David Unsworth - The Athletic

[Roger Ritchie]

Unsworth article in the Athletic. 

 

Behind a paywall if anyone can post the article in here that would be lovely. Or if anyone knows how to get around The Athletic's paywall. 12 foot ladder didn't work. 

 

https://theathletic.com/3689456/2022/10/14/david-unsworth-everton-oldham/?source=user_shared_article

[TamarBridgeLatics]

David Unsworth: ‘I loved being Everton manager. I wanted the job so badly’

By Greg O'Keeffe

Oct 14, 2022

---

Five years ago, David Unsworth was hoping to become manager of Everton — his billionaire-backed boyhood club with plans for a new £500million stadium and a transfer budget that, at one stage, seemed perilously unlimited.

Now, he is in charge at Oldham Athletic, a proud old club who dropped out of the Football League last season, and where Unsworth sometimes attends board meetings in the dining room of their owner’s house.

By his own admission, outsiders may wonder why the 48-year-old chose Oldham ahead of the six other clubs to have approached him since he left Everton in April.

But the man once known as Rhino in his playing days has a thick skin that matches his nickname. Since the low of missing out on the Goodison job after two spells as caretaker manager in successive seasons, he has been waiting for a chance that, quite simply, just felt right.

The task of re-building Oldham, founder members of the Premier League 30 years ago before falling on hard times, has reinvigorated him.

“This is a big club and if we get it right we can bounce up and get promotions quickly,” he tells The Athletic after overseeing training. “It feels like the right place for me.”

---

Unsworth will always be associated strongest with royal blue, after 11 years as a player and nine as a coach in various guises at Goodison.

As a boy, he would watch matches on the Gwladys Street and he remains a proud member of the last Everton team to win silverware in the 1994-95 FA Cup final.

So before we get to his new beginnings, let’s address those two stints as the club’s caretaker manager.

He was asked to step in following the sackings of Roberto Martinez and Ronald Koeman, in May 2016 and the late autumn of 2017, and the latter period was billed in some quarters as an extended job interview.

The first instance took in just one game, the final one of the season, where he oversaw a 3-0 defeat of Norwich City.

The second time around, he got five matches: winning two, drawing one, and losing twice. Those seven points collected after Koeman’s departure enabled Sam Allardyce, who then came in until the end of that campaign, to make a bright start in his successful bid to keep relegation-haunted Everton safe.

“I loved being Everton manager and trying to turn the team we inherited around,” Unsworth says. “I felt we were doing that.

“The results in the Europa League (getting beaten in the group stage by Lyon and Atalanta) weren’t great but we effectively had to forget about them and focus on the league. We had to play our strongest team in the Premier League fixtures, so it meant rotating in Europe.

“I was so desperate to do well, and you shouldn’t really be desperate for anything in life but I so badly wanted it. I wanted to show the owner I was ready for the opportunity.

“We found a system and a way of playing that, by the time Sam came in, we’d gone from right near the bottom to going to 10th when he won his first game against Huddersfield. Those points made a big difference in getting us out of trouble and Sam went on to get us to eighth.

“For me, it was a big accomplishment — from the day I took it and the sense of panic that surrounded us, to get to safety.”

Unsworth signed off in style with a vital 4-0 home win over West Ham in the final week of November and, a few days later, Allardyce oversaw a 2-0 Goodison victory against Huddersfield.

“I always looked at those two home games, against West Ham and Huddersfield, as winnable,” Unsworth says. “I was like a boxer who was saying, ‘Let me have one more fight’. I probably wanted one more game but then Sam came in before Huddersfield.”

Speculation had swirled that former England manager Allardyce was being lined up — he even watched the West Ham win from the stands — and Unsworth had to juggle his own dreams with focusing on the task in hand.

 

Unsworth on the touchline during Oldham’s game this month against Wrexham (Photo: Eddie Garvey/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“I remember saying to the chairman on the phone that I just wanted an indication of what was going to happen,” he says. “But the longer I didn’t hear, I just wanted to know what they were going to do.

“Sam was class, though. I really liked him and his staff. He calmed everyone down and got a league position that has been decent since then, when you look in hindsight.

“I think I would probably have needed to win every game to have been given the job full-time. But I did get a chance and, in a way, that’s all you can ask for. It was not enough to get it permanently but I played my part.”

For Unsworth, missing out on the permanent job meant reverting to his previous role as the club’s academy director and manager of their under-23 (later under-21) team.

He admits it was not easy dealing with his disappointment, even if he returned to a task he enjoyed and had success in; winning two Premier League 2 titles during his time.

“It was really tough because I had the (senior) managerial bug,” he says. “It probably led me to a period of reflection about what I wanted. But that summer, we brought in a group of players, such as Josh Bowler, Lewis Gibson and Dennis Adeniran and I felt responsible for staying to help develop their careers.

“But I did take not getting the (first-team) job hard. I’d done my time with the under-23s and felt it was time to start planning for what came next.”

For the next five years, though, Unsworth settled back into what was a key role at Everton. He says his views of how young players should be developed were stymied by the Premier League’s decision not to adopt a B-team system.

Although the Premier League did shift its under-23 stage to under-21s this season, it left Unsworth feeling the time had come for him to move on.

“I felt it meant the B-team idea I was banging the drum for had fallen on deaf ears and I didn’t know if it was ever going to happen in the Premier League,” he says. “It was moving further and further away from what I believe to be the best way of producing talent — young players working alongside senior players, being exposed to training with senior players and so on.

“Our average age in the last year (at Everton) was 19, and when it goes down to under-21s it’ll be 17, so it was moving further from what I believe in. I had been there for 10 years and I just felt it was too comfortable.

“I’m 50 next year, and I felt that if I didn’t push myself out of that comfort zone I might be at Everton’s academy for another 10 years. I might have regretted not making that move to senior football.”

A brief sabbatical from April was interrupted last month by the chance to succeed John Sheridan at Oldham.

It was part of a new dawn, after local businessman Frank Rothwell bought the troubled club from Abdallah Lemsagam, long the subject of fan protest and anger.

In a region that has recently lost Bury and Macclesfield Town in a choppy ocean of financial issues, Oldham have been another north west club dogged by monetary problems.

In July, they were in the High Court to have a winding-up petition dismissed after a debt owed to HMRC was cleared.

It has been a steady descent down the divisions since Oldham became one of the 22 founder members of the Premier League in 1992. They were relegated two years later, then fell to League One in 1997, remaining in that division for 21 years before going down to League Two. Their slide continued in May as they dropped out of the EFL altogether.

For Unsworth, though, they feel like a forward-looking, family club.

 

“I get the chance to work here with Darren Royle (son of former Everton manager Joe), who is the CEO and one of the best in the business,” he says. “Joe, who I know very well, is a director, and the owner is an incredible man; so passionate about his town and the club.

