the boardroom.

It was in England's South- west that he made his name as a manager, hauling Plymouth Argyle from the depths of what was then the Third Division to the brink of the First. He did start off in the management game on home ground, but found himself weighed down in Scotland by the baggage of the collapse he suffered one match-day in the St Johnstone dug-out.

"I hyperventilated," Sturrock says, reflecting on that 1995 scare. "I was shouting and bawling and I couldn't breathe properly. The thing is, I got labelled as having heart trouble, which is wrong. I was just a young manager getting worked up.

"It's not a problem now. I've learned to control myself, although funnily enough I got really excited again the other Saturday. I was trying to run a few boys' games out on the pitch, which is going to happen, because obviously this team need to be led."

But can the Wednesday boys out on the pitch actually pick out the instructions being bawled at them from the side of a 20,000 crowd? "They can hear," Sturrock says. "They hear what they want to hear... I tell you what: they better hear what I want them to hear."

They have been warned. The manager with the steely glint means business in the Steel City.