If Swindon’s training field is haunted, as Ian Holloway claimed it earlier this season, all ghosts may have been frightened this week.
The veteran manager of the Ligue de la Ligue two has just entered the room after giving his players an all-powerful roller for a rare sub-parlage performance in Morecambe and admits that “their ears will always be”.
Not just the team, but also all the guests not invited beyond the grave.
Shortly after having resumed a team on the slide, he said that the reason for their crisis was due to a ghostly presence on their training ground which led to a succession of reservations canceled in the sports center and a polite warning to stop talking about it.
So, we will not dwell too much on the subject, but, as Holloway jokes, it is difficult not to mention. “You get these television programs trying to find ghosts … which can all be staged,” he said to Mail Sport. “But with that, I saw it on a video surveillance camera.
“He picked up a broken shadow through the wall, then throwing a drink on a shelf. Who can configure this? Who can deceive that? It happened where we are. I watched hours and hours of what I call “nothing is passing TV” with my wife … Then I came here and, after a day, I saw that!
Ian Holloway banned the “ghosts” on the Swindon training field – and the specter of the relegation of the Ligue two
After four years of match, he won almost half of his games since his participation in October
He says that he “feels living again” in the game and that a football manager can never “really retire”
But as Holloway is in situ, all bad spirits seem to have left Swindon. He took over with the Mutiny fans base about a property crisis and the 22nd team, dangerously on the dance of the noise on the trap for the relegation of the football league.
Now things are better with Swindon comfortably mid-table, closer to the play-offs than the last two. So, in this spirit, Holloway now does something he admits that he hates doing: still sit.
“Being back in football makes me feel alive again,” said the man with more than 1,000 management games in nine clubs. Now 62, Holloway spent four years from the canoe after leaving her last post in Grimsby.
“I don’t think a football manager is really retiring. You cannot find a job. Maybe I needed a break. It’s a strange world. I have eight grandchildren, my wife supported all kinds of things over the years – I moved her 48 times!
“So I spent time learning all kinds of things because I just couldn’t sit down. But there is nothing like football, absolutely nothing like it … Unless you are Blackpool on one of them rides! Life is to be excited.
“Having all this information flying around my brain, all these decisions to be made in Swindon, I feel normal again. When I didn’t have it, I didn’t feel well. You cannot replace the feeling of football with something else, it is an exaggeration of everyday life – high, low, all the time.
So, what did Holloway do in his time? “My wife and I are maximalists, we like to collect things. I would look at roadshow antiques, I would try to find good deals in charity stores – but they are intelligent now, they check on the internet.
“Then I learned to paint with acrylics. I tried to paint the classic girl with a pearl earring from Johannes Vermeer. Banksy made one, the earring was the alarm system. I made one like that, I just used my eye! I did one of the Ian Wright and Heath Ledger as a joker.
The fans were frustrated before his arrival, but he swindled comfortably halfway in the Ligue two
During his years of leave, he liked to collect antiques, paint with acrylics and go to the gymnasium
He and his wife Kim moved home 48 times. She “supported all kinds of things over the years,” he said
“I go to the gymnasium, I learned to make pull -ups, I can do dips, I must continue to move. I am at 5:30 am, go to the gymnasium. It wasn’t that I thought I was wasted, I just thought, “What can I do?”. I got this work, just at the top of the road, so I didn’t have to go away.
“My wife and I went to Somerset, walking around cemeteries to try to find his loved ones to see the line of her family. My wife likes metal detection, so I go with her but I am not patient enough – she can stay there for hours. I can’t stay motion.
“Now I’m back to work, I have a balance now and I always try to keep that. Take advantage of your work, but you need time to be with the people you like the most. And also have time with yourself. After Covid, I thought the biggest gift was to have time with the people you love.
Holloway also knows sign language due to three of his four children, who are now adults, being deaf. He pleads that everyone in the United Kingdom has lessons on how to carry out the RCR after the former captain of Luton Tom Lockyer collapsed on the field last year.
“I have become really emotional,” explains Holloway sur Lockyer, whom he knows by following his former club Bristol Rovers. “Now they have brought him to talk about it. What a brilliant thing to do. My father died of a heart attack years and years ago.
“But what a brilliant thing to do to save someone’s life to stop at a brutal end. Covid was the worst thing for me, people lost their loved ones, couldn’t even sit next to them.
“You can learn it in one day and you can have a better knowledge of how to save someone.
“As many people should do it as possible. My father never met my children. Thinking about this breaks me in half even now. I was 25 when I lost it, my son is 27 years old now. So if you are lucky enough to do it, do it.
“ I must continue to move ”, he says – and part of this diet includes get up at 5.30 am
He is best known as a manager so that Blackpool is promoted to the Premier League in 2010
Obviously, the family and life are two of the greatest passions in Holloway. This makes him a friendly character and his players certainly joined his tracks, with Swindon beating Espoirs de Promotion AFC Wimbledon Tuesday before Saturday’s trip to Fleetwood.
“My grandchildren realize that their grandfather is in football now,” he adds. “My children, when they were young, I was dismissed at QPR and they thought the club was mine, as I had owned. They didn’t understand, didn’t like it.
“The grandchildren now think:” Oh, there are old gramps, why is it on TV? ” ». I am happy for myself, to be honest, I will not go all the time with my wife. When you go to the stores, it’s just: “Why are you putting that in the cart?”.
“I had to go get a goal, so thank God, I have it in Swindon.
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