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HENRY WINTER | MARK ROBINS INTERVIEW
Mark Robins: I learnt how to be a winner by playing Fergie at head tennis
The FA Cup put Mark Robins’s name down in folklore. Now he is back for more with exiled Coventry City, writes Henry Winter
Robins is fêted by Manchester United supporters after scoring the winner in the 1990 FA Cup semi-final replay against OldhamCOLORSPORT/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The Times, January 25 2020, 12:01am
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Mark Robins will never forget when his father asked him, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Robins was ten. “I want to be a football player,” he replied. His father nodded, and clearly felt his son should start toughening up for the rigours ahead.
“My dad was a police officer, a judo player and a wrestler, and as hard as nails, very strict,” Robins says. “Where we lived in Oldham was a block, so he took me out on the front and said, ‘Right, ten laps around the block.’ The block was a long, long way for a ten-year-old and I had to do ten. The first lap I came round and I had a stitch, and I remember him saying to me, ‘Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth and carry on.’ I wanted to stop but he just said ‘carry on’. I carried on and got through the stitch. That was it. I’d started training aged ten years of age.’’
Forty years on, Robins is Coventry City’s highly regarded manager, praised for building an attractive team despite all the Sky Bet League One club’s myriad ownership and stadium problems, and today facing the surreal situation of being the home side against their landlords, Birmingham City, at St Andrew’s in the FA Cup fourth round. The cup features prominently in Robins’ story, and he is remembered fondly for a fine career as a striker that, particularly, brought FA Cup glory with Manchester United.
As well as his father being a police officer, Robins’ mother was a midwife and nurse, and sitting at Coventry’s Ryton training ground yesterday morning, he nods at the concept of selfless service running in the family.
“Absolutely. It’s not been a conscious thing. I must have inherited that,” he says. It’s why he feels so committed to Coventry, a club he first became fully aware of aged 17, watching the 1987 FA Cup final against Tottenham Hotspur, marvelling at Keith Houchen’s header, and the source of the decisive own goal that became a Coventry fanzine title, Gary Mabbutt’s knee. “I watched every FA Cup final from 1979, when Man United lost to Arsenal — I was devastated,” says the boyhood United fan. “We’d do the whole build-up, watch all of that [programmes leading up to the final], the FA Cup final was a big event. I remember the diving header, the own goal from Gary Mabbutt. The FA Cup has always been a big thing, so for this club to win it in ’87 was huge.”
His love affair with Coventry began in 2012. “I’d been working in the youth department at the Premier League and quite enjoying that,” he says. “Five months into the job, I got a call from my agent about Coventry. ‘Right. OK. Coventry City? I really fancy that.’ I had no real connection, only playing against them, but it’s a big club with loads of potential. Jimmy Hill, Highfield Road, the players they’ve had, winning the FA Cup, the support we’ve got, the potential support that we’ve got, all goes in its favour. The fact that it has had a really bad time, over the last few years, is something else that makes me want to try to help it back.
“Coventry got into my blood. When I came into the building for the first time, it got under my skin. I stupidly said, ‘If you cut me, I bleed blue blood’ and then within a short space of time [five months] I’d gone to Huddersfield, a ridiculous thing to say but it was the way I felt. I went with a heavy heart to Huddersfield. It was sad. I loved working here. But this is a tough, tough job for anybody.”
Robins left because he “couldn’t get any reassurances” from Coventry’s owner, the hedge fund Sisu, about whether the club would stay at the Ricoh Arena. “It became clear there was a chance we’d lose the stadium and there was no real plan. So I said I need to go and speak to Huddersfield,” he says.
After spells with Huddersfield Town and Scunthorpe United, Robins returned to Coventry in 2017. He understands fans’ frustration, and anger, at the labyrinthine mess that has left their beloved club without a home, with many blaming Sisu’s controversial director, Joy Seppala. Robins, inevitably, voices his support of Seppala. “The owner’s absolutely brilliant, charming, honest, wants success for the club but wants success the right way,” he says. “Put a lot of investment in initially, lost out big time, and clearly had a remorse for doing that, she’s backed me as much as she can.”
