Kevin Phillips: ‘I’ve waited a long time to be a manager – I want to do it right’

Kevin Phillips starts with a confession. “Before I signed for Sunderland I didn’t even know it was by the sea,” says the new manager of South Shields. “Geography clearly wasn’t my strong point but I ended up enjoying my time in this area so much that, in the back of my mind, I’ve always hoped to come back one day.”

The former England striker’s return to the north-east has brought him to Mariners Park, seven miles up the road from the Stadium of Light and a 10-minute drive from the sandy North Sea beaches where he will doubtless sometimes put his fully professional seventh-tier Northern Premier League Premier Division squad through their paces.

At the age of 48 the only Englishman to have won Europe’s Golden Shoe award – in recognition of Phillips’s 30 Premier League goals for Sunderland as Peter Reid’s then side finished seventh in 1999-2000 – has begun 2022 by finally securing his first managerial posting.

Two games and two wins into life in the hot seat Phillips’s tenure has begun brightly enough to suggest that those chairmen who mystifyingly overlooked his numerous job applications could soon have cause to kick themselves.

“When you try and persuade clubs to take a chance on you as a manager but just have constant knock-backs you kind of almost give up,” admits a man who has spent recent years occupying senior coaching positions at Leicester, Derby and Stoke. “Happily Geoff Thompson [the South Shields chairman] was willing to take the risk. I’ve waited a long time for this so I want to do it right and I immediately said I’d be moving up here.”

True to his word, Phillips has rented an apartment and will return to the home in the Midlands he shares with his wife, Julie, and their four children only on days off.