Interview: Eddie May, Falkirk manager

Published on Saturday 7 November 2009 20:29

FROM A distance, Falkirk's travails this season have seemed to be the classic case of an upstart young manager receiving his deserved comeuppance. Eddie May, from the tenor of his big talk on taking over the position from John Hughes in July, was going to be improve on what had gone before.

His assertions about playing to players' strengths, getting more from individuals, defending properly and getting in more crosses and shots were interpreted as sleights on his predecessor. Indeed, the absence of even the most platitudinous expression of thanks for Hughes' contribution over five mainly successful years at the club appeared damning.

It made May a marked man among the football community, if popular with a Falkirk support who, frankly, had had it with Hughes following the club's flirt with the First Division.

Yet, seeing him at close quarters, it is difficult not to feel sympathy for May – even if he seemed almost to set himself up for the ten-game winless run in the SPL that has anchored his club to bottom spot. He comes over a straightforward, if slightly awkward, character. One whose failure to edit his thoughts for public consumption isn't so much born of arrogance as a misplaced sense of integrity.

The cheap option, the inexperienced option, in those early press conferences the 42-year-old patently wanted to set out a vision that demonstrated he was more than a excellent youth coach elevated beyond his station. He got carried away and ramped up his team's prospects to the exclusion of acknowledging what an unenviable, hellishly tough job he had been handed.

"People shouldn't lose sight of the fact we were 20 minutes from being relegated last season. We then lost 14 players," he says. "We got a third of the budget cut off. Is Eddie May going to transform Scottish football on the back of that? No. Is Eddie May going to be the best manager in the world? No.

"I never said I was going to do it better. I said we were going to change the way we play and I will do things my way and play to people's strengths. It wasn't until two weeks later there was another 325,000 that every single SPL club got wiped off their budget (because of the Setanta collapse]. That is major. That dictates that what you can recruit becomes very, very limited. You've got an outlook, players in mind, but sometimes finance dictates that. I've got a way I want to play in my head, the team I want to play and a system I want to play but I don't have the players to do it."

These are not excuses from May. These are valid reasons why, ahead of his team hosting Celtic this afternoon to complete the first SPL circuit, the term "embattled" has been welded to him; why he finds himself the subject of rumour-mongering about being jettisoned and control of team affairs being handed to Alex Smith and Steven Pressley, the coaching team he brought in.

Aside from the obvious of having only four points to trail second-bottom Hamilton by five points, what counts against May is that what he is saying now about the difficulties he faces, he should have said four months ago. Stubbornly, he regrets nothing of what he then did, or did not, utter. "We have had more crosses than last year, more shots," he says. "We've lost 14 players because the money restriction dictated that. How are you meant to lose a third of your income for players? If you go back, I said from day one that my main job was to keep us in the SPL, not get into the top six. I am realistic, quite a positive person, and a very truthful person.

"At no point was I being disrespectful towards anybody who's ever been here. Anyone who suggests that I will challenge. At no point did I say the people in the previous regime didn't know what they were talking about. All I said was that, in my view, we could do things a little bit differently, get the ball forward in wider areas and try to put it in the box a bit more. I think we've achieved that on a lot of occasions. And on a lot of occasions we've lost silly goals and we're trying to address that.

"If someone wants their midfielder to get on the ball and play little passes, or a midfielder to just go and tackle, who is right and who is wrong? The player will dictate that. I'm not always right, I get things wrong, it can happen every single day. I don't think I am fireproof, I don't think I know everything. Is it going to make a good story if I said John did a good job for five years? No. Does it make a good story if I say John didn't know what he was going to do or I could do better? It probably does, but nothing could be further from the truth.

"If you look back, I was part of that set-up for five years, so if they are wrong then I am wrong and I am contradicting myself. I haven't spoken to John about it; I didn't need to because we worked here for five years very successfully. We don't have any problem at all.

"People will make whatever they want to make out of things but we've been part of a football club at a time when it's been at its most successful between the first team and youths. Never been in a better position in that sense.

"The only difference this year is the youths are still going very well, and what has changed is the first team. Is that down to Eddie May? I think it's down to circumstances and reasons."

The more fair-minded would surely agree the circumstances that leave Falkirk six points worse off than at the corresponding juncture last season are not of May's making. He has had a dreadful time of it with "injuries and operations". And this week even his chairman, Martin Richie, admitted he had not given his manager enough of a summer budget, though suggestions he will receive the guts of a 500,000 rights issue in January seem fanciful. Where May hasn't helped his cause is how he has spoken about it. Yet his approach is non-negotiable.

"You could talk a lot of rubbish (to the press], go away and think: 'I've fooled them all'. You stand up, tell the truth and if people like you, they'll like you. If they don't like you, they don't like you. But the one thing you've got to be in life is honest with people.

"If people take offence at honesty then there is something wrong. I think it's important you tell it as you see it, even if I might not see it the right way. I will never change. I'm not going to give out a lot of rubbish. I'll tell you what I think and that's going to be the honest truth."

Sometimes the truth hurts. And not just the told, but also the teller.