12 1GG Monday January 3 2022 | the times
thegame
treated them the same, and I think
they liked me by the end.“
He is ready for a new challenge.
There is interest from one Premier
League club and another in the
Championship, looking to fill roles
in their academies.
“As a coach I want to walk into
a first-team set-up one day when
I’m ready and impress players,”
he says. “First impressions are
absolutely crucial.
“I’m watching teams improve for
what I’m giving them. There will be
principles. There will be things about
how we play. In my head I know
exactly how I want a team to play,
but you have to remember there is
another team playing against you.
“Me as a player? If you’re going off
nine red cards [in his career], then
people get a certain image. If you
watched me every week you’d have
seen I’m pretty good on the ball as
well. You don’t play as many games
as I did in the Premier League [271]
without being a decent footballer.
“I had too many managers too
quick and I was always changing my
game. I went from Gus Poyet to Sam
Allardyce. I went from playing No 6 to
playing No 8. I went from running
10km to running 13. I was willing to
do anything for the team, just to get
in the team.
“People say Gus Poyet improved
me technically. He didn’t. He gave me
more options, more understanding.
That’s what I want to give to players.”
And is he still taking notes?
“One hundred per cent, yes,” he
replies. “I will always take notes.
I want to learn.”getting his coaching badges in Ireland
(he has just received his Uefa A
licence) and a brief wait for an
opportunity to start his new career.
He was eight years old when he
first went to a training session at
Middlesbrough’s academy, signing
when he was 12. Twenty-five years
after that first session he was on his
way back, when the opportunity to
coach the club’s under-14s came along.
“It was a tough drive,” he says.
“How? All the emotions. I started
thinking of my childhood. My dadtook me there three nights a week,
my mam took me there three nights a
week. You think about that. You think
about what you did before training.
I signed when I was 12, with Bryan
Robson. There are still pictures of
my teams on the walls.”
Cattermole talks of nerves.
“The first time I got the balls
and the cones out for them I was
petrified,” he says. “I haven’t had kids.
When I talk to kids I lose my natural
personality towards football. I’m
direct and demanding and a certain
kind of leader.
“The under-14s was different. My
first session went well. My second
session was a nightmare. Over the
course of the eight months, I cared
about them, challenged them to be
better players and better people,training looking forward to it. It was
stimulating and I was learning.
“He gave me huge responsibility to
be in the right place at the right time.
I listened to every word he said for a
year and a half, whether it was to a
right back, or to a winger. I was a
good student.”
He was struggling with the severe
hip pain when Sunderland were
relegated and he took that flight to
the United States for an operation.
There was a year in the Sky Bet
Championship and then League One,
when he scored seven goals, before a
brief period with VVV-Venlo in the
Dutch Eredivisie.
By then he was coaching. “I
thought I was ready
to make the step,”
he says. “The first
week I was there,
we did a video
analysis of Ajax. I wasn’t
bothered about the
money, it didn’t matter.
That’s where I started my
coaching; on a Thursday
night I used to help out with
the youth team. I got close to
the reserve coach, Jordy
Reneerkens. He was a really
good coach. I was taking
notes from his sessions.”
Then Covid-19 hit.
Cattermole and his wife
packed up their apartment
in two cars and raced
home, as the borders in
the Netherlands closed.
Then came that jog,
and then came
retirement,Lee Cattermole was sitting on a
transatlantic flight, carrying the pain
that meant he hadn’t slept properly in
two years — his destination the clinic
of the world-renowned knee surgeon
Dr Richard Steadman — when the
words began to flow.
He did not sleep then, either, for
the duration of the nine-hour journey,
a Premier League footballer, aged 26,
compelled to write all the beliefs he
had in how you should run a team,
and indeed a football club. It was an
empty notebook when he set off from
Gatwick, but by the time he landed in
Denver, much of it was filled.
“With what? With everything I had
learnt and everything I had thought
about in the game,” he says. “Looking
at football clubs in general, every area
of it. Your recruitment, your staffing,
your players, your mentality, your
environment, with the ball, without
the ball.
