Pascal Chimbonda at Skelmersdale United: Seriously! What the f?

April 16, 2024

It is time for the huddle and the man dominating the centre of the dressing room is calling his players together for some final words of encouragement.

Pascal Chimbonda has been in these situations as a player alongside Zinedine Zidane, Thierry Henry and various other greats of French football.

He knows what it is like to be part of a pre-match huddle before the World Cup final, having been in France’s squad for the 2006 tournament. He was also part of the last Tottenham Hotspur side to win a major trophy and was named in the Premier League’s team of the year during his time with Wigan Athletic.

Now, though, Chimbonda is trying to establish himself as a manager with Skelmersdale United of the North West Counties League Premier Division, the ninth level of English football.

Skelmersdale – or Skem, as everyone calls them – are playing Colne, also from the county of Lancashire in the north west of England, and The Athletic has been allowed into the dressing room to see, close up, how everything is coming together under their new manager.

And, five minutes before Tuesday night’s kick-off, Chimbonda sounds concerned.

“That warm-up was f—ing shocking. Seriously, listen to me. That 10 minutes is important. But that was so f—ing sloppy. That was crap. We cannot warm up like that again. We have to be better, much f—ing better.”

One player can be heard asking for a hairdryer because his boots are still wet from the weekend’s match. Others have arrived late because of the traffic on the M62 motorway.

The referee has knocked on the door. It is the signal for the players that they have a minute to line up in the tunnel and make their way to the pitch.

“Switch on, switch on,” Chimbonda calls out. “Every single ball, we have to win it. Every single header, win it. Every tackle, win it. Right from the start, we need to be ready, we need to be sharp. I don’t want to see any sloppy passes. Because I will be shouting at you. You know me, and I will shout.”

He brings the players and staff together for a show of unity. Each holds up an arm, leans in and clasps hands with his team-mates.

“One, two, three, Skem!” they shout.

Always find it fascinating to see close-up what goes down in a dressing room.

Grateful to Pascal Chimbonda and Skelmersdale United for letting me join them.

Unfortunately, the game didn’t go to plan. Article in ⁦@TheAthleticFC tomorrow (72 expletives just at half-time) pic.twitter.com/8rF59RJCy8

— Daniel Taylor (@DTathletic) November 23, 2023

What follows can be described only as a professional humiliation and, for Chimbonda, a jarring reminder that there are good reasons why his new team are bottom of the league.

It is an accident-prone, dysfunctional, shocker of a performance: Skelmersdale 0-6 Colne. And when the players return to the dressing room, Chimbonda is true to his word.

There is a lot of shouting.

A drive through Skelmersdale explains why the club’s supporters wear scarves with the slogan: “Land of the Roundabouts.”

Steve Heighway, one of Liverpool’s legendary players from the 1970s, began his career here. Leon Osman, the former Everton midfielder, was a Skem lad and The Verve was formed out of Richard Ashcroft meeting his future bandmates at nearby Up Holland school.

Simon Tong, The Verve’s guitarist, started a new band a few years ago and brought out an album called Prospect of Skelmersdale. And, yes, there are enough roundabouts here to make your head spin, including one that is purportedly the second largest in Europe.

There are no traffic lights in the entire town.

Skelmersdale – the town of no traffic lights (Historic England Archive/Heritage Images via Getty Images)

As for the prospects of its football team, they have some committed people working on their behalf and a chairman, Frank Hughes, who is devoted enough to drive a car with the personalised registration plate OOO 5KEM.

But it is never going to be straightforward while Skem are effectively homeless, staring at relegation and trying to keep their heads above water after a series of ordeals that, according to Hughes, have put a 141-year-old club “in a position where, technically, we are threatened with closing down”.

Enter Chimbonda, with all the relevant coaching qualifications, offering his services for free and willing to make a regular 330-mile (530km) round trip from his home up in Newcastle.

Unfortunately for Chimbonda, it is going to need some kind of football miracle to prevent the chilly fingers of relegation closing around Skelmersdale’s throat.

He inherited a side which had won one out of 16 league fixtures under predecessor Matt Potter, falling 10 points adrift at the bottom of the league.

THE TEAMS ARE OUT

Skelmersdale United Vs Colne#WeAreSkem #Skembonda @nwcfl pic.twitter.com/HNjOSqCthm

— Skelmersdale United FC (@Skemutdofficial) November 21, 2023

Yet this latest defeat is a new low and, trailing 4-0 at half-time, the home dressing room is boiling over even before Chimbonda walks through the door.

