Ian Cathro - The Athletic

[spacerjoe]

3 hours ago, Bull's-eye said:

He would have remained in situ for a lot longer if he'd listened to advice and taken criticism from above in the right way.

 

He was fine with the players and i know for a fact they enjoyed his methods.

 

He couldn't manage up though and that was his inevitable downfall.

 

Who in particular are you referring to?

[GavK1012]

Players gave him the nickname The Riddler, as like us, they had no idea what he was prattling on about....his pre and post game interviews were farcical....no standing at that age in a senior dressing room like Hearts, players didn't play for him, end of. 

[Bull's-eye]

19 minutes ago, Ex member of the SaS said:

Bollox. Everyone watched Levein interfere. Besides I am important( to some ) and I don't argue with idiots.

 

Thankyou for clarifying my post.

[spacerjoe]

3 hours ago, Geoff Kilpatrick said:

Cathro's fundamental problem was that he had no people skills. I don't question his coaching ability but some people in football suit that role.

You could say the same about Mourinho though and he did alright.

 

They've had similar paths to be fair.

 

With the right people around him, he could make it work if he is actually able to learn from his mistakes.

 

There's definitely some truth to what he says that he should have taken a job abroad first, where he'd have been scrutinised, but probably in a much less personal way.

 

Not having to speak to press in his mother tongue would have helped also I'm sure. You can get away with being less open.

[A_A wehatethehibs]

Just now, Bull's-eye said:

 

Thankyou for clarifying my post.

As mentioned, Levein was not interfering but rather trying desperately for 6 months too long to help save the career of a young guy he’d stuck his neck out for. He failed.
 

In retrospect, good directorship would’ve been simply admitting it was a mistake and pressing the sack button, rather than trying to help. The sad thing about it was the club repeated exactly the same mistake with Levein himself 2 years later. Should’ve been sacked in about Feb 2019 and bemusingly lasted till Nov 

[bistokid]

1 hour ago, RobboM said:

Not disagreeing with anyone who said he needed to be emptied BUT my memory of him was an early game up at Dundee. The first half from Hearts was jaw droppingly good.  Scored early and created a hutch load of gilt edged chances but only led 1-0 at HT. Dundee regrouped second half and eventually won it 3-2. Cathro needed early wins to convince fans and players that he had something about him. It didn't happen and the confidence ebbed from him, the players and supporters.

Remember watching that game. Agreed , 1st half we played like the OF, utter dominance like I can't recall seeing before or since. Second half think someone got injured and we went to pot and lost ridiculous goals. 

[Go for it 1308]

3 hours ago, I P Knightley said:

Thanks for posting it - as you say; an interesting read. 

 

Cathro recognises the mistake he made in jumping into the Hearts job when he did. He may not have said all of this out loud but my take on it is:

 

* It was a bold move by Levein to go for a highly regarded young coach with a decent track record in doing what he was doing. 

* Hearts (i.e. Levein) needed to prepare the ground for Cathro coming and to do everything they could to settle him into his role, otherwise, it was just a gamble, not a measured risk with mitigations. 

* Levein, with all his experience in and around Scottish football, should have anticipated what might happen to Cathro and should have had a support framework that allowed him to do what he was good at without attracting the venom that would inevitably come his way. 

 

At the time, I did wonder whether the appointment was a product of Levein's vanity ("look at how I can do something no one's ever done before") and that he failed to build that structure around Cathro and the squad to get the best out of the organisation. 

 

Cathro seems to accept that it was a leap too far - without going into much detail on why that was the case. Could his appointment have worked in a different set-up? Could it have worked in a different league? At a lower-profile club? But let's face it, a young lad is offered an exciting position at the JTs... who's not going to be tempted? He needed more guidance - personally and professionally. 

 

Then you've got to add into the mix that Craigan is a prick and that Boyd is a fat, arrogant ugly ******* prick scumbag c*n*. And that while their jobs-for-the-boys mentality is prevalent throughout Scottish football, we're never going to make steps forward. 

 

 

 

Spot on

[Diego10]

54 minutes ago, spacerjoe said:

You could say the same about Mourinho though and he did alright.

 

They've had similar paths to be fair.

 

With the right people around him, he could make it work if he is actually able to learn from his mistakes.

 

There's definitely some truth to what he says that he should have taken a job abroad first, where he'd have been scrutinised, but probably in a much less personal way.

 

Not having to speak to press in his mother tongue would have helped also I'm sure. You can get away with being less open.

Mourinho has no people skills is a spectacular shout.

[spacerjoe]

1 hour ago, Diego10 said:

Mourinho has no people skills is a spectacular shout.

That was my point.

 

He's judging it based on what you see in public.

 

It's been well documented that Mourinho is amazing with his players even if he's not with the press.

 

It's also been documented that Cathro is also great with his players.

 

To say Cathro has no people skills is baseless.

[Dia Liom]

Fair play to him, interesting to see he puts it down mostly to failing to cope woth the pressures of the job.

 

I agree with others that he made the major error of getting rid of decent players and signing masses of unproven ones.

 

For me though the biggest warning came towards the end of the first season. Malory Martin said in an interview something like ‘the squad is being built, we are not doing too well right now but next season we will be able to achieve what we want’. Once excuses like that start being made it is very difficult to turn it around. A good manager wouldn’t allow that kind of thinking.

[spacerjoe]

2 hours ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

 

In retrospect, good directorship would’ve been simply admitting it was a mistake and pressing the sack button, rather than trying to help. The sad thing about it was the club repeated exactly the same mistake with Levein himself 2 years later. Should’ve been sacked in about Feb 2019 and bemusingly lasted till Nov 

 

I hope to never have to work under you 😂

[Peebo]

He was utterly useless. Completely out of his depth. A complete slaver. 

