Chris Ramsey was the epitome of composure as he sat down in the hot seat at QPR’s training ground. Life has not changed overnight for the man who has spent the best part of three decades coaching away from the spotlight. He is still sleeping well, even if team selections sometimes cross his mind in the dead of night. He reminds himself to be a little more guarded than normal now he has the status of a Premier League manager. But he remains a “normal bod”, trying to seize an opportunity years in the making to prove himself among the elite.
A little under a year ago, Ramsey was such a normal bod, not so well known outside the academy circles he worked in for years at Tottenham, he was airbrushed out of a photograph splashed over the back pages of some national newspapers. In the original image, Emmanuel Adebayor salutes the Tottenham dugout and Tim Sherwood and Ramsey are returning the compliment but for the Daily Mail and the Mirror, Ramsey appeared to be superfluous. The rapport between player and manager mattered. The man in between apparently didn’t.
They definitely underestimated him. After a momentous few days in which he oversaw QPR’s first away win of the season and was handed the task by the chairman Tony Fernandes of trying to keep the club up, Ramsey both looks and sounds the part. He will try to inspire a second away win at Hull on Saturday and the players have responded to his style. The training sessions have caught their imagination. Selecting players in their favoured positions has had an impact. The combination of straight talking and calmness has had an effect. Ramsey is doing everything he can to give this season a happy ending for the club and for himself. Fernandes said he would be “nuts” not to keep Ramsey on as manager if that happens.
This experience is a meaningful one for a man whose years in football gave the impression he was a classic career coach. It’s a vocation he admits he fell into. As a player – with Brighton he appeared in the 1983 FA Cup final, then he had spells at Swindon and Southend before leaving the English game – coaching wasn’t on his radar at all. But life took him to a point where he felt compelled to re-evaluate everything.
In his mid-20s he was playing for Naxxar Lions in Malta, where he would discover the joy of coaching because he had to find something. “I had frittered away what pennies I had. I had no money. I was at a low ebb and that changed my life.
“When you go to a holiday place you can only go to the beach so often. Because you haven’t got a peer group around you to get up to no good, you come to a point in your life where you need to go in one direction or another.”
Ramsey took the path to re-educating himself. He began working in a gym as a personal trainer. He learned how to guide someone through rehab. He took a series of courses. “Physiology, anatomy and so on,” he says. “I got myself a tutor in the afternoons to teach me maths so I could get through the exams to come back to uni.” He makes a self-deprecating joke about how his maths evidently didn’t do him any good when it comes to negotiating contracts.
Ramsey returned to Holloway in north London – “my manor,” as he calls it proudly – and studied. He graduated with 10 diplomas. The taste for coaching became almost addictive. Ramsey took off for America, where he absorbed yet more lessons in sporting philosophy and the university of life. They have served him well enough in that he has no fear of the challenge in front of him at QPR. “Leaving England to go to another country, and all of a sudden if things don’t go well you leave, or get the sack, and come back to England with nothing. No place to go,” he says. “That was probably more pressure for me, as an individual, than this is.
“Pressure comes in different ways. When I was in Malta, in those days foreign players used to come and go weekly. If you lose three or four games you are gone. I managed to stay there for three years and left of my own accord. But the pressure of going to play knowing that if you don’t play well you are going to be back in England in 48 hours is a lot worse than this.”
Much of Ramsey’s experience in recent years has been with youth football, both with the FA mostly working with the England Under-20s, and then at Spurs where he collaborated with Sherwood and Les Ferdinand in bringing through Harry Kane, Nabil Bentaleb and co. QPR recruited him to work in youth development but this opportunity has knocked, and Ramsey intends to grab it.
Isn’t it what he worked towards all those years? “You’ve got to say yes but I haven’t made it yet,” he says. “I have still got 13 games to go in order to make sure I am still sitting here next season with QPR still in the Premier League.”
Saturday’s trip to Hull, so soon after finally curing their travel sickness, gives Ramsey another invitation to make sure more people get to know exactly what he is made of.
