Alex Neil, Norwich manager interview: ‘The worst thing when you lose is going to see Delia’

Alex Neil is the league’s youngest manager and admits the dugout can be a lonely place, especially with his Norwich side on a poor run. He tells Simon Hart how he’s coping, how he’s trying to improve and how he faces the club’s famous owner

Alex Neil faces his biggest challenge yet as Norwich manager at Manchester City ( Si Barber)

If Norwich City fans think it has not been fun witnessing their club’s recent losing run, they should hear how it feels for their manager. “When you’re losing, it feels like there’s one of you and the other 50,000 are about five miles behind you,” Alex Neil says.

“When you are losing a game and not doing well, your supporters, your players, the rest of your staff, the directors, everybody, [they] are focused on you, thinking, ‘Right, what are you going to do to change it?’ because ultimately there is only one person that can change it. The players can change it on the pitch but in terms of making decisions regarding team, regarding shape, regarding tactics, only the manager can do that and if it’s not going well, it can be a lonely place.”

Neil is speaking in his office at a rather more welcoming place, the Canaries’ Colney training ground. On the wall is a whiteboard with the month of October mapped out before us. The Premier League’s youngest manager could be forgiven for wishing to welcome November, after a month which has brought narrow home losses to Leicester and West Bromwich Albion either side of a dispiriting 6-2 defeat at Newcastle.

It is the first time he has suffered three straight league defeats as a manager and there was no respite in the Capital One Cup at Everton on Tuesday, though after Norwich’s shoot-out loss he could have easily repeated the words uttered to The Independent before that tie was played: “For large parts of games we have been as good as, if not better than, a lot of teams we have played so far.”

Today comes the biggest test yet for the 34-year-old, with a visit to a Manchester City side who crushed Norwich 7-0 on their last trip to the Etihad in 2013. Yet Neil, a spiky midfielder until not so long ago, is not the type to be daunted – this is a manager who in October last year oversaw Hamilton Academical’s first victory at Celtic since 1938. “Beating Celtic at Celtic Park is proper David and Goliath stuff in terms of size and stature of clubs,” he recalls. “We get 1,200 fans, they get 60,000, and one of their players will earn as much as the full squad, so it just shows you the differences at that level.”

It was Neil’s feats with Hamilton which brought him to the attention of Norwich. He had played for the Accies from 2005 – after spells at Barnsley and Mansfield – and in 20 months as manager led them to promotion with a play-off success over Hibernian (“a huge club in comparison”). By the time of his departure, they sat third in the Scottish Premier League. He did it with aggressive, pressing football, and the same approach spurred Norwich to promotion via the play-offs, yet he acknowledges that the Premier League is a greater challenge.

Alex Neil (right) celebrates Norwich’s third goal during the 3-1 win over Bournemouth at Carrow Road last month (Getty)

“Tactically you are getting asked a lot more questions,” says Neil, and he has enjoyed some battles more than others. “The Liverpool one was really interesting. They played three at the back. Generally, I would always play three up front against that but you are going to Anfield and if you play three up front, they go 3-4-3 and have more men going forward than you.”

His response, he explains, was to tuck his two wide forwards “in between the left centre-back and right centre-back and the two wing-backs” in an effort “to entice their two wing-backs to drop back in to make it a five to let us outnumber them in the middle of the park”. The outcome? A 1-1 draw.

Other afternoons have provided less satisfaction. “Trying to get that balance at the top level between scoring and not conceding is difficult,” he says, and the obvious example was at Newcastle, where he removed holding midfielder Alex Tettey with his team chasing an equaliser at 3-2 down. “I could have been more patient.” There are other areas where he feels a Norwich side with the division’s second-leakiest defence can improve – he has spoken this week about the need for better decision-making and being “better without the ball” – and whatever happens in Manchester today, his players will hear where they have gone right or wrong in his Monday morning debrief.

After each match Neil, as he explains, will “torture myself by watching the game” again – sometimes on the same evening. After Newcastle, he reviewed that video nasty five times. “When you lose a game you dig a lot deeper into it to try to figure out where you went wrong. The worst feeling for me when you’ve lost is going in to see Delia [Smith, the club’s joint majority shareholder] and her mum and [husband] Michael Wynn Jones, and people who are supporting you and putting faith in you. That feeling of not delivering what you wanted for them, that is the hardest thing.

“I have always been a bad loser. I don’t like losing at things – and especially when there is so much at stake for so many people. My team is not just playing for me. They are playing for themselves, their families and they are playing for everybody that supports and works for Norwich City, because ultimately what we provide on a Saturday is going to affect all these people.”

These words underline that Neil knows just what a football club means to its community. They also remind you he is a fierce competitor. He is not afraid to make big decisions. After his first defeat as Norwich manager, he ripped up the training schedule he had inherited and put down his own timetable. With promotion won, he sold player of the year Bradley Johnson to Derby County. “I felt I needed to inject pace in the wide areas. Counter-attacks are a huge part of the game now and if I had Brad on that left side it restricted me and made me rely on one channel and at Premier League level, if they recognise you have only one element of strength, they nullify it.”

When Neil offers a matter-of-fact response when asked if he has sampled Delia’s cooking – “I wonder if anybody has asked Louis van Gaal if he has been around to the Glazers for dinner?”– it is another hint of the no-nonsense streak he undoubtedly needs in the unforgiving environment of Premier League management. “The biggest thing about the Premier League I’ve found is the media side,” he says. “Since I’ve been in England as a manager, I think with nearly every manager in the Premier League there has been some hype about them getting sacked at some stage. You go back to [Manuel] Pellegrini at the end of last season, to Van Gaal when he had a wee sticky spot, and just now [Jose] Mourinho. And these guys are some of the top managers the world has probably seen.”

Neil had actually been forewarned by Sir Alex Ferguson, who made the effort to contact his fellow Scot before the season began. “Jim Fleeting [runs] the SFA course for my Pro Licence and he said to me that Alex Ferguson would like to speak to me. I gave him a call and just spent an hour chatting in general about football and the Premier League and what to expect and what not to expect, different things like that. I had not spoken to him before. It was things in general, his experiences and the media hype – they are much more scrutinised than they have been in the past.”

Neil is the currently the Premier League’s only Scottish manager and Fergie would admire his interest in developing young talent. As a player at Hamilton he worked with the club’s Under-17s and, as captain, mentored a young James McCarthy and James McArthur – now at Everton and Crystal Palace respectively – in a three-man midfield.

In the face of the short-term thinking often found in the elite English game, he wishes to develop footballers. “I will remain the same in that way – I want to make the younger players better and I have a great project here with Nathan Redmond,” he says of the England Under-21 winger and Norwich top scorer.

“He is one of your top young talents and I think I have seen big changes in his game. His assist ratio and goal ratio have improved significantly. He is a bright boy, Nathan – the good thing about him is he is really geared to learning and wants to become better.” Just like his manager.

My Other Life

Reading Books

I have a young family and I go back after work and see my kids for two hours before they go to bed. This is a 24-hour job – your phone is always on. But I do like reading. I like books that I think might teach me something, real-life stories that you can take a lesson from – things that have happened to people and how they’ve managed to come back against the odds or cope.