Neil McNab, born 4 June 1957, Greenock, Scotland.
PART ONE
Neil McNab was signed by Greenock Morton in 1972, and in doing so they made him the youngest professional the club had ever had on its books, a distinction that told you everything about the hurry he was in even then. McNab spent two seasons learning his trade at Cappielow, accumulating fourteen appearances for the first team, slight of build but quick of thought, the kind of midfielder who saw the pass before anybody else on the pitch had even noticed the space existed.
Cappielow in the early 1970s was not the sort of ground that produced fanfare, a compact stadium hemmed in by the shipyards that still gave the town its rhythm, and Morton themselves were a club perpetually squeezed between the two Glasgow giants and the harder economic realities of provincial Scottish football, forever needing to sell talent on before they could truly enjoy it. That reality shaped McNab’s earliest footballing education every bit as much as any coach did, for he learned quickly that a small man with a slight frame had to make his living through anticipation and technique rather than through physical dominance, and it was a lesson that would serve him well for the best part of two decades in some of the most physically unforgiving midfields English football had to offer. Word travelled south quickly in those days when a good young player emerged from the west of Scotland, and it was not long before one of English football’s grandest old names came calling.
Tottenham Hotspur brought him to north London in 1974, and the club wasted no time throwing him into the deep end, for McNab made his first-team debut as a substitute in a 2-1 defeat against rivals Chelsea at White Hart Lane on 3 April while still only sixteen years old, thereby becoming the youngest player ever to appear for Spurs in a first-team fixture. It was a startling debut for a boy so slight that some in the crowd must have wondered whether he would be knocked off the ball inside the opening minute, but McNab possessed a low centre of gravity and a natural sense of balance that let him ride challenges most players twice his size would have been floored by, and he quickly won a regular place in and around the Tottenham midfield.
Between his arrival and 1978 he went on to make seventy-two appearances for the club, scoring three goals along the way, and during that same period he was capped for Scotland at Under-15, Under-18 and Under-21 level, a record that marked him out as one of the most promising young footballers north of the border. In his first full season on the books, moreover, Tottenham’s youth side won the FA Youth Cup in 1973–74, and McNab, still a teenager finding his feet in London, was part of that triumphant group, which gave him a taste of silverware before he had even established himself as a first-team regular.
That youth-team success mattered a great deal to a club still rebuilding its production line of homegrown talent, and it meant that by the time McNab was pushing for regular first-team involvement he had already tasted what it felt like to win something together with team-mates, several of whom would go on to make their own way in the professional game. London itself was a considerable change of scenery for a boy raised on the banks of the Clyde, and adjusting to life away from Greenock, away from family and the familiar rhythms of a small Scottish town, asked a great deal of a player not yet out of school uniform in any conventional sense, but McNab settled quickly, helped in no small part by the presence of other young Scots dotted around English football’s youth and reserve set-ups at the time, and by a coaching staff at White Hart Lane who took his development seriously rather than treating him merely as a curiosity.
Yet Tottenham in the mid-1970s were a club sliding rather than rising, and for all McNab’s early promise he found himself part of a Spurs side that went down to the Second Division at the end of the 1976–77 campaign, relegation arriving as a genuine shock to a club that considered itself among the aristocracy of English football. Keith Burkinshaw, who had taken over team affairs not long before the drop, set about the task of taking the White Hart Laners straight back up, and McNab, still only twenty years old but already experienced beyond his years thanks to those early London seasons, became one of the senior professionals that the manager leaned upon as the rebuilding work started.
PART TWO
The opening fixture of that promotion campaign, on 20 August 1977, brought a 4–2 victory over Sheffield United at White Hart Lane, Keith Osgood converting two penalties while John Duncan and Chris Jones supplied the other goals, and although Tottenham were then held goalless at Blackburn Rovers four days later, Duncan struck twice in a 2–1 victory over Notts County on 27 August to give Spurs five points from their opening three matches under the two-points-for-a-win system then in operation.
Those early results eased some of the sting of relegation, but nobody at White Hart Lane could afford to treat promotion back to Division One as a formality, because the Second Division of the late 1970s was stacked with clubs nursing serious top-flight ambitions of their own. Bolton Wanderers, Southampton, Brighton and Hove Albion, Sunderland, Stoke City and Blackburn Rovers all fancied their chances that season, and most of them regarded a visit from Tottenham as the biggest fixture of their calendar, the kind of occasion that swelled attendances and stiffened tackles alike.