[Watt-Zeefuik]

6 hours ago, Geoff Kilpatrick said:

Cathro's fundamental problem was that he had no people skills. I don't question his coaching ability but some people in football suit that role.

 

Yes. And it doesn't matter how brilliant your football ideas are, if you can't convey them to the players, or at the very least your fellow coaches, they will never end up on the pitch.

 

5 hours ago, Chaps said:

Biggest mistake was ripping up a decent side sitting in 2nd after Robbie left and signing a load of crap in January.

 

 

 

Indeed. Had no notion of how to gradually adapt a side he hadn't built to his way of playing. It might have been okay if he'd brought in any decent players but look at this January. Absolutely horrific. He did better over the summer but the signings of Berra, Lafferty, and Smudge look far more like Levein signings than his.

 

 

And Tziolis was clearly a player but Cathro couldn't get a song out of him.

 

4 hours ago, RustyRightPeg said:

Felt sorry for Cathro in truth. He wasn’t ready, but took a leap of faith (both sides did) and it didn’t work out, sometimes that happens. I’ll never complain about that.
 

Good luck to him, that’s a good interview. Hopefully he does go on and have an even better career than he has already. It’s an impressive CV, that’s for sure.  
 

 

Yeah, I don't fault him for taking the job. Never should have been offered to him in the first place, but no judgement on him for taking a bite at the apple.

 

2 hours ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

 Levein didn’t “interfere” mate, but simply tried desperately to help a totally out his depth floundering young coach. Levein must have known very very early on he had ****ed up badly with that appointment. After that he spent 6 months tryinf to save him which was the biggest mistake of his life and ****ed our club up massively 

 

And then spent the next two years trying in vain to dig out of the hole Cathro had dug and ended up digging it deeper. The horrifying decisions Cathro was making were absolutely not Levein-style moves. Just the opposite. Which was probably a huge problem—as the article says, Cathro is deep in his bones opposed to the very football which Levein has made a career out of.

 

Even though Levein gets the blame for making such an unfortunate hire, I'll give him a bit of credit for hiring someone who was so out of kilter with his own tendencies.

Edited May 7 by Watt-Zeefuik

[rudi must stay]

I wish him well. He gave Hearts his best shot and we had some good performances with him as manager 

[rudi must stay]

8 minutes ago, Watt-Zeefuik said:

 

Yes. And it doesn't matter how brilliant your football ideas are, if you can't convey them to the players, or at the very least your fellow coaches, they will never end up on the pitch.

 

 

Indeed. Had no notion of how to gradually adapt a side he hadn't built to his way of playing. It might have been okay if he'd brought in any decent players but look at this January. Absolutely horrific. He did better over the summer but the signings of Berra, Lafferty, and Smudge look far more like Levein signings than his.

 

 

And Tziolis was clearly a player but Cathro couldn't get a song out of him.

 

 

Yeah, I don't fault him for taking the job. Never should have been offered to him in the first place, but no judgement on him for taking a bite at the apple.

 

 

And then spent the next two years trying in vain to dig out of the hole Cathro had dug and ended up digging it deeper. The horrifying decisions Cathro was making were absolutely not Levein-style moves. Just the opposite. Which was probably a huge problem—as the article says, Cathro is deep in his bones opposed to the very football which Levein has made a career out of.

 

Even though Levein gets the blame for making such an unfortunate hire, I'll give him a bit of credit for hiring someone who was so out of kilter with his own tendencies.

 Tziolis was rubbish 

[Bozi]

6 hours ago, boag1874 said:

He was out his depth, took on a job that was way too big for him & ultimately failed miserably. The press were snide ***** during his tenure and took way too much glee in sticking the boot in, it was clearly an attempt to rattle him and the squad, it worked and showed him up as someone who simply doesn't command enough respect to be manager at a club like Hearts.

 

We tried something outside the box and the gamble didn't pay off, the damage was done & shit happens. He's a good coach and maybe with a bit more of an older head on his shoulders will eventually make a decent manager if he can improve his people skills.

Exact same synopsis could be given for Stendels time here 

[Watt-Zeefuik]

2 minutes ago, rudi must stay said:

 Tziolis was rubbish 

 

I'm clearly remembering the wrong player then. I've blocked a lot of that season from memory.

[rudi must stay]

3 minutes ago, Watt-Zeefuik said:

 

I'm clearly remembering the wrong player then. I've blocked a lot of that season from memory.

 

Far too slow for the league 

[i wish jj was my dad]

I think it was evident that he lacked the comms and people skills needed in the dressing room. He was an absolute car crash whenever he spoke and I nearly did crash the car when he came out with the goalpost comment. 

I never bought into the conspiracy that Levein was interfering. If anything he gave him far too much support with signing  players that were so far away from Levein types. 

[i wish jj was my dad]

5 minutes ago, rudi must stay said:

 

Far too slow for the league 

His ability and pace weren't the problem. The bermuda shorts, flip flops and shades gave me a clue. 

[Cambo_Jambo]

I think the job was too big for him and he was a bit of a weird fish but just as importantly, the cretins that inhabit the Scottish media world really didn't like being made to feel that their view of football as a game entirely dependent on 'wanting it more than them' and 'get it up to the strikers' was somehow out of date.

 

You can see that in the intervening 7 years, both Craigan and Boyd have ascended to the highest heights in terms of football analysis. Only thing I'd go to Kris Boyd for advice is which Yazoo pairs best with pickled onion Monster Munch.

[Hmfc1965]

4 minutes ago, Cambo_Jambo said:

I think the job was too big for him and he was a bit of a weird fish but just as importantly, the cretins that inhabit the Scottish media world really didn't like being made to feel that their view of football as a game entirely dependent on 'wanting it more than them' and 'get it up to the strikers' was somehow out of date.

