Doing the 92 is Daniel Storey’s odyssey to every English football league club in a single season. The best way to follow his journey is by subscribing here.
To a casual observer, a lot seems to have gone right for Scott Lindsey over the last decade. He progressed from a coaching job to his first senior managerial role at non-league Chatham Town. He left to become Swindon Town’s assistant manager and then, when Ben Garner left for Charlton Athletic, became a permanent Football League manager for the first time.
Even though Swindon were eighth in League Two in January 2023, Lindsey decided to take the reins at Crawley Town, the club then 89th in the Football League ladder.
Despite predictions of doom and relegation into non-league, Lindsey first kept Crawley up and then achieved one of the more remarkable promotions in recent history. Crawley won their three play-off matches by an aggregate scoreline of 10-1.
Earlier this season, Lindsey chose to move on from Crawley, even though they and he were in League One. He took the job at Milton Keynes Dons with the remit to reshape this project and take the club up to the third tier.
Lindsey is also a relentlessly positive man. At Crawley, he started talking about promotion as early as September and jokes that players probably presumed that he wasn’t being serious.
He calls it his “law of attraction”, a manifestation of positive outcomes that he believes will be infectious if players and staff choose to get on board.
The point is this: you would not guess what Scott Lindsey has been through, and Scott Lindsey has been through plenty. His story, of a guy with a dream to be a head coach for two decades who finally saw it realised, would be endearing anyway. In this case, it’s extraordinary.
In July 2019, Lindsey was at Forest Green Rovers’ training camp in Devon when he got a call to say that his wife Hayley had collapsed in the shower. Hayley was diagnosed with cancer and, with her condition showing little sign of improvement, Scott left Forest Green to care for her.
Tragically, sickbed became deathbed. Hayley died on 21 November 2019 at the age of just 44. She left behind three daughters and a husband.
“It was so hard at the start,” says Lindsey. “Most of my coaching jobs were away from home, so really Hayley brought the kids up. When she died, I had no clue about any of the basics. I had to learn those things. The girls went to two different schools and I remember one day dropping one of them off at the wrong school.
“I was probably a terrible dad beforehand, but I’d like to think that I became a very good mum and dad very quickly because I had no choice. I got so much wrong, but I think my girls knew that I tried my hardest and, you know what, I probably got a few things right too.”
Scott’s mum Jean helped out with the girls as much as she could and was, in Scott’s own words, entirely adored by his three children. But Jean also suffered from health problems. In 2022, at the age of 73, she also passed away from cancer and Lindsey had lost his complete family network.
Sadly, there’s more. In 1995, Lindsey was playing for Dover when his housemate Alan Nicholls was loaned to Stalybridge Celtic and the two teams met. To mark the occasion, Scott’s dad Keith and brother Matthew both came to watch the game. On the way home from the game, Matthew and Nicholls were both killed in a motorbike accident.
The event broke the spirit of Keith, who had been a professional footballer himself and who Scott describes as the biggest supporter of his career. Scott’s father died in 2003 of a sudden brain haemorrhage. He was just 56.
I simply don’t understand how anyone processes that much grief in one lifetime, let alone how they cope with the repetition of such emotional trauma and still enjoy the progression of his career while becoming a sole parent to three children. The reality, as Scott says, is just taking it day by day and using things that you love as a support.
For him, that meant football. While he was caring for Hayley, she persuaded him to take the part-time manager’s job at Chatham Town to keep his eye in.
Football became a form of escape but also a dose of normality. Having been a player, an academy coach, a first-team coach, an assistant manager and a manager, what other way to clear your head than football?
“Football has been amazing for me,” Scott says. “I’ve been through tough times, but football has always been there for me, as an escape and to help me grieve. It’s not for everybody, but it really did help me. My wife passed away on a Thursday and, on the Saturday, I was giving the team talk and getting organised for a game.
“I walked into the dressing room and I could see that the players felt bad about me being there. I didn’t want that. I wanted it to be normal. My assistant manager told me that the players had got me a gift for the girls and I just told him not to give it to me before the game – wait until the car park after the match.”
I ask Lindsey, very much with my amateur psychologist’s head on, whether there’s something about going through that grieving process that might make it easier to cope in the mania of football. There is huge pressure piled upon professional football managers and it seems to increase all the time.
For all that football has helped Scott, he must surely be able to cut through some of the bluster? If you needed a way of putting sport – even one that provides your livelihood – into perspective, he has experienced it.
