Sheffield Wednesday secret weapon Jimmy Shan on family, hating the industry and the Darren Moore moment that changed his life

“I had an hour on the phone with Darren,” he says after a moment or two about Darren Moore, his long-time colleague and coaching brother in arms who at the time of the call had just been sacked as manager of their beloved West Bromwich Albion. “I found it very, very difficult.”

Fourth in the Championship and well-set for promotion, the circumstances of Moore’s dismissal were some way south of kind and bore yet another example of the bare-chested brutality of modern football. Moore, a former Baggies player of huge repute and a fledgling coach who had rescued the club from what had become a miserable downward spiral in the latter days of their Premier League relegation season, was sacked after a draw with Ipswich Town. It was March 2019.

Moore’s assistant managers Graeme Jones and Wayne Jacobs were sacked with him and first team coach Shan, then 40 years old and on a rapid rise from a coaching career that nearly never began after he had weighed-up a life as an electrician in Australia in his 20s, had been asked to take his place as caretaker manager.

“Anybody who tries to say 'it's just the industry' when they take over in circumstances like that must say it with little or no emotion for those who have left the building,” Shan told The Star in a soft Midlands drawl some months after Shan was reunited with Moore as his first team coach at Sheffield Wednesday.

“I had worked with Darren for a long time. It's different if you're an under-23 coach and you don't have any sort of bond with the first team staff. But I found it very, very difficult.

“I had an hour on the phone with Darren the next day who told me to think about my young family. I wasn't in a position where I could walk away from it and he told me ‘If it is one day, one week, one year, get in there and enjoy it.’ He gave me his blessing to go in and do it for myself and that put me at ease.

“The club eventually said it was mine until the end of the season and I could settle down and start doing it. It made me feel a bit more comfortable, but I only ever felt I could do it with the blessing from Darren.

“Before every game, the first person to wish me luck was Darren. At the end of the game he was the first person to send me a message. That's the character of the man.”

Jimmy Shan – family man

It is on matters human that Shan is beguilingly open and forthright, smile growing when discussing his three children – 12, nine and three and all boys – who own football shirts of all their dad’s previous teams and attend Sheffield Wednesday matches as much as they can.

Clearly a proud and passionate family man, the 44-year-old was happy to discuss the brow-beating nature of the football industry and the affect it can have on the family unit – not least when you are thrown from the relative anonymity of academy football to the caretaker management of one of the biggest clubs in the Midlands in just a few short months.

When the call came to take over from Moore in the Baggies dugout, Shan’s youngest son was just two days old.

“He was born in the Thursday and then on the Saturday, 6:30pm, I was caretaker manager of the club,” Shan said. “That was a crazy period of my life.

“The first three or four games, I was just being told to do the next game, do the next game. I was telling my wife our lives could really change because there was massive speculation that Alex Neil was going to take the job. The bottom line is that if Alex had come in, I could have been out of work. It was a strange situation to be in.

“The downside was that, ultimately, I didn't really have an initial bond with my newborn baby because I was never there. I was only 20 minutes away in terms of the commute, but there was so much time and effort that goes into planning games that people just don't see, watching games, planning and so on. I wasn't able to truly form that bond until the end of that season.”

It’s a line that cuts through the relative nonsense talk of Sheffield Wednesday promotion attempts and concerns over squad depth after a quiet January transfer window.

Football people as human beings? Who’d have thought it? And taking a tip-toed dip down that line of questioning, Shan is only happy to discuss the cut-throat nature of football, one of which he has plenty of experience having come and gone from jobs previously.

With his family based back in the Midlands, Shan spends most of his working week away in South Yorkshire, blasting up and down the motorway to see as much of them as he can but staying over for days at a time so as to offer Sheffield Wednesday FC the best of himself. Such commitment to the cause is marked.

“It's been similar to other jobs I've had,” he said. “I tend to stay up here on a Monday, a Thursday and a Friday. We tend to have a Wednesday and a Sunday off and those are my times back spending time with the family. Other than that it's all geared around planning and prepping for games and I never really switch off from it.

