I was on the bus into town at tea time yesterday, listening to the radio on my portable telephone via some seriously overpriced ear pods. Flicking through the stations, I found myself, inexplicably, listening to BBC Radio Bristol’s review of the day’s sport. They were playing a recorded interview with Bristol C*ty manager Gerhard Struber after their 1-0 win at struggling Portsmouth earlier in the day. This was probably the last thing I wanted to hear and was just about to switch stations when host Richard Hoskin played an interview with Bristol Rovers manager Darrell Clarke after their loss to Notts County. I stayed with it.
Like most Gasheads – and I’ll always have a bit of blue and white coursing through my veins, so despite not having been to a game in seven and a half years, I remain a Gashead in spirit – Clarke has a special place in my heart. He delivered considerable success during his previous spell as manager from 2014 to 2018 and having returned to the club last summer, he has great credit in the bank with Gasheads, despite the team being on an eight game losing run.
This was a bog standard post-match interview with a manager, albeit in Clarke’s case searingly and I would say painfully honest interview. Rovers apparently dominated the game and were desperately unlucky to come away with nothing, yet again. Despite playing well, Clarke said there was nothing good to take from the game because they lost. I think that’s fair comment because losing when you’re playing crap is one thing but losing when you are playing well is quite another – and far more worrying.
Darrell Clarke’s life journey has been very tough. He was brought up by his grandmother after his mother died in a car crash when he was two, his father was an alcoholic and in 2022 his 18 year-old daughter committed suicide. (Clarke disputes the suicide verdict. He said: “It was a cry for help that went drastically wrong, in my opinion.”) This powerful interview in The Guardian, which took place in 2023, explains his life story better than I ever could. Every time I hear Clarke interviewed, I cannot avoid thinking about the hell on earth he has lived through. I only wish for him to be well and be successful. His aforementioned searing honesty shone through in yesterday’s interview, but not, I felt, in a good way.
Asked how he was feeling following yet another defeat, Clarke replied: “I’m not gonna jump off a bridge.” I’d say that was an off-the-top-of-the-head remark, almost a throwaway line, but tellingly, I am told, it was later removed from the rest of the interview. On the rare occasions I have appeared on radio shows, I have found it difficult to stay focused and coherent, finding myself saying things rather than carefully considering them before words tumble out. I look at Clarke’s comment in that context, totally innocent in its own way, but jarring nonetheless.
I heard what he said, Radio Bristol plainly did because they later omitted the comment from subsequent replays of the interview and I find it hard to imagine Clarke didn’t realise what he said. I thought instantly about his personal tragedy. I was, I admit, shocked and saddened to hear it.
The Guardian interview is raw and unflinching, just like the man himself. Despite the outward bonhomie, the scars from his difficult life must be deep, none deeper than the unimaginable loss of a daughter. All at once, when he uttered the words, football didn’t matter anymore and in my little world, it barely matters at all these days.
Darrell Clarke’s reappointment was a hugely popular, even populist, one from the club’s latest owners, providing them with cover, I suspect, from their own bewildering incompetence and complete disinterest in communicating with supporters. With the team’s current run of terrible results, taking them perilously close to the trapdoor to non-league football, there is even talk of the manager being sacked. God, I hope that doesn’t happen. I was one of the few people who thought Clarke should never have gone back, not just because perceived wisdom says that managers should never go back to their previous clubs, but also because of the basket case Bristol Rovers has become under successive owners.
In another time, I believed that football was not a matter of life and death, but it was more important than that. Bill Shankly was apparently joking when he said that, but I know and know of plenty of people for whom football is the be all and end all in their lives. Darrell Clarke surely proves beyond reasonable doubt that there is another world out there, one we should cherish far more than the here today, gone tomorrow world of football. He’s a fine football coach and an even better human being. In a game where results determine the present and future, it’s worth remembering that. And hopefully sticking with him. If I was there, I surely would.