“I think that’s probably right,” he says. “People looking from the outside will see this profession as high-pressured; I don’t see it that way. I’ve been in pressured situations in my life that far outweigh this. I lost my wife to cancer; I cared for her on her sickbed and then her deathbed for three months with my three children watching on.
“That’s pressure. Managing a football team is nothing compared to that. So every time that we lose a game and you have thousands of people screaming that you don’t know what you’re doing… I’ve dealt with far worse. Let’s just say I’m quite thick-skinned.
“I want to be clear: losing a football match is still the worst thing. But my point is that I don’t feel pressure when we lose a game, externally or internally. I just feel an urge to put it right quickly.”
Everybody I speak to about Lindsey reiterates how hard he works and how obsessed he is about his job.
Every Sunday he spends six or seven hours watching back Saturday’s game and the next opposition so that, on Sunday evening, all the staff get a WhatsApp message with every single training session planned for that week. He’s a tactics board and laptop at the dinner table sort of guy.
That’s partly explained by the desire to make the most of rare opportunities and is shared by plenty in the game. If you play your last Football League match in 1995 and have to wait until 2022 for your first Football League game as a manager, you’re going to commit everything to it. Scott’s dad Keith used to say something on repeat to him: “You’ll only ever get out of football what you put in”.
But – and the amateur psychologist is back – there’s also something deeper here, surely? Scott knows more than anyone else that life is precious and that life can be cut short with little notice. The more experiences you have that reinforce its fragility, the more single-minded you become to make every day count.
“I spoke to a player about this,” he says. “I said ‘How old are you now, 22? Just say, for argument’s sake, that you die at 80. You’re 22 years of age. Why don’t you just go for it for four years with your football?’
“What I mean by that – and they should be doing this already really – is go to bed early, eat all the right foods, drink no alcohol, drink lots of water, train like a demon, get in the gym like a demon and work like a lunatic. You do that for four years out of 80 and I’m telling you now: you will become a millionaire”.
“Now you’ve asked me that question too, I wonder if, without really knowing it, that’s what I have done to myself because I’ve lost good people at young ages. What’s the point in not going for it and what’s the point in waiting?”
“Maybe I have gone for it more so because of what has happened in my life, subconsciously saying ‘right I’m going to everything I possibly can’,” Lindsey says.
“I probably appreciate that you’re in this world for a certain period of time and you have to make the most of it.”
MK Dons 0-1 Gillingham (Saturday 14 December)
- Game no.: 48/92
- Miles: 150
- Cumulative miles: 7,789
- Total goals seen: 133
- The one thing I’ll remember in May: There’s no getting over the vast open spaces in Stadium MK. It is a fabulous venue, but cavernous for League Two football.
Things may continue to go well for Lindsey in the Football League or they may not. You can only control your own effort and do your best. Football has a dozen other uncontrollables. He says that the culture with the group at MK Dons is not exactly as he would like yet, but that it will be and, when that happens, people will see complete togetherness.
The things that matter most, though, are going well. Scott has met someone and he and partner Kelly are now living together. Kelly has three children, Scott has three and, with his mother-in-law also with them, theirs is now a nine-person household. It’s busy and vibrant, just as Scott likes it.
Scott wants to make a note of how incredibly grateful for Kelly’s support. She comes to every game, with all, some or none of the children. She nags him – rightly, he concedes – to create down time but understands that he needs to dive head first into football too.
He says that he should probably give Kelly more credit for his career taking off. It would not have been possible without her love and her parenting.
But for all that Lindsey considers himself fortunate for what he has and what he does, and for all that he intends to make the most of every season, there will always be regret for what happened beyond his control.
Even someone relentlessly positive, as he is, is acutely aware of the need to reflect upon what might have been different. There are people who should have seen all this happening to him.
“The biggest disappointment of my professional life is that my dad doesn’t know what I do now,” he says. “You cannot believe how much that gets to me. He was a professional footballer himself who loved me playing. He travelled the country to watch me play and I wasn’t very good.
“And my mum. I used to talk to her all the time about the dream of being a head coach and she would always tell me that I would get there one day. She died and then three months later I became a head coach. It sickens me that neither of them are there to see me.
“We do things in our life for the future and for the present, but we also do them for people who have been influential upon our lives. I’m doing it for more of those than I’d like: my mum, my dad, my wife, my brother. Hopefully they are all somewhere together and they’re so proud looking down on me.”
Daniel Storey has set himself the goal of visiting all 92 grounds across the Premier League and EFL this season. You can follow his progress via our interactive map and find every article (so far) here
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