“It's just part of the industry and it goes with the nature of the beast that is this job, unless you're very fortunate to work at a football club within an hour or so of where you live. With all the time that goes into it all now, the planning, the analysis of previous games, the training, it's an expected part of the job now.

“You have to try to find a way around it as a family. The oldest two kids come to as many games as they possibly can so at least they're with me in some form on a matchday. But yeah, it’s not always easy.”

After racing through the ranks of the academies at Birmingham City and West Brom before he was relieved of his duties and a 13-year association with the latter with the appointment of Slaven Bilić to the Baggies top job, Shan took on non-league roles at clubs local to the Midlands; first a short-term gig at Kidderminster and then a more long-term project with Solihull Moors.

Sacked by the ambitious National League club amid an injury crisis just 32 league matches into the role, Shan speaks both as a football man and a family man when asked to offer an explanation on how one goes about dealing with a life in an industry that is so fly-by-night. His boss Moore is not yet at the two-year mark of his time at Hillsborough. Of the 92 managers in jobs in English league football, 70 have been there less than that.

“It's something you have to accept,” Shan said. “I love the game but I hate the industry. Things can be out of your control and it has such an impact on your life and your family's finances.

“You go two or three games and you're not successful and you get beaten, you never know what's round the corner but in that period, I probably wouldn't work any differently as to when I've been successful and ultimately when the players cross the white line, as a coaching staff, you have to put a lot of trust in the players to execute the plans and the instructions they've been given.”

First meeting with Darren Moore and the start of a beautiful friendship

Fast-forward via a stint as assistant manager of Rochdale and it’s no coincidence that Shan’s appointment at Wednesday came shortly before a near five-month unbeaten league run that still stretches on heading into this weekend’s trip to Charlton Athletic. Popular with players and staff alike, the coach has certainly made an impact.

The way the pair dealt with the potentially awkward situation at West Brom four years ago could have prevented them working together again. Wednesday fans will be happy it didn’t and it’s a relationship that always seemed to be a goer, Shan remembers.

It was in Spring a decade or so ago that in a meeting room at West Brom’s Walsall-based training ground, Shan looked at his watch and poured himself another coffee as he waited on the then-Burton Albion centre-half Moore, whose reputation as a player preceded him more than a reputation for snappy time-keeping.

“He was late for the meeting,” Shan smiled. “It was a Sunday morning at the training ground and Darren was just finishing his playing career. It wasn't public knowledge that he was going to retire from playing. He had a couple of options to continue playing on but the academy manager Mark Harrison wanted to get him involved and he came in alongside myself to take the under-18s.

“We spent about three hours in a classroom going through the academy philosophy, the principles of play and how we could work together to bring his playing experience with my coaching, being an ex-centre-back, being more focused on being out of possession and so on.

“We hit it off straight away. I knew from that meeting I was going to connect with him and I think everyone that comes across Darren Moore realises what an unbelievable character and gentleman he is. We struck a chord in the first meeting and I knew we were going to be successful together.

“In the early days we had two very different skill sets, the obvious one being that I didn't have a playing career and he did. I was so much around the performance and the technical and tactical aspects, whereas Darren had just stepped out of a professional changing room and understood the importance of winning. His ability to motivate people was huge and we had such a great balance early doors.

“Fast-forward to where we are today, Darren has both. He can really fire people up and when he talks, because of his natural presence and size as an audience he holds you. But also he has really developed as a coach. He's a deep-thinker and an astute tactician.”

This article is the second instalment of The Star’s two-part in-depth interview with Wednesday first team coach Jimmy Shan. To read the first part, which tells the story of his career as a player in the Midlands, how close he came to packing it in to become an Aussie electrician and more, is available to read here: Failed Owls trials, Australia and an admission to mum: The making of Sheffield Wednesday secret weapon Jimmy Shan – Part One

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