Diary of a football manager: Former Wolves midfielder Karl Henry leaving no stone unturned at Boldmere to achieve management dreams

Long-range strikes from Jannelle Straker and Ridhi Ruparelia had settled a lively contest and returned the Mikes to winning ways, having lost their previous two league games on the back of opening the season with six successive wins.

Wolves’ former Championship title-winning captain is in his second full season at Boldmere, on the latest step of a coaching journey which began at grass roots level within junior football five years go. Henry’s former Molineux team-mate Rob Edwards takes charge as Wolves’ permanent head coach against Crystal Palace this weekend, and the Wolverhampton-born former midfielder has set his own lofty ambitions of managing in the Football League or Premier League in the future.

In pursuit of that aim, he is leaving no stone unturned.  Not only is he close to completing his UEFA ‘A’ Licence, but he also delivers his role at Boldmere with all the professionalism and diligence of being in the Premier League already. That moment at full time on Sunday was the culmination both of a week’s precise planning, and a longer-term structure, of meticulously detailed work making use of all the relevant technology and support staff at Henry’s disposal.

So here it is. Ahead of Boldmere’s toughest game of the season this weekend – an Adobe FA Cup trip to Liverpool Feds from a division higher – the Secret Diary of a women’s football manager, aged 42 years and 359 days! As told to Paul Berry.

MONDAY

- Watch yesterday’s game at Sheffield back and make post-match notes on    team and individual performances. Overall, the performance was good. Build-up (playing out from the back), and progression, the    (middle third) phases were fantastic! We just lacked quality and    good decision-making in our attacking phase (the final third) which ultimately cost us. A total of 68% possession, 18 shots, and 4 XG, meant that a 1-0 defeat wasn’t a reflection of the game, but that’s football.    

- Speak with Assistant Head Coach James Byrne about the game to exchange post-match views before he clips the game and tags in individual players via the Veo platform.    

- ⁠Update the IDP (Individual Development Plan) notes, and feed those notes back to the players via their IDP WhatsApp groups.    

- Touch base with our physio Madison Jordan regarding injuries. We lost another two players during the game, one with damaged ankle ligaments and one with a broken ankle. We now have six starters out injured and another four or five carrying knocks. A big challenge for any team at any level.  Check on those freshly injured players to make sure they’re ok.    

- ⁠Update WBA on the status of their loan players, Chidubem Arinze and Asiah Janny, who are 16 and 17 respectively. I update them weekly on minutes played, performance and any injury updates. I also send them a recording of the game. I must say, the Albion manager Siobhan Hodgetts is a class act and a real pleasure to deal with.

TUESDAY

- ⁠My weekly meeting with club secretary, Dave Travers.  We discuss Sunday’s result and team performance, individual performances, injuries, recruitment and the plan for the week ahead. Dave is the equivalent of a Director of Football and I’m pleased to say we have a fantastic relationship. His football-understanding and extensive knowledge of the women’s game enables him to offer me a    level of guidance and support that is second to none. Without him, we’d achieve nothing.

- ⁠Speak with potential new signing, Suraya Hutchinson, about joining us and invite her to train with us tonight. Whilst continuing to feed post-match notes back to the players via IDP WhatsApp groups.    

- ⁠Plan the evening training session. We work off a 12-week structure that we add more detail to depending on numbers, players available and issues from the weekend that urgently need to be addressed.    

⁠- Training (Matchday +2): Post-match video-analysis followed by a high-intensity training session. With only two evenings of training per week, we make sure the players work hard on Tuesdays. Although    it was cold, windy and raining the whole evening, we were delighted with the quality and, more importantly, the intensity of the session. Potential new signing Suraya was also excellent.

WEDNESDAY

- Watch training back, clip highlights and update IDP notes. Also watch latest game of upcoming opponents. This has to be made available via the FAWNL shared ‘Hudl’ platform by Wednesdays, so I am    often unable to watch before then. Will also watch other recent games if haven’t already seen them.    

