Andy Woodman is at home preparing for Sunday’s National League play-off final at Wembley. And when the Bromley boss is asked how nervous he is ahead of the biggest game of his managerial career, he bursts into laughter.
“When you have a family like mine where everything is chaos – my daughter is about to have a baby – then Sunday’s game is a relief. I’ll tell you what, it’s an escape for me from the crazy world of the Woodman house.
Woodman, a coach whose outsized presence on the sideline exudes enthusiasm, is perhaps deliberately downplaying the importance of this game. For Bromley, as well as their opponents Solihull Moors, this is a historic highlight. Unlike last year’s play-off finalists Chesterfield and Notts County, neither club has league pedigree. The prize at stake is completely transformative.
“Oh, it’s the promised land, the Holy Grail,” says Woodman. “This club has existed for 132 years and this is the highest point it has ever reached. Solihull will have the same feelings. Of course there will be nervousness in the place, the fans will be nervous, the board will be nervous. But it’s something we don’t shy away from. Since July last year, we have set ourselves one goal and one goal only: to reach the EFL.”
Swapped the Premier League for the National League
Sunday also represents the pinnacle of Woodman’s managerial career, the culmination of a surprisingly diverse coaching and playing background. He started out as a goalkeeper in Crystal Palace’s academy. And although he never played for the first team at Selhurst Park, there he made many useful contacts.
Particularly when, after playing for eleven different league and non-league clubs, including Oxford United and Northampton, he received a call from his old Palace team-mate Alan Pardew asking if he would like to be goalkeeping coach at West Ham. He did. And the pair got on so well that he followed Pardew to Charlton, Newcastle and back to Palace. When Pardew left Selhurst, Woodman got a job at Arsenal. Then, in 2017, he was asked to become manager of Isthmian League team Whitehawk in Brighton.
“People thought I was crazy, leaving Arsenal out of the league,” he says. “But I wanted to manage and I thought I had the credentials. And interestingly enough, my experience made it work. You are speaking to someone who played most of his career at the lower levels and then trained at the higher levels. There’s a nice mix in me. I felt like I could get along anywhere and with anyone.”
Plus, if he needed management advice, he knew who to turn to. His oldest friend, the godfather of his son Freddie, the Preston and former Newcastle goalkeeper, is Gareth Southgate. They met when they were both juniors at Palace and have spoken virtually every day since then with Woodman’s best man at Southgate’s wedding.
In 2004, he wrote a wonderfully warm book about their relationship, which won the autobiography section of the British Sports Books Awards. Called Woody and Nord: A Football Friendship, it shows how they remained best friends even when one played for England and the other for Thurrock. Nord, in fact, was the nickname Wally Downes first gave to Southgate at Palace because of his apparent resemblance to Dennis Nordern (one for the teenagers, there).
Southgate’s influence on Woodman
“We’re best friends, we talk about everything, not just football,” says Woodman. “But of course, we talk about football like all best friends. We laugh because we have very similar moans, from very different ends of the spectrum. It’s good to talk to someone who knows what it’s like. The problem with being a manager is that everyone thinks they can do it better than you. Gareth told me that his postman thinks he could manage England.
So will Southgate be there on Sunday to check on his best friend?
“I would have thought he was done with Wembley,” Woodman laughs. “If I were Gareth, I would watch it in front of the television, with a glass of wine in my hand. To relax. After all, he has some very important games ahead of him.”
Woodman underestimates the influence the England manager has had on his career, but admits there is one aspect of Southgate’s approach that he readily embraces.
“We both know how to treat people,” he says. “We both played under coaches who we thought: that’s not how it’s done. We’ve talked about this before and we agree that the best way to get the most out of people is to treat them with respect. Whether it’s the most talented ones, like he deals with, or the not-so-talented ones, you need to make them comfortable in their own skin. This is called management.”
‘You put together a team not to play classic football, but to win’
For Woodman this is particularly important. Bromley have a budget half the size of some in the National League. And although he has been able to use his old contacts to bring in players (his midfielder is Mitchel Bergkamp, Dennis’ son, who he knew from Arsenal’s academy), he has never had the ability to use money as bait.
“No disrespect to our owner, who is absolutely fantastic, but our budget is the 16th or 17th biggest in the league. We don’t get 9,000 crowds,” he says. “The budget determines the football we play. You have to bring in hungry players and form a team not to play classic football, but to win.
Winning has been something he has done a lot of since moving to Bromley in 2021. He has taken them to the quarter-finals and semi-finals of the National League play-offs every year since arriving and guided his team to victory in the FA Trophy in 2022. It was a triumph that was noticeable. Gillingham that season offered him the manager’s job, but he turned it down.
“It was very flattering, but I didn’t feel like it was right at the time,” he says. “Also, I know this is not a very elegant word in football, but I felt a sense of loyalty to the chairman, the fans and the lads at Bromley who gave me the opportunity. Now I’m in a position where I could become a league manager. With Bromley.
And if he gets past Solihull on Sunday, probably the first call he expects to receive will be from his older teammate Southgate.
“Are you kidding me? I hope it’s Man City and not bloody Gareth.”
