HE’S had emulsion and bleach all over them, but ask one-time £3.5m Premier League star Garry Flitcroft if he regrets getting his hands dirty in Non-League management and the answer is resounding.
“No chance,” says the ex-Manchester City and Blackburn Rovers midfielder when I remind him of one or two friends and relatives who have overtaken him in the managerial standings in the five years since he took over at Leigh Genesis.
The 41-year-old may be flying high at the top of the Evo-Stik NPL Premier with Chorley, where last Saturday he oversaw a club record 11th straight victory in all competitions.
It is a far cry from the year-and-a-bit at now-defunct Leigh, where the club struggled to even get access to their own pitch to play on. But he’s not gone as far as quickly as ex-Maine Road team-mate Steve Lomas, who took a Non-League job at St Neots Town in the same week as Flitcroft at Leigh, but is now in the Championship at Millwall.
Ambition
Then there is his brother David, whose playing career was spent in the lower divisions while Garry picked up England Under-21 honours and captained Premier League teams, but is now also a gaffer in the second tier at Barnsley.
“When I took the job on I spoke to Neil Warnock, who was my final manager at Sheffield United, because a lot of lads that I’ve captained have gone straight into League management,” says Flitcroft.
“Neil said to me ‘Do your apprenticeship first’, and that’s the reason I came into Non-League and done it the way I’ve done it. I’m glad I have because I believe it’s tougher than getting a full-time League job.
“I’ll set my session up for a Thursday night and I’ll get five lads who’ll phone up and say there has been an accident, or their late out of work, so it snookers your session.
“You end up doing everything around the club, from painting the place to cleaning the toilets out. But I love that.
“I’ve made sure that our dressing room is right, we’ve got everything in there that the lads would want, and I’ve just enjoyed it so much.
“For me, it’s still part of the learning process. I’ve got a lot of other things going on, with interests in property and I’m now part of a company now that builds timber frame houses.
“When I took the Chorley job it was obviously part-time, Tuesday and Thursday night training, and that suited me. But since I’ve got involved I absolutely love it, I put everything into it. 
“I’ve had a couple of shouts for jobs, but they just didn’t seem to be the right ones and I want to see if we can keep taking Chorley through the leagues, because there is so much potential here with the people we’ve got on the board now.
“They are ambitious people and they want to progress the club, so as long as they’ve still got the ambition, it suits me fine at Chorley at the minute.”
Especially the way not just results, but attendances, are going. Chorley were a Conference club for two seasons in the late 1980s, but Flitcroft had to lift them from Step 4 in his first season.
That was followed by a play-off spot in 2011-12, when they were beaten in the semi-final by FC United of Manchester, before last season’s disappointing eighth-place finish.
There were reasons for that, however, with former Chorley accountant Philip Haslam and his distant relative, Ian Daniels, jailed in April for stealing almost £70,000 from the club.
Now the Magpies are flying again, with last Saturday’s win over Ilkeston attracting a four-figure crowd to Victory Park and leaders Skelmersdale firmly in the second-placed side’s sights, with two games in hand and a single-point deficit before this weekend.
“The theft really killed us last season,” says Flitcroft. “We had to cut the budget, lads were playing for half their money and they did well to stand by me, to be fair. We always said we’d make their money up when we got the gates up.
Rewards
“I lost a few lads, inevitably, and we finished where we did. But it made the club stronger for this year because we had a lot of directors come on board, and the chairman Ken Wright and Graham Watkinson, who’s come on board and been a breath of fresh air, did a ‘200 Club’.
“It linked a load of companies from Chorley who all put £200 apiece in and whoever got the draw at the end of the season got the sponsorship for this year. It saved the club really, because it could have gone with what the old accountant did. We are reaping the rewards this year, because the crowds have rocketed.
“Before I took the job on it was always one of those where people would say ‘It’s a massive club, Chorley’. And it is. It’s a big area.
“In my first season we were getting good crowds, and in my second year we were getting 3-3,500 with Chester and FC United, so when we are going well the fans will turn up. They see what we are doing at the minute, and not only are we getting results, the lads work their socks off week in, week out.
“That’s all football fans want to see, so hopefully they’ll keep supporting us and we can achieve what we want to achieve this season, and that’s promotion to Skrill North.”