“Every page is titled; one is about
recruitment, where you would recruit
from, characteristics of the player, or
the club you’re playing at. I think
Sunderland or a North East club need
to attract a certain kind of character.
“I still have those notes, and I
look back at those pages I wrote
on that flight and the detail I put in
is amazing.”
It is not quite the starting point for
Cattermole’s fascination with how to
run a team — that has been there for
years, he insists, with a new chapter
about to begin — but it draws an
immediate parallel with another
tough North Easterner who was
scribbling his key beliefs on football,
on how to run a team, long before he
had finished playing.
“Yeah, I did watch Finding Jack
Charlton,” Cattermole says. “The bits
of paper with his thoughts on the
game and how you should act were
unbelievable. I really liked that.”
Jack would have liked where we
are chatting, at a smart inn, filled
with character and history, tucked
away in a small village in south
Northumberland. Cattermole has
found peace here. His home is close
by, one he shares with his lawyer wife
of seven years, Claire. When he told
her he was retiring, last year, after a
playing spell in the Netherlands cut
short by Covid-19, she said it was the
right time to follow a dream.
“I was running five days a week,”
Cattermole, now 33, says. “I went for
a 5km run and after 3km I stopped.
That was it. I was done. I’ve been with
my missus for seven years and when
I told her [about his coaching plans]
she said, ‘It’s what you’ve always
wanted to do.’ I started my badges
two days after that.”
First a quick recap. Cattermole
was 17 when he made his debut for
Middlesbrough, his home-town club,
away to Newcastle United. He was a
regular immediately and moved to
Wigan Athletic when Steve Bruce
signed him three years later.
In 2009 he was the driving force
of an England midfield that reached
the final of the Under-21 European
Championship. After a year with
Wigan, Bruce, by then the Sunderland
manager, took Cattermole back to the
North East, where he would stay for
a decade.
“I experienced losing a manager for
the first time with Steve when he was
sacked [in 2011] and that really hurt,”
he says. “I was devastated. When you
look at the turnover in managers you
don’t have the time to build up those
relationships. The longevity of an
average manager now is 14 months.”
The list of those he played for and
learnt from covers the full spectrum;
Steve McClaren, Bruce, Martin
O’Neill, Gus Poyet, Paolo Di Canio,
Dick Advocaat, Jack Ross, David
Moyes. It is Poyet who made him
think the most.
“He was South American and it
was a totally different way,”
Cattermole says. “He was
a big basketball fan, and
basketball players are
about ‘protecting the
basket’, keeping
things in
front of you.
“I never
forget one of
the ways he explained
defending. He said if there were
three people trying to break into
your front door, you wouldn’t run to
one of them, because one of the
others would get in. It was, ‘Can you
see all three of them?’, and then, can
you go deeper and make sure you
protect your door. I was going into‘Like my hero Jack Charlton, I always
made notes on running a football club’
Lack of job security has
not put Lee Cattermole
off career in the dugout,
he tells Martin Hardy
Where are they now?
England’s 2009 Under-21 Euros final starting XIScott Loach........................In goal for Chesterfield after nearly 500 career games
Martin Cranie........................................................... A free agent, left Luton last summer
Micah Richards....................................... A powerful right back turned top TV pundit
Nedum Onuoha........................................Retired in 2020 after three seasons in MLS
Kieran Gibbs..........................................................Capped ten times, now at Inter Miami
Fabrice Muamba..................Forced to retire in 2012 after on-pitch cardiac arrest
Lee Cattermole................................................... Embarking on a coaching career at 33
Mark Noble.........................................................In the last of 17 seasons with West Ham
James Milner............................Offering a veteran presence in Liverpool’s midfield
Adam Johnson...........................Released from jail in 2019 after child sex offences
Theo Walcott............................. In a second stint with boyhood club SouthamptonCattermole has
coached the
under-14s at
Middlesbrough,
where his
career began‘As a player? If you
are going off nine
red cards, people
get a certain image’CHARLIE HEDLEY FOR THE TIMESCattermole played under many
managers with Sunderland