The feature writers who list moving home as one of life’s most stressful events have never tried managing a team in the SPFL Premiership. Building a four-bedroom semi from scratch with two bare hands and a B&Q screwdriver would bring less grief and hassle.
While McGlynn stopped fretting over the grey hairs long ago, the manager of Falkirk sat back in his new abode before Christmas to ask himself if the sweat and sacrifice of a life in football might have taken more out of him than he had ever stopped to consider.
Former Hearts colleague and friend Gary Kirk, the head scout of Dunfermline, collapsed after a football match in November and never recovered. Early last year, his assistant manager Paul Smith suffered a heart attack after a game.
The late Jock Stein died in a technical area in his early sixties and, after turning 64 in December, McGlynn did not fancy becoming a casualty of his hopeless addiction to football. “I was close to Gary Kirk and when I saw what happened to a pal like that it did give me a bit of worry,’ he admits now. “So much so that I recently went and got myself a wee health MOT.
“I had an ECG and bloods taken and I was given a wee machine to check my blood pressure every day for five days and take all the readings and send them in. I did that after Gary passed away in November because it did get me thinking.
“I thought I better have a wee check and so far, so good,” he says, touching the wooden surface of his desk in the Falkirk Stadium.
“I have still to get my blood results back but all the other things were fine. Even then, it doesn’t guarantee anything, does it?”
Read more:
Scottish Cup weekend offers a reminder of just how fragile life can be. Twelve months ago his right-hand man Smith, 62, was rushed to hospital after a fourth-round defeat to Raith Rovers. Checking the wall calendar to keep himself right, McGlynn nods as he checks the date. Football management, he acknowledges, can be detrimental to a man’s health.
“Paul had the attack after the game and had to have three stents inserted. He is brand new now and the doctor told him that once the stents were in he’d be as healthy as he’d ever been.
“The fact is that you make sacrifices in this job. You don’t spend as much time with your family as you should.”
He still speaks of spending Tuesday and Thursday nights driving here, there and everywhere to coach youth teams. He would drive the bus, load the kit, get home at midnight then spend every Saturday and Sunday tending the needs of young footballers while spending little or no time with his wife Wilma and daughter Mandy.
“My wife was always understanding and supportive all the way through and I’ve managed to mention her on TV a few times, thanking her for putting up with me.
“My daughter worked in the Hearts shop when I was working there and here, there and everywhere with football.
“Football gets you like that. It’s an amazing industry, an amazing sport and you do get absorbed in it to the exclusion of everything else. It’s in the blood.”
Three decades have passed since his old pals Jim Jefferies and Billy Brown gave him his big break in professional coaching with Hearts, the club he went on to manage and the team which now stand between his Falkirk side and a place in the fifth round of the Scottish Cup. When he really should be taking life a bit easier and spending some quality time around the new house, McGlynn shows no sign of slowing down. Buoyed by back-to-back promotions, Falkirk sit sixth in the SPFL Premiership and he is clearly enjoying himself too much to start looking out the garden shears.
“The going is good eh? So long as that’s the case, you keep going as long as you can. Why not?”
Brendan Rodgers, his old boss at Celtic, once claimed that McGlynn still has one big job left in him yet. Laughing at the very idea, he might have dismissed it out of hand until he came up against a 73-year-old Martin O’Neill in Wednesday night’s narrow defeat to Celtic.
“It was funny seeing Martin the other night, nine years older than me.
John McGlynn greets Celtic manager Martin O'Neill. (Image: Stuart Wallace / Shutterstock)
“I’m 64 and I can’t really visualise myself in nine years’ time going back in… But, who knows? Craig Brown went back in when he was a fair age as well at Motherwell and Aberdeen.”
The streets of Wallyford turned him into one of the game’s great survivors. Remarkably, the former mining stronghold seven miles east of Edinburgh has a proud record of rearing successful football managers. Legendary treble-winning Rangers boss Jock Wallace and Scottish Cup-winning Hearts manager Jefferies were from the same town.