“In my mind, we could be a League One club, knocking on the door of the Championship. The owner has come in, totally started again, and he’s asked me to help him build it from scratch.

“When I came in, I had one physio, a part-time goalkeeping coach and the academy fitness coach. Other than that, it was a blank piece of paper.

“A lot of people have asked why I’ve dropped down to the fifth tier but I don’t see it like that. I had five or six opportunities. I always felt like I was pushing it and maybe it was me driving the talks, but here I felt wanted straight away.

“I went to the owner’s house on Sunday and we all had breakfast and had a board meeting in his dining room. Joe pops in once or twice a week and Darren and I are in each other’s office every day. We are building something here.”

Unsworth’s team are without a win since he took over, however.

They sit 18th in the 24-team table having lost his opening two fixtures (3-0 to Bromley and 2-1 against Wrexham. Both are in the top five). But draws with Scunthorpe and Maidenhead United have been more promising. Sixth-tier Chester visit in the FA Cup’s fourth qualifying round this weekend, before next Saturday’s home game against Yeovil Town.

“I’m not naive and I know we have to get results but there’s plenty going on behind the scenes that bodes well for the future,” Unsworth insists.

When the chance comes in January to add to the squad, his contacts in the academy system will help him chase top young talents.

He has already borrowed James Carragher, the promising 19-year-old son of former Liverpool defender Jamie, from Wigan Athletic of the Championship.

“I tried to get him 12 months ago when I was at Everton but we couldn’t agree a deal with Wigan. So when I got this job and realised he was available for loan, I was straight on the phone,” he says. “He has got the right character and he wants to learn.

“It’s a challenge for him but he’s shown he has the bravery to come out of his comfortable environment and stick his neck on the line. I respect that. He is going to be a really good player and he’s turning from a boy into a man with us.”

Unsworth’s own upbringing in the game was bolstered by a similarly fear-free attitude.

“I will never forget my development as a player,” he says. “I started in reserve football and as a 17-year-old centre-back I was playing alongside (Everton title-winning defender) Alan Harper.

“Jimmy Gabriel was my first manager and I learned so much from that. I went on to learn even more under Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall and Joe Royle and it was invaluable for me. I don’t think it will ever go back to those days, with a reserve league in England but every other country in Europe does it, because they know how important it is for young players to experience that too.”

Unsworth may have been busy with new horizons but will always follow Everton closely.

He admits to satisfaction at the development of Anthony Gordon and other academy players he used to manage.

“I’m massively proud to have contributed — and that’s all it was, a contribution — to Anthony’s career so far,” he says. “He’s done brilliantly to get where he is and there’s more to come.

“The likes of him, Dom (Calvert-Lewin) and Mason Holgate, who came in as lads to us, are all doing well.

“Along the way, we managed to beat the likes of Manchester City and Liverpool and we won two Premier League Two titles, which we had no right to do with some of those other clubs competing.”

There are some who argue that winning titles at youth level is meaningless if the club’s first team struggles. Others felt that Unsworth’s dual roles at Everton, as academy director and under-23s manager, were too much for one person.

In both cases, he disagrees.

 

Unsworth presents Everton’s under-23 player of the season award to Nathan Broadhead in 2019 (Photo: Tony McArdle – Everton FC/Everton FC via Getty Images)

“I know people will say it’s not about winning,” he says. “But I have always believed that you can develop players and win because you are teaching a winning mentality, which is vital. It’s about letting them know what it takes to keep a clean sheet and fight for results.

“The big thing for me when I was there was the amount of calls from other clubs who wanted to loan our players, saying, ‘You do it right’ . They saw that we didn’t just play academy football. Yes, we played nice football but we could also do the ugly things as well.”

Unsworth says he always felt supported at Everton, particularly by chairman Bill Kenwright, who he considers a close friend.

“He was amazing,” he says. “I know the stick that man has got and it’s ridiculous. I can say that now.

“He’s an incredible negotiator, a brilliant chairman and the support he gives people is amazing. He has done it for David Moyes, Roberto Martinez and he did it with me. He is desperate for Everton to be successful.

“Bill doesn’t deserve the criticism but he takes it because is chairman of the club he loves.”

Unsworth’s own love for Everton remains undiminished.

He recalls their nail-biting Premier League survival last season with a smile.

“I watched the Crystal Palace game at home,” he says. “I was that nervous that I kept changing the channel and going back to see if there’d been any goals. When Dom scored (the 85th-minute winner), I jumped higher than I have in a long time.

“When they needed to, the players stepped up and produced an amazing comeback. But you’ve got to say that the fans got them over the line.

“Goodison hasn’t seen too many atmospheres like that. I texted Frank (Lampard, the manager) that night, but he must have had a good night because I didn’t hear back until the next day. I texted Dom too, because that was the type of goal I have seen him score since he was 16.

 

Unsworth shares a joke with Joe Royle (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

“They have started better this season. (Director of football) Kevin Thelwell is a really good guy who is quietly working in the background, doing the right things. I really hope that Frank will be there for many years, because then he will have been successful.”

Now, though, Unsworth is concentrating on his own hopes of revival.

In a competitive division, featuring Hollywood-backed Wrexham and historic clubs such as Notts County and York City, he will have his work cut out to get Oldham back into the Football League.

But as he works from the ground up (his phone rings so often, he charges it several times a day), Unsworth is tasked with building every aspect of the club, from medical to analysis and recruitment.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

This former Dog of War under Joe Royle still loves getting his teeth into a challenge.

(Top photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

[Wardie]

A good read and I feel the club has been extremely fortunate to land a character like Unsworth. There is no doubting the whole shebang will be his to build from the ground up, it's exciting but tempered with the impatience to get those wins under the belt and take the team away from the wrong end of the table. He says "chances to add to the squad in January" which confuses me a little, however, I'm sure somebody is going to explain why.

 

The connection with Everton is good, in my opinion and let's hope some talented young players are coming our way, as well as some more experienced heads who know the lower leagues and what is required. Any way we look at it, this has to be so much better than the dark times the club has just emerged from.

[Roger Ritchie]

33 minutes ago, TamarBridgeLatics said:

David Unsworth: ‘I loved being Everton manager. I wanted the job so badly’

By Greg O'Keeffe

Oct 14, 2022

---

Five years ago, David Unsworth was hoping to become manager of Everton — his billionaire-backed boyhood club with plans for a new £500million stadium and a transfer budget that, at one stage, seemed perilously unlimited.

Now, he is in charge at Oldham Athletic, a proud old club who dropped out of the Football League last season, and where Unsworth sometimes attends board meetings in the dining room of their owner’s house.

By his own admission, outsiders may wonder why the 48-year-old chose Oldham ahead of the six other clubs to have approached him since he left Everton in April.

But the man once known as Rhino in his playing days has a thick skin that matches his nickname. Since the low of missing out on the Goodison job after two spells as caretaker manager in successive seasons, he has been waiting for a chance that, quite simply, just felt right.