Crowds grew whenever Spurs came to town, and Burkinshaw’s players had to show that the passing game which had once lit up the First Division could survive on the tighter, more combative pitches of the lower division against opponents happy to fight for every second ball. Ralph Coates, a wing-half who had grown up in County Durham and learned his trade in Burnley’s famously disciplined youth system, understood those demands as well as anyone in the dressing room, but by this stage of the rebuild he was no longer central to Burkinshaw’s planning, and his experience counted for less than the manager’s determination to build around younger legs.
September brought a goalless draw at Cardiff City and then a 1–0 home win over Fulham through a Jones goal, before Glenn Hoddle and Duncan combined for a 2–0 victory at Blackpool, and Tottenham followed that with a 2–0 defeat of Luton Town at White Hart Lane, Osgood scoring from the spot and Jones again on target. By the close of that month the change in Tottenham’s defensive record was unmistakable: a side that had shipped seventy-two goals during the relegation season had conceded only three in its first seven Second Division outings, keeping five clean sheets in the process. Barry Daines had taken over in goal from Pat Jennings, Steve Perryman was providing the kind of leadership a promotion campaign demands, and Hoddle was increasingly dictating the rhythm of the team from midfield, which was precisely where McNab, industrious and combative in equal measure, did much of his most telling work alongside him.
October opened with a 1–1 draw at Orient, Taylor scoring at Brisbane Road, before a 2–0 defeat at Hull City handed Tottenham their first League loss of the campaign. The response, though, was emphatic, for Oldham Athletic were beaten 5–1 at White Hart Lane on 8 October, Duncan scoring twice, Martin Robinson once and Taylor twice, and although Charlton Athletic brought Spurs firmly back down to earth a week later by winning 4–1 at The Valley, the very next Saturday produced the single most remarkable result of the entire season and, indeed, the biggest League victory in Tottenham’s history to that point.
Bristol Rovers arrived at White Hart Lane on 22 October and were beaten 9–0, Colin Lee marking his debut with four goals, Ian Moores completing a hat-trick of his own, and Taylor and Hoddle adding the others. Lee had only just joined from Torquay United, and to score four goals on his first outing for the club exceeded anything reasonable expectation could have demanded of him, but the result transformed Tottenham’s goal difference and gave the supporters an afternoon that washed away plenty of the gloom relegation had left behind.
A result of that magnitude might easily have bred complacency, but Tottenham instead beat Stoke City 3–1 at the Victoria Ground on 29 October, Pratt scoring once and Gerry Armstrong twice, and a week later Burnley visited White Hart Lane for the first meeting of the two clubs since both had dropped into the Second Division. Spurs won 3–0, Hoddle, McNab and Taylor all finding the net, McNab’s goal a reminder that for all his defensive graft he could arrive in the penalty area at the right moment when the occasion demanded it.
Burnley were still struggling to find their feet after their own relegation, whereas Tottenham were gathering real momentum near the top of the table, and a 2–1 win over Crystal Palace at Selhurst Park on 12 November, through goals from Moores and Duncan, kept that momentum rolling before a goalless draw with Brighton at White Hart Lane on 19 November drew a crowd approaching fifty thousand, an extraordinary attendance for a Second Division fixture and proof of just how much support Burkinshaw’s rebuilding project continued to command even outside the top flight.
Bolton Wanderers, themselves among the season’s leading promotion contenders, overcame Tottenham by 1–0 at Burnden Park on 26 November, and a goalless draw with Southampton at White Hart Lane followed on 3 December, results that tightened the upper reaches of the table even though Spurs remained firmly in contention because defeats were still rare. Duncan scored both goals in a 2–1 win over Sunderland at Roker Park on 10 December, Hoddle struck twice in a 2–2 draw with Crystal Palace at White Hart Lane a week later, and Tottenham beat Millwall 3–1 at The Den on Boxing Day through Duncan, Lee and Taylor, before a 1–1 draw with Mansfield Town the following day, Duncan again on the scoresheet, and then a rousing 4–0 win over Blackburn Rovers on New Year’s Eve, Hoddle, Pratt and a Lee double doing the damage. By the turn of the year Tottenham had firmly established themselves among the division’s leading sides, though the sheer number of drawn matches meant Bolton, Southampton and Brighton were never allowed to drift too far away.