 

You can see that in the intervening 7 years, both Craigan and Boyd have ascended to the highest heights in terms of football analysis. Only thing I'd go to Kris Boyd for advice is which Yazoo pairs best with pickled onion Monster Munch.

That may be so, and I don't like either, but ultimately they were right on this one.

[Bazzas right boot]

4 minutes ago, Cambo_Jambo said:

I think the job was too big for him and he was a bit of a weird fish but just as importantly, the cretins that inhabit the Scottish media world really didn't like being made to feel that their view of football as a game entirely dependent on 'wanting it more than them' and 'get it up to the strikers' was somehow out of date.

 

You can see that in the intervening 7 years, both Craigan and Boyd have ascended to the highest heights in terms of football analysis. Only thing I'd go to Kris Boyd for advice is which Yazoo pairs best with pickled onion Monster Munch.

 

Banana,  it's a nice contradiction of flavours.

 

 

[Nookie Bear]

3 hours ago, spacerjoe said:

You could say the same about Mourinho though and he did alright.

 

They've had similar paths to be fair.

 

With the right people around him, he could make it work if he is actually able to learn from his mistakes.

 

There's definitely some truth to what he says that he should have taken a job abroad first, where he'd have been scrutinised, but probably in a much less personal way.

 

Not having to speak to press in his mother tongue would have helped also I'm sure. You can get away with being less open.

well, you could say that….but you couldn’t be further from the truth. 

[Darren]

4 hours ago, Lone Striker said:

In that OP interview, he comes across like David Brent's & Lee Johnson's love-child.    A bit arrogant, weirdly mysterious, but  mainly full of b*llsh*t. 

 

 

He'd have been well suited to Hibs. Full of shit, an obsession with "flair" football and delivered terrible results.

[EH11 2NL]

The less said about him the better. A completely embarrassing period for the club. The press were harsh but were right. 

[rudi must stay]

50 minutes ago, i wish jj was my dad said:

His ability and pace weren't the problem. The bermuda shorts, flip flops and shades gave me a clue. 

 

Ah well he was relaxed 

[spacerjoe]

24 minutes ago, Nookie Bear said:

well, you could say that….but you couldn’t be further from the truth. 

As I mentioned in an above reply, from the outside looking in both would appear to be terrible with people. But that's not the case as reported from players who've worked with either.

 

To say Cathro isn't a people person was baseless.

 

I'm not comparing him with Mourinhos skillset. More that you can't completely judge his personality based on what you see in press interviews.

 

What I did find interesting regarding their paths, was that both came from a non-playing background and I wonder if that makes them more naturally defensive when their capabilities are questioned.

 

Or both might just be *****, who knows.

[Papa]

1 hour ago, rudi must stay said:

 Tziolis was rubbish 

Tziolis could have been the best player in the league. He just couldn’t be @rsed.

[rudi must stay]

4 minutes ago, Papa said:

Tziolis could have been the best player in the league. He just couldn’t be @rsed.

 

Absolutely right

[A_A wehatethehibs]

2 hours ago, spacerjoe said:

 

I hope to never have to work under you 😂

The fact is a big section of the fans could see it was absolutely a disaster within about 10 games. That fecking Raith game was in the January! How the fuuuuuuck did that poor lost fella last all the way till August 🤣 Its called the Sunk Cost Fallacy that’s how. Levein had stuck his neck out and knew how the appointment reflected on him. In a properly run football club, the guy would’ve been sacked, 8-12 weeks max. When a shambles like that occurs, it’s a case of terminate immediately before the damage gets worse. And it did get massively worse 

[Watt-Zeefuik]

37 minutes ago, spacerjoe said:

As I mentioned in an above reply, from the outside looking in both would appear to be terrible with people. But that's not the case as reported from players who've worked with either.

 

To say Cathro isn't a people person was baseless.

 

I'm not comparing him with Mourinhos skillset. More that you can't completely judge his personality based on what you see in press interviews.

 

What I did find interesting regarding their paths, was that both came from a non-playing background and I wonder if that makes them more naturally defensive when their capabilities are questioned.

 

Or both might just be *****, who knows.

 

When your own players call you "The Riddler" because they have no idea WTF you're talking about, it's a decent sign you're not exactly a people person, or at least aren't great at conveying your ideas.

[spacerjoe]

4 minutes ago, Watt-Zeefuik said:

 

When your own players call you "The Riddler" because they have no idea WTF you're talking about, it's a decent sign you're not exactly a people person, or at least aren't great at conveying your ideas.

Did they say he was unapproachable?

 

I've never seen this documented.

 

If so, I'll hold my hands up.

[spacerjoe]

21 minutes ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

The fact is a big section of the fans could see it was absolutely a disaster within about 10 games. That fecking Raith game was in the January! How the fuuuuuuck did that poor lost fella last all the way till August 🤣 Its called the Sunk Cost Fallacy that’s how. Levein had stuck his neck out and knew how the appointment reflected on him. In a properly run football club, the guy would’ve been sacked, 8-12 weeks max. When a shambles like that occurs, it’s a case of terminate immediately before the damage gets worse. And it did get massively worse 

Think you've taken my comment too seriously.

 

He's obvs deserved to go early doors 😂

[I P Knightley]

1 hour ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

The fact is a big section of the fans could see it was absolutely a disaster within about 10 games. That fecking Raith game was in the January! How the fuuuuuuck did that poor lost fella last all the way till August 🤣 Its called the Sunk Cost Fallacy that’s how. Levein had stuck his neck out and knew how the appointment reflected on him. In a properly run football club, the guy would’ve been sacked, 8-12 weeks max. When a shambles like that occurs, it’s a case of terminate immediately before the damage gets worse. And it did get massively worse 

In a properly run football club, you wouldn't have such a radical appointment being made without ensuring there was a structure aligned around Cathro to allow him to do whatever Levein's vision was that he should do. There would have been a timeline with set milestones and deliverables. There would have been contingencies, including admitting you'd got it wrong and doing a reverse ferret but allowing for that within 3 months wouldn't have been an option with strong leadership.