The task of re-building Oldham, founder members of the Premier League 30 years ago before falling on hard times, has reinvigorated him.

“This is a big club and if we get it right we can bounce up and get promotions quickly,” he tells The Athletic after overseeing training. “It feels like the right place for me.”

---

Unsworth will always be associated strongest with royal blue, after 11 years as a player and nine as a coach in various guises at Goodison.

As a boy, he would watch matches on the Gwladys Street and he remains a proud member of the last Everton team to win silverware in the 1994-95 FA Cup final.

So before we get to his new beginnings, let’s address those two stints as the club’s caretaker manager.

He was asked to step in following the sackings of Roberto Martinez and Ronald Koeman, in May 2016 and the late autumn of 2017, and the latter period was billed in some quarters as an extended job interview.

The first instance took in just one game, the final one of the season, where he oversaw a 3-0 defeat of Norwich City.

The second time around, he got five matches: winning two, drawing one, and losing twice. Those seven points collected after Koeman’s departure enabled Sam Allardyce, who then came in until the end of that campaign, to make a bright start in his successful bid to keep relegation-haunted Everton safe.

“I loved being Everton manager and trying to turn the team we inherited around,” Unsworth says. “I felt we were doing that.

“The results in the Europa League (getting beaten in the group stage by Lyon and Atalanta) weren’t great but we effectively had to forget about them and focus on the league. We had to play our strongest team in the Premier League fixtures, so it meant rotating in Europe.

“I was so desperate to do well, and you shouldn’t really be desperate for anything in life but I so badly wanted it. I wanted to show the owner I was ready for the opportunity.

“We found a system and a way of playing that, by the time Sam came in, we’d gone from right near the bottom to going to 10th when he won his first game against Huddersfield. Those points made a big difference in getting us out of trouble and Sam went on to get us to eighth.

“For me, it was a big accomplishment — from the day I took it and the sense of panic that surrounded us, to get to safety.”

Unsworth signed off in style with a vital 4-0 home win over West Ham in the final week of November and, a few days later, Allardyce oversaw a 2-0 Goodison victory against Huddersfield.

“I always looked at those two home games, against West Ham and Huddersfield, as winnable,” Unsworth says. “I was like a boxer who was saying, ‘Let me have one more fight’. I probably wanted one more game but then Sam came in before Huddersfield.”

Speculation had swirled that former England manager Allardyce was being lined up — he even watched the West Ham win from the stands — and Unsworth had to juggle his own dreams with focusing on the task in hand.

 

Unsworth on the touchline during Oldham’s game this month against Wrexham (Photo: Eddie Garvey/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“I remember saying to the chairman on the phone that I just wanted an indication of what was going to happen,” he says. “But the longer I didn’t hear, I just wanted to know what they were going to do.

“Sam was class, though. I really liked him and his staff. He calmed everyone down and got a league position that has been decent since then, when you look in hindsight.

“I think I would probably have needed to win every game to have been given the job full-time. But I did get a chance and, in a way, that’s all you can ask for. It was not enough to get it permanently but I played my part.”

For Unsworth, missing out on the permanent job meant reverting to his previous role as the club’s academy director and manager of their under-23 (later under-21) team.

He admits it was not easy dealing with his disappointment, even if he returned to a task he enjoyed and had success in; winning two Premier League 2 titles during his time.

“It was really tough because I had the (senior) managerial bug,” he says. “It probably led me to a period of reflection about what I wanted. But that summer, we brought in a group of players, such as Josh Bowler, Lewis Gibson and Dennis Adeniran and I felt responsible for staying to help develop their careers.

“But I did take not getting the (first-team) job hard. I’d done my time with the under-23s and felt it was time to start planning for what came next.”

For the next five years, though, Unsworth settled back into what was a key role at Everton. He says his views of how young players should be developed were stymied by the Premier League’s decision not to adopt a B-team system.

Although the Premier League did shift its under-23 stage to under-21s this season, it left Unsworth feeling the time had come for him to move on.

“I felt it meant the B-team idea I was banging the drum for had fallen on deaf ears and I didn’t know if it was ever going to happen in the Premier League,” he says. “It was moving further and further away from what I believe to be the best way of producing talent — young players working alongside senior players, being exposed to training with senior players and so on.

“Our average age in the last year (at Everton) was 19, and when it goes down to under-21s it’ll be 17, so it was moving further from what I believe in. I had been there for 10 years and I just felt it was too comfortable.

“I’m 50 next year, and I felt that if I didn’t push myself out of that comfort zone I might be at Everton’s academy for another 10 years. I might have regretted not making that move to senior football.”

A brief sabbatical from April was interrupted last month by the chance to succeed John Sheridan at Oldham.

It was part of a new dawn, after local businessman Frank Rothwell bought the troubled club from Abdallah Lemsagam, long the subject of fan protest and anger.

In a region that has recently lost Bury and Macclesfield Town in a choppy ocean of financial issues, Oldham have been another north west club dogged by monetary problems.

In July, they were in the High Court to have a winding-up petition dismissed after a debt owed to HMRC was cleared.

It has been a steady descent down the divisions since Oldham became one of the 22 founder members of the Premier League in 1992. They were relegated two years later, then fell to League One in 1997, remaining in that division for 21 years before going down to League Two. Their slide continued in May as they dropped out of the EFL altogether.

For Unsworth, though, they feel like a forward-looking, family club.

 

“I get the chance to work here with Darren Royle (son of former Everton manager Joe), who is the CEO and one of the best in the business,” he says. “Joe, who I know very well, is a director, and the owner is an incredible man; so passionate about his town and the club.

“In my mind, we could be a League One club, knocking on the door of the Championship. The owner has come in, totally started again, and he’s asked me to help him build it from scratch.

“When I came in, I had one physio, a part-time goalkeeping coach and the academy fitness coach. Other than that, it was a blank piece of paper.

“A lot of people have asked why I’ve dropped down to the fifth tier but I don’t see it like that. I had five or six opportunities. I always felt like I was pushing it and maybe it was me driving the talks, but here I felt wanted straight away.

“I went to the owner’s house on Sunday and we all had breakfast and had a board meeting in his dining room. Joe pops in once or twice a week and Darren and I are in each other’s office every day. We are building something here.”

Unsworth’s team are without a win since he took over, however.

They sit 18th in the 24-team table having lost his opening two fixtures (3-0 to Bromley and 2-1 against Wrexham. Both are in the top five). But draws with Scunthorpe and Maidenhead United have been more promising. Sixth-tier Chester visit in the FA Cup’s fourth qualifying round this weekend, before next Saturday’s home game against Yeovil Town.

“I’m not naive and I know we have to get results but there’s plenty going on behind the scenes that bodes well for the future,” Unsworth insists.

When the chance comes in January to add to the squad, his contacts in the academy system will help him chase top young talents.

