JAY’S SECRET TO FAMILY AND FOOTBALL SUCCESS – an understanding wife
Maidstone United’s Jay Saunders is carving out an enviable reputation as one of English non-league football’s brightest and young managers. Here, he tells Simon Finlay how a strong marriage is the foundation of his success…
“The game is about glory. It’s about doing it in style, with a flourish, about going out and beating the other lot, not waiting for them to die of boredom.”
So spoke Danny Blanchflower, the
former Spurs captain, whose team won the league and FA Cup double in 1961 to universal acclaim.
Maidstone’s glory
boys captured some of that essence in May, when, at the end of a successful season, the Stones nudged aside Ebbsfleet United in the play-off finals to secure a berth in the National League, formerly known as the Conference.
out which followed saw the Stones edge a little closer to a place in the football league which Maidstone fell from almost a quarter of a century before.
A save by goalkeeper Lee Worgan set
the seal on the day and became perhaps the defining moment of Jay’s football career to date.
A gripping few minutes drenched in tension and emotion, saw the Stones edge a little closer to a place in the football league.
On that heady afternoon, the Stones’
young manager Jay Saunders watched his team score a last gasp, extra-time equaliser just as his opposing bench had got to their feet ready to celebrate their own historic victory.
In a gripping few minutes drenched in tension and emotion, the penalty shoot-
“I think we all went
through every emotion that day. It was indescribable. The atmosphere, everything. But I knew when we scored in the dying seconds and took it
to penalties that it would be ours,” says Jay, in his quiet but assured way.
It marked three promotions in four
years for a man who didn’t quite make it to professional ranks as a player, his apprenticeship cut short with the arrival at Gillingham by Tony Pulis and owner Paul Scally.
But sitting in the garden of his Victorian family home in Bearsted
Mid Kent Living 7
almost two decades later, he has no lasting regrets and not a tinge of bitterness either.
“Tony Pulis came into the dressing
room and made it clear that he saw the future not with the youth set-up, but in older and more experienced players. It proved to be the right policy as he achieved promotion. It worked for him and I guess he was right.”
Like a lot of young players who don’t
quite make it — further flirtations with Fulham and Charlton never quite came to anything — Jay was much in demand in the lower leagues below the full-time professional game.
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