 

There was a director/directors responsible for strategic matters and they failed to plan strategically. They brought him in and left him to dangle in the breeze.

[OTT]

6 minutes ago, I P Knightley said:

In a properly run football club, you wouldn't have such a radical appointment being made without ensuring there was a structure aligned around Cathro to allow him to do whatever Levein's vision was that he should do. There would have been a timeline with set milestones and deliverables. There would have been contingencies, including admitting you'd got it wrong and doing a reverse ferret but allowing for that within 3 months wouldn't have been an option with strong leadership.

 

There was a director/directors responsible for strategic matters and they failed to plan strategically. They brought him in and left him to dangle in the breeze.

 

Spot on. Cathro's appointment was a strategic failure. We were going outside of the pre-approved Scottish football managerial merrygoround so any appointment had to be set up for success and needed a structure built up which could support the Cathro in the most meaningful way. In hindsight:

 

- Levein takes the team after Neilson leaves from Dec 16 with Cathro joining as his assistant for the duration of the season. This allows Cathro to build experience and confidence working with the group of players he is to inherit

- To support Cathro, he gets an experienced assistant - Look at the value Frankie McAvoy has brought to Naismiths coaching team. Someone like that to support Cathro alongside an ex-pro who could better relate to the players (sort of a Gary Locke type)

- January window, Esmael still comes in, but the team isn't ripped up in the same manner. 

- Cathro gets the summer to work with his new team and the players to implement his style of play

 

I'll be honest, I don't know why Austin MacPhee was his number 2. It was like weird and weirder. I think for Cathro to have been a success, he needed someone that contrasted with him, instead of being another version of himself. 

 

It was a bad appointment, there's no getting away from that. He was too young, and didn't have the appropriate experience which would command the dressing room. Had he been an ex-pro whose career was ruined in his late 20s and was an incredible coach then (think Ryan Mason type), it might have been easier, but I think players would have struggled to respect him. Regardless of his experience. The structure around him had to be perfect, and he needed to be carefully managed/ mentored from Leveins POV because of the inexperience, since obviously giving him too much rope ended up hanging him in the end. He shouldn't have been allowed to rip up the team, he shouldn't have been allowed to pick his team in the manner he did. I think Levein gave him too much freedom. 

[Dagger Is Back]

10 hours ago, Jim Panzee said:

craigan was caretaker manager for motherwell for 2 games. Boyd has never managed? At least Cathro had the balls to take on a top managerial job.

 

at the very least they could've been neutral and taken a 'lets see how it pans out' attitude. 

 

 

Ex players like Boyd are cowards. Not got the balls to take on a proper pressurised job but happy to be a TV pundit spouting their so called expert opinions.

 

Say what you like about Cathro but he had balls to take it on.

 

 

[Watt-Zeefuik]

1 hour ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

The fact is a big section of the fans could see it was absolutely a disaster within about 10 games. That fecking Raith game was in the January! How the fuuuuuuck did that poor lost fella last all the way till August 🤣 Its called the Sunk Cost Fallacy that’s how. Levein had stuck his neck out and knew how the appointment reflected on him. In a properly run football club, the guy would’ve been sacked, 8-12 weeks max. When a shambles like that occurs, it’s a case of terminate immediately before the damage gets worse. And it did get massively worse 

 

I very much beat the drum for making no sudden moves and giving coaches a chance to improve or to turn around downturns in fortune, but by March I'd had enough. We just kept getting worse.

 

Thank **** for the points Neilson accrued at the beginning of that season or we'd have been in serious trouble.

[john thomas]

2 hours ago, Watt-Zeefuik said:

 

When your own players call you "The Riddler" because they have no idea WTF you're talking about, it's a decent sign you're not exactly a people person, or at least aren't great at conveying your ideas.

Think that has been proven to be nonsense. Players enjoyed working with him . Apart from those who didn't give a shit 

He has coached at the highest level .

 

[periodictabledancer]

1 hour ago, OTT said:

 

Spot on. Cathro's appointment was a strategic failure. We were going outside of the pre-approved Scottish football managerial merrygoround so any appointment had to be set up for success and needed a structure built up which could support the Cathro in the most meaningful way. In hindsight:

 

- Levein takes the team after Neilson leaves from Dec 16 with Cathro joining as his assistant for the duration of the season. This allows Cathro to build experience and confidence working with the group of players he is to inherit

- To support Cathro, he gets an experienced assistant - Look at the value Frankie McAvoy has brought to Naismiths coaching team. Someone like that to support Cathro alongside an ex-pro who could better relate to the players (sort of a Gary Locke type)

- January window, Esmael still comes in, but the team isn't ripped up in the same manner. 

- Cathro gets the summer to work with his new team and the players to implement his style of play

 

I'll be honest, I don't know why Austin MacPhee was his number 2. It was like weird and weirder. I think for Cathro to have been a success, he needed someone that contrasted with him, instead of being another version of himself. 

 

It was a bad appointment, there's no getting away from that. He was too young, and didn't have the appropriate experience which would command the dressing room. Had he been an ex-pro whose career was ruined in his late 20s and was an incredible coach then (think Ryan Mason type), it might have been easier, but I think players would have struggled to respect him. Regardless of his experience. The structure around him had to be perfect, and he needed to be carefully managed/ mentored from Leveins POV because of the inexperience, since obviously giving him too much rope ended up hanging him in the end. He shouldn't have been allowed to rip up the team, he shouldn't have been allowed to pick his team in the manner he did. I think Levein gave him too much freedom. 

I completely agree with everything you've said re CL : I don't believe Cathro was getting the support he needed. And to think CL wanted to get him into the club even earlier and Cathro turned him down. 