He has already borrowed James Carragher, the promising 19-year-old son of former Liverpool defender Jamie, from Wigan Athletic of the Championship.

“I tried to get him 12 months ago when I was at Everton but we couldn’t agree a deal with Wigan. So when I got this job and realised he was available for loan, I was straight on the phone,” he says. “He has got the right character and he wants to learn.

“It’s a challenge for him but he’s shown he has the bravery to come out of his comfortable environment and stick his neck on the line. I respect that. He is going to be a really good player and he’s turning from a boy into a man with us.”

Unsworth’s own upbringing in the game was bolstered by a similarly fear-free attitude.

“I will never forget my development as a player,” he says. “I started in reserve football and as a 17-year-old centre-back I was playing alongside (Everton title-winning defender) Alan Harper.

“Jimmy Gabriel was my first manager and I learned so much from that. I went on to learn even more under Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall and Joe Royle and it was invaluable for me. I don’t think it will ever go back to those days, with a reserve league in England but every other country in Europe does it, because they know how important it is for young players to experience that too.”

Unsworth may have been busy with new horizons but will always follow Everton closely.

He admits to satisfaction at the development of Anthony Gordon and other academy players he used to manage.

“I’m massively proud to have contributed — and that’s all it was, a contribution — to Anthony’s career so far,” he says. “He’s done brilliantly to get where he is and there’s more to come.

“The likes of him, Dom (Calvert-Lewin) and Mason Holgate, who came in as lads to us, are all doing well.

“Along the way, we managed to beat the likes of Manchester City and Liverpool and we won two Premier League Two titles, which we had no right to do with some of those other clubs competing.”

There are some who argue that winning titles at youth level is meaningless if the club’s first team struggles. Others felt that Unsworth’s dual roles at Everton, as academy director and under-23s manager, were too much for one person.

In both cases, he disagrees.

 

Unsworth presents Everton’s under-23 player of the season award to Nathan Broadhead in 2019 (Photo: Tony McArdle – Everton FC/Everton FC via Getty Images)

“I know people will say it’s not about winning,” he says. “But I have always believed that you can develop players and win because you are teaching a winning mentality, which is vital. It’s about letting them know what it takes to keep a clean sheet and fight for results.

“The big thing for me when I was there was the amount of calls from other clubs who wanted to loan our players, saying, ‘You do it right’ . They saw that we didn’t just play academy football. Yes, we played nice football but we could also do the ugly things as well.”

Unsworth says he always felt supported at Everton, particularly by chairman Bill Kenwright, who he considers a close friend.

“He was amazing,” he says. “I know the stick that man has got and it’s ridiculous. I can say that now.

“He’s an incredible negotiator, a brilliant chairman and the support he gives people is amazing. He has done it for David Moyes, Roberto Martinez and he did it with me. He is desperate for Everton to be successful.

“Bill doesn’t deserve the criticism but he takes it because is chairman of the club he loves.”

Unsworth’s own love for Everton remains undiminished.

He recalls their nail-biting Premier League survival last season with a smile.

“I watched the Crystal Palace game at home,” he says. “I was that nervous that I kept changing the channel and going back to see if there’d been any goals. When Dom scored (the 85th-minute winner), I jumped higher than I have in a long time.

“When they needed to, the players stepped up and produced an amazing comeback. But you’ve got to say that the fans got them over the line.

“Goodison hasn’t seen too many atmospheres like that. I texted Frank (Lampard, the manager) that night, but he must have had a good night because I didn’t hear back until the next day. I texted Dom too, because that was the type of goal I have seen him score since he was 16.

 

Unsworth shares a joke with Joe Royle (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

“They have started better this season. (Director of football) Kevin Thelwell is a really good guy who is quietly working in the background, doing the right things. I really hope that Frank will be there for many years, because then he will have been successful.”

Now, though, Unsworth is concentrating on his own hopes of revival.

In a competitive division, featuring Hollywood-backed Wrexham and historic clubs such as Notts County and York City, he will have his work cut out to get Oldham back into the Football League.

But as he works from the ground up (his phone rings so often, he charges it several times a day), Unsworth is tasked with building every aspect of the club, from medical to analysis and recruitment.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

This former Dog of War under Joe Royle still loves getting his teeth into a challenge.

(Top photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

 

Yes lad! Thank you! 

 

 

[Ogdenwoodwhittle]

1 hour ago, TamarBridgeLatics said:

David Unsworth: ‘I loved being Everton manager. I wanted the job so badly’

By Greg O'Keeffe

Oct 14, 2022

---

Five years ago, David Unsworth was hoping to become manager of Everton — his billionaire-backed boyhood club with plans for a new £500million stadium and a transfer budget that, at one stage, seemed perilously unlimited.

Now, he is in charge at Oldham Athletic, a proud old club who dropped out of the Football League last season, and where Unsworth sometimes attends board meetings in the dining room of their owner’s house.

By his own admission, outsiders may wonder why the 48-year-old chose Oldham ahead of the six other clubs to have approached him since he left Everton in April.

But the man once known as Rhino in his playing days has a thick skin that matches his nickname. Since the low of missing out on the Goodison job after two spells as caretaker manager in successive seasons, he has been waiting for a chance that, quite simply, just felt right.

The task of re-building Oldham, founder members of the Premier League 30 years ago before falling on hard times, has reinvigorated him.

“This is a big club and if we get it right we can bounce up and get promotions quickly,” he tells The Athletic after overseeing training. “It feels like the right place for me.”

---

Unsworth will always be associated strongest with royal blue, after 11 years as a player and nine as a coach in various guises at Goodison.

As a boy, he would watch matches on the Gwladys Street and he remains a proud member of the last Everton team to win silverware in the 1994-95 FA Cup final.

So before we get to his new beginnings, let’s address those two stints as the club’s caretaker manager.

He was asked to step in following the sackings of Roberto Martinez and Ronald Koeman, in May 2016 and the late autumn of 2017, and the latter period was billed in some quarters as an extended job interview.

The first instance took in just one game, the final one of the season, where he oversaw a 3-0 defeat of Norwich City.

The second time around, he got five matches: winning two, drawing one, and losing twice. Those seven points collected after Koeman’s departure enabled Sam Allardyce, who then came in until the end of that campaign, to make a bright start in his successful bid to keep relegation-haunted Everton safe.

“I loved being Everton manager and trying to turn the team we inherited around,” Unsworth says. “I felt we were doing that.

“The results in the Europa League (getting beaten in the group stage by Lyon and Atalanta) weren’t great but we effectively had to forget about them and focus on the league. We had to play our strongest team in the Premier League fixtures, so it meant rotating in Europe.

“I was so desperate to do well, and you shouldn’t really be desperate for anything in life but I so badly wanted it. I wanted to show the owner I was ready for the opportunity.

“We found a system and a way of playing that, by the time Sam came in, we’d gone from right near the bottom to going to 10th when he won his first game against Huddersfield. Those points made a big difference in getting us out of trouble and Sam went on to get us to eighth.