PART THREE
The new year opened with successive away draws, 2–2 at Sheffield United and 3–3 at Notts County, Duncan and Taylor scoring at Bramall Lane and Pratt twice with Lee once at Meadow Lane, before Cardiff City were beaten 2–1 at White Hart Lane through two more Duncan goals. Draws remained a persistent theme through the winter months, Tottenham finishing 1–1 at Fulham and 2–2 at home to Blackpool, before a 4–1 win at Luton Town on 22 February, Hoddle scoring twice and McAllister and Duncan supplying the others, offered a reminder of just how potent this Tottenham attack could be when the mood took it.
Orient held Spurs to a 1–1 draw at White Hart Lane three days later, Lee on target for the home side, and on 4 March Oldham Athletic earned an identical scoreline at Boundary Park, McNab himself getting on the scoresheet in a performance that underlined his growing importance to Burkinshaw’s midfield. Tottenham were proving extremely difficult to beat and possessed the strongest scoring record anywhere in the division, and yet too many drawn matches were preventing them from opening a comfortable gap over their promotion rivals.
Spring brought a vital run of victories. Tottenham edged out Charlton Athletic by 2–1 at White Hart Lane on 11 March, a Hoddle penalty and a Pratt goal doing the business, then won 3–2 against Bristol Rovers at Eastville a week later through Pratt, McNab and Jones, McNab’s second goal of the campaign arriving at exactly the moment his side needed it, before Stoke City were beaten 3–1 on home soil at on 22 March, McAllister scoring once and Lee netting twice.
Those three wins strengthened Tottenham’s position considerably, though consecutive 3–3 draws against Mansfield Town and Millwall slowed the momentum again, Hoddle scoring twice and Jones once at Field Mill before Hoddle and a Jones brace earned the point against Millwall. On 1 April, Burnley edged out Tottenham 2–1 at Turf Moor, Taylor scoring in reply, but Spurs answered in the best possible fashion by beating leaders Bolton Wanderers 1–0 at White Hart Lane on 8 April, McAllister the scorer in front of a crowd well in excess of fifty thousand, a result that appeared to place promotion firmly within reach.
Instead, Tottenham’s position grew uncertain in the final weeks of the campaign. Brighton beat them by a 3–1 margin at the Goldstone Ground on 15 April, Jones replying, and Sunderland then won 3–2 at White Hart Lane on 22 April, Taylor and Duncan scoring in a losing cause. Two defeats arriving in such quick succession could not have come at a worse moment, allowing Brighton to draw level on points and elevating goal difference to a matter of real importance.
On 26 April, Tottenham beat Hull City 1–0 at home, Perryman scoring, leaving them needing just a point from their final fixture away at Southampton three days later. Southampton had already secured their own promotion and could still claim the championship, while Brighton waited to pounce should Spurs slip. The match at The Dell on Saturday 29 April finished goalless, and that single point was enough to secure Tottenham third place and, with it, immediate promotion back to the First Division. Bolton won the Second Division championship with fifty-eight points, Southampton finished second with fifty-seven, and Tottenham took third on fifty-six, level with Brighton on points but promoted by virtue of a goal difference nine better: eighty-three scored and forty-nine conceded for Spurs, against sixty-three for and thirty-eight against for Brighton.
Tottenham’s completed record read forty-two matches played, twenty won, sixteen drawn and only six lost, eighty-three goals scored against forty-nine conceded. At White Hart Lane they won thirteen, drew seven and lost just once, scoring fifty and conceding nineteen; on their travels they won seven, drew nine and lost five, scoring thirty-three and letting in thirty. Duncan finished the season with twenty competitive goals, Hoddle scored thirteen, Taylor twelve and Lee eleven, while Pratt chipped in with eight, giving Burkinshaw an enviably varied set of scoring options to call upon. Coates, for his part, did not register a single competitive goal and made only three League appearances all season, so although he remained part of the squad that won promotion, nobody could reasonably claim he had played a substantial part in achieving it, and his experience of the club’s grander days now belonged firmly to the past.
The cup competitions offered rather less to celebrate. Tottenham thrashed non-League Wimbledon 4–0 at White Hart Lane in the League Cup second round on 31 August, Osgood converting a penalty and Duncan completing a hat-trick, but Coventry City won 3–2 at White Hart Lane in the third round on 26 October despite goals from Pratt and Armstrong. In the FA Cup, Tottenham drew 2–2 at home to Bolton Wanderers on 7 January 1978, Hoddle and Duncan on target, before losing the replay 2–1 after extra time at Burnden Park three days later, Taylor converting from the penalty spot in a losing cause. None of that, however, could take the shine off the wider achievement, for Tottenham had bounced straight back to the top flight at the first attempt, and McNab, not yet twenty-one, had played a genuine part in getting them there, both as a combative presence in midfield and, on occasion, as a scorer of important goals.