[WASTREL]

18 hours ago, Bungalow Bill said:

Ian Cathro sparked a culture war in Scotland — then wrote a book. Now he's ready to manage again

‘O Meu Jogo’

Ian Cathro places the book on the table. ‘My game’ — that’s the translation from Portuguese — is not for sale. The author wrote it for himself as much as anyone.

“I spent five years working on this,” Cathro says.

“I suppose it’s a personal project and a way of committing your thoughts, checking up on your convictions and testing yourself. You can’t separate these things because I don’t think there is a ‘you’ as a coach and a ‘you’ as a person, because then it starts to smell a bit like bull***t to me. The guys who are the absolute best at what they do, it’s because they’re authentic.”

The 134-page A4 book includes tactical diagrams and innovations — the benefits of playing centre-backs on their unnatural side among them — as well as off-the-field topics, such as the importance of family.

“I don’t know if I’m gonna win,” Cathro says. “I don’t know if I’m gonna lose. But this has got everything about how the team is gonna work, how we’re gonna train, how we’re going to adapt, how I view football, how we view the development of the club.”

He looks up and there is the hint of a smile. “Was it entirely for that reason that I wrote it? It was probably a little bit of therapy for me too.”

Cathro rarely gives interviews (I’ve been chasing this one for longer than it took him to write his book) and has a fascinating backstory.

Aged 37, he has been coaching for more than 20 years, going back to when he was a secondary-school pupil in his hometown of Dundee, sitting in a business management class and visualising passages of play for the training sessions he would take later that day. Coaching quickly became his raison d’etre. By his admission, he was obsessed.

His school teachers, Cathro says, “just accepted it”.

But Scottish football didn’t.

In December 2016, Cathro was named head coach of Hearts in the Scottish Premiership. He was 30 years old at the time and, according to Cathro’s Wikipedia page, the appointment “caused some debate” within Scottish football.

“Yeah, that’s apt,” Cathro says, laughing.

“Caused some debate” is quite the understatement. Hearts’ decision to turn to Cathro provoked outrage among some ex-players in particular.

A 29-second clip of Stephen Craigan, the former Motherwell defender, arguing with Chris Sutton, live on television, gives you an insight into the strength of feeling.

“He’s never had a job before!” Craigan said, his face contorted in anger as Sutton responded by accusing the man sitting next to him of jealousy.

Cathro, for the record, has never had a job outside of football. Not only that but before he had spent the previous four years coaching in the top flight in Portugal and Spain under Nuno Espirito Santo, and at Newcastle United with Rafael Benitez.

He had not, however, been a manager or played the game professionally and the latter was clearly a problem for some people in Scotland. As was the fact that Cathro was so young and — brace yourself for this next bit — he did some of his work on a laptop.

Kris Boyd, the former Rangers and Scotland striker, used all that and more to mock Cathro in a newspaper column published 48 hours before he was confirmed as Hearts manager. The opening line read: “He’s probably not been this excited since FIFA 17 came out on PlayStation.”

There was plenty more where that came from, rooted in personal criticism — “crass demeaning of someone who deliberately ploughed his own furrow” is how Ewan Murray, the Guardian newspaper’s Scottish football correspondent, described it at the time.

Cathro shakes his head. “The moment when I thought this has gone properly crazy was when somebody told me that someone had said, ‘He didn’t invent the light bulb’.

“What have I done to suggest that I did that?”

“I had the misfortune of being the example of this thing that may disturb job opportunities for other people — this culture war that maybe hadn’t quite made its way to Scottish football, and I became the thing they needed to defeat.”

If that was the case, “they” succeeded. Cathro was sacked at the start of the following season. He lasted seven months.

Seven years later, he is contemplating returning to management.

It is tempting to say that time has been a good healer in that respect, but using that phrase implies Cathro was hurt by what happened at Hearts.

He was angry rather than hurt — really angry — and also annoyed with himself for being so impatient in the first place.

Growing up in Dundee, Cathro “wasn’t the super-talented kid” who was on the path to football stardom. He was part of the youth setup at Forfar Athletic and Brechin City, and suspects he might have been able to carve out a career as a lower-league player in Scotland. A knee injury prompted a rethink and, with the encouragement of his school PE department, Cathro fell into coaching.

His first session as a coach left him feeling underwhelmed. After the second, he was hooked.

“I just became obsessed,” Cathro says. “I was probably a bit peeved about how I trained as a kid. The ability to express yourself was really limited. There were maybe four or five things you could do in a football game: you get in their faces, you win the first battle, you don’t take risks, ‘If in doubt put it out’, ‘Turn them early’. And I was the young kid who was going: ‘Nah, that can’t be it’.”

In the words of Jack Souttar, whose sons Harry and John were coached by Cathro before going on to play professionally, the young Scot was “a bit of a maverick”.

Cathro smiles. “I was probably on a bit of a crusade, and the whole thing was proving to these kids and everybody around them…”

He pauses for a moment. “It was driven from — and this probably speaks to some of the things that we’ll end up talking about later — I’d never had a good relationship with people in Scottish football. I wasn’t going around telling everybody what you’re doing is wrong. But the fact that I was doing something different was, subconsciously, telling everybody that I think what you’re doing is wrong. That wasn’t my intention. I was just doing what I wanted to do.”

At ‘Cathro Clinic’, the private football academy he set up in Dundee, the focus was on individual player development. Cathro prioritised touches of the ball, encouraged boys to play with freedom, set them skill-based challenges to incorporate into their game, and urged them to reach for the stars.

At the same time, Cathro had his own dreams. Although Dundee United, the Scottish Premiership club on Cathro’s doorstep, were impressed by his coaching and gave him a role in their youth department, the ambition was always to work overseas.

Two meetings with Portuguese coaches in the space of 12 months proved pivotal.