“For me, it was a big accomplishment — from the day I took it and the sense of panic that surrounded us, to get to safety.”

Unsworth signed off in style with a vital 4-0 home win over West Ham in the final week of November and, a few days later, Allardyce oversaw a 2-0 Goodison victory against Huddersfield.

“I always looked at those two home games, against West Ham and Huddersfield, as winnable,” Unsworth says. “I was like a boxer who was saying, ‘Let me have one more fight’. I probably wanted one more game but then Sam came in before Huddersfield.”

Speculation had swirled that former England manager Allardyce was being lined up — he even watched the West Ham win from the stands — and Unsworth had to juggle his own dreams with focusing on the task in hand.

 

Unsworth on the touchline during Oldham’s game this month against Wrexham (Photo: Eddie Garvey/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“I remember saying to the chairman on the phone that I just wanted an indication of what was going to happen,” he says. “But the longer I didn’t hear, I just wanted to know what they were going to do.

“Sam was class, though. I really liked him and his staff. He calmed everyone down and got a league position that has been decent since then, when you look in hindsight.

“I think I would probably have needed to win every game to have been given the job full-time. But I did get a chance and, in a way, that’s all you can ask for. It was not enough to get it permanently but I played my part.”

For Unsworth, missing out on the permanent job meant reverting to his previous role as the club’s academy director and manager of their under-23 (later under-21) team.

He admits it was not easy dealing with his disappointment, even if he returned to a task he enjoyed and had success in; winning two Premier League 2 titles during his time.

“It was really tough because I had the (senior) managerial bug,” he says. “It probably led me to a period of reflection about what I wanted. But that summer, we brought in a group of players, such as Josh Bowler, Lewis Gibson and Dennis Adeniran and I felt responsible for staying to help develop their careers.

“But I did take not getting the (first-team) job hard. I’d done my time with the under-23s and felt it was time to start planning for what came next.”

For the next five years, though, Unsworth settled back into what was a key role at Everton. He says his views of how young players should be developed were stymied by the Premier League’s decision not to adopt a B-team system.

Although the Premier League did shift its under-23 stage to under-21s this season, it left Unsworth feeling the time had come for him to move on.

“I felt it meant the B-team idea I was banging the drum for had fallen on deaf ears and I didn’t know if it was ever going to happen in the Premier League,” he says. “It was moving further and further away from what I believe to be the best way of producing talent — young players working alongside senior players, being exposed to training with senior players and so on.

“Our average age in the last year (at Everton) was 19, and when it goes down to under-21s it’ll be 17, so it was moving further from what I believe in. I had been there for 10 years and I just felt it was too comfortable.

“I’m 50 next year, and I felt that if I didn’t push myself out of that comfort zone I might be at Everton’s academy for another 10 years. I might have regretted not making that move to senior football.”

A brief sabbatical from April was interrupted last month by the chance to succeed John Sheridan at Oldham.

It was part of a new dawn, after local businessman Frank Rothwell bought the troubled club from Abdallah Lemsagam, long the subject of fan protest and anger.

In a region that has recently lost Bury and Macclesfield Town in a choppy ocean of financial issues, Oldham have been another north west club dogged by monetary problems.

In July, they were in the High Court to have a winding-up petition dismissed after a debt owed to HMRC was cleared.

It has been a steady descent down the divisions since Oldham became one of the 22 founder members of the Premier League in 1992. They were relegated two years later, then fell to League One in 1997, remaining in that division for 21 years before going down to League Two. Their slide continued in May as they dropped out of the EFL altogether.

For Unsworth, though, they feel like a forward-looking, family club.

 

“I get the chance to work here with Darren Royle (son of former Everton manager Joe), who is the CEO and one of the best in the business,” he says. “Joe, who I know very well, is a director, and the owner is an incredible man; so passionate about his town and the club.

“In my mind, we could be a League One club, knocking on the door of the Championship. The owner has come in, totally started again, and he’s asked me to help him build it from scratch.

“When I came in, I had one physio, a part-time goalkeeping coach and the academy fitness coach. Other than that, it was a blank piece of paper.

“A lot of people have asked why I’ve dropped down to the fifth tier but I don’t see it like that. I had five or six opportunities. I always felt like I was pushing it and maybe it was me driving the talks, but here I felt wanted straight away.

“I went to the owner’s house on Sunday and we all had breakfast and had a board meeting in his dining room. Joe pops in once or twice a week and Darren and I are in each other’s office every day. We are building something here.”

Unsworth’s team are without a win since he took over, however.

They sit 18th in the 24-team table having lost his opening two fixtures (3-0 to Bromley and 2-1 against Wrexham. Both are in the top five). But draws with Scunthorpe and Maidenhead United have been more promising. Sixth-tier Chester visit in the FA Cup’s fourth qualifying round this weekend, before next Saturday’s home game against Yeovil Town.

“I’m not naive and I know we have to get results but there’s plenty going on behind the scenes that bodes well for the future,” Unsworth insists.

When the chance comes in January to add to the squad, his contacts in the academy system will help him chase top young talents.

He has already borrowed James Carragher, the promising 19-year-old son of former Liverpool defender Jamie, from Wigan Athletic of the Championship.

“I tried to get him 12 months ago when I was at Everton but we couldn’t agree a deal with Wigan. So when I got this job and realised he was available for loan, I was straight on the phone,” he says. “He has got the right character and he wants to learn.

“It’s a challenge for him but he’s shown he has the bravery to come out of his comfortable environment and stick his neck on the line. I respect that. He is going to be a really good player and he’s turning from a boy into a man with us.”

Unsworth’s own upbringing in the game was bolstered by a similarly fear-free attitude.

“I will never forget my development as a player,” he says. “I started in reserve football and as a 17-year-old centre-back I was playing alongside (Everton title-winning defender) Alan Harper.

“Jimmy Gabriel was my first manager and I learned so much from that. I went on to learn even more under Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall and Joe Royle and it was invaluable for me. I don’t think it will ever go back to those days, with a reserve league in England but every other country in Europe does it, because they know how important it is for young players to experience that too.”

Unsworth may have been busy with new horizons but will always follow Everton closely.

He admits to satisfaction at the development of Anthony Gordon and other academy players he used to manage.

“I’m massively proud to have contributed — and that’s all it was, a contribution — to Anthony’s career so far,” he says. “He’s done brilliantly to get where he is and there’s more to come.

“The likes of him, Dom (Calvert-Lewin) and Mason Holgate, who came in as lads to us, are all doing well.

“Along the way, we managed to beat the likes of Manchester City and Liverpool and we won two Premier League Two titles, which we had no right to do with some of those other clubs competing.”

There are some who argue that winning titles at youth level is meaningless if the club’s first team struggles. Others felt that Unsworth’s dual roles at Everton, as academy director and under-23s manager, were too much for one person.

