Hartlepool United boss Lennie Lawrence on why retirement is not for him

Lennie Lawrence insists retirement is not for him as he steels himself for another promotion fight at the age of 77.

Lawrence, who made his name as a manager in a near nine-year spell at Charlton during the 1980s and early 1990s before steering Middlesbrough into the Premier League, will spend Saturday afternoon in the dugout at the Prestige Group Stadium, the home of National League Hartlepool, with his sights firmly set on a securing a play-off berth.

By his own estimation, he has managed in around 1,200 professional games and has up to 700 more under his belt in an advisory capacity, but he has no intention of hanging up his tracksuit just yet.

Speaking on the eve of Pool’s fifth-tier clash with Woking, Lawrence told the PA news agency: “Retirement is not for me. It’s not for everybody. “It’s not for me. If you don’t do enough, if you don’t do whatever it is you do, you’ll vegetate.”

When Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson announced his plan to retire at the end of the 2001-02 season, then Newcastle counterpart Sir Bobby Robson questioned what he would do at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and suggested – with prescience – that he may not be able to go through with it.

It was a feeling shared by Lawrence, whose view has not changed during the intervening years.

He said: “I spoke to Fergie – I was quite close to him at the time – I spoke to Fergie on the phone and I said, ‘What would you do if they come to you and said we really want you to stay on?’.

“I remember saying to him, ‘It’s none of my business, but are you sure?’.”

Ferguson, like Robson, eventually retired at 71, while former England boss Roy Hodgson was 76 when he called it a day at Crystal Palace. Leicester’s 2016 title-winning boss Claudio Ranieri has returned to frontline football at Roma as a 73-year-old but will move into an executive role at the end of the season.

By contrast, Lawrence is still going strong as the oldest manager in England’s top five divisions, if somewhat unexpectedly. A man whose interest in coaching developed during his days as a semi-professional player, he has come full circle since getting his first chance as a professional at Plymouth in 1978.

He guided Charlton to promotion to the top flight and kept them there for four seasons in the midst of a tumultuous period for the club off the pitch during which they came within 30 minutes of bankruptcy and were forced to leave their home at The Valley.

His departure for Middlesbrough during the summer of 1991 came as a huge blow, but Lawrence simply enhanced his reputation by guiding Boro into the top flight and to the League Cup semi-finals.

Alongside his name on the list of top-flight managers on that first weekend of the inaugural Premier League campaign were those of Ferguson and Brian Clough – whose sons, Darren and Nigel respectively, are currently managing in the Football League – although his presence among that lofty company ultimately lasted just one season.

Asked how much pride that gave him, he said with a smile: “Pity I didn’t do it a bit longer, but there we are. But it was great to be in it.”

Lawrence took charge at Bradford, Luton, Grimsby and Cardiff before heading into a series of advisory and mentoring roles, and was serving as a non-executive director and consultant at Hartlepool when in November he was asked to step back into the limelight until the end of the season.

Management and football itself may have changed considerably during his lengthy career, but he believes the fundamentals remain largely the same.

He said: “There’s an old phrase: players don’t care what you know until they know that you care. That sums it up, really.

“Players will see through you in a flash if you try to be something you’re not. Be open to learning, and listen. But most of all, be yourself.”

Lawrence’s passion remains undimmed in an age when the pressure on managers has never been greater, and he admits he can understand why Jurgen Klopp decided to walk away from his hugely successful reign at Liverpool last summer after admitting he was “running out of energy”.

He said: “To be a manager per se is harder now, and to survive in the top leagues is also harder now.

“When I started at Charlton, they said, ‘What do you want to do?’. I said, ‘I want to build a club as well as a team’. If I said that now, people would look at you and say, ‘Are you sure? You won’t last long enough’.

“That’s the difference. I got time to do it. Would they get that time now? I don’t know.”