Ex-Bolton coach Fred Barber reveals keeping secrets of Jaaskelainen and Co

As the Rovers striker placed the ball, preparing to equalise from the spot, there was activity on Bolton’s bench and goalkeeper coach Fred Barber emerged with one hand held in the air, attracting his protégé’s attention.

Jaaskelainen guessed right, preserving Bolton’s lead. Incredibly, just three minutes later, he would have to face another penalty – this time from Jason Roberts. Again, Barber sprung off the bench, and again the Big Finn wrecked Blackburn’s chances of getting back on level terms.

The double derby penalty save has passed into the Wanderers history books. But speaking for the first time about the secret behind Jaaskelainen’s magical moment, Barber revealed how the movement of Blackburn’s players had actually given the game away.

“Jussi wasn’t making that many penalty saves and so he asked me if I had any ideas,” he told The Bolton News. “We’d done some homework on overloads around the area and looking at how players would naturally gather on the side they thought the player would put his penalty.

“So when the first penalty was given you can actually see Jussi look at me in the dugout, and I put my hand up, seeing that there were more Blackburn defenders on that side of the area.

“It was the same three minutes later when he got another one. Players just tend to drift.

“I remember my lad Jonathan watching it back on Match of the Day that night, and you can actually see us exchanging glances.

“We were always looking at little ways we could improve.”

Although he worked with several top keepers in his time with Wanderers, Barber’s name will always be inextricably linked with Jaaskelainen, who had arrived as a youngster in 1997 from VPA Vaasa with plenty to learn and the likes of Keith Branagan, Aidan Davison, Gavin Ward and Mark Westhead ahead of him in the pecking order.

“We’d got Jussi in after seeing him in a trial for Norwich,” Barber said. “We thought he was good but while he could save anything low, he could save nothing at all high.

“People used to talk about his kicking but that was our main concern early on with him.

“He was also very selective when he spoke English. I’m sure he used to play that card when he wanted more rest.

“He used to call me something in Finnish and we found out what it was.

“Next time I saw him I said: ‘I’m not a devil’. And he laughed and said: ‘How did you know?’”

They say you can’t kid a kidder. And throughout more than 400 professional games, Barber earned a reputation for someone who would often raise a laugh in the dressing room.

But the serious side of a nomadic career was that he spent more time away from home than he would have liked.

“I’d be playing at Luton or Peterborough and basically sleeping in my car,” he said. “I’d finish training and keep a sleeping bag in my boot, pull in at a service station and then go back the next day.”

It was at Peterborough he sustained a serious shoulder injury which threatened his career in the early nineties.

“I thought I had snapped my neck,” he said. “It was (Jon) Taylor at Bradford who went in on me and I ended up with a broken clavicle which had to be fixed with a metal plate on hooks.

“It ended up getting infected and I got taken into hospital. I was completely delirious.

“I remember getting a phone call from my wife to tell me she was pregnant. When I came around I was shaking my head thinking: ‘Did she really say that?’ “I played my last game against Tranmere for Birmingham and walked out knowing that was it. I wanted to make sure I went out with a result, and we drew 2-2.

“It was a gamble to go freelance after that. Nobody was really doing it.”

Barber arrived at Wanderers in 1996 on a part-time basis. He had been used by Sam Allardyce at Blackpool and had been making “fifty quid here and there” at the likes of Stockport, Halifax and Sunderland, whilst also running soccer school during the evening in Bolton, Shrewsbury, Stoke, Kidderminster and Wolverhampton.

“I’d be changing kits in the car, doing about 80,000 miles a year,” he said. “I was going through vehicles like you wouldn’t believe.”

He was employed full-time at Wanderers in 2004 by Allardyce after ending up as piggy-in-the-middle over one of the players he had helped train, Tomasz Kuszczak.

“I was working with Gary Megson at West Brom and he’d asked about Kuszczak and knew he’d been in at Bolton,” he said. “I asked how he knew and he said an agent had told him.

“When I got to Bolton, Sam and Simon Marland weren’t happy. They felt like I’d be playing one club off against the other.

“It came down to West Brom giving him better wages but after that I was working at Bolton and nowhere else. They were good times.”