In both cases, he disagrees.

 

Unsworth presents Everton’s under-23 player of the season award to Nathan Broadhead in 2019 (Photo: Tony McArdle – Everton FC/Everton FC via Getty Images)

“I know people will say it’s not about winning,” he says. “But I have always believed that you can develop players and win because you are teaching a winning mentality, which is vital. It’s about letting them know what it takes to keep a clean sheet and fight for results.

“The big thing for me when I was there was the amount of calls from other clubs who wanted to loan our players, saying, ‘You do it right’ . They saw that we didn’t just play academy football. Yes, we played nice football but we could also do the ugly things as well.”

Unsworth says he always felt supported at Everton, particularly by chairman Bill Kenwright, who he considers a close friend.

“He was amazing,” he says. “I know the stick that man has got and it’s ridiculous. I can say that now.

“He’s an incredible negotiator, a brilliant chairman and the support he gives people is amazing. He has done it for David Moyes, Roberto Martinez and he did it with me. He is desperate for Everton to be successful.

“Bill doesn’t deserve the criticism but he takes it because is chairman of the club he loves.”

Unsworth’s own love for Everton remains undiminished.

He recalls their nail-biting Premier League survival last season with a smile.

“I watched the Crystal Palace game at home,” he says. “I was that nervous that I kept changing the channel and going back to see if there’d been any goals. When Dom scored (the 85th-minute winner), I jumped higher than I have in a long time.

“When they needed to, the players stepped up and produced an amazing comeback. But you’ve got to say that the fans got them over the line.

“Goodison hasn’t seen too many atmospheres like that. I texted Frank (Lampard, the manager) that night, but he must have had a good night because I didn’t hear back until the next day. I texted Dom too, because that was the type of goal I have seen him score since he was 16.

 

Unsworth shares a joke with Joe Royle (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

“They have started better this season. (Director of football) Kevin Thelwell is a really good guy who is quietly working in the background, doing the right things. I really hope that Frank will be there for many years, because then he will have been successful.”

Now, though, Unsworth is concentrating on his own hopes of revival.

In a competitive division, featuring Hollywood-backed Wrexham and historic clubs such as Notts County and York City, he will have his work cut out to get Oldham back into the Football League.

But as he works from the ground up (his phone rings so often, he charges it several times a day), Unsworth is tasked with building every aspect of the club, from medical to analysis and recruitment.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

This former Dog of War under Joe Royle still loves getting his teeth into a challenge.

(Top photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

Thanks  , good read and contextualises his decision to come to Oldham. I'm happy to give him some time and looking forward to some promising youngsters getting a chance,  Harry?

[peanuts2]

2 hours ago, Wardie said:

A good read and I feel the club has been extremely fortunate to land a character like Unsworth. There is no doubting the whole shebang will be his to build from the ground up, it's exciting but tempered with the impatience to get those wins under the belt and take the team away from the wrong end of the table. He says "chances to add to the squad in January" which confuses me a little, however, I'm sure somebody is going to explain why.

 

The connection with Everton is good, in my opinion and let's hope some talented young players are coming our way, as well as some more experienced heads who know the lower leagues and what is required. Any way we look at it, this has to be so much better than the dark times the club has just emerged from.

Because the efl/prem transfer window opens a lot of players will be free to be re loaned /released that are currently not available ad already on loan 

[Monty Burns]

17 hours ago, TamarBridgeLatics said:

David Unsworth: ‘I loved being Everton manager. I wanted the job so badly’

By Greg O'Keeffe

Oct 14, 2022

---

Five years ago, David Unsworth was hoping to become manager of Everton — his billionaire-backed boyhood club with plans for a new £500million stadium and a transfer budget that, at one stage, seemed perilously unlimited.

Now, he is in charge at Oldham Athletic, a proud old club who dropped out of the Football League last season, and where Unsworth sometimes attends board meetings in the dining room of their owner’s house.

By his own admission, outsiders may wonder why the 48-year-old chose Oldham ahead of the six other clubs to have approached him since he left Everton in April.

But the man once known as Rhino in his playing days has a thick skin that matches his nickname. Since the low of missing out on the Goodison job after two spells as caretaker manager in successive seasons, he has been waiting for a chance that, quite simply, just felt right.

The task of re-building Oldham, founder members of the Premier League 30 years ago before falling on hard times, has reinvigorated him.

“This is a big club and if we get it right we can bounce up and get promotions quickly,” he tells The Athletic after overseeing training. “It feels like the right place for me.”

---

Unsworth will always be associated strongest with royal blue, after 11 years as a player and nine as a coach in various guises at Goodison.

As a boy, he would watch matches on the Gwladys Street and he remains a proud member of the last Everton team to win silverware in the 1994-95 FA Cup final.

So before we get to his new beginnings, let’s address those two stints as the club’s caretaker manager.

He was asked to step in following the sackings of Roberto Martinez and Ronald Koeman, in May 2016 and the late autumn of 2017, and the latter period was billed in some quarters as an extended job interview.

The first instance took in just one game, the final one of the season, where he oversaw a 3-0 defeat of Norwich City.

The second time around, he got five matches: winning two, drawing one, and losing twice. Those seven points collected after Koeman’s departure enabled Sam Allardyce, who then came in until the end of that campaign, to make a bright start in his successful bid to keep relegation-haunted Everton safe.

“I loved being Everton manager and trying to turn the team we inherited around,” Unsworth says. “I felt we were doing that.

“The results in the Europa League (getting beaten in the group stage by Lyon and Atalanta) weren’t great but we effectively had to forget about them and focus on the league. We had to play our strongest team in the Premier League fixtures, so it meant rotating in Europe.

“I was so desperate to do well, and you shouldn’t really be desperate for anything in life but I so badly wanted it. I wanted to show the owner I was ready for the opportunity.

“We found a system and a way of playing that, by the time Sam came in, we’d gone from right near the bottom to going to 10th when he won his first game against Huddersfield. Those points made a big difference in getting us out of trouble and Sam went on to get us to eighth.

“For me, it was a big accomplishment — from the day I took it and the sense of panic that surrounded us, to get to safety.”

Unsworth signed off in style with a vital 4-0 home win over West Ham in the final week of November and, a few days later, Allardyce oversaw a 2-0 Goodison victory against Huddersfield.

“I always looked at those two home games, against West Ham and Huddersfield, as winnable,” Unsworth says. “I was like a boxer who was saying, ‘Let me have one more fight’. I probably wanted one more game but then Sam came in before Huddersfield.”

Speculation had swirled that former England manager Allardyce was being lined up — he even watched the West Ham win from the stands — and Unsworth had to juggle his own dreams with focusing on the task in hand.

 

Unsworth on the touchline during Oldham’s game this month against Wrexham (Photo: Eddie Garvey/MI News/NurPhoto via Getty Images)

“I remember saying to the chairman on the phone that I just wanted an indication of what was going to happen,” he says. “But the longer I didn’t hear, I just wanted to know what they were going to do.

