Tranmere’s Nigel Adkins: ‘I still feel like an 18-year-old on the training ground’

Nigel Adkins is talking about being back where it all started at Tranmere Rovers, recounting the days when, as an apprentice goalkeeper at Prenton Park, he would clean boots, sweep dressing room floors and even climb on to the roof of the Cowshed Stand to retrieve stray balls. A few years earlier he was looking on from the terrace when Charlie Lindsay, an avid supporter, infamously whacked the Bournemouth goalkeeper Kenny Allen with his walking stick for time-wasting.

Adkins carries fond memories of watching his heroes from behind the goal. “At the end of the game I’d run on the pitch – you were allowed to back in those days – and try and get Ronnie Moore’s tie-ups, or Dickie Johnson’s or Stevie Coppell’s, and then scarper up Woodchurch Lane and down Woodchurch Road to try and make sure I got home in one piece,” Adkins says. “Sometimes if there was a bit of a scuffle, my mum would go: ‘You’re not going to football any more.’ But I’d always go down on a Friday night, because it was my team.”

The 59-year-old, who was born in Birkenhead and went to Ridgeway high school, a couple of miles from the ground, has gone full circle. He was a boyhood supporter, a player and now is the manager, via a four-month stint as technical director. His assistant manager is the former midfielder Neil Danns, father of Liverpool’s teenage striker Jayden. When Adkins took the reins, initially on an interim basis last September, Tranmere had three points from their first seven matches and non-league loomed ominously. In the past six weeks they have beaten the current top three in League Two and, such has been their form, had the season begun when Adkins took the job permanently in November they would be in an automatic promotion place. Victory at home to Crawley on Saturday, could help them make an unlikely late run for the playoffs.

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Perhaps Tranmere’s remarkable resurgence should not be a huge shock. After Adkins guided Scunthorpe into the Championship in his first job in the Football League, supporters sang: “Who needs Mourinho, we’ve got our physio,” a nod to his decade in the medical department, when he would double up as a fitness coach and backup goalkeeper. “I had a key to every room in the building – I’d do all the jobs. You just muck in. Lose your ego, it’s all about the team. You don’t go: ‘That’s not my role.’ I hate that: ‘You’re just the physio, you’re just the cleaner, you’re just the kit man.’ No, you’re not. Everyone is important and that’s stuck with me through my career.”

As a player, Adkins’s career took him from Tranmere to Wigan, for the princely sum of £3,000, and then Bangor, where he became player-manager. After leaving Scunthorpe for Southampton, whom he managed in the Premier League, he had spells at Reading, Sheffield United and Hull City. At Southampton he famously recited The Man in the Glass by Dale Wimbrow in a press conference, during lockdown he kept his social media followers’ spirits up by posting inspirational daily videos and last week he went viral after borrowing a philosophical line attributed to Eleanor Roosevelt, the former first lady of the United States. “The past is history, the future is a mystery. Today’s a gift, that’s why they call it the present,” he said after victory over the leaders, Mansfield.

Tranmere shared the clip on social media, declaring it “Wednesday wisdom” and supporters quickly flagged the passage was also used in the animated film Kung Fu Panda 2. “I’ve heard of Hong Kong Phooey but not Kung Fu Panda … I’ve been using that quote since I was at Scunny. The other quote I really like is from a speech given by [Theodore] Roosevelt: ‘The Man in the Arena.’ I’ve always picked out quotes from different places to use with the players.”

Adkins’s previous stint in management ended in exasperation at Charlton three years ago and having accepted an upstairs role at Tranmere after a conversation with the chairman, Mark Palios, with whom he played for the club, and started a postgraduate degree in strategic leadership, did he think his days in the dugout were gone? “Let’s face it, I didn’t have any intention of becoming a League Two manager again,” he says. “I love it, but I hadn’t gone in search of being a manager. I’d not applied for any jobs. Sometimes it can be classed as being a young man’s game but I still feel like an 18-year-old on the training ground. It was a logical decision because I care about the club. I’ll always be a Tranmere Rovers fan and I’ll always do whatever I can to help.”

It was while a teenager at Tranmere that Adkins got his first taste of management, taking charge of Renbad Rovers, the Birkenhead Sunday League team for whom his younger brothers, Roy and Richard, played. Adkins, while starting his Uefa coaching badges, led them from the fourth division to the first, winning league and cup doubles along the way. Alan Woan, brother of Everton’s assistant manager, Ian, represented Renbad during Adkins’s nine years in charge and the former Premier League referee Mike Dean, a Tranmere fan, was sometimes the man in the middle. “He was starting out as a youngster but you could see he was heading for the top.”

Adkins’s attention to detail extended to painting Subbuteo players in Renbad colours. “Before a game I would be on my knees using my Subbuteo pitch to explain what we were looking to do tactically. I’ve still got all of my team sheets from every game, a book for each season; it says who we played, the score, who scored, the formations, who the subs were, what the weather was like. It was a great grounding and a very early introduction into coaching. That was the start of it all.”

Upon accepting the position of technical director at Tranmere, the plan was to work a couple of days a week helping to review and improve practices, from recruitment to rehabilitation, and spend time with his parents, who still live on the Wirral, his wife, Angie, and his two-year-old grandson, Ollie. A trip to Japan to celebrate Angie’s 60th birthday last month had to be put on the back burner. “As my wife said to me: ‘So much for two days a week,’” Adkins says, laughing.