Robins’s Coventry side are “at home” to landlords BirminghamANDREW FOX FOR THE TIMES
Fans don’t like her, though, I put to Robins. “There’s a perception around what has happened, almost a rhetoric around it,” he says. Does Seppala really care about the club? “She cares about the club, absolutely, and she cares about the development of it, but also it [has to] become self-funding at a better level. Clearly we need a stadium. The only way forward would be either to have part-ownership of a stadium or full ownership of a stadium or access to more revenue streams within. I have no idea whether we will go back to the Ricoh. That’s something I have reconciled myself with.” He must feel like he’s fire-fighting. “I am all the time.”
His focus is “around building the team”, drawing on the expertise of the “great staff around me”, yet there is an understanding of the need to self-finance. “We have to sell [our best players],” Robins says. The latest target for wealthier clubs is the left back, 19-year-old Sam McCallum. “He will go at some point. That’s the difficulty.” So they simply hunt “the next one”, recruiting despite their “limited resources” through the hard work of his head of recruitment, Chris Badlan, analyst Stuart Bentham and “seven scouts on small retainers or voluntary”.
Robins was a teenage star striker at United. When Alex Ferguson succeeded Ron Atkinson, the new manager took some of the prospects “under his wing”. “We’d play against him and Archie Knox at head tennis in the gym,” Robins says. “It was like an old badminton net with shoelaces and you could cheat, when the ball had gone under the net. ‘It was over the net!’ He taught you to win. That was brilliant, to start off with a manager and an assistant manager taking such an interest. Ron was a brilliant manager for Manchester United but they always seemed to get the chequebook out. Some kids came through — Norman Whiteside was phenomenal. Sir Alex showed how to develop a football club, just by getting the scouting network and the structure right, and the man-management was different then, it was fear.”
Fear and also knowing how to dispel nerves. Ferguson had Robins travel with the match-day squad to face Wimbledon at Plough Lane on December 30, 1989. “I remember being in the room at the hotel before the game, and Viv Anderson was sitting there with the big broadsheet paper, and he just looked over it, saying, ‘Get ready, you’re playing.’ I scored.”
The next week, before the famous January 7 1990 FA Cup third-round tie against Nottingham Forest, Robins was rooming with Lee Martin. “We’d had our dinner, gone to bed, young lads, bored, watching Match of the Day probably, and Lee wanted a glass of milk, or it might have been blackcurrant and lemonade, and some sandwiches. Fergie clocked it [the extra expense] and went absolutely mental.”
Ferguson was under extreme pressure. United’s chairman, Martin Edwards, has always stated that Ferguson would have been backed even had they gone out to Forest, but Robins’ headed winner from a Mark Hughes cross has always felt like the mystical goal that changed the course of United’s history, as they went on to win the FA Cup. “I knew the goal was important on the day, but there was no inkling. His [Ferguson’s] steel was impressive. He never thanked me. I never expected him to either. He picked me to play, and I scored. Mark Hughes always talks about that, ‘I put a great ball in and nobody mentions it!’
“The goal I scored to get us to the final [in the semi-final replay against Oldham Athletic] was, for me, massive. I look at the photographs of the fans carrying me off the pitch and there’s one of the lads I went to school with.”
The FA Cup’s ability to spring surprises continues. “I didn’t watch the draw live,” Robins says “but from the response of our WhatsApp group — laughing emojis — straight away I thought, ‘We’ve got Birmingham.’ I knew there was going to be some friction there at first, because it is totally tribal. But they have been really classy.” Robins can’t wait. “The cup still matters, financially and in terms of being able to play against the best opposition. And also to remind people of Coventry.”
