Alan Stubbs discusses his best feeling in football and the one episode which causes him “huge regret”, he relives a spat with Jamie Carragher, a colourful sortie into management – and explains his ‘live for today’ outlook. This 'long read' article was set for publication in Everton's matchday programme for this month's postponed Merseyside derby.
Alan Stubbs doesn’t waste time fretting over what might have been. What use reliving being kept in the dark over Joe Royle’s attempt to sign him for Everton, or wondering how life would have mapped out had he not been released from Goodison Park as a schoolboy?
Why imagine how things would have unfolded if he’d completed a move to Arsenal on the cusp of Arsene Wenger’s transformational reign? Stubbs’s two “poor” career choices of late? In his view, football management contains an element of “Russian roulette” and when he accepted jobs with Rotherham United and St Mirren the chamber was loaded both times.
Stubbs, an uncompromising centre-back with a tremendous passing range and whose speed was all upstairs, sees life through the prism of someone whose personality was altered by two encounters with cancer.
“It did change me, it made me live for the day,” says Stubbs.
“There’s no point thinking, ‘What if?’
"You just want to live life.
“Is there a small bit of me thinking, ‘Will it come back one day?’ “Of course. “But that small bit gets smaller every day.”
Stubbs titled his autobiography How Football Saved My Life.
He “would not be here to tell my story” but for his testicular cancer being exposed by a random drugs test after playing for Celtic in the 1999 Scottish Cup final.
When the cancer returned 18 months later it was in the form of a tumour at the base of Stubbs’s spine and “much more serious”.
The second of four rounds of chemotherapy shrunk the unwelcome impostor and a subsequent eight-hour operation ridded Stubbs of his tumour altogether.
“When I came round I asked the nurse in intensive care how serious it had been and she told me I could have died in the operating theatre,” he says.
Stubbs underwent surgery in early 2001 and later the same year, aged 29, fulfilled the ambition he’d harboured for the previous quarter century when he joined Everton.
“Maybe that was my reward for coming through the illness,” says Stubbs. “If it was, it made my dad the proudest guy you could meet.
“All he ever wanted was to see me play for Everton at Goodison and he did that just before he died.
“Perhaps it was even more special because of what I’d been through, but signing for Everton was special, full stop.
“I found out when I finished that Joe Royle approached Bolton [in 1995/96] but [manager] Colin Todd wanted to keep me and asked Joe not make it public to avoid unsettling me.
“But I played for Everton and captained Everton. That is the most important thing. I will be proud of that until my time comes.”
Let’s address the elephant in the room, then. In Stubbs’ fourth – and “best” – Goodison season in 2004/05 he was instrumental in Everton achieving Champions League qualification.
Out of contract in the summer, the defender’s stay was presumed to be a fait accompli.
Instead an unseemly squabble erupted and Stubbs joined Sunderland. He confesses to existing in a state of disbelief during six months on Wearside before transferring back to Everton.
“It is a huge regret,” says Stubbs. “To put in so much hard work then not play for Everton in the Champions League..." He tails off, no need to add to the sentence.
“Being offered a one-year contract when I’d been a big part of that team… I felt under-valued.
“I think they thought I’d sign because I was an Evertonian.”
Stubbs bought himself a new phone soon after leaving and has no explanation for why one day in January 2006 he switched on his old device.
Hours after firing up the formerly idle mobile, the name of Moyes’s assistant Jimmy Lumsden lit up its screen.
“He asked if I would be interested in coming back,” says Stubbs. “I said, ‘Jimmy, I didn’t want to leave’.
“It happened very quickly from there. I met David at the Tickled Trout hotel in Preston and we did the deal. “We were both wrong – and he didn’t want to talk about it again.
“There were no hard feelings.”
All but nine months of Stubbs’ total of six years at Everton were spent under Moyes.
Predecessor Walter Smith, reasons Stubbs, was “a brilliant man manager, the right man at the wrong time”.
Indeed Stubbs hived off elements of Smith’s methods and added them to strands of Moyes, Kenny Dalglish, briefly Celtic boss, and the “volatile” Bruce Rioch to aid his own start in management with Hibernian.