Ben Barnes, the goalkeeper, is shouting with so much force it feels like the walls were beginning to vibrate.

“That’s the s—-est performance I’ve ever been involved in. That is f—ing dog s—. There are fans who have paid f—ing good money to come here and watch this. So why the f— is nobody here showing any b——ks?”

When Chimbonda enters the room, he starts by telling everyone to shush. But he is raging, too, and the volume quickly goes back up.

Eyes blazing, index finger pointing, it’s a seven-minute diatribe featuring 72 expletives in all and probably everything you would have expected given the blitz of substitutions he had made, almost like a form of protest, inside the opening 30 minutes.

Two players were taken off, leaving the pitch cursing, at the midway point of that first half. A third was hooked on the half-hour mark. For a footballer, this is the ultimate humiliation. A fourth was then substituted during the interval, when the dressing room was at its most volatile and Chimbonda was struggling to make sense of what he had just seen.

“What the f—! What the f—! What the f—! What the f—! What the f—! Seriously, what the f—!”

You get the idea. But, frankly, what else would you expect from a manager whose team are 4-0 down at half-time at home to mid-table opponents?

To observe these moments, however, was to be reminded that when ITV Granada, a north-west UK television network, sent a film crew to cover one of Skem’s recent training sessions, they had to bleep out some of the material and the reporter, David Chisnall, introduced Chimbonda as “passionate, professional and potty-mouthed”.

No serious professional in football wants to be publicly embarrassed and, in that 15-minute half-time break, Chimbonda’s players were finding that out the hard way.

“Now go back out there and show a bit of f—ing something in the second half,” came the instruction. “Because this is a shambles. This is f—ing horrible. This is s—. If it wasn’t for him (pointing at goalkeeper Barnes), it would be six or seven.”

In quieter moments, Chimbonda can reminisce about the years when he was voted as the Premier League’s best right-back.

He won the 2007-08 League Cup with Spurs and had a perfect view, as an unused substitute that night in Berlin, of Zidane’s headbutt on Marco Materazzi in the 2006 World Cup final.

As a manager, he preaches good football and that quickly becomes apparent when you watch him set up his training sessions.

Chimbonda still wears one of his old Tottenham training tops. Look after the ball, is his message, treat it like your friend. Every routine is geared towards making sure the players are comfortable in possession. “I’ve been inspired by Guardiola, Mourinho, Simeone and Zidane,” he says. “My philosophy will be to play attractive football.”

Pascal Chimbonda takes training at Skelmersdale (Frank Hughes)

All of which brings us back to the question of why a man with his CV has pitched up at a crisis-hit club in the depths of non-League where attendances seldom get above 150, the budget is the lowest in the division and the players earn little more than their travelling expenses.

“I want to show that Black managers can do a good job,” says Chimbonda. “Everyone knows how difficult it can be for somebody in my position. I have applied for lots of jobs. I love football, I love coaching. I think I can help people. I send my CV and I don’t even get a reply. No interviews, nothing. ‘No experience’, they say. But I was never going to give up.”

Against that kind of backdrop, it is worth remembering that Patrick Vieira, another former France international, has said “doors are not open” for his fellow Black managers and that there are all sorts of statistics to back that statement up. One report last year showed that 43 per cent of Premier League players were Black, and 34 per cent in the EFL. Yet only 4.4 per cent of managers in those competitions were Black.

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Chimbonda has been fortunate – if that is the right word – that the people in charge at Skelmersdale seem just as grateful that he applied for the job as he is for them entrusting him to pull off an improbable feat of escapology.

“I couldn’t understand how a man who had played in the Premier League, with all his expertise and experience, had been passed over for so many management jobs,” says chairman Hughes.

“I always found it quite insulting that people were happy to trust Black players but didn’t seem to trust Black managers. That worries me. I’m an advocate for diversity and Pascal’s view was always that he was being passed over because of his colour.”

Chimbonda and Skelmersdale chairman Hughes (Frank Hughes)

The challenge for Chimbonda is to show, with limited time and resources, that he can flourish at this level, and more fool those clubs who overlooked him in recent years. But he is also having to cope with the harsh realities of ninth-tier football and he has already seen how tough it is.

Skelmersdale don’t even play in their own town. They had to move ground last year after failing the mandatory FIFA “bounce test” on the artificial pitch where they used to play. A new playing surface would cost £300,000 and that, plainly, is beyond the means of a club where a GoFundMe collection page – Help Us Bring Skem Home – was set up in April, raising £900.

