15 AUG 1998 , Edition 2, Page 15.
Joker on the park
Meet the man who’s coached a team of soccer giant killers. Roy Pilott talks to Jeff Coulshed.
Coach Jeff Coulshed
“You wanted to play for your team, not Everton, not Arsenal, your team.” Jeff Coulshed
“For starters, Coulshed, we’ll get a new mug of you for this — you’ve stopped perming your hair, and the one we used this week is five years old.”
That’s a blow for the Ngaruawahia coach who’s managed to con non-soccerites for years that he still looks like the long-lost older brother of the Bee Gees.
I proffer a copy of the latest copy of Bruce Holloway’s soccer fanzine Sitter. It contains a clipping from the Oratia club programme — a scathing attack on Coulshed over his choice of adjectives during an after-match speech last month. And I’ve asked his age.
It’s a bit rough on an old bloke who’s just introduced me to wife Judy as “the son of the only referee I’ve ever been scared of”.
You don’t need kid gloves with Jeff Coulshed, coach of a genuine fairytale football team.
He is, as someone suggested to me, a bit of yer Arfur Daley. And his team, my son, is playing in yer semifinal of the genuine Chatham Cup in Dunedin tomorrow.
Last weekend Coulshed was careful to mind his pees and queues during the aftermatch speeches.
His effort, which included presenting the ref with a pair of thick-lens specs, was more entertaining than the match.
The ref saw the funny side and put the specs on. It didn’t happen like that at Oratia.
Coulshed is unusually serious for a moment.
“You know it was done in jest — Billy Connolly gets paid millions to do it; I get fined.”
Connolly might counter that he knows how to adjust his routine to suit the audience.
But they’re a down-to-earth bunch at Narra, and Coulshed, in his fourth season there, fits in nicely. He’s moulded a team of youngsters and club vets. They’re proud of the way he ignored football mercenaries and told those who offered to play for money to look elsewhere.
COULSHED’S coaching path to the Cup semifinal has been unconventional.
He is the reluctant coach — who wanted to play until his body said no more.
But he was thrown into the fray with a relegated National League side, Hamilton, as Kevin Fallon’s successor at Muir Park in the late ’70s. It kept him off the park for two years.
He got Hamilton back up, but missed playing. So in order to play and coach, he took over the Waikato women’s team in 1982 “because they play on a Sunday”.
By the time he finished playing and was tapped by Ngaruawahia, he had taken Waikato to the national women’s title twice, gone around the world with the under-19 and under-21 sides and coached the full national women’s squad.
“I got more enjoyment out of coaching Waikato to a top four place and then two titles than from any other soccer I’ve played,” he says. “I don’t see that ever being surpassed, because the players were so dedicated.”
It was dodgy knees which ended Coulshed’s playing days, though it had looked more likely that it would be an ankle. Go back to the early 1960s and he was a young Orral lad who loved supporting Everton — but had dreamed of playing for his home team, Skelmersdale United, since he was 7.
“You wanted to play for your team, not Everton, not Arsenal, your team,” he recalls.
He did it, earning a fiver a week — only to stuff up his ankle and see his career at the White Moss Road ended.
Two years later a winger called Steve Heighway had his shirt. If that means nothing to you, go and ask a Liverpool fan.
“In those days you got injured and they made you put your foot in hot water — there was no x-rays.”
Coulshed was so depressed his dad Arthur told him to emigrate.
He came to New Zealand as a panel beater rather than soccer player, and spent two years in Wellington before heading for Auckland — and getting no further than Hamilton East’s Riverina Tavern.
In the mid-1960s you only needed an English accent in the Riverina to get an invitation to play on Saturday.
It was the start of the second phase of his career. Doctors found he had broken bones in his ankle. They fixed the problem and he ended up playing for Technical Old Boys — who won the Chatham Cup in 1968.
Apart from spells in Australia with Hakoah in Sydney and Macedonia in Melbourne, he has been in Hamilton ever since.
In 1969, when Skelmersdale got to a non-league final at Wembley, Coulshed went home to watch them in the semifinal. He never made it to the game. Arthur Coulshed — who once played league for Wigan — had a heart attack on the morning of the game and was dead before kickoff.
Coulshed Jr gave his charges a similar scare 14 years later in 1983 when he collapsed as he talked to the Waikato women’s team before a match. It was a brain haemorrhage.
Judy Coulshed was told to get there quick because her husband wasn’t expected to make it through the night. He did.
And he played again, six months later in a Golden Oldies tournament after getting a clean bill of health.
When Coulshed decided he could play no more, Ngaruawahia stalwart Geoff Tozer was first to hear. Tozer had a new coach for his club.
THE LONG grass was cut before last Saturday’s home match against league leaders Three Kings United. Cut without a catcher. On a grey Saturday neither team worked out how to thread the ball between the clumps. Not too many people watched.
Coulshed’s team lost.
It was just another match day at the Ngaruwahia Soccer Club.
Tomorrow won’t be.