As well as Jaaskelainen, Barber would help Oman international Ali Al-Habsi settle in England and become a Premier League class keeper with Bolton, Wigan and Reading, and also iron out the kinks in Hungarian Adam Bogdan to set him on the road to Liverpool and beyond.

“All I can remember with Adam was him moaning ‘this isn’t how we did it in Hungary,’ – he was a nightmare,” Barber laughed. “Jussi would stand there giggling. He knew who would win in the end.

“We had to rip a flipping headband off his head as well in the beginning. I wasn’t letting him wear that.

“He did well. One thing that disappointed me slightly it that there’s an unwritten code of conduct between keepers which says the senior keeper goes first in training. When Jussi started, he stepped back because Keith Branagan was the senior keeper.

“Unfortunately, that didn’t happen for Adam. He wanted to be first in line and there was a little bit of disrespect, I think.”

Barber’s final years at Bolton would become complicated, as despite being a mentor to Jaaskelainen, Ali Al-Habsi and to a lesser degree the up-and-coming Bogdan, Barber felt he was pushed into the background by new keeper coach Phil Hughes.

“Owen Coyle wanted to bring in his own man, and that’s football I suppose,” he said. “But it got messy. I remember meeting Phil and shaking his hand, he said ‘hi mate, I’ll be training the first team keepers.’ I said: ‘That’s really funny because I’ll also be training the first team keepers.’

“He said: ‘Well, I’ll be doing matchdays.’ I’m like: ‘You’ll never believe this, but I do matchdays.’ “Different keepers have different drills and I don’t think Jussi was that happy with what Phil was doing. He was being a bit of a sod at times.

“We went to Owen with the problem and he was so superstitious. We must have won the last game because he just asked ‘who did the last one?’ “We both felt like we were getting messed around and it didn’t really work with Jussi asking why I wasn’t doing training and all the bickering.

“They paid me off, and that was that.

These days Barber is working at Crewe, whose promotion from League Two should be confirmed this week by the EFL.

He is once again working alongside a Jaaskelainen, this time with Jussi’s son, Will, who was released by Bolton in the summer of 2017.

He had come through the Bolton academy ranks with Aaron Ramsdale, another of the club’s goalkeeping alumni released at the age of 15 and now playing in the top-flight with Bournemouth.

Barber remembers the decision never quite sat right with him.

“I remember at the time they (Jaaskelainen and Ramsdale) were both 13 and there were a few complaints about them being lobbed, which was happening quite a lot,” he explained. “I argued it was more about development at that stage and me and Neil Edwards could see he was going to get somewhere in his career.

“I said he could come to my soccer school for nothing because his family didn’t have much money spare and I used to get my wife to pick him up.

“He went to Sheffield United and ended up going to Bournemouth for £800,000. Now what’s he worth? I’m pleased for the lad, of course, but could he have stayed at Bolton?”

Barber’s reputation as a tough trainer has followed him to Crewe, and he takes pride from the fact that some keepers who went on to have good careers have been unable to keep pace.

“I’m a hard task master,” he said. “Will still tells me now when he came to Crewe we used to make him physically sick. He was petrified working with me.

“Sam (Allardyce) used to sit there laughing, like ‘you’ve seen off another trialist then, Fred!’ “I remember Lukasz Fabianski coming to us at Bolton and I think we could have had him for about £50,000 or £100,000. But we did a session and he ended up walking around the corner saying he had a groin strain. I don’t think he wanted the hard work.

“Wojciech Szczesny was a bit better. I think you tend to get a good work ethic with Polish players, in fairness, but at the time he was with us there were three keepers ahead of him – Ali, Jussi and Kevin Poole, so it wasn’t easy getting him a deal.”

Barber has high hopes for Jaaskelainen Jnr, however, and feels his loan spells around the non-league in recent years have helped him start to mature as a player.

“I remember Will coming to me after he’d been out on loan and saying ‘they’re literally fighting in the dressing rooms’ but that’s the way it is. It’s proper experience, and now he’s a Finland Under-21 international and has a two-year deal at Crewe with a bright future.

“He has a lot of his dad’s mannerisms. If you don’t know Finnish people you can take them to be a bit dour but they know what they want and he’s willing to work hard to get it.

“Will is actually a bit better at kicking than his dad was at his age, maybe a couple of inches shorter but I think he’s got a reach chance to develop at Crewe.”