- ⁠Make notes of opponents’ formations, strengths, weaknesses and key players (standard stuff) and create corresponding video clips to present to players.    

- Exchange notes with coaching team who often watch a different previous game of our upcoming opponents.

- Between 4pm and 8pm, is the first of two weekly sessions running my Karl Henry Academy, coaching young players alongside my role at Boldmere. The session is ‘Attacking Wednesdays’ at Sutton United for Under 9s to Under 13s.

THURSDAY

- Put pre-match analysis presentation together on Kidderminster Harriers, including our provisional starting line-up and game plan.  Includes finalising the video clips to show the players before training.

- ⁠Wash and dry the training bibs after Tuesday’s session in the rain. Black bits everywhere. Wife Lucy really not happy.    

- Our second evening training session of the week. Video analysis on Kidderminster followed by two hours on the pitch at Castle Vale. The girls were in great spirits, and the tempo in the session was fantastic both from the starters and the second team. A general feeling of positivity going into Sunday’s game.    

FRIDAY

- ⁠Finalise new signing Suraya Hutchinson and liaise with Dave Travers to get her registered. Liaise with physio about injured players before finalising squad.    

- Send matchday programme notes to our Social Media Manager Sophie Willis. Print deadline - 11am. Sent over - 12:12. Henry Time! Luckily, they were happy to get it printed.    

- Friday night, from 4pm-9pm, is again time for the Karl Henry Academy. Five hours in one hit can be gruelling – but I love it.  Especially when you see the players making real progress. It was a    possession-based Friday for Under 7s to Under 14s, on a night when it was extremely cold with strong winds and torrential rain all evening. Genuinely the worst conditions I’ve ever had to coach  in. Fair play to the kids that turned up and braved the weather.  After 20 years in professional football, it’s ingrained in me to train no matter what. That’s the mentality at the top. So, if the    facility is available, we train.    

SATURDAY

- Arrange cover for Boldmere’s girls only Mini-Mikes (Saturday morning session for 7-10 years-olds). We try and send two first-team players each week to coach the sessions. We’re doing everything we can to create a strong bond between our junior girls’ teams and women’s first team. And helping players develop is a big part of what I want to do at Boldmere. I have vowed to make sure we include at least two Under-18 players in every senior matchday squad while I am head coach. We had three 16 year-olds, two 17 year-olds and two 18 year-olds on the bench on Sunday.

- Collect shirts from Tag in Burton for new signings, Asiah Janny (on loan from WBA) and Suraya Hutchinson.    

- Announce matchday squad to the and finalise the matchday plan for coaches.

- Saturday afternoons are usually spent either watching Wolves or my eldest son Marley play hockey. They don’t play football at his school, so he had a choice of cricket and hockey and hockey is tactically very similar to football – he loves it. Like me, he’s a ball winner on the pitch. He covers every blade of grass making tackles and interceptions and looks after the ball well for the team. This weekend however he was struggling with a knee injury that’s been bothering him for a while, so he was advised to rest up which her reluctantly agreed to in the end!    

SUNDAY

- Game day! We welcome Kidderminster Harriers in a 3pm kick off. ⁠Get to our ground, the Amber Arena and Community Stadium, in the morning to watch my son, Monty, playing for the club’s Under-10s team. It’s a 1-1 draw.  Monty is far better technically than I was at his age. If he had the bite I had, he’d be a very good player. Maybe it will come.      

- Meet coaches early to prep for game. Just to explain the league context, the winners of our league go up automatically to Tier 3 of the women’s game where Wolves, WBA, Burnley, Stoke and Derby currently play. 

The second goes into a play-off final with the second placed team from Division One North. In our league Peterborough have forged clear at the top. They are a big club with a massive budget and a huge catchment area. As a result, they have a great squad of players. It’s difficult for anybody in our league to compete with them financially and it would be a disaster for them not to win this league given their resources and level of investment. Second place is well up for grabs though, and should Peterborough falter like they did the back half of last season, we’d like to be the team just behind them ready to pounce. 

