Paul Sturrock opens the door to the manager’s office at Yeovil Town and there is a strong smell of emulsion. Everything seems green at Huish Park but the wall behind Sturrock’s desk has recently been painted orange as a nod of respect to Dundee United, the club he represented with such distinction across four decades.
“I normally have more of my teams on the wall, but this is the one I support,” Sturrock says. “Sixteen years as a player [from 1974], five years as a coach and, stupidly, I took the manager’s job to keep them up for two and a half years. Normally this wall [to the left] would be green, light blue, dark blue, red – like a stick of rock.”
That eclectic colour scheme, Sturrock explains, is because he feels an emotional attachment to the clubs he has worked for over the years – a list that also includes St Johnstone, Plymouth Argyle, Southampton, Sheffield Wednesday, Swindon Town, Southend United and now Yeovil.
It is hard to think of another manager who would call a decorator in to do something similar, but then so much about Sturrock seems unique. The 58-year-old is the quizmaster at The White Hart Hotel, his local pub in the village of Menheniot, in Cornwall, on a Saturday night and on Sunday he plays in the pool league. In the past he has also combined life in the dugout with working as a restaurant critic.
“Plymouth twice, I did a wee bit at Southend for the local paper and Swindon for a wee while as well. This ties in with my love of food. It was quite enjoyable going around, even though you weren’t critiquing, [sometimes] people thought you were!” Sturrock says with a chuckle.
“Over the years I’ve just started to enjoy cooking; it’s something I like doing for people. I struggle with the baking, I must admit. I’m having a nightmare with muffins at the minute, just trying to get them totally right. Muffins are hard, actually. Anyway, that’s another story.”
During an enjoyable hour in Sturrock’s company, plenty of tales are told, many of them humorous and one or two emotive, in particular the day when he was chatting with some Plymouth supporters at Home Park and realised that the cup of tea in his hand was shaking. “I knew there was something wrong,” Sturrock says. “Two days later I spoke to the club doctor and he sent me to a specialist. They found out I had the start of Parkinson’s.”
Sturrock was only 42 at the time. “I made a conscious decision I wouldn’t tell anybody, because I did feel it would affect my career. And I do feel since I’ve come out with it I’ve maybe lost several jobs because of it. But for a number of years the only people who knew in football were the club doctors who were tied to the oath and my two trusted henchmen, Kevin Summerfield and John Blackley [his backroom staff].”
It was 2008 when Sturrock, in his second spell as Plymouth manager, decided he needed to go public. “The tablets have done a fantastic masking job, but the flick in my left leg … it was becoming pretty obvious I had something. I was making out to people I had achilles trouble as a player. Also, just at that time, there was a strength change in my tablets which I thought was going to affect me a wee bit and I did feel that I did not want anyone surmising about my illness.”
Sturrock had a health scare in 1995, when he was managing St Johnstone and collapsed in the dugout after he hyperventilated, but the news that he was suffering from Parkinson’s, a degenerative disease that is much more common in people over the age of 65, came as a huge shock to many.
The one thing Sturrock has never wanted, he says, is sympathy. “The flick on my left leg will never go away and I do tire sometimes late at night, but I know now how to monitor my day so that I have enough energy for everything that I’ve got to do as a football manager. And, at the end of the day, it doesn’t affect this job, because this is clear as a bell,” Sturrock says, pointing to his head.
After spending two years in the wilderness, in part because of his reluctance to leave the south-west, Sturrock found himself in the strange position this month of taking two jobs in the space of a week. He started in an advisory role at Torquay United but walked out only four days later. The following afternoon he was unveiled as Gary Johnson’s replacement at Yeovil. “I had no contract at Torquay so when this job came along it was a no-brainer,” Sturrock says.
A slightly surreal week came to an almost inevitable end when Yeovil drew with Notts County and were relegated from League One only 48 hours after Sturrock had introduced himself to the players. “In my mind when I got here, I was relegated. I don’t think there was any other way of looking at it. It would have taken a damn miracle,” Sturrock says.
