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PREMIER LEAGUE | CHRIS WILDER INTERVIEW
Chris Wilder: I’ll say the wrong thing plenty of times; in fact I’ve started already
Chris Wilder, Sheffield United’s manager, has no illusions about size of his task this season, writes Alyson Rudd
Alyson Rudd
July 26 2019, 5:00pm, The Times
Wilder has led the club he supported as a boy and represented as a player into the top flightDANNY LAWSON/PA
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Rip it up and start again? The task facing Sheffield United this season as they take their place in the Premier League after a 12-year absence is a daunting one but Chris Wilder, the manager, has destroyed only the one page from the coaching manual that has served him well since he took over three years ago when the club were struggling in League One.
“We’ve put up in the staff room challenges for this season,” Wilder, 51, says. “We have a players’ handout with basic stuff, plus expectations and only that page is going to be ripped up.”
It is the page that explains how, “We’ve never once set up to play for a draw and try to nick something”.
Wilder knows that he now has to be less impatient, less flamboyant.
“Points are so precious in the Premier League,” he says. “We had a gung-ho approach and, looking back, it cost us points as well. It would be naive of us not to alter it, adjust, tinker. But it won’t be a wrecking ball.”
Last season, had it been goalless away from home with ten minutes left he would have taken off a defender and thrown on a striker.
“We were going for it, we were going for everything but now we have to change our mindset a bit,” he says. “The difference between 38 and 39 points is huge isn’t it? We’ll have a positive outlook and go to win the game but you have to recognise and respect the standard of the opposition.”
We are sitting in a perfectly pleasant room overlooking the training pitches, but Wilder looks around the building and explains that it is a working men’s club that has been tarted up with a lick of paint.
“It’s a bottom third of the Championship standard training ground,” he says.
Wilder, the former Sheffield United full back who went on to manage Halifax Town, Oxford United and Northampton Town before returning to Bramall Lane, jokes that he secured his first win after a poor start in League One thanks to some heckling from Tony Cascarino. In fact, Wilder is the sort of manager who soaks up advice from all quarters. When he discovered that Bournemouth were sharing the same pre-season training base in Marbella two years ago, he asked Harry Arter to address his players.
Jagielka has returned to Bramall Lane to bring some Premier League experience to the squadNATHAN STIRK/GETTY IMAGES
“Harry had been non-League, playing at Woking,” he says. “I’d seen his rise from when I was manager at Halifax. And Bournemouth were in the Premier League with players who had been with them in League One. It was inspirational.”
It was so inspirational that he took United to Hillsborough a few months later and won 4-2. “We’d had Wednesday shouting about how tough the Championship has been for the past six years while we had been in a pub league and we went in their own backyard and smashed them.”
When Wilder says “we” he means it. He was a childhood United supporter and that, he argues, gave him an advantage when appointed, especially as he had played for the club from 1986 until 1992 before returning for the 1998-1999 season. He knew the club’s history and he knew how the fans felt.
“The club had been overspending and underperforming,” he says. “The players hated the supporters, the supporters hated the players. I had an insight as to what the supporters were craving. They needed us to play two up front, not to rely on counterattacking football. You have to run around, put your body on the line and they didn’t have that. You need good players but doing those things first and foremost.”
Indeed, the relationship between players and fans had deteriorated horribly when he took over at the club.
“The boys were parking round the back because they didn’t want to walk towards the players’ tunnel because there might be supporters there so I told them they had to run the gauntlet, start playing well, start winning a few games and then they might be signing autographs.”
After his first four games in charge, United were bottom of League One but ended the season with 100 points and the title. The players started signing autographs. Wilder refused to let them gloat. As we sit, supping our tea, Phil Jagielka ambles past. The defender had just signed from Everton, returning to the club where he started his career, and there was a lovely sense of symmetry in having the 36-year-old former England centre back at the club as the player who can offer Premier League insight. What impresses Wilder the most, though, is Jagielka’s humility.
Wilder knows his promotion-winning side will need to find another gear to stay in the Premier LeagueDAVE HOWARTH/PA
“He’s a good fit for us, started his career here, a great lad with experience,” Wilder says. “He was a young kid here when I was a player, he’ll fit seamlessly into our group and give us the calmness and experience we need and, importantly, he does not expect to just get straight into the team.
“We’re not lazy recruiters, we talk to previous managers, it’s an old-school approach and the player’s mentality has to be spot on. We took on Leon Clarke [in July 2016] who has had nine clubs. It’s fundamentally about where they’re at and their character.”
Wilder will be subject this coming season to a level of scrutiny far beyond what he is used to but he is not about to become cagey and dull.
“I’ll drop bollocks right the way through,” he says, deadpan. “I dropped a bollock two days ago and thought, ‘I shouldn’t have said that.’ I asked the reporter, ‘Are you on drugs?’ after he asked me if I imagined I’d be in Premier League while I was manager at Halifax. I was waiting for the chuckle which never came.”
This kind of faux pas is not a concern, however. The main challenge for Wilder is how his team react should they be torn apart in a game at say, Anfield or the Emirates, or go on a losing run, and there is a flipchart in his office that asks the big question: “Can we handle it as a staff, can the players handle it?”
“What people say, I can’t affect that,” he says. “If we get beat 5-0, I can’t affect that. We’ve won percentage-wise as many as anyone over the past three years. Physically there is a challenge; they run more in the Premier League, they are faster, we have to bring in better technical players to compete. Tactically we’ve got to up our game.
Pochettino is the Premier League manager that Wilder says he is most looking forward to meetingWALLACE WOON/EPA
“What gives me confidence is what they’ve done over the past three years has been ridiculous. Every game we lost we won the next game. Nobody’s going to give us a chance but we’ve got the chance of ruffling a few feathers. The mentality of the group is going to be the biggest thing. They’ll raise their game.”
He is looking forward to chatting with Mauricio Pochettino, the Tottenham Hotspur manager. “I like the way he works, the system that he employs, the way he recruits, the way they play.”
After promotion was secured in April, Wilder and his players could not squeeze into any of the local pubs without being mobbed so he took the team to his cousin’s back garden on a local council estate. “I pulled into a service station and bought £150 worth of beer and this taxi driver is looking at me so we piled all this beer into his taxi.”
Why not go to Wilder’s garden? “Because I’d possibly still be there now,” he says, “not able to get rid of them all.
Boardroom battle rages
Chris Wilder insisted that the boardroom battle at Sheffield United will not disrupt preparation for the new season. Kevin McCabe and Prince Abdullah bin Musa’ad bin Abdulaziz Al Saud each own 50 per cent of the club and are waiting on a High Court ruling as to which of them has control.
“I can’t get involved, it’s awkward, nobody wants it, but I’ve got to respect both owners,” Wilder said. “I’m not a coach, I’m a manager, I manage budgets and they allow me to get on with that. The key relationship is with the chief executive [Stephen Bettis].”
“It does wind me up when people use it as an excuse. Players are still getting paid, the grass is still getting cut. I had to say this when I was at Northampton where wages were paid late and I told the players you’re not immune to the real world.”
You had me at 'hello'. In CWAK 
we trust.
. Can’t wait to see lineker asking wilder a question on match of the day