Winning our league would be incredible, and had we not lost so many key players this early on in the season, I genuinely think that’s where we’d have finished irrespective of the resources available to Peterborough. A second place finish with a chance of promotion via the play-offs, however, would be a fantastic achievement for us given the hand we’ve been dealt. So, we must do everything we can to ensure we’re in that position. A win today would likely put us and Leafield on the same points going into our head-to-head in two weeks’ time. The winner of that game will probably be in second position at the Christmas break.

- Back to today: Kidderminster are another big club at this level, but it’s a game we should win. Their main threat is their striker, who causes problems when she receives the ball in and around the box. They mix their game up, but do like to get the ball down and play. They’re not great playing out under pressure which would usually mean us high-pressing them from the first to the last minute. However, with three of our regular back four unavailable, we don’t want to go  player-for-player back there given their nine is their biggest threat. Instead, we opted to let one of Kidderminster’s centre backs have the ball and force her down one side of the pitch where we had the overload (our two centre backs against their striker).    

This bit of inception makes teams think they’re getting joy playing out from the back because their centre back is stepping out from goal kicks every time pretty much unopposed. But as they’re guided forward by our striker and reach the point where they have to play their next pass, it almost always results in them giving the ball back to us. Today played out exactly as we thought it would and Kidderminster’s only chances came from set-pieces smashed into the box or cheap turnovers from in our defensive third.    

In possession, we wanted to dominate the ball as we always do, but by playing in their half play at a high tempo. We wanted to get our full backs overlapping at every opportunity, attack with intensity and, most importantly, get our shots off and work their goalkeeper.

⁠Kidderminster pressed us high with five players which left big gaps to drop the ball into to our wingers. Something we work on regularly. There are a number of ways to break a press and we want our players to understand and be able to execute every which way to do that. If    they drop their wingers back to stop us hitting our front players, we play short again. It’s a game of cat and mouse.

We had some excellent passages of play and created a number of good moments without breaking the deadlock. Finally, we went 1-0 up late in the first half with a well-worked goal curled into the bottom corner beautifully by our right-winger, Jannelle Straker.    

Second half, we sat in a little more with the objective of hitting them on the break which we did well, often lacking that final ball or action. ⁠If there’s something we’ve been guilty of this season, it’s not killing games off. When there’s only one goal in the game, teams keep throwing everything at you. Scoring a second goal usually knocks the stuffing out of teams which, in turn, allows you to play with more freedom. It also allows you to get young players on the pitch to gain that valuable experience. We scored our second goal in the 90th minute with a great finish from midfielder Ridhi Ruparelia, to earn a well-deserved 2-0 victory. We had 59% possession in the game, with 13 shots, two goals and a clean sheet.

That’s 7 wins from 9 in the league. Not a bad start at all. But there’s a long way to go. And pretty quickly my focus moves on to the next. When I get home, I’m always exhausted after games. I feel like I’ve played a game because I’m that involved kicking every ball. That’s my style and I’m not sure I’ll ever change it. I want to bring energy, passion and relentlessness throughout games as a coach because I believe it creates an intensity within your team that is required to win games consistently. I am also loud and passionate on the touchline, just like most of the other coaches in the league.  We all want to win, and, over the 90 minutes of a game, that is all I am interested in. I don’t let players relax, not for one second. Not in matches, not in training. But yes, when I get home, I’m knackered and feel like I’ve played 90 minutes myself.        

Anybody who knows me and my character won’t be surprised to see how seriously I take my role at Boldmere. I am on a coaching journey and know where I eventually want to go, but I am definitely enjoying every part of the journey along the way. I feel fortunate to work with such a great group of players and coaches who share my drive and intensity and it’s such a shame that having built a really talented squad, that we’ve been hit by so many injuries. This is the reality of competitive football though, and I love the challenge. Having worked as hard as I did to reach the Premier League as a player, and work for so many brilliant and influential managers, I’d love the opportunity to one day do the same myself. For now though, it’s all about Liverpool Feds on Sunday.