The first was with Andre Villas-Boas in 2010, not long after he had taken over as Porto’s manager.

“That was a turning point,” Cathro says. “I left Porto’s training ground and decided I’m not a youth coach anymore.”

But the “Sliding Doors moment”, to borrow Cathro’s description, came the following summer when he attended a UEFA B Licence course at Largs, in Ayrshire, where he was in the company of some big names in Scottish football (Duncan Ferguson and Paul Hartley among them) but ended up hitting it off with a former Portuguese goalkeeper by the name of Nuno.

“I looked like the 24-year-old who nobody knows,” Cathro recalls. “But in my mind, I was the most experienced coach on the course, and I had done the most coaching of everybody. I probably thought I was the best one on the course and that probably came across — not when we’re sitting eating our lunch, but when they say, ‘Go out and take a session’, I spoke to people the way that I would. So there’s a big contrast probably, and that can be difficult. And I know that’s what got Nuno’s attention.

“He saw this quiet kid, expecting nothing, and then he goes and does his session and all of a sudden, ‘What the hell?’. And it was a combination of the way that I was, how I would work and speak — the assertiveness, but also that the exercises were different. He looked at what I was doing and thought, ‘That looks like a high-level training session. The other stuff looks like what you do on the course to get through the course’. And that’s when we started to speak.”

As much as Nuno was impressed with Cathro’s session, he had some constructive criticism for him too. “He said to me, ‘Are you maybe a bit arrogant?’.”

And was he?

“I don’t know,” Cathro replies. “But I kept my distance (with others) — there was something in the air.

“Maybe I did have an arrogance and Nuno prodded that straight away. That was probably the bit that made me most interested to be having more conversation with him. With every bit of the course that passed, we just spent more time talking, and that changed my life in the end.”

A year later, Cathro took a phone call from Nuno saying he was going into management and asking if he wanted to work with him. It was at Rio Ave, a Portuguese Primeira Liga club. Cathro couldn’t pack his bag quickly enough — and then reality hit.

“I vividly remember walking down the steps — the good old Ryanair steps — putting my foot on the ground and thinking, ‘I don’t know one word of Portuguese. I have no idea where I’m going. Do I take the next step?’.”

Adapting to his new life was interesting. There were formal language lessons in a classroom alongside future Atletico Madrid goalkeeper Jan Oblak, while the football jargon was learned at Nuno’s home, where Cathro was given a roof over his head. “I remember sitting on his balcony preparing training sessions, and every now and then I’d go, ’How do you say that?’”

If Cathro was assessing players that he knew little about, it seems inevitable that they were doing the same with him. Did he sense that?

“Yeah, and I think that was normal,” Cathro says. “There were probably people in the club doing that as well, and I understand it. Why would a Portuguese club appoint a mid-twenties Scottish coach to the staff? That’s something for Nuno to explain and it was difficult for him to explain. They’re not going to know anything about me. So they just see the profile and make a judgement based on that. And then they know he doesn’t speak the language. And then you’re weighing those things up and they’ve got to be going, ‘That’s strange’. But that just passed.”

Cathro ended up thriving, so much so that Nuno described him as a “genius”. By the end of the first season, Cathro was fluent in Portuguese and, more significantly, an integral part of a coaching team that led Rio Ave to two domestic cup finals and European qualification.

Nuno’s stock was rising fast and when he took over at Valencia in the summer of 2014, it was inevitable that Cathro would join him. A fourth-place finish in La Liga followed, earning a place in the Champions League in the 2015-16 season, but Cathro and Nuno were about to part.

With his father seriously ill, Cathro wanted to be closer to Dundee, prompting him to take a coaching job with Newcastle United, initially under the management of Steve McClaren and later working with Benitez. “It was a personal decision, which became a great professional option, which is probably why it doesn’t look like a personal decision,” Cathro says.

All the while, the desire to be a manager burned fiercely.

Hindsight is a wonderful thing but hearing Cathro’s backstory, it seems strange to think he chose to take his first job as a head coach in Scotland, the country he had been so keen to leave behind in search of a football culture that aligned with his ideology.

Picture the path of least resistance and Cathro was travelling in totally the opposite direction.

He listens and nods. “I think the exact same way,” Cathro says.

“Fundamentally, it was impatience.

“And this is probably the hardest bit to make sense of… obviously, if the aim of the game is to prepare a career and make smart decisions so you just go success, success, success, success, success, Hearts was a huge mistake. If that’s the question, of course I regret it. I should have never worked in Scottish football. It wasn’t the appropriate environment at that time, it may never be the appropriate environment.

“But if the question is different, ‘Do you regret it from the point of view of how it’s helped you improve and get yourself to a point where maybe the path is: success, learn, hit the floor, figure it out, step forward, focus, grow?’, then I can’t say that I regret doing it.”

Cathro won five, drew four and lost 13 of his 22 league matches in charge. In short, his record wasn’t good enough.

In his mind, Cathro was ready to manage at that level but he wasn’t equipped, he says, to deal with all the noise.

“I couldn’t figure out how to process that. That took me off track. I was trying to navigate that and then you stop navigating the thing that you’re actually good at. That very quickly made me very angry, to the point where if there was a way out early on, I would have taken it.”

It says everything that Cathro’s appointment created such a stir in Scotland that the reaction to the reaction became a story.

He was, in the words of the New York Times journalist Rory Smith, “Scottish football’s great experiment”.

Some people didn’t want to wait for the results though.

Aside from being obsessed with mentioning Cathro’s laptop and making the FIFA 17 jibe, Boyd described a man he had met on a coaching course but never seen in a work environment as “way, way out of his depth”.

Jamie Fullarton, another former Scottish Premiership player, questioned Cathro’s social skills and whether he even coached at Newcastle (Matt Ritchie, who played for Newcastle and talked about the quality of Cathro’s training sessions, was probably better qualified on that subject).