Nothing of Wim Jansen, though, the erudite Celtic manager who torpedoed a superior Rangers’ bid for a 10th successive title in Stubbs’ second Parkhead season.
Stubbs went to Celtic following Bolton’s relegation in 1996.
He was poised to reunite with Rioch at Arsenal but headed for Scotland to meet boss Tommy Burns regardless.
“I was 30 minutes outside Glasgow and Bruce rang to say, ‘I am having problems here, I could be gone soon, go and sign for Celtic’,” says Stubbs.
“Good on Bruce for telling me.
“Arsenal would have been something else, playing at Highbury and alongside Tony Adams.
"People were talking about me potentially playing for England and it could have led to that – but my career is not defined by not having an England cap.
"It’s not the be all and end all.
"I had five of my happiest years with Celtic.”
Burns’s Celtic of Stubbs, Paolo Di Canio, Jorge Cadete and Pierre van Hooijdonk were an exhilarating watch.
They would routinely play Rangers off the park and invariably lose.
Then came Jansen and his singular approach. “One day he deliberately put on a really poor training session,” says Stubbs.
“He wanted everything to be slow, we were bored and getting nothing from it. He was stopping and starting, getting his coach to interject.
“He wanted to see who would say something, who were his leaders? “I told him what I thought of it.
“He never responded, gave nothing away. He just wanted to know who would accept it and who wouldn’t.
“We didn’t know until way down the line what he had been doing.”
Yet Stubbs employed none of Jansen’s tricks in his three management posts.
“I always thought, ‘Don’t give players an excuse, they will pounce on it,” says Stubbs.
“People are different today and society has changed.”
Equally, the type of upbringing Stubbs had at Bolton Wanderers – where he was invited after dad Ron convinced his desolate son being let go by Everton was not “the end” of his football hopes – belongs to the past.
Stubbs was raised at Burnden Park in an era when apprentices doubled up as general dogsbodies and counted being asked to paint stanchions or clean boots as a lucky break.
“It gave me a brilliant grounding and a lot of respect for the senior players,” says Stubbs.
“You had a responsibility to make sure your jobs were done properly, same as you would on the pitch.”
Stubbs was in Bolton’s first team at 19 and one of Rioch’s most treasured assets as his side climbed two divisions to the Premier League.
Bolton’s party piece under Rioch involved toppling more celebrated opponents. Liverpool, Arsenal and Aston Villa all got a smack on the nose from lower league Wanderers.
Everton, too, and Stubbs scored when Bolton overturned a 2-0 deficit in a Goodison FA Cup third-round replay in 1994.
“There was no sense of wanting to prove people wrong,” says Stubbs.
“I was driven on by playing against my boyhood team and afterwards I had mixed emotions: ‘Great, we won, but what is my family going to say?’
“I was never bitter or angry about the decision [to release him].
“As you grow up, you understand that’s football.”
Everton finished seventh in Moyes’ first full season – “he was enthusiastic for the job and had a point to prove and he immediately made us hard to beat” – and Stubbs attributes a drop off the following campaign to a blithe collective belief everything would continue in similarly positive fashion.
“We maybe thought it would just carry on but probably needed some fresh impetus,” says Stubbs.
“We were working just as hard but started slowly. With David, the reason we lost would always be we hadn’t trained hard enough, never that we’d trained too hard.”
Stubbs responded to taskmaster Moyes – he had considered the similarly unyielding Rioch a “father figure” and admits it was a “massive blow” when the Scot exited Bolton for Arsenal – and credits watching Moyes work first-hand after coming back to coach in Everton’s Academy in 2008 for opening his eyes to the sprawling demands of management.
Stubbs’s second stint as an Everton player had lasted two years.
He went to Derby County in January 2008 on an 18-month contract but was restricted by an uncooperative knee and called it quits after six months.
“I didn’t want to let anyone down or waste [manager] Paul Jewell’s time,” says Stubbs.
“They honoured my contract and are a proper, proper club.”
