“When those words rippled out I went ‘You are f-ing joking!’. He said ‘No I’m not. And by the way you’re going to have to tell that lovely wife of yours that you’re coming home because we’ve got a press conference arranged for the next day or the day after and then we’ll fly you back out’.

“I went, ‘Happy days!’. Of course there were a lot of conversations that night. Pickford’s had to be told to go and get lost, we had to do this that and the other. Then I was unveiled and the rest is history, if you like.

“And, of course, the first person that rang me was Joe. Really gracious and lovely and I said ‘Listen, I’ll never be off the phone from you’. He was brilliant and I had nothing but huge admiration and respect for him, I loved Joe, I loved working for him and he was a point of reference for me to.”

Rumour at the time suggested it was Derek Bowden who was particularly impressed with you in the interviews and that he was the member of the board most pushing for your appointment.

“I don’t know, to be honest,” Magilton said. “That’s the first I’ve heard of it. I had a fantastic relationship with Derek.

“Derek was a lovely, lovely man and I remember an early lesson he gave me. If it was Derek I’m so grateful to him because if it was him, he gave me my first opportunity which was so very gracious. I always got on well with him.

“He taught me a really brilliant lesson about managing up. He rang me on consecutive days and I ignored it. Not deliberately, but I ignored the calls. I saw missed call, missed call, missed call, whatever was going on, it might have been about players.

“I was dealing with players, dealing with staff, dealing with whatever else is going on, so I went in the office and he came in and you could never tell with Derek. He just said ‘I’m going to tell you this and it’s for your own good. When I’m ringing you it’s not to talk about the f-ing weather it’s to talk about club business. So when I ring you can you please have the common decency to return a call? That is your first lesson in football - never ignored a call’.

“I never ignored another call from him or anybody else. It was a brilliant lesson and he delivered it like Anthony Perkins out of flipping Psycho, he looked at me and went ‘I’ll never do it again!’. And he said ‘I know you won’t’. And that was it.

“I was learning on the job and the first 12 months was helter-skelter, hectic, 24-seven and then I realised I really needed to schedule, delegate, make sure I had my own way of doing things, have set schedule, monthly schedules for players - this is the way I want it done.

“It took time to develop. Obviously then there was the huge transformation of Marcus coming in and not having that relationship with the board that I’d had and dealing one-to-one with an owner, who was ravenous for success.”

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