by Stuart Hammonds
The Football League’s youngest manager Adam Murray has told The FLP how his opponent in the technical area tomorrow has been one of the biggest influences on his move into coaching – but also how he used to hold a grudge against him.
Murray, 34, takes his Mansfield Town team to Northampton in League Two‘s game of the day, with the Stags in sixth place – one position behind Chris Wilder‘s Cobblers.
Next weekend will mark the first anniversary of Murray’s appointment as Paul Cox’s replacement, initially as caretaker, in the Mansfield hot-seat, but in this week’s FLP he tells how Wilder‘s arrival as his boss at then-Conference strugglers Oxford in December 2008 set him down the coaching pathway.
Murray said: “When Chris came in at Oxford, he did things as a manager and I thought ‘Yeah, I like you’. He was top drawer and he got me thinking even more about coaching.
“He brought a lot of new ideas in which at the time at Oxford, we were struggling, and he put a lot of structure and organisation in, he did things a little bit differently and I thought ‘You’re decent, I like this’.
“Chris has been good for me. As a manager he got me playing for him. I was having a tough time personally at Oxford. I was captain but the previous manager Darren Patterson had taken me off it.
“Chris came in and said ‘You’re the best player here, you’re my captain, I don’t care what’s gone on – lead my team’. For me, that was brilliant. We went on and we were really successful.
“That first season was incredible and it was only a matter of time before we were going to get promoted there. If we’d stayed together, I think we’d have gone again in League Two.
“But, on the flip side of it, that summer I’d signed a three-year contract and my back went towards the end of the season and I had to have an operation.
“After we won promotion in 2010, he released me. Now, I see where he was coming from. His manager head went ‘I’m not sure he’s going to get back to the same player’, so he got rid of me.
“At the time, I went ‘You so and so’, and I had a grudge against him because I thought ‘I’d gone through walls for you, I was captain’ and this, that and the other.
“But probably a year after that I sat back and understood it, because my back could have been career threatening and Chris had had the same injury and it nearly finished him, so he knew what was going on.
“When I look back now I respect that decision because I would have done the same thing.”
Murray says he often turns to his old gaffer for advice on things at Mansfield.
He adds: “Even before becoming manager I’d drop him a text or phone him to pick his brain about certain things, when I played against his team as a player it was always good to talk to him, and when I got this job, he was the first one on the end of the phone.
“Up to now I’ve asked him questions about certain things and he’s always been honest with me: ‘I wouldn’t do that Muzza’, or ‘You need to get that sorted or do that’.
“He’s been decent for me and, in my opinion, he’s up there with the best in the League.”
Read our full interview with the Stags boss in Sunday’s paper.