His track record suggests that he may well be the man to get Yeovil moving in the right direction again after the club slipped from the Championship to League Two in the space of two years. Sturrock has won promotion five times as a manager and the fact that the Glovers have already beaten Sheffield United and Swindon, two play-off candidates, under his watch hints at a brighter future.
Proud of his past achievements as a player and a manager, Sturrock picks up the DVD sitting on his desk. It is Dundee United’s famous win over Barcelona at the Camp Nou in the second leg of their Uefa Cup quarter-final in 1987 and has already been viewed on the Yeovil team coach.
“I did the tactics for the game against Swindon very much like what we did against Barcelona away from home. So they watched it on the bus going to the game, and then I mentioned it in the team talk. Yes, it was a bit of fun showing me playing in the game, but I said the serious part is: ‘Look at the organisation of that team and the way we played,’ and I think they took it on board.”
Sturrock talks with great fondness of his playing days at Dundee United, for whom he scored 171 goals in 576 games, and tells a lovely story about returning to Tannadice in November with four friends from Cornwall. They had been away on a golfing weekend in Scotland when Sturrock accepted an invitation to visit the club he helped to win the title in 1983. After speaking in several of the lounges before the game, Sturrock was running late for the match and had to get to the other side of the ground to return to his seat. He ended up walking around the side of the pitch and the standing ovation that followed is something that will never leave him.
“My four mates said they were crying, the tears were coming down my face as well. It was the best moment ever. It was like a Mexican wave, one boy recognised me and it went like wildfire all the way round. Incredible,” Sturrock says, smiling. “It’s a bit of a shame with the team now, because the players were going: ‘What’s all this clapping for?’ Half of them didn’t know me from Adam. They just saw this fat bastard walking along the track waving at everybody, thinking: ‘Who the fuck’s he?’”
Sturrock goes on to reveal that he is planning on bringing out an autobiography later in the year and it is safe to say that it will not be short of material. Never mind all his experiences on the pitch and in the dugout, this is a man who once made two St Johnstone players have a go at roofing for the day – “If you go on YouTube you’ll see the boys” – and two years ago travelled to Wembley with Southend fans after politely turning down an offer to lead the team out for the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy final a fortnight after he had been sacked.
“I got on a supporter bus and finished up at a pub next to Wembley with 4,000 Southend supporters. I was mobbed. Drink everywhere. I had a kilt on, full regalia, Dundee United colours, and I had a fantastic day until I watched the game, which was my saddest moment in football,” Sturrock says. “I thought it should have been me there managing the team.”
Sturrock’s one shot at the Premier League in England ended prematurely. Appointed Southampton manager in March 2004, at a time when his stock was high after transforming Plymouth’s fortunes, Sturrock lasted only five and a half months at St Mary’s. He won five, drew two and lost six of his 13 games in charge but never saw eye to eye with Rupert Lowe, the Southampton chairman at the time. “People seem to think I got sacked, I never. It was mutual,” Sturrock says. “I had no qualms about leaving because I didn’t like working for the man.”
Management, Sturrock says, has been a “rollercoaster of a time” but Yeovil already feels like it could be a good fit on and off the field. He is only an hour and 50 minutes from his adopted home – “Devon and Cornwall is my type of living, mañana is the word they use down there” – which means that he has some valuable “thinking time” in the car when he is not staying over in Yeovil and he can also keep his job at the White Hart Hotel. “I can probably get down in time to get a quiz done on a Saturday night after a home game,” Sturrock says.
As for his health, Sturrock is doing much more than soldiering on. “The worrying aspect for me is people like Muhammad Ali and Michael J Fox, who have got a serious Parkinson’s ailment; the tablets are not helping them any longer. And that’s what people surmise that it looks like with everybody – which is totally untrue,” he says.
“There’s lots of people working out there with this illness. You’ve just got to be positive in your approach. Some days I feel hellish but you get up in the morning and as soon as you’re on your feet, you get going. One day it will win. But I can tell you now, I’m going to put up a hell of a battle.”