“Sam was class, though. I really liked him and his staff. He calmed everyone down and got a league position that has been decent since then, when you look in hindsight.

“I think I would probably have needed to win every game to have been given the job full-time. But I did get a chance and, in a way, that’s all you can ask for. It was not enough to get it permanently but I played my part.”

For Unsworth, missing out on the permanent job meant reverting to his previous role as the club’s academy director and manager of their under-23 (later under-21) team.

He admits it was not easy dealing with his disappointment, even if he returned to a task he enjoyed and had success in; winning two Premier League 2 titles during his time.

“It was really tough because I had the (senior) managerial bug,” he says. “It probably led me to a period of reflection about what I wanted. But that summer, we brought in a group of players, such as Josh Bowler, Lewis Gibson and Dennis Adeniran and I felt responsible for staying to help develop their careers.

“But I did take not getting the (first-team) job hard. I’d done my time with the under-23s and felt it was time to start planning for what came next.”

For the next five years, though, Unsworth settled back into what was a key role at Everton. He says his views of how young players should be developed were stymied by the Premier League’s decision not to adopt a B-team system.

Although the Premier League did shift its under-23 stage to under-21s this season, it left Unsworth feeling the time had come for him to move on.

“I felt it meant the B-team idea I was banging the drum for had fallen on deaf ears and I didn’t know if it was ever going to happen in the Premier League,” he says. “It was moving further and further away from what I believe to be the best way of producing talent — young players working alongside senior players, being exposed to training with senior players and so on.

“Our average age in the last year (at Everton) was 19, and when it goes down to under-21s it’ll be 17, so it was moving further from what I believe in. I had been there for 10 years and I just felt it was too comfortable.

“I’m 50 next year, and I felt that if I didn’t push myself out of that comfort zone I might be at Everton’s academy for another 10 years. I might have regretted not making that move to senior football.”

A brief sabbatical from April was interrupted last month by the chance to succeed John Sheridan at Oldham.

It was part of a new dawn, after local businessman Frank Rothwell bought the troubled club from Abdallah Lemsagam, long the subject of fan protest and anger.

In a region that has recently lost Bury and Macclesfield Town in a choppy ocean of financial issues, Oldham have been another north west club dogged by monetary problems.

In July, they were in the High Court to have a winding-up petition dismissed after a debt owed to HMRC was cleared.

It has been a steady descent down the divisions since Oldham became one of the 22 founder members of the Premier League in 1992. They were relegated two years later, then fell to League One in 1997, remaining in that division for 21 years before going down to League Two. Their slide continued in May as they dropped out of the EFL altogether.

For Unsworth, though, they feel like a forward-looking, family club.

 

“I get the chance to work here with Darren Royle (son of former Everton manager Joe), who is the CEO and one of the best in the business,” he says. “Joe, who I know very well, is a director, and the owner is an incredible man; so passionate about his town and the club.

“In my mind, we could be a League One club, knocking on the door of the Championship. The owner has come in, totally started again, and he’s asked me to help him build it from scratch.

“When I came in, I had one physio, a part-time goalkeeping coach and the academy fitness coach. Other than that, it was a blank piece of paper.

“A lot of people have asked why I’ve dropped down to the fifth tier but I don’t see it like that. I had five or six opportunities. I always felt like I was pushing it and maybe it was me driving the talks, but here I felt wanted straight away.

“I went to the owner’s house on Sunday and we all had breakfast and had a board meeting in his dining room. Joe pops in once or twice a week and Darren and I are in each other’s office every day. We are building something here.”

Unsworth’s team are without a win since he took over, however.

They sit 18th in the 24-team table having lost his opening two fixtures (3-0 to Bromley and 2-1 against Wrexham. Both are in the top five). But draws with Scunthorpe and Maidenhead United have been more promising. Sixth-tier Chester visit in the FA Cup’s fourth qualifying round this weekend, before next Saturday’s home game against Yeovil Town.

“I’m not naive and I know we have to get results but there’s plenty going on behind the scenes that bodes well for the future,” Unsworth insists.

When the chance comes in January to add to the squad, his contacts in the academy system will help him chase top young talents.

He has already borrowed James Carragher, the promising 19-year-old son of former Liverpool defender Jamie, from Wigan Athletic of the Championship.

“I tried to get him 12 months ago when I was at Everton but we couldn’t agree a deal with Wigan. So when I got this job and realised he was available for loan, I was straight on the phone,” he says. “He has got the right character and he wants to learn.

“It’s a challenge for him but he’s shown he has the bravery to come out of his comfortable environment and stick his neck on the line. I respect that. He is going to be a really good player and he’s turning from a boy into a man with us.”

Unsworth’s own upbringing in the game was bolstered by a similarly fear-free attitude.

“I will never forget my development as a player,” he says. “I started in reserve football and as a 17-year-old centre-back I was playing alongside (Everton title-winning defender) Alan Harper.

“Jimmy Gabriel was my first manager and I learned so much from that. I went on to learn even more under Colin Harvey, Howard Kendall and Joe Royle and it was invaluable for me. I don’t think it will ever go back to those days, with a reserve league in England but every other country in Europe does it, because they know how important it is for young players to experience that too.”

Unsworth may have been busy with new horizons but will always follow Everton closely.

He admits to satisfaction at the development of Anthony Gordon and other academy players he used to manage.

“I’m massively proud to have contributed — and that’s all it was, a contribution — to Anthony’s career so far,” he says. “He’s done brilliantly to get where he is and there’s more to come.

“The likes of him, Dom (Calvert-Lewin) and Mason Holgate, who came in as lads to us, are all doing well.

“Along the way, we managed to beat the likes of Manchester City and Liverpool and we won two Premier League Two titles, which we had no right to do with some of those other clubs competing.”

There are some who argue that winning titles at youth level is meaningless if the club’s first team struggles. Others felt that Unsworth’s dual roles at Everton, as academy director and under-23s manager, were too much for one person.

In both cases, he disagrees.

 

Unsworth presents Everton’s under-23 player of the season award to Nathan Broadhead in 2019 (Photo: Tony McArdle – Everton FC/Everton FC via Getty Images)

“I know people will say it’s not about winning,” he says. “But I have always believed that you can develop players and win because you are teaching a winning mentality, which is vital. It’s about letting them know what it takes to keep a clean sheet and fight for results.

“The big thing for me when I was there was the amount of calls from other clubs who wanted to loan our players, saying, ‘You do it right’ . They saw that we didn’t just play academy football. Yes, we played nice football but we could also do the ugly things as well.”

Unsworth says he always felt supported at Everton, particularly by chairman Bill Kenwright, who he considers a close friend.

“He was amazing,” he says. “I know the stick that man has got and it’s ridiculous. I can say that now.