As for Craigan, he was so irate about Cathro getting the Hearts job that he rowed with Sutton and started talking about light bulbs and Thomas Edison.

Did Cathro know that it was going to be like this? “I should have anticipated some of it, but no, I didn’t know that when I went in,” he says.

“It was 99 per cent bull***t to the point where, if I had money, I would have sued a couple of people because some of it was defamation. And then, afterwards, the anger that I felt continued a little bit because I’m thinking, ‘There’s other people. He’s losing games as well. What’s being said about this lad?’ — not that I wanted somebody else to get attacked.

“If I lose and the team’s a mess — and sometimes it was — that criticism is absolutely fine. But some of the other sketch-show ridicule and absolute nonsense because they obviously felt safe enough to come at me — no, that’s not cool.”

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Cathro recognises his own errors too. He went through a period of self-reflection after losing his job at Hearts and some of that made for uncomfortable viewing, both in terms of the football on the pitch and how he came across off it.

“The bit that was wholly on me was I had a couple of really, really bad moments with the press. And I’m sure there will be memes forever, which is fine because they can then get swung around to laughs in the future,” Cathro says. “But I struggled with that just because I couldn’t put the anger to the side. It kind of freezes you in some ways and then it’s not really you that comes across. The real version of me is doing everything I can to hold the anger in. Maybe you’re better off just letting the anger out.

“The people who actually knew me would look at some things and go: ‘Who’s that? What’s happened? Where are you? Just be yourself, will you?’. But I was so, so angry and you can’t function like that. Even having this conversation now, it’s really empowering.”

As for how Hearts performed, Cathro sounds more disappointed by that than anything else. “I didn’t even recognise some of the football, and that’s the hardest bit,” he says. “So if there’s critiques from that at a certain point, those are fair. But it goes back to that point — I wasn’t ready to deal with being in the middle of a culture war.”

Cathro lost his job at Hearts but he never lost his sense of humour.

Asked whether he was married when he was managing, Cathro laughs and replies: “No, I waited until I’d been ridiculed to such an extent that if she was to say yes, it’s a pretty solid yes!

“So a couple of weeks after leaving (Hearts) we went to Valencia, we hired bikes and after doing a couple of loops in the park, I stopped and proposed. I thought if she says yeah now she’s gonna stay. So that was that.”

Cathro is a father as well as a husband now and that, allied to another five years’ coaching experience, means that he has a much more rounded view of football and life. Less intensity, more clarity.

“I’ve got an off switch now and I enjoy pushing it,” he says. “I work smarter. Everything’s more clear to me. I know how I’m gonna be, how I’m gonna work. Football’s not gonna give me sleepless nights. I’m not gonna be that guy.”

His rehabilitation after Hearts started, and continued, alongside a familiar face. After taking 12 months out to reset, Cathro was reunited with Nuno at Wolves in 2018, where they spent three years together, finishing seventh in the Premier League in successive seasons, qualifying for Europe and coaching a team that produced some exhilarating football.

When Cathro thinks back to that period, his eyes light up. He talks about the passing and movement patterns in such detail that you could be forgiven for thinking that he has just come off the training ground with Diogo Jota, Ruben Neves and Raul Jimenez. “It was special. Really special,” Cathro says.

The same can’t be said for their time together at Tottenham Hotspur, where it felt destined to go wrong from day one — or maybe that should be ‘day 72’, when Spurs ended an exhaustive managerial search by turning to Nuno. He was sacked after four months.

“You turn up on set but you’re in the wrong movie,” Cathro says. “I imagine everybody would probably reach the same conclusion. Every time there’s been connection and alignment, Nuno’s only had success, but it didn’t fit (at Spurs).”

It would be fair to say that working in the Middle East wasn’t what Cathro had in mind next, but Nuno’s appointment as the manager of Al Ittihad in 2022 took the Portuguese and his staff in that direction. After being sceptical initially, Cathro embraced the opportunity.

“It took me longer to get in the car to go to the airport to fly to Saudi Arabia than what it did to drive down to Enfield (Tottenham’s training ground). Nobody’s hiding that,” Cathro says.

“But nobody owns football. You don’t get to belittle somebody else’s love of football because it’s not a top-five league, or it’s not Western culture.

‘There was a learning process in that for me because I did have that attitude at first. I was probably a bit snobbish — football snobbish — of what I was going into. But that disappeared within three or four weeks.”

Although shade was hard to find on the training ground, success wasn’t; Al Ittihad won the Saudi Pro League in 2023 and Cathro took great satisfaction from seeing how much that title meant to the long-serving staff at the club.

Nuno was dismissed in November, though, and when he took over at Nottingham Forest the following month, Cathro decided to take a break. He had a wife and young daughter to get reacquainted with after his time in Saudi Arabia, a book to finish and a seven-year itch to scratch.

Is management definitely what he is going to do next? “Should what I think is the right opportunity come along, then yeah, I’m at a natural point for that,” Cathro replies.

He picks up his book again from the coffee table. “Like every person on the planet, I’ll have strengths and weaknesses,” Cathro says. “But it’ll be authentic, and there will be nobody more driven to be successful wherever I am.”

Intesting read.  And interesting how it was "the dicks" that were given the media voice to pour the scorn 

[A_A wehatethehibs]

8 hours ago, I P Knightley said:

In a properly run football club, you wouldn't have such a radical appointment being made without ensuring there was a structure aligned around Cathro to allow him to do whatever Levein's vision was that he should do. There would have been a timeline with set milestones and deliverables. There would have been contingencies, including admitting you'd got it wrong and doing a reverse ferret but allowing for that within 3 months wouldn't have been an option with strong leadership.

 

There was a director/directors responsible for strategic matters and they failed to plan strategically. They brought him in and left him to dangle in the breeze.

