When Iñigo Calderón was appointed Bristol Rovers head coach on Boxing Day last year, his memories of the Memorial Stadium soon came flooding back. He played there once in the third tier for Brighton, the club where he became a cult hero, but his first visit had stuck in his mind. It was November 2009, while he was hunting for a club after exiting Alavés of his native Basque Country, and after trials with Gillingham, Norwich and Swansea, Southampton’s visit to Rovers in the FA Cup was next on his itinerary. “I stayed in a bed and breakfast round the corner, on Gloucester Road,” he says, smiling. “The last thing I was thinking then was: ‘I could coach here.’ It was kind of romantic when I came back.”
Calderón is back in League One, this time fighting relegation from the sidelines. When he signed for Brighton in January 2010, they were 20th in the division, above the drop zone on goal difference, but finished in mid-table. How Calderón would settle for a repeat, with Rovers 20th before Saturday’s trip to struggling Crawley after a 5-0 loss at Lincoln last weekend. He references that defeat when discussing how he implements on a daily basis his master’s in sports psychology, which he achieved after completing a sports science degree during his playing career. “Five-nil, it was a disaster, but at the same time you have to put yourself in the players’ shoes. The easy thing to do would be to shout: ‘Disgrace, disgrace!’ But it was not that long ago I was a player and as a player you are the first one to know it wasn’t good enough. I love emotional intelligence.”
It is an insight into Calderón’s character. Another arrives when he reveals his pain at recently selling his beloved campervan. “I wasn’t the stereotypical footballer,” he says, explaining how he would turn up to training at Alavés in a van. “The players would laugh: ‘Wow, what are you doing?’ But I was so happy. I never wanted to be a footballer to have the life of a footballer. I wanted to be a normal guy. I don’t need ‘extra’ things to be happy. I like to go to the mountains or the beach, sleep in the van and wake up in the middle of nowhere … but I don’t like the cold so it has to be more than 20 degrees.”
He would appear ripe for a trip to Glastonbury festival? “I’m going to try and go – I would love that. Everyone has been telling me about it. I like lots of music: house, classical, salsa, indie, Coldplay and film soundtracks. There’s a festival in my city [Vitoria-Gasteiz] called Azkena, but it’s not my music really – quite heavy rock – but I still love to go there because you have so many people, always in a good mood and I love the atmosphere.”
Calderón was influential in Brighton’s journey towards the Premier League across six years and scouted for the club when they won promotion to the top flight while finishing his playing career in Cyprus and India. “I watched Pascal Gross when he was in the German second division at FC Ingolstadt. Even then I was training my eyes in a different way.”
Brighton could qualify for the Champions League this season and their rise began in earnest the day they secured their return to the Championship, Calderón scoring in a 4-3 victory over Dagenham & Redbridge in 2011. “I see similarities with Rovers because I arrived at Christmas time when the team was in League One, fighting to avoid relegation, and everything was getting there, the new training ground, the new stadium, everything was planned. And I think it is something similar here,” he says, alluding to Rovers’ plans to redevelop their ground and expand their training base. “I lived that transition.
“What really impressed me was how calm the club were when they didn’t get the results. I remember the playoffs when we didn’t go up [after losing to Sheffield Wednesday in the semi-finals in 2016] and the next day everybody was in the office working as normal and, for me, coming from Spain, where if you lose a playoff everything is on fire, it was amazing because they were calm. Credit to Tony [Bloom, Brighton’s owner and chairman] and Paul [Barber, the chief executive] because they had the calmness to say: ‘We’re in a good way, let’s not move from it.’ It’s not easy in football because it’s so emotional.”
Calderón is diplomatic about the picture with Rovers six points clear of the relegation zone with nine games to play. “We are not playing as pretty as I would like to,” he says. Asked about compromising some of his beliefs to prioritise points, he nods. “I have to be clever enough to select the right time to play and the areas to play … they [Rovers] brought me here because of my philosophy but I have to get results as quickly as possible in our situation. I have to adapt and I think I have been doing that. It is about trying to be more pragmatic and then, if we can avoid relegation, we can implement the idea a little bit more.”
It was a similar story at Bournemouth for Andoni Iraola, with whom Calderón played for the Basque youth team. “He was a right-back as well … I think I was playing ahead of him,” he says, chuckling. Iraola is one of several Basque coaches excelling, with Mikel Arteta, Xabi Alonso, whom Calderón recalls playing against, and Unai Emery also from the region.
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Iraola’s assistant, Tommy Elphick, played with Calderón at Brighton and several players from those days are making tracks in coaching. Andrew Crofts is assistant to Fabian Hürzeler at Brighton and to Craig Bellamy at Wales; Tomer Hemed, Gordon Greer and Sam Baldock have roles in Brighton’s academy. Liam Rosenior is Strasbourg manager. Keith Andrews is at Brentford, Bruno at West Ham. Calderón, whose mother, Maria, was an English teacher, spent 18 months coaching Brighton’s under-18s. “I needed more ‘real’ football, the adrenaline to win, pain when you lose,” he says.
Calderón tells of having a tactics board aged 13 and spent the last decade of his playing career building a document brimming with inspiration. “I think it’s called the Bible,” he says, smiling. “I still update it now. Roberto [De Zerbi] changed Brighton – you cannot do that [his style] in League One but you can get some ideas. [Pep] Guardiola is the obvious one but I have here [José] Bordalás, my first coach as a professional at Alicante,” he says, grabbing a mug decorated with a cartoon of the Getafe manager.
Perhaps it was fate that Calderón, one of only two overseas managers in the third and fourth tiers, would return to Rovers. He scored the best goal of his career against their neighbours Bristol City, beating David James with a swerving shot. “I scored 19 goals [for Brighton] but not too many I could show anyone … even my brother said I made the deflection an art. So bad,” he says, grinning and shaking his head.
The quirks do not stop there. Each club Calderón has represented – from Alavés to Anorthosis and Chennaiyin – play in blue and white. Rovers’ training facility is called the Quarters, a nod to their famous strip. “That’s another thing,” the 43-year-old says. “I cannot be that selective … yet,” he says, breaking into laughter.