Holloway's crazy days of summer STILL BARKING. “HE BREEZED INTO THE room, more or less hijacked the interview completely, took it over with his enthusiasm. His passion is unmatched, I’ve never met anybody who’s got that much life about them. It’s not just football, it’s the whole of his life. It’s lifted the whole city,” Damon Lenszner, a Plymouth Argyle director, said.
Thus, famously, spoke Ian Holloway after winning promotion to the Coca-Cola Championship with Queens Park Rangers in 2004: “They say every dog has his day. And today is Woof Day. I want to go out and bark.”
Last season, the noises emanating from Loftus Road were more like agonised howls, but now Holloway’s tail wags once more. His managerial CV is solid but it is his personality that has made him a cult figure. Last year, Time Out magazine named “Olly” the fifteenth-funniest Londoner, ahead of the Little Britain duo and Paul Merton. Not bad for a Bristolian.
In 2004 he painted a canvas called Promotion in the style of Jackson Pollock for a BBC documentary called Stress Test, in which he was shown crying when talking about his wife and battling bouts of rage as he tried to cope with managing QPR and being a husband and father to four children, three of whom are profoundly deaf and so were unfazed when he ranted at them in an argument about a cushion.
As with José Mourinho, Holloway’s best quotations are collected in book form: The Tao of Ian Holloway. A modest man, the 43-year-old would presumably reject the implication that it is possible to base a life-guiding philosophy around his musings, yet extraordinary charisma shines from his small frame. His enthusiasm is contagious because it is so sincere and omnipresent.
Sentences flood out like a burst dam and drench listeners with metaphors that are often magical even if they are mixed. Desire, honesty and conviction are his petrol as interviews drive off in a straight line then veer off-road without warning and a routine trip turns into a safari.
The chunky West Country accent adds a lyrical hue and there is no sense of ironic self- parody, the creeping archness that infected the work of another noted benefactor to football’s lexicon, Ron Atkinson. “What I want to do is add one or two players, but I’ll take my time,” Holloway said after a pre-season friendly on Friday. “Slowly, slowly. The way I look at it, I want to drip-feed some of the things that I want.” He mimed a hospital infusion pump. “Tonight, they were so keen to impress me, they cut the bag and it all whooshed over the floor in the first half. If that makes any sense. It should be just drip, drip, drip.”
Barry Hayles played for Holloway at Bristol Rovers so knew what to expect when he joined from Millwall this summer. “A few of the boys have been a bit surprised,” the striker said of his manager’s ardour. “He’s very excited, he made it clear he’s got big plans, he wants to get a squad that’s good enough to challenge for the top six.”
Holloway managed Rovers for 4½ years, then took over at QPR in 2001 and won the Londoners promotion, making them an established Championship club despite a paltry budget. A feud between directors last season led to Holloway being caught in the crossfire.
He was placed on gardening leave by QPR in February and arrived at Home Park at the end of June to replace Tony Pulis, who rejoined Stoke City. Holloway denied that the souring of his relationship with QPR had sapped his morale. “Not in a million years,” he said. “I probably feel the best I’ve ever been. I’ve had five months to sort my life out, to see what I want to do. I think I got thrown into football management because I was cheap, I could do two jobs for the price of one. I’m very proud I took that opportunity, people can never take that away from me. What I want to do is leave a mark on the next club I’m managing, which is this one.”
Holloway took Plymouth to the Memorial Stadium for a friendly on Friday and was generously received by the locals, especially since the League Two side won 1-0. “That makes Bristol Rovers as good as Real Madrid,” Holloway pointed out. This month Plymouth lost by the same scoreline to the Spanish behemoths in a friendly arranged as compensation for Real taking Plymouth’s hotel at pre-season training in Austria. “Who are they to move us?” Holloway had said. “I don’t like it myself — we’re Argyle, get out of our way! We’ll leave something on a few of them and I don’t think they’ll like that too much.
“In three, four, five years we’ll be pushing for one of those play-off places with that man in charge,” Lenszner said. If that sounds like a relaxed timescale, he points out that it took John Madejski 15 years to bankroll Reading into the big-time. Plymouth were only promoted from the bottom division in 2002 and the board, without Madejski’s millions, are focused on incremental growth. “It’ s going to take time and I’ve only been here two minutes,” Holloway said. “If this is a 24-hour clock, the alarm hasn’t even gone off yet, has it?”