He did not stay to enjoy the fruits of that promotion for long, though, because in November 1978, with Tottenham back among the First Division elite, McNab was transferred to Bolton Wanderers for a fee of £250,000, a substantial sum for a midfielder still shy of his twenty-second birthday and a clear indication of how highly the game rated his ability. At Burnden Park he made thirty-five appearances and scored four goals, contributing to a Bolton side that, ironically enough, had itself just won promotion to the First Division as champions of the very division Tottenham had escaped from a season earlier, meaning McNab found himself once again operating at the top level of English football, albeit now wearing white rather than the colours of Spurs.
PART FOUR
Neil McNab´s time at Bolton proved relatively brief in the scheme of a well-travelled footballing life, but it added further top-flight experience to a résumé that already looked unusually rich for a man still so young, and it set him up for the next significant move of his career. Bolton’s return to the First Division did not last long, the club finding the step up every bit as demanding as Tottenham had two seasons earlier, and by the time McNab moved on the Burnden Park club were themselves facing the prospect of another relegation battle, a reminder of just how unforgiving the top division could be for clubs without the deepest of resources behind them. For McNab personally, though, the Bolton spell served its purpose, keeping him involved in senior first-team football at the highest level available and ensuring that his reputation as a tenacious, reliable midfielder continued to grow even as the shirt on his back changed colour for a second time in barely more than a year.
That move arrived in February 1980, when Brighton and Hove Albion, managed by the former Tottenham favourite Alan Mullery, paid £220,000 to bring McNab to the Goldstone Ground. Mullery knew exactly what he was signing, later describing McNab in typically vivid terms as a Scottish whippet, a description that captured perfectly the compact, tireless energy McNab brought to every midfield battle he was involved in. Brighton were themselves on the rise at the time, having only recently established themselves in the top flight, and McNab settled into a squad that combined old heads with emerging talent, going on to make one hundred and three appearances for the Seagulls and scoring four goals across a stay that lasted until 1983.
It was not always the smoothest of relationships between player and supporters, McNab himself later reflecting with characteristic bluntness that the Goldstone crowd had, in his estimation, been the toughest he ever played in front of, a comment that says as much about his own uncompromising personality as it does about any particular failing on Brighton’s part. Nevertheless, he remained a regular fixture in the Brighton midfield for the best part of three seasons, his combativeness and reading of the game proving just as valuable on the south coast as it had been at White Hart Lane and Burnden Park.
During 1982, with Brighton’s fortunes beginning to wane and first-team opportunities becoming harder to guarantee, McNab spent time out on loan, first with Leeds United, where he made five appearances, and then with Portsmouth, where he did not manage to add to that total before returning to the Goldstone Ground. Loan spells of that kind were rarely glamorous, more a matter of ticking over and staying match-fit than of building anything lasting, but they nonetheless widened McNab’s experience of English football still further, adding Elland Road and Fratton Park to a list of grounds that already included some of the biggest names in the game.
By 1983, with Brighton’s top-flight standing under increasing pressure and McNab himself approaching his mid-twenties, the time had come for another move, and this one would prove to be the making of him in a way none of his previous clubs quite managed. Brighton’s own fortunes would take a dramatic turn not long after McNab’s departure, the club reaching an FA Cup final in 1983 before suffering relegation from the top flight that same year, so in a sense his exit came at precisely the moment the Goldstone Ground’s brief spell among English football’s elite was drawing to its close, and although he had not always found the crowd there to his liking, few players leave any club entirely without affection, and McNab’s contribution across three seasons of first-team football had been a substantial one by any measure.
PART FIVE
Manchester City signed Neil McNab in the summer of 1983 for a modest fee of £35,000, a deal so unremarkable on paper that it barely registered with a City support who had little reason to feel excited about a midfielder arriving from a struggling Brighton side for what amounted to pocket change by the standards of the day. Billy McNeill, the former Celtic and Scotland captain who had taken charge at Maine Road, saw something in McNab that the transfer fee alone did not suggest, and