Callum Davidson on Queen's Park return - 'hardened' by St Johnstone, Dundee rejection, Robbie Neilson and America

Double cup winner back in management after period of reflection on the golf course

Callum Davidson believes the rough and smooth experienced at St Johnstone can be the gain of a Queen's Park he has targeted taking to the top flight from their lowly position of second-bottom in the Championship. (Photo by Craig Foy / SNS Group)

Time for self-reflection wasn’t in short supply for Callum Davidson across his nine months out of football.

A period ended this week when he accepted the managerial position at Queen’s Park, the youth development-accenting club he will now seek to haul up from their lowly position of second-bottom in the Scottish Championship. A Saturday morning when the 47-year-old found himself teeing off at 11am on a glorious day at Gleneagles before the three-handicaper produced a fine round at one of Scotland’s grandest courses provided one such moment. “As all the Premiership games were kicking off [as I was finishing up] I thought ‘this is nice’,” said Davidson. Nicer, certainly, than what led to this enforced leisure time. A dramatic fall following the greatest accomplishment in the modern-day Scottish game by any manager of a truly-modest provincial club in the form of a cup double with St Johnstone in 2021 that gave way to cutting a truly careworn figure across the subsequent two seasons as the Perth club flirted with relegation.

Yet, ultimately, however flogged he had been by football’s Fates across his three-year stint in charge of a McDiarmid Park club with which his bonds are profound there was something else about his days golfing that told him he couldn’t distance himself from the game forever. “I was there every Saturday looking at results,” he said. “So that told me I wanted to go back in.”

Wounds required to heal for that, though. Davidson, just as he was about to be announced, elected to pass on taking the reins with newly-promoted Premiership Dundee last May - six weeks after he parted ways with St Johnstone. “I think the biggest thing was I had just come out of a job and ‘boom’, I had that opportunity and, rightly or wrongly, I decided to say no at the time,” he said. “Tony [Docherty] has gone in there and done brilliantly. You look back on it…was it the right or wrong decision? You never know. I just felt at that time, I wasn’t ready to go straight back in.”

He says “a little bit” of that was then not having fully shaken off the woes that enveloped him in Perth. “That is the experience you gain from managing,” he said. “I was assistant manager for eight or nine years, you go into management and it is completely different. You don’t realise until you have done it just how completely different it is. I started my career at St Johntone, finished my career at St Johnstone, was assistant manager there. It was a club where you felt pressure because you didn’t want to let anybody down. That is probably the same anywhere. I am here now [at Queen’s Park] and making close connections and don’t want to let anyone down. But I’ll definitely use my experience to prevent it affecting me outside of it. I’ll just go and enjoy myself and do the best I can.

“You look everywhere, managers are under pressure if they lose two or three games and they are the worst ever. You have to accept it. It probably has hardened me. That’s why I’ll try to enjoy it here, helping develop the players and hope, with that, Queen’s Park can creep up the league and eventually get promoted to the big league. There were times when I was out the game when I really missed it – and there were times when I thought, ‘this is all right’.”

Davidson had the chance to go to America, as Robbie Neilson now has following his jettisoning by Hearts, but wanted to stay in a footballing “hub” country; whether that was Scotland, England or a European league. And the refreshingly ego-free personality had one or two other “nibbles” he didn’t judge by whether they were opportunities to be a manager again, or a coach. “When I left I was probably ready for a break, by that point,” he said. “It wasn’t so much there was a lot going on [at St Johnstone then], it was that it was at a point that it was never going to get better than it had been with winning the cups. I had a great affinity with St Johnstone, so when I left I felt, ‘phew, that’s ok’, and I wanted to take a wee breather.

“You then get those bits when you get a bit frustrated, a bit disappointed, and that just goes up and down the whole time. The busier you keep yourself, the better it was, and always with an eye out to getting back in. It was very hard to go and watch games because you never knew what type of games to watch because you didn’t know where you could be when getting back in…whether it is America, or somewhere else. You look and Robbie [Neilson] has just gone to Tampa, and he left at the same time as me, so you never know where you are going to end up. When my golf was good I was happy, and when my golf was crap I was peed off.

“I am pretty much open to anything, I’m not that ‘I want to be a manager’ type. I enjoy it, don’t get me wrong. But I’m quite comfortable doing anything. I’m comfortable working for the BBC, working for the SFA - which I’ve been doing quite a lot for. With all these things, I think my time off has helped me. Working with the SFA as a coach educator helped me get the wee buzz back again about coaching and developing those I work with. Hence the reason why this job has probably jumped on from it. There I was helping all the young coaches and thought I was probably better off helping young players.”