Returning Blues stalwart Bryan Klug says his 2010 axing by former manager Roy Keane ultimately did him a favour as it gave him the chance to spend two years broadening his horizons at Tottenham's academy. Klug, who was yesterday was confirmed as Town’s new academy director, was in a head of football development role, having previously been Jim Magilton’s assistant manager, when Keane removed him from the Blues' staff.
Klug, who subsequently worked as assistant academy director and head of player development at Spurs, said: "Football clubs always operate so the manager has the right to pick his staff and you have to respect that.
"Obviously, that was the decision and it was made for the right reasons at the time, I guess. But that’s in the past, we’re now looking ahead.
"It did probably do me a big favour because I’d been in this corner of East Anglia for a long time and I needed to broaden my horizons.”
The 51-year-old says the decisions was nothing personal but that Keane didn’t see the value in the position Klug had taken up a year earlier after John Gorman had come in as Magilton’s assistant: "That was never going to work with Roy. I don’t think you can bring a manager in and impose that on him. The football club was going through a lot of changes at the time.
"At that time I’d been Jim’s assistant, we’d started a role that Roy wasn’t interested in and he was perfectly entitled to pick his own staff as far as I’m concerned. I told him at the time I thought he was wrong, but he was entitled to do that.
"He operated in a different way to the way I operate. In any walk of life that’ll end in one way — the boss wins.
"It’s an occupational hazard. When I broke my leg, I remember lying in the ambulance thinking ‘that’s an occupational hazard when you play football’. You have to take it that way.
"You’ve just got to look back and see it as a positive now. At the time I didn’t feel that way but the day I left I had phone calls from a lot of football clubs and luckily landed at one which was a good fit - apart from being 70 miles down the A12!”
He says he has thoroughly enjoyed his time with Tottenham and has learnt a lot from it: "It stimulated me going away. I got back out on the coaching field with youngsters again, which I hadn’t done for a couple of years.
"I worked with the person who I consider to be the best academy manager in the country at Tottenham, John McDermott, who is a fantastic coach, and it was great to be in an environment in which I was learning again, which probably in the latter years here didn’t happen enough for me.
"I needed the challenge. I’ve gone away and I’m going to nick a few ideas from Tottenham! I’ve been able to go out on the training field and watch the first team there, players like Luka Modric and Scott Parker and I’ve seen a lot of good practice and worked with some really top young players at Tottenham as well.
"I’ve spent two years working with those guys and hopefully I can use that for the good of Ipswich Town now.
"The quality of the they’ve got at Tottenham, watching the coaches deliver and give fresh ideas has been a really good learning experience.”
Chief executive Simon Clegg says he and Klug talked about a possible return even when they were negotiating the terms of his exit: "We spoke about it when we were having the difficult conversations about his departure, hoping there might be the opportunity for us to work together again in the future.”
Clegg hopes he and the club dealt with the parting of the ways in the correct manner: "I had to deal with the contractual issues between the two of us. It was important to recognise that Bryan had been at the club for many, many years and it was a difficult time for him and I hope that we handled it as well as we could have done.
"But you have to back your manager, particularly who he selects for the starting XI any week but also in terms of the staff around him.
"Bryan was no longer in the academy at that stage, he’d moved on, he was working with the first team, he was reserve team manager, and the manager at the time decided that he needed to change things around.”
He says Klug and his successors as academy directors will work to those in his role rather than whoever the first team boss might be at the time: "To protect the integrity of the academy going forward the academy director will report straight to the chief executive, but obviously there needs to be very close linkage with the manager.
"You’ve got this challenge in terms of delivering what the manager wants over the next couple of years, but while also trying to ensure what’s in the pipeline is delivering in the Ipswich way.
"It’s always been the case that the academy manager has answered to the chief executive and not the manager, but certainly over recent years that’s become blurred.
"It’s much more formalised now and it’s also a requirement of EPPP, those structures are very clear.
"It’s not just [to protect against] a new manager bringing their own person in, but changing the whole football philosophy in terms of what’s in the pipeline.
"We’ve got to have an Ipswich Town philosophy which runs from the U9s all the way through to the scholars with some tweaking right at the top end to deliver what the manager wants for the following season.”