How Ian Holloway banished training ground ghosts to get Swindon firing and the three quirky hobbies that kept veteran boss busy during four-year hiatus

If Swindon’s training ground is haunted, as Ian Holloway claimed earlier this season, any ghosts may have been scared away this week.

The veteran manager of the League Two club has just entered the room after giving his players an almighty rollicking for a rare sub-par performance at Morecambe and admits ‘their ears will still be ringing’.

Not just the squad, but any uninvited guests from beyond the grave, too.

Shortly after taking over a team on the slide, he claimed that the reason for their slump was due to a ghostly presence at their training ground which led to a succession of cancelled bookings in the sports centre and a polite warning to stop talking about it.

So we will not dwell on the topic too much but, as Holloway jokes, it is hard not to mention. ‘You get these TV shows trying to find ghosts… that can be all staged,’ he tells Mail Sport. ‘But with this, I’ve seen it on a CCTV camera.

‘It picked up a shadow smashing through the wall and then throwing a glass off a shelf. Who can set that up? Who can cheat that? It’s happened where we are. I have watched hours and hours of what I call “nothing happens TV” with my wife… then I came here and, after a day, I saw that!’

After four years out of the game, he has won almost half of his games since joining in October

He says he ‘feels alive again’ in the game and that a football manager can never ‘truly retire’ 

But since Holloway has been in situ, any evil spirits seem to have left Swindon be. He took over with the fanbase in mutiny over an ownership crisis and the team 22nd, tap-dancing dangerously over the trapdoor of relegation out of the Football League.

Now things are looking better with Swindon comfortably mid-table, closer to the play-offs than the bottom two. So with that in mind, Holloway is now doing something he admits he hates doing: sitting still.

‘Being back in football makes me feel alive again,’ says the man with more than 1,000 games in management across nine clubs. Now 62, Holloway spent four years away from the dugout after leaving his last post at Grimsby.

‘I don’t think any football manager ever truly retires. You just can’t get a job. Maybe I needed a break. It is a strange world. I have eight grandchildren, my wife has put up with all sorts of things over the years — I have moved her 48 times!

‘So I spent time learning all sorts of things because I just couldn’t sit still. But there is nothing like football, absolutely nothing like it… unless you’re in Blackpool on one of them rides! Life is about being excited.

‘Having all this information flying around my brain, all these decisions to make at Swindon, I feel normal again. When I didn’t have it, I didn’t feel right. You cannot replace the feeling of football with anything else, it is an exaggeration of every-day life — ups, downs, all the time.’

So, what did Holloway get up to in his time away? ‘My wife and I are maximalists, we like to collect things. I would watch Antiques Roadshow, I would try to find bargains in charity shops — but they are clever now, they check things on the internet.

‘Then I was learning to paint with acrylics. I tried to paint the classic, Girl with a Pearl Earring by Johannes Vermeer. Banksy did one, the earring was the alarm system. I did one like that, I just used my eye! I have done one of Ian Wright and Heath Ledger as The Joker.

Fans were frustrated before he came but he has Swindon comfortably mid-table in League Two

In his years off, he enjoyed collecting antiques, painting with acrylics, and going to the gym 

He and his wife Kim has moved house an astonishing 48 times. She ‘has put up with all sorts of things over the years,’ he says

‘I go to the gym, I’ve learned how to do pull-ups, I can do dips, I’ve got to keep moving. I am up at 5.30am, go to the gym. It wasn’t that I thought I was wasting away, I just thought, “What can I do?”. I got this job, just up the road so I didn’t have to move away.

‘My wife and I went to Somerset, walking round churchyards to try and find her relatives to see the lineage of her family. My wife likes metal detecting so I go along with her but I’m not patient enough — she can stand there for hours. I can’t stand still.

‘Now I’m back at work, I have a balance now and always try to keep that. Enjoy your work but you need time to be with the people you love the most. And also have time with yourself. After Covid, I thought the biggest gift is having time with the people you love.’

Holloway also knows sign language due to three of his four children, who are now adults, being deaf. He is advocating for everyone in the UK to have lessons in how to perform CPR after former Luton captain Tom Lockyer collapsed on the pitch last year.

‘I got really emotional,’ says Holloway on Lockyer, who he knows from following his former club Bristol Rovers. ‘Now they brought him in to speak about it. What a brilliant thing to do. My dad died from a heart attack years and years ago.

‘But what a brilliant thing to do to save someone’s life stopping at a brutal end. Covid was the worst thing for me ever, people lost their loved ones, couldn’t even sit by them.

‘You can learn it in a day and you can get better knowledge of how to save someone.

‘As many people should do it as they can. My dad never met my kids. Thinking about that breaks me in half even now. I was 25 when I lost him, my son is 27 now. So if you get a chance to do it, please do it.’

‘I’ve got to keep moving,’ he says – and part of that regime includes getting up at 5.30am

He is best known as a manager for getting Blackpool promoted to the Premier League in 2010

Clearly, family and enjoying life are two of Holloway’s biggest passions. It makes him a likeable character and his players have certainly bought into his ways, with Swindon beating promotion hopefuls AFC Wimbledon on Tuesday ahead of Saturday’s trip to Fleetwood.

‘My grandchildren realise their grandad is in football now,’ he adds. ‘My kids, when they were young, I got sacked at QPR and they thought the club was mine, like I owned it. They didn’t understand it, didn’t like it.

‘The grandkids now think, “Oh there’s old Gramps, why’s he on the TV?”. I am happy for me, to be honest, I am not getting on at my wife all the time. When you go to the shops, it is just, “Why are you putting that in the trolley?”.

‘I needed to go and get a purpose so thank God I have got that at Swindon.’

Sky Bet and the EFL have joined forces in support of the British Heart Foundation to host the Sky Bet EFL Every Minute Matters Relay – a gruelling 4000km challenge, where fans walk, run or cycle to every one of the 72 Sky Bet EFL Clubs in just 28 days.

To learn CPR in just 15 minutes with the BHF’s free, online tool, search ‘RevivR’.