So ‘home’ games are now played at Burscough FC, 14 miles away, where there is a clubhouse, one stand and three sides of the ground where there is little to prevent stray balls ending up on the adjacent fields and railway tracks. For the Colne match, six of them had to be rescued during the warm-up alone.

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The groundshare costs them £500 per match, which is a serious drain on the finances of a club at this level. Then insult was added to injury last season when, despite finishing 11th in the 20-team Northern Premier League Division One West, Skem were relegated because Burscough’s ground was not deemed up to the grade required.

It was, in the words of then-manager Richard Brodie, “upsetting, unsettling … like my kids had built a Lego house and a dog came through and stood on it”.

Chimbonda has inherited a part-time team, including one player who makes caravans for a living.

Nor is it ideal that training is held every Thursday evening, 8pm to 9pm, on a rented pitch at St John Bosco Arts College in the Croxteth district of Liverpool, a city some 15 miles south west of Skelmersdale.

Last week’s session was preceded by a game between Aintree Ajax and Crosby in the North Liverpool Junior Football League. That match overran and, at 8.02pm, there was the slightly surreal sight of a World Cup finalist wondering how much longer he needed to wait before it was acceptable to kick a bunch of under-12s off the pitch.

Chimbonda with fellow France internationals Zinedine Zidane and William Gallas (John Macdougall/AFP via Getty Images)

When the session finally got underway, Chimbonda had to make do without a goalkeeper because Barnes was unable to get out of his night shift. Barnes is a police officer, which came in handy when some local youths started causing trouble at a recent match. Still in his kit, Skelmersdale’s No 1 ran off the pitch after the final whistle to apprehend one of the troublemakers.

And now, facing a Colne side managed by former Burnley midfielder Paul Weller, it is only a string of saves from Barnes that prevents the damage reaching double figures.

One of Skem’s players is sent to the sin bin for 10 minutes for complaining too loudly about the match officials (though not as loudly as Chimbonda, who disputes virtually every decision).

Then, at 6-0, another player is injured and the only remaining substitute is their reserve goalkeeper. However, unaware he is needed, he has helped carry his crocked team-mate to the dressing room. Someone has to fetch him. His goalkeeper’s top comes off, replaced by an outfield shirt, and for the final 20 minutes he is used as a centre-forward.

“I saw two teams out there,” Hassan Salim, Chimbonda’s assistant, tells the players in another eviscerating inquest at full-time. “One was their team, and I don’t even think they were very good. But you… you lot were like a team of ghosts.”

Chimbonda has calmed down a little by this stage. He pulls up a chair and softens his tone, telling his players he was angry with them because he cares about their development and wants them to learn. He even says he might be partially to blame for picking the wrong team.

His verdict, though, is that they are “too nice”. Why, he asked, was nobody having a go back at him? Where was their fire? “Football is not f—ing nice,” he says, voice rising again. “I love all of you. I would go to war for all of you. But I don’t know if you guys would go to war with me.”

It had been, by some distance, the worst night of his five weeks in charge. And, somehow, the shouts from spectators can seem much more voluble when it is only a sparse crowd.

The Skelmersdale faithful (Daniel Taylor/The Athletic)

One fan behind the goal seemed unimpressed by the manner in which Chimbonda’s arrival had brought a wave of publicity. He was shouting with heavy sarcasm, from 5-0 onwards, that the club “need to call another press conference”. Others were just slating the performance as embarrassing, the old-fashioned way. At the final whistle, some of the players went over to apologise.

Ultimately, though, it feels unfair to judge Chimbonda on one distressing night when the evidence is clear for everyone to see: this team need a miracle worker. And, in one sense, this was his first league defeat, at least while he was in the dugout. Chimbonda had won his first league fixture and drawn another two (in between, he missed a run of three league defeats because of a pre-arranged trip to see his elderly mother on the Caribbean island of Guadeloupe).

Skem’s directors could be found after the match in a clubhouse where a buffet had been laid on for the Colne players. Hughes, re-appointed in May for a second stint as chairman, was disappointed but realistic. It was the fifth time this season, he pointed out, they had let in six and the previous four occasions all came before Chimbonda’s appointment.

“He is not asking for a penny,” says Hughes. “He just wants the chance to show he can be a decent football manager. He has a point to prove because of the number of times he has been passed over. And good luck to him, I say. When you look at everything he has done in the game, there is a good argument to say he should already be managing at a higher level.”

(Top photos: Daniel Taylor/The Athletic)

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