Jean-Paul de Marigny’s move from assistant coach at Melbourne Victory to assistant coach at Newcastle Jets was one of the more curious transfers of the off-season. Why would anyone leave a championship-winning club to go to the last-placed, crisis-ridden club he had taken to court just a few years earlier?
It was family, not football, that forced “JP” to leave Melbourne. On 1 May earlier this year, as Victory were preparing for a blockbuster A-League semi-final against Melbourne City, De Marigny’s wife Donna was undergoing surgery for breast cancer. Victory went on to win that semi-final 3-0, and then repeated the same score in the grand final against Sydney FC. De Marigny, however, found it hard to enjoy the moment.
“Football-wise it was the highest you could go in this country, but personal life was as low as I could be,” he says. “So it was mixed emotions. It was like a double life basically.”
When the season finished he left Melbourne Victory immediately, turning his back on a two-year deal at the most successful and most stable club in the country to return to Sydney and look after his wife. For a coach who was out of the A-League from 2006 to 2013, that’s a big call. De Marigny, of course, says “there was really no decision to make”.
There are two JPs – the ruthless, football-obsessed competitor that the fans see, and the doting husband and father his friends and colleagues know. You get a complete picture of the man when he says: “I still regard one of my biggest achievements – apart from being a father and a husband – is actually making a full-time living out of football in Australia.”
Born in Mauritius, at 15 De Marigny migrated to Australia with his mother after his parents divorced. In 1986, he met Donna on the Central Coast after a National Soccer League match, and since then his number one focus has been family. Four years ago, when his son Jake was 15 – the same age De Marigny was when he left his best mate in Mauritius – he turned down a coaching opportunity in Asia so that his son wouldn’t have to go through the same experience.
“Everything you do always has a cost,” he says. “My goal was always to break the cycle of my family being dysfunctional.”
His football career – 318 national league games, three championships, five Socceroos caps – has been one of crisis management. Just as he was hitting his strides as a young player, his first club Hakoah Sydney City collapsed and withdrew from the NSL after three rounds in 1987. In 2003-04 he had one season as head coach with Marconi, but that was interrupted as the NSL folded and re-started as the A-League 15 months later. In 2006 he was sacked as assistant coach by the Jets with two years to run on a three-year contract (he successfully sued the club over the dismissal, with the judge describing his treatment as “appalling”). And when Donna fell ill this year, they were preparing to move to Melbourne permanently.
With the long shadow of former owner Nathan Tinkler slowly receding, Football Federation Australia as stand-in owners and under the guidance of 33-year-old rookie coach Scott Miller, Newcastle Jets sit third on the A-League ladder ahead of this Saturday’s derby against Central Coast Mariners. Ten years ago, De Marigny was the head coach of the Jets in their first ever competitive fixture against the Mariners. Now, he says he’s back for “unfinished business”.
De Marigny is a quiet achiever well-respected by his peers. He’s content to be recognised by the likes of Kevin Muscat, who sought him out to be his assistant, and Tony Popovic, who wanted him at Western Sydney Wanderers after he left Victory. Since joining the Jets, Miller has said De Marigny has been one of the biggest influences on his career – a big wrap from a coach who has worked with the likes of Martin Jol, Roy Hodgson, Mark Hughes, René Muelensteen and Ange Postecoglou.
That sort of respect is engendered by hard work and modesty, the values which are central to engineer a rebuild at the Jets. On the club’s past mistakes, De Marigny is blunt: “The way the owners conducted themselves was completely different to the values of this town. They didn’t take the responsibility that was given to them. For me, they took it with no humility and honour. They disrespected the whole process.”
De Marigny intimately understands the local aesthetic. When asked which players he wants to see at the club, he talks of uncovering the next Col Curran, David Lowe, Joe Senkalski, Craig Johnston and Ray Baartz. Ten years ago when the Jets put together their first A-League side, he was the first person to move to Newcastle, instructing the players they had to live in the area they wished to represent. “You’ve got to bring everything here to be part of it,” he says. “That was not negotiable. If you’re going to sign you need to live here in a proper manner.”
Nobody knows the fragility of Australian football better than De Marigny, but he’s already thinking of a long-term future in Newcastle. The Jets, like all regional clubs, operate best as an extended family, and now that Donna is on the mend, De Marigny is ready to nurse Australian football’s most dysfunctional family back to good health.
“I saw this as coming back to finish the work that we started,” he says. “I saw it as a big opportunity. I really believe that this football club can be a very, very big club. It has to be a big club for the benefit of the A-League.”