Structures… milestones… deliverables… contingencies… strategic matters 

 

What a load of corporate buzzword pish. Is that you ian? Sort of pish he would talk in his interviews 

[A_A wehatethehibs]

8 hours ago, OTT said:

 

Spot on. Cathro's appointment was a strategic failure. We were going outside of the pre-approved Scottish football managerial merrygoround so any appointment had to be set up for success and needed a structure built up which could support the Cathro in the most meaningful way. In hindsight:

 

- Levein takes the team after Neilson leaves from Dec 16 with Cathro joining as his assistant for the duration of the season. This allows Cathro to build experience and confidence working with the group of players he is to inherit

- To support Cathro, he gets an experienced assistant - Look at the value Frankie McAvoy has brought to Naismiths coaching team. Someone like that to support Cathro alongside an ex-pro who could better relate to the players (sort of a Gary Locke type)

- January window, Esmael still comes in, but the team isn't ripped up in the same manner. 

- Cathro gets the summer to work with his new team and the players to implement his style of play

 

I'll be honest, I don't know why Austin MacPhee was his number 2. It was like weird and weirder. I think for Cathro to have been a success, he needed someone that contrasted with him, instead of being another version of himself. 

 

It was a bad appointment, there's no getting away from that. He was too young, and didn't have the appropriate experience which would command the dressing room. Had he been an ex-pro whose career was ruined in his late 20s and was an incredible coach then (think Ryan Mason type), it might have been easier, but I think players would have struggled to respect him. Regardless of his experience. The structure around him had to be perfect, and he needed to be carefully managed/ mentored from Leveins POV because of the inexperience, since obviously giving him too much rope ended up hanging him in the end. He shouldn't have been allowed to rip up the team, he shouldn't have been allowed to pick his team in the manner he did. I think Levein gave him too much freedom. 

So what you’re saying is, if we’d had Levein with Cathro as his assistant, 2 of the most clueless individuals abject failures to be at our club in the post vlad era, that would’ve succeeded? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Levein Cathro dream management team.

 

As a starting point, Cathro was and is arrogant. He would not have come to Hearts to be an assistant. He came here because he got a management job. He got one. And we all witnessed the outcome 

[the posh bit]

Levein's vanity project. 

[OTT]

15 minutes ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

So what you’re saying is, if we’d had Levein with Cathro as his assistant, 2 of the most clueless individuals abject failures to be at our club in the post vlad era, that would’ve succeeded? 🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣🤣 Levein Cathro dream management team.

 

As a starting point, Cathro was and is arrogant. He would not have come to Hearts to be an assistant. He came here because he got a management job. He got one. And we all witnessed the outcome 

 

See that final paragraph I posted? Read it again. 

[Saint Jambo]

He might be better suited to a manager role now than he was then. People develop, mature and gain experience. He'd now be older than almost all the players and can point at over a decade working in coaching roles. The idea that he was rubbish at 31 so will be forever more is clearly stupid. It would be like watching a player at 18 and assuming that was their peak.

 

That said, it isn't an interview that endeared him to me. Not a single mention of the Hearts fans in all of that. Managers and players find it easy to talk about the importance of the fans when things are going well. But the mark of the man is acknowledging that you have let the fans down when things have gone badly.

 

I like the idea of trying something different with a managerial appointment. There is a bit of a recognition that the upside could be higher, but so is the risk. Unfortunately the two times we've gone down that path recently have both been a total disaster.

[A_A wehatethehibs]

1 minute ago, OTT said:

 

See that final paragraph I posted? Read it again. 

Yeah but i was talking about your plan for master Levein to take on Cathro as his apprentice padwan, train him in the ways of the force, then go back upstairs and give Ian the #1 job… 

[OTT]

1 minute ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

Yeah but i was talking about your plan for master Levein to take on Cathro as his apprentice padwan, train him in the ways of the force, then go back upstairs and give Ian the #1 job… 

 

yeah but nothing if you're going to try and ridicule my post at least understand the point I'm making - the post was about the possible circumstances that may have helped give a bad appointment more chance of success/ logging the areas where had we done things differently. It was always probably doomed for failure, but if the club did more to give Cathro the chance to stick the landing, then I think we'd have improved the odds of success. Levein treated him like he knew what he was doing, the laddie was 30 years old. 

 

Leveins whole philosphy at that time seemed to be around coaching coaches - which is just stupid and dripping with hubris. 

[A_A wehatethehibs]

9 minutes ago, OTT said:

 

yeah but nothing if you're going to try and ridicule my post at least understand the point I'm making - the post was about the possible circumstances that may have helped give a bad appointment more chance of success/ logging the areas where had we done things differently. It was always probably doomed for failure, but if the club did more to give Cathro the chance to stick the landing, then I think we'd have improved the odds of success. Levein treated him like he knew what he was doing, the laddie was 30 years old. 

 

Leveins whole philosphy at that time seemed to be around coaching coaches - which is just stupid and dripping with hubris. 

It was doomed to failure starting in 2014 mate when Levein was given the keys to the club. Ultimately that’s where it all goes back to. Total fluke that he got the first appointment right with Robbie. 

Edited May 8 by A_A wehatethehibs

[Ex member of the SaS]

16 hours ago, A_A wehatethehibs said:

 Levein didn’t “interfere” mate, but simply tried desperately to help a totally out his depth floundering young coach. Levein must have known very very early on he had ****ed up badly with that appointment. After that he spent 6 months tryinf to save him which was the biggest mistake of his life and ****ed our club up massively 

So are you denying he was in the dressing room before during and after matches? Are you denying he passed a note ( seen live on TV ) from the stand to the manager?

I would suggest that is interfering, you may suggest he was trying to help but I can't see any manager happy with the DoF hanging around while trying to give a team talk, and I can't see Levein sitting quietly in the corner when this was happening.