“I knew Jock Wallace very, very loosely. They were not living in Wallyford when he was manager of Rangers. But I remember school summer holidays when his son would come through and play football near the grandparents’ house.
“We would play football in this old-fashioned area like everybody did years and years ago. A bit of grass, a couple of jerseys and there was always a game of football going on.
“Jock’s boy was a relation of some of the pals I knocked around with. But that was it.”
Jefferies and his loyal sidekick Brown would have a significantly bigger impact on his life and career. His brother Charlie kicked around the same streets with the pair before Jefferies began preparing for a life in football management by coaching the Wallyford Welfare Colts, attached to the local miner’s welfare when he was still playing for Hearts.
McGlynn turned out for the team at under-14 level and, when his own playing career ended at 26, he coached the wonderfully-named Easthouse Lily, then Musselburgh, before Jefferies offered him the chance to coach the Hearts under-16s in 1995.
“It was a part-time thing really. I had qualified as a plumber and that was what I did full time.
“It was a good time to be at Hearts. Jim went on to win the Scottish Cup in 1998 and on the back of that Paul Hegarty went to Aberdeen as first- team coach and there was a promotion for Peter Houston.
“Housty moved into Paul’s job and I managed to get a full-time post in November 1998.”
Read more:
Despite the move to one of Scotland’s biggest clubs – and the current Premiership leaders – McGlynn was never the type to get ideas above his station. They can take the boy out of Wallyford; they will never take Wallyford from the boy. “All the mines have shut down now, but my dad was a miner,” he says. “Almost everyone of his era was down the pits.”
The values he learned from the mining community equipped him to spend 11 years at Hearts before spells as manager of Raith Rovers and Livingston.
Pitching up at Falkirk in May 2022, the Bairns were a League One outfit losing £1 million a year. Some serious elbow grease was required.
“When you are brought up in a mining village like mine, you grow up realising that you are going to have to work for a living. And I mean work.
“You are never going to get anything laid on a plate for you. You have to graft and I think that has stood with me all through my life. The players recognise the work that you put in and demand the same from the players. For me, that’s how it should be.”
Too modest to bracket himself with the likes of Stein, Ferguson, Shankly or Busby, McGlynn might be one of the last old-school working-class managers to hail from a hard-bitten industrial landscape. He is proud of the fact.
“When we came in three-and-a-half years ago the club was not in a great place.
“Things behind the scenes were not great and everything needed a clean up and a brush up and a lick of paint here and there just to get a bit more respect around the place.
“I was a plumber in the trade, so I can dabble a bit when I need to.
“When I was at Raith Rovers I would have fitted the showers or taken on any wee jobs that needed doing at any particular time. Within reason of course. “Thankfully I’ve not had to do anything in the Falkirk Stadium because it’s run by the council and they take care of that.
“But a manager can hardly ask people to respect a club if it’s not earned. If there’s a culture of chucking boots around the place and people accept that then that becomes the standards.
“I try to implement standards, and maintain standards and improve standards anywhere I go.”
The standard of Falkirk’s football has drawn compliments across the board. A genuine asset to the Premiership, the Bairns should have taken something from a defeat to Celtic when they crafted a number of first-half chances.
Despite retaining the core of the squad who won successive promotions, McGlynn wants his team to play football which is easy on the eye. “I love Motherwell and the way they play. I’m sure Motherwell people will not thank me for saying this but I think they must realise that the manager is going to move soon because he is just too good.
“It’s very difficult to play like that. But in the three-and-a-half years I have spent in this place it has been really good.
“In the first year, we got to a Scottish Cup semi-final and the foundations were laid to kick on.
“Since then it has been all on the up in one way or another. To have 5700 season ticket holders here is incredible. The club is in good health.”
After a check on his brakes and tyres before Christmas, the same might be said of John McGlynn, the steady, reliable runner taking Falkirk on a footballing joy ride.