Stubbs had managed Everton Under-21s for four years when he was appointed boss at Hibernian following the club’s relegation in 2014. Stubbs’ first campaign ended with Hibs pipped by Rangers in a two-legged promotion play-off game.
In his extraordinary second season the Edinburgh team exorcised a 114-year Scottish Cup hoodoo by beating Rangers at the death in a barmy final.
Hibs’ triumph was all the more magical in the context of a last-minute play-off semi-final defeat to Falkirk one week earlier– on top of losing in the League Cup final against Ross County.
“I walked into turmoil at Hibs but that gave me a blank canvas and I worked with a brilliant chief executive in Leeann Dempster,” says Stubbs.
“The fans wanted the chairman out and there were lots of protests. But I loved the challenge.
“By the end, we felt we’d given the fans their club back.
“Missing promotion was a massive blow because that was the main objective.
“I spoke to the players all week before the cup final about their chance to go down in history.
“We had to change the club’s mindset.
“Hibs fans were mentally scarred going into finals [Hibernian lost 10 Scottish Cup finals between 1902 and 2016].
“Saying somebody ‘Hibs’d it’ meant they’d bottled it. But I just knew we’d win.”
The footage of Hibernian supporters crammed into one half of Hampden Park belting out Sunshine on Leith after their side’s 3-2 win over more fancied Rangers is spine tingling.
Where does that achievement rank in Stubbs’s career?
"Walking out at Goodison to captain Everton in a Merseyside derby takes some beating,” he says.
“But the jubilation and pride of winning something for other people was incredible.
“It was so emotional… such a powerful moment.”
Stubbs confesses he experienced “no better feeling” in football than when Everton defeated Liverpool in December 2004.
“For a local lad to play in a derby is incredibly humbling,” says Stubbs. “I absolutely loved them.
“They are what I miss most not playing. If I was in the tunnel as a player and heard that siren… your hairs would be up on your neck, you’d be pumped up, blood boiling, eyes popping out.”
Stubbs sighs at the memory of yanking Jamie Carragher’s arm as the pair shook hands following a derby loss.
“I was wrong but I desperately wanted to win for Everton and I was frustrated,” says Stubbs.
“I wanted to grab hold of his hand – and do more – and we had words.
“I apologised. But your emotions are running wild and your disappointment consumes you.”
Stubbs left Hibs for Rotherham United in 2016 believing it would be impossible to surpass that cup success at Easter Road.
He was not long in Yorkshire when he realised he had made a mistake.
Stubbs discovered what he saw as “no structure” and a desperately thin squad which needed supplementing with “panic signings”.
He says the chairman rowed back on the demand for an overhaul of the club’s playing philosophy and after less than five months Stubbs was “the most relieved I’ve been in football” when Rotherham ended his tenure.
Stubbs admits he "did not do enough due diligence” before taking charge at St Mirren in summer 2018. He was soon engulfed by a sense of déjà vu, managing on a meagre budget and without a recruitment department, while trying to keep in check a smattering of insubordinate players and bridge a north/south dressing room divide.
He left after three months and following a meeting with the club’s chairman when Stubbs refused to wait 24 hours for a verdict on his future.
“I said, ‘You’re making a decision now, if you think I’m waiting… you have another thing coming’,” he says.
“It was 3pm and I said I wanted to know by 5pm.”
The news he expected was relayed to Stubbs by telephone and wife Mandy is rather hoping the call drew a line under her husband’s managerial career.
There was no truth in stories of Moyes asking Stubbs to join him at West Ham United this season.
“She’s had enough of worrying about results,” says Stubbs. “It would have to be really appealing, not just a job for the sake of it.”
Stubbs is filling his days preparing to launch his football academy in Formby and working in a head of coaching position in a private school.
Son Sam, who was a toddler when his dad was first diagnosed with cancer, is a centre-half playing on loan from Middlesbrough at Dutch club ADO Den Haag.
“It is tough for him but a brilliant experience,” says Stubbs.
“I think he will have a career. At what level I don’t know, he will decide that.”
If he’s inherited his dad’s resolve and spirit, then Sam will do all right.
