Living on the Volcano: The Secrets of Surviving as a Football Manager Paperback – 19 May 2016

A book which gives an insight on how the life of a top class manager is! Great read and amazing service.

Good book. Nice observations

Excellent book well worth reading for football fans throughout the football pyramid.

Interesting but not great at setting out who is commented on in each chapter. Good stories though.

I am quite sure that football fans would be more patient and have a better understanding of the problems and pressures that managers face every day if they took the time to read Mike Calvin’s fascinating and illuminating new book, Living On The Volcano.Calvin has gained a well-earned reputation over the past few years for obtaining the inside track on what goes on behind the scenes in football and he has now focused his attention on the role of football managers and how they deal with everything that is thrown at them. Calvin has followed his tried and tested method of becoming a fly on the wall and observed a variety of managers, young and old, established and new, successful and otherwise from the Premier League down to Division Two as they went about their business throughout the 2014/15 season.The title of the book came from Arsene Wenger who compared the insecurity of his job to that of living on a volcano where any day might be your last, and the statistics substantiate his concern.The average lifespan of a manager is seventeen months in the Football League and a mere eight in the competitive jungle of the Championship. On average it takes a sacked manager eighteen months to get a new job and fifty-eight percent of first time sacked managers never receive a second opportunity to get it right. Ian Holloway has spent nineteen years as a football manager and moved home thirty-two times throughout his long and illustrious career.The pressure is intense and unrelenting and just as is the case in all other walks of life where one in every four of us suffers from mental health problems, some football managers also cannot cope and become ill. Martin Ling, a chirpy, confident manager at Leyton Orient and Torquay United was so stricken with depression that he underwent an ultimately successful course of Electroconvulsive Therapy and is now making his way back into the game despite the self-proclaimed coffee stain on his CV and the ignorance and prejudice he has to overcome if he is to find a new post.Despite the fact that managers are in competition against each other every week and new jobs only come about as a result of dead men’s shoes, there is a real sense of family, brotherhood and fraternity between them all and a deep shared understanding of the problems they all face to a greater or lesser degree, such as lack of financial support, second guessing owners and chairmen and the ignorant vitriol spewed on fans’ message boards.Yes, there are some well-publicised feuds such as that between Neil Warnock and Stan Ternent but Ling was touched to receive many calls of support during his darkest hours from illustrious members of the League Managers Association such as Sir Alex Ferguson and Sam Allardyce.Notts County manager Shaun Derry was visibly shocked and angered at the total lack of respect paid to Russell Slade by Leyton Orient’s ignorant and bumbling new Italian ownership who totally disrespected him and cut him off at the knees by threatening him with the sack in front of his players if he did not win his next match. Nobody deserves to be treated like that, let alone a manager of Slade’s stature and accomplishments.Managers cannot show weakness or their true feelings in front of their players and Tommy Docherty once talked about his stuck–on smile that he wore every day at the training ground irrespective of his true feelings.Readers also could not fail to be affected by the poignancy of Adie Boothroyd’s fourteen year old son bursting into tears when informed of his dad’s sacking by bottom of the league Northampton Town and how well his father dealt with the situation and turned it into a life lesson for his son.Boothroyd also talks a lot of sense about picking a good chairman before you pick a new club and ensuring that football does not take over your life. He also confirms what I have long suspected, that most club chairmen have no real idea of how best to hire a new manager so Adie often has been forced to set the agenda and pose the following key questions during interviews:What is their strategyWhat is their structureWhere do they want to beWhat are they trying to doWhat are they prepared to acceptWhat aren’t they prepared to acceptHe also makes the gratifying if frankly surprising point for somebody whose job depended on results, that winning football games is not as important as how you play the game.Gareth Ainsworth is another young manager rapidly making a name for himself at Wycombe Wanderers. He admits that this job consumes your life and eats you up. He transformed the fortunes of a club that was one match away from being relegated from the Football League. They survived by the skin of their teeth with a last day of the season victory at Torquay, a win wildly celebrated on the triumphant bus trip home. Yet in the ruthless and merciless game of football, the following week seven of those selfsame players were released and in all fourteen players left the club.Ainsworth highlights the importance of providing suitable pastoral care for the young men, often vulnerable and impressionable, who are under his care and he fully admits how painful it is to release players at the end of every season. Football manager as social worker.He admits too that he has finally learned not to worry too much about the opposition. As a player he always felt that more attention should be given to what we could do to them rather than the other way round. A lesson here perhaps for the likes of Uwe Rosler?The book continues in this vein as other managers such as Brendan Rogers and Garry Monk also reveal the secrets of their trade, their inspirations and the insecurities that they have to acknowledge and deal with on a daily basis.I can do no more than wholeheartedly endorse and recommend a book that lifts the lid on a subject previously so shrouded in arcane mystery and secrecy. Calvin used the title Family when writing about Millwall FC a few years back and the same title could just as easily have been used for this book as it so perfectly describes the manner in which football managers regard each other as fellow members of a rare and talented breed.