“He’s an incredible negotiator, a brilliant chairman and the support he gives people is amazing. He has done it for David Moyes, Roberto Martinez and he did it with me. He is desperate for Everton to be successful.

“Bill doesn’t deserve the criticism but he takes it because is chairman of the club he loves.”

Unsworth’s own love for Everton remains undiminished.

He recalls their nail-biting Premier League survival last season with a smile.

“I watched the Crystal Palace game at home,” he says. “I was that nervous that I kept changing the channel and going back to see if there’d been any goals. When Dom scored (the 85th-minute winner), I jumped higher than I have in a long time.

“When they needed to, the players stepped up and produced an amazing comeback. But you’ve got to say that the fans got them over the line.

“Goodison hasn’t seen too many atmospheres like that. I texted Frank (Lampard, the manager) that night, but he must have had a good night because I didn’t hear back until the next day. I texted Dom too, because that was the type of goal I have seen him score since he was 16.

 

Unsworth shares a joke with Joe Royle (Photo: Peter Byrne/PA Images via Getty Images)

“They have started better this season. (Director of football) Kevin Thelwell is a really good guy who is quietly working in the background, doing the right things. I really hope that Frank will be there for many years, because then he will have been successful.”

Now, though, Unsworth is concentrating on his own hopes of revival.

In a competitive division, featuring Hollywood-backed Wrexham and historic clubs such as Notts County and York City, he will have his work cut out to get Oldham back into the Football League.

But as he works from the ground up (his phone rings so often, he charges it several times a day), Unsworth is tasked with building every aspect of the club, from medical to analysis and recruitment.

He wouldn’t have it any other way.

This former Dog of War under Joe Royle still loves getting his teeth into a challenge.

(Top photo: Tony McArdle/Everton FC via Getty Images)

 

@JoeP

[Monty Burns]

16 hours ago, Ogdenwoodwhittle said:

Thanks  , good read and contextualises his decision to come to Oldham. I'm happy to give him some time and looking forward to some promising youngsters getting a chance,  Harry?

not sure if Harry made it after the Bteam match, but Rhino mentions another kid who stood out and is now in the squad.

 

FWIW another 'little thing' which seems to have been fixed; on the fish site if theres a video or an interview and you click on it the video plays. its pretty novel, no payment needed. love Frank, me.

[Chaddyexile84]

1 hour ago, Monty Burns said:

 

 

FWIW another 'little thing' which seems to have been fixed; on the fish site if theres a video or an interview and you click on it the video plays. its pretty novel, no payment needed. love Frank, me.

 

Its been that way for years 

[Monty Burns]

19 minutes ago, Chaddyexile84 said:

 

Its been that way for years 

hasnt you had to sign up and pay with your information

[Chaddyexile84]

1 minute ago, Monty Burns said:

hasnt you had to sign up and pay with your information

 

I havent paid in years and seen every single interview...

[Monty Burns]

we may have discussed this before, it is possible you don't class clicking on something, being redirected and having to hand over information before being allowed to watch a few minutes later as 'paying' whereas l do

[Monty Burns]

you see

you click

they show

 

 

its almost revolutionary

[Chaddyexile84]

7 minutes ago, Monty Burns said:

we may have discussed this before, it is possible you don't class clicking on something, being redirected and having to hand over information before being allowed to watch a few minutes later as 'paying' whereas l do

 

6 minutes ago, Monty Burns said:

you see

you click

they show

 

 

its almost revolutionary

 

Just accept youre wrong occasionally Monty

 

I have handed nothing other or paid anything since long before Corney left and still seen every. Single. Interview 

 

Have a good day 

[JoeP]

2 hours ago, Monty Burns said:

 

@JoeP

 

Nice article, but I'm not sure we've learned anything new there, have we?

[Monty Burns]

6 minutes ago, Chaddyexile84 said:

 

 

Just accept youre wrong occasionally Monty

 

I have handed nothing other or paid anything since long before Corney left and still seen every. Single. Interview 

 

Have a good day 

l'm wrong all the time its how we learn.

 

lve just clicked on it and it played without asking me for anything. this is new, the last dozen or so times over the years it has asked me to sign up. it surprised me so l said it on here.

[Monty Burns]

3 minutes ago, JoeP said:

 

Nice article, but I'm not sure we've learned anything new there, have we?

99% who listen haven't, no.

but you learned the bit about Rhino only signing because he wanted the blank canvas. the bit you were asking about and struggling with mere days ago.

[BP1960]

1 minute ago, Monty Burns said:

99% who listen haven't, no.

but you learned the bit about Rhino only signing because he wanted the blank canvas. the bit you were asking about and struggling with mere days ago.

 

He did say there are no reserve leagues anymore, but as I've mentioned there is the Central League North West and the Lancashire and Manchester Senior Cups we could enter.

 

[Monty Burns]

15 minutes ago, Chaddyexile84 said:

 

 

Just accept youre wrong occasionally Monty

 

I have handed nothing other or paid anything since long before Corney left and still seen every. Single. Interview 

 

Have a good day 

just searched 'paywall' and it shows you having this same convo with other people unaware this had changed. you were borderline preachy with them aswell.

 

maybe if you did a post telling people it would be helpful and avoid this ohhhhh actually now l get it are you excitedly awaiting your next 'there is no paywall anymore' victim?

fuckin bigtime Zings incoming your way

 

[Monty Burns]

1 minute ago, BP1960 said:

 

He did say there are no reserve leagues anymore, but as I've mentioned there is the Central League North West and the Lancashire and Manchester Senior Cups we could enter.

 

l think he was more railing against the prem set up of u23 becoming u21 and how this doesnt fit with his vision.

sounded like he is looking at one Bteam match per week(ish) until around jan and then out on loan

[LightDN123]

Less chats more wins Unsworth. Don’t care what job offers he’s had previously. 

[Monty Burns]

1 minute ago, LightDN123 said:

Less chats more wins Unsworth. Don’t care what job offers he’s had previously. 

how did you feel when he said he was 'excited' to see the team after another week on the official site?

[Chaddyexile84]

11 minutes ago, Monty Burns said:

just searched 'paywall' and it shows you having this same convo with other people unaware this had changed. you were borderline preachy with them aswell.

 

maybe if you did a post telling people it would be helpful and avoid this ohhhhh actually now l get it are you excitedly awaiting your next 'there is no paywall anymore' victim?

fuckin bigtime Zings incoming your way

 

 

I just assumed people would have become aware the same way I did 

 

If you want to pay me to be the OWTB non paywall notification officer I might just do it 

 

And you definitely have no idea what excites me if you think thats it 

[Monty Burns]

nah l was jus tryna Zing u back thats all

[LightDN123]

26 minutes ago, Monty Burns said:

how did you feel when he said he was 'excited' to see the team after another week on the official site?

I’m already bored of hearing him speak I won’t lie, I just want us to win games and battle at this point.