Mark Robins: I learnt how to be a winner by playing Fergie at head tennis
The FA Cup put Mark Robins’s name down in folklore. Now he is back for more with exiled Coventry City, writes Henry Winter
Robins is fêted by Manchester United supporters after scoring the winner in the 1990 FA Cup semi-final replay against OldhamCOLORSPORT/REX/SHUTTERSTOCK
The Times, January 25 2020, 12:01am
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Save
Mark Robins will never forget when his father asked him, “What do you want to do when you grow up?” Robins was ten. “I want to be a football player,” he replied. His father nodded, and clearly felt his son should start toughening up for the rigours ahead.
“My dad was a police officer, a judo player and a wrestler, and as hard as nails, very strict,” Robins says. “Where we lived in Oldham was a block, so he took me out on the front and said, ‘Right, ten laps around the block.’ The block was a long, long way for a ten-year-old and I had to do ten. The first lap I came round and I had a stitch, and I remember him saying to me, ‘Breathe in through your nose, out through your mouth and carry on.’ I wanted to stop but he just said ‘carry on’. I carried on and got through the stitch. That was it. I’d started training aged ten years of age.’’
Forty years on, Robins is Coventry City’s highly regarded manager, praised for building an attractive team despite all the Sky Bet League One club’s myriad ownership and stadium problems, and today facing the surreal situation of being the home side against their landlords, Birmingham City, at St Andrew’s in the FA Cup fourth round. The cup features prominently in Robins’ story, and he is remembered fondly for a fine career as a striker that, particularly, brought FA Cup glory with Manchester United.
As well as his father being a police officer, Robins’ mother was a midwife and nurse, and sitting at Coventry’s Ryton training ground yesterday morning, he nods at the concept of selfless service running in the family.
“Absolutely. It’s not been a conscious thing. I must have inherited that,” he says. It’s why he feels so committed to Coventry, a club he first became fully aware of aged 17, watching the 1987 FA Cup final against Tottenham Hotspur, marvelling at Keith Houchen’s header, and the source of the decisive own goal that became a Coventry fanzine title, Gary Mabbutt’s knee. “I watched every FA Cup final from 1979, when Man United lost to Arsenal — I was devastated,” says the boyhood United fan. “We’d do the whole build-up, watch all of that [programmes leading up to the final], the FA Cup final was a big event. I remember the diving header, the own goal from Gary Mabbutt. The FA Cup has always been a big thing, so for this club to win it in ’87 was huge.”
His love affair with Coventry began in 2012. “I’d been working in the youth department at the Premier League and quite enjoying that,” he says. “Five months into the job, I got a call from my agent about Coventry. ‘Right. OK. Coventry City? I really fancy that.’ I had no real connection, only playing against them, but it’s a big club with loads of potential. Jimmy Hill, Highfield Road, the players they’ve had, winning the FA Cup, the support we’ve got, the potential support that we’ve got, all goes in its favour. The fact that it has had a really bad time, over the last few years, is something else that makes me want to try to help it back.
“Coventry got into my blood. When I came into the building for the first time, it got under my skin. I stupidly said, ‘If you cut me, I bleed blue blood’ and then within a short space of time [five months] I’d gone to Huddersfield, a ridiculous thing to say but it was the way I felt. I went with a heavy heart to Huddersfield. It was sad. I loved working here. But this is a tough, tough job for anybody.”
Robins left because he “couldn’t get any reassurances” from Coventry’s owner, the hedge fund Sisu, about whether the club would stay at the Ricoh Arena. “It became clear there was a chance we’d lose the stadium and there was no real plan. So I said I need to go and speak to Huddersfield,” he says.
After spells with Huddersfield Town and Scunthorpe United, Robins returned to Coventry in 2017. He understands fans’ frustration, and anger, at the labyrinthine mess that has left their beloved club without a home, with many blaming Sisu’s controversial director, Joy Seppala. Robins, inevitably, voices his support of Seppala. “The owner’s absolutely brilliant, charming, honest, wants success for the club but wants success the right way,” he says. “Put a lot of investment in initially, lost out big time, and clearly had a remorse for doing that, she’s backed me as much as she can.”
Robins’s Coventry side are “at home” to landlords BirminghamANDREW FOX FOR THE TIMES
Fans don’t like her, though, I put to Robins. “There’s a perception around what has happened, almost a rhetoric around it,” he says. Does Seppala really care about the club? “She cares about the club, absolutely, and she cares about the development of it, but also it [has to] become self-funding at a better level. Clearly we need a stadium. The only way forward would be either to have part-ownership of a stadium or full ownership of a stadium or access to more revenue streams within. I have no idea whether we will go back to the Ricoh. That’s something I have reconciled myself with.” He must feel like he’s fire-fighting. “I am all the time.”
His focus is “around building the team”, drawing on the expertise of the “great staff around me”, yet there is an understanding of the need to self-finance. “We have to sell [our best players],” Robins says. The latest target for wealthier clubs is the left back, 19-year-old Sam McCallum. “He will go at some point. That’s the difficulty.” So they simply hunt “the next one”, recruiting despite their “limited resources” through the hard work of his head of recruitment, Chris Badlan, analyst Stuart Bentham and “seven scouts on small retainers or voluntary”.
Robins was a teenage star striker at United. When Alex Ferguson succeeded Ron Atkinson, the new manager took some of the prospects “under his wing”. “We’d play against him and Archie Knox at head tennis in the gym,” Robins says. “It was like an old badminton net with shoelaces and you could cheat, when the ball had gone under the net. ‘It was over the net!’ He taught you to win. That was brilliant, to start off with a manager and an assistant manager taking such an interest. Ron was a brilliant manager for Manchester United but they always seemed to get the chequebook out. Some kids came through — Norman Whiteside was phenomenal. Sir Alex showed how to develop a football club, just by getting the scouting network and the structure right, and the man-management was different then, it was fear.”
Fear and also knowing how to dispel nerves. Ferguson had Robins travel with the match-day squad to face Wimbledon at Plough Lane on December 30, 1989. “I remember being in the room at the hotel before the game, and Viv Anderson was sitting there with the big broadsheet paper, and he just looked over it, saying, ‘Get ready, you’re playing.’ I scored.”
The next week, before the famous January 7 1990 FA Cup third-round tie against Nottingham Forest, Robins was rooming with Lee Martin. “We’d had our dinner, gone to bed, young lads, bored, watching Match of the Day probably, and Lee wanted a glass of milk, or it might have been blackcurrant and lemonade, and some sandwiches. Fergie clocked it [the extra expense] and went absolutely mental.”
Ferguson was under extreme pressure. United’s chairman, Martin Edwards, has always stated that Ferguson would have been backed even had they gone out to Forest, but Robins’ headed winner from a Mark Hughes cross has always felt like the mystical goal that changed the course of United’s history, as they went on to win the FA Cup. “I knew the goal was important on the day, but there was no inkling. His [Ferguson’s] steel was impressive. He never thanked me. I never expected him to either. He picked me to play, and I scored. Mark Hughes always talks about that, ‘I put a great ball in and nobody mentions it!’
“The goal I scored to get us to the final [in the semi-final replay against Oldham Athletic] was, for me, massive. I look at the photographs of the fans carrying me off the pitch and there’s one of the lads I went to school with.”
The FA Cup’s ability to spring surprises continues. “I didn’t watch the draw live,” Robins says “but from the response of our WhatsApp group — laughing emojis — straight away I thought, ‘We’ve got Birmingham.’ I knew there was going to be some friction there at first, because it is totally tribal. But they have been really classy.” Robins can’t wait. “The cup still matters, financially and in terms of being able to play against the best opposition. And also to remind people of Coventry.”
