Ex-Bolton Wanderers manager Bruce Rioch's exclusive interview, part four

Two promotions, a League Cup final and a run of audacious giant-killings were crammed into three successful season’s under Rioch’s watch as Legends were made.

Three decades on, The Bolton News sat down to talk with one of Wanderers’ greatest-ever managers to talk in detail about his time with the club.

In part four, Rioch discusses the people who helped shape his managerial style and why their lessons helped him at Wanderers.

IT certainly can’t have harmed Bruce Rioch’s education as a manager that he was able to call on past advice from doyen-like footballing figures like Brian Clough, Bill Shankly and Ron Saunders throughout his career.

For Wanderers fans below a certain vintage, the significance of Rioch’s playing days may not be entirely recognised.

A goalscoring midfielder and the first English-born player to captain Scotland, he was a title-winner with Derby County in 1974/75 and eventually made more than 550 appearances in the Football League. He played at the 1978 World Cup finals – although by his own admission, he did so in poor form and should have been replaced by Graeme Souness in the famous defeat against a Cubillas-inspired Peru.

But even before he had kicked a ball for pay, Rioch considered himself a scholar of the game. He tells a story of watching the great Stanley Matthews against Chelsea and racing around the other side of the pitch in the second half so he could continue to see the wing-wizard up close.

He studied the great Tottenham double-winning side of the 1960s and then even in his playing days be pestering his Aston Villa manager, Vic Crowe, for opportunities to go out and watch other clubs.

“From the early seventies I would be going out to two games a week watching matches,” he told The Bolton News. “I used to ask my manager, Vic Crowe, and my mentor coach Rob Wylie, who did everything for me, to get me upstairs at games so I could talk to other managers and scouts.

“In those days you had a player’s pass, which could allow you to stand on the terraces at a game, but I wanted to be up there in the lounge to speak to people.

“Before the game I’d bump into the managers of the day and get a chance to talk to them, learn from them, get advice. And that, to me, was so important. Priceless, even.”

Scouting was always a skill Rioch treasured. His admiration for Ian NcNeil’s work at Wanderers is well known but he also gave chances to out-of-work managers in order to get the best information in an pre-internet age. Future Stoke City and Gillingham boss Tony Pulis, for example, was one of the early informants in Bolton’s White Hot years.

Without the mass databases and analytical tools of today, managers existed on the strength of their own network.

“It goes without saying that the money wasn’t in the game like it is now, or the technology,” Rioch recalled. “I remember between about 9-10am every morning you’d pick the phone up and ring other managers on a fact-finding mission, picking up bits of background on character and ability of different players. It was a big part of the process.”

Rioch switches decades to Everton in 1976 when the legendary Bill Shankly – at that point exiled from Liverpool’s base at Mellwood – would drop by to help Mick Lyons coach the youth team.

For a player coming to the end of his playing days, the opportunity to learn from one of the masters was manna from heaven.

“He used to come into the club every day at the training ground and I used to love to sit with him and talk about different aspects of football,” he said.

“I never played for him but he would be there often. Every time you spoke to him he made me feel 100ft tall.

“He was an unbelievable person. The one piece of advice that always sticks with me, he said: ‘Son (at this point he does a passable impression of the great man), when you are looking to buy a player you have to make sure he’s fit.

“I don’t mean fit, he can run, I mean fit from injuries. If you buy a player and he has regular hamstring or calf injuries then you are going to lose him for a lot of games.

“That disrupts your continuity. And it will cost you.

“So in my management career I’d stack up the Rothmans books and if we liked a player we’d dip in and see how many games he’d played over the last five seasons.

“If he’d done 15,18, 16, then he was either not good enough or he keeps getting injured and do we’d have to do homework. And in in all likelihood we didn’t sign them.

“I think if you look at the players we brought into Bolton, Brown, Burke, Seagraves, McAteer, Thompson, Lee, McGinlay, Coyle, Paatelainen, Darby – they didn’t miss many games and they had long careers.

Advice from his managerial peers did not even have to come directly.

At the time Rioch was closing his top-flight playing days, Brian Clough was leading Nottingham Forest to a pair of European Cups.

The all-encompassing influence Clough had on the mindset at Forest was something Rioch wanted to emulate when he arrived at Bolton with a clean slate in 1992.

“The philosophy in the club was ‘we’re going to win everything,’” he said.

“We are going to win the league we’re in, we’re going to win the Central League and we’re going to win the youth league.

“That is how we set the standard up within the players and within the coaching staff, and that came from Cloughy.

“I never played under Brian Clough but I spoke to so many players that did and his players were geared up for success from day one, they knew exactly what was expected of them.

“I think we did fourth, third and first in the Central League with Steve Carroll, which was great. And it was that mentality which ran right the way through the club. You don’t accept second best.”

The winning ethos did indeed spread through the club, and Wanderers had success at every level in the Rioch years. But had it not been for one result on Friday, April 30, 1992, it could have been so different.

Boothferry Park. A dark and brooding venue at the best of times, let alone when you are chasing automatic promotion, a man down, and 1-0 behind.

Nevertheless, that is where Rioch found himself when Alan Stubbs was sent off against Hull City for deliberate handball, the penalty slotted away by Dean Windass.

Rioch, enthusiastically raids the history books for an explanation.

“I went to America in 1980 to play for six months in Seattle and when I came back to the UK in the September I went to see Ron Saunders at Aston Villa to ask if I could train at Bodymoor Heath during the week,” he said.

“I was playing for Torquay on the Saturday, so I’d be at Villa Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday then drive down to stay over on the Friday down there.

“Ron allowed me to do that – but that time I got watching another great manager in action was so vital.

“One thing I picked up was on was that once a week he’d play his first team against his youth team but 10 v 11. He let Peter Withe have an hour off.

“That taught his players how to play with 10 against 11. And I did exactly the same when I went to Bolton, so we would be prepared for that eventuality.

“I think it was the game against Hull City where that paid off. Stubbsy got sent off and we beat them 2-1 and the Hull manager at the time, Terry Dolan, came up to me afterwards and said that was the finest performance with 10 men that he had ever seen.

“The players knew exactly how they were going to play with 10 men to stop the opposition scoring but also to counter-attack and create chances at the other end.

“There is a lot of detail that goes into the preparation and training and that the players have to absorb.

“You look across to the best teams of today, Pep Guardiola and Jurgen Klopp, they make sure their players know how they are playing for each particular circumstance. It isn’t luck, it is design.”

Rioch closes this portion of the conversation with a philosophical point of his own.

“As a player and young manager, I’d go around picking up these little stories and pieces of advice from Terry Venables, Ron Saunders, Bobby Robson.

“And I have always been on the opinion that if you ever want to succeed in life, then you’d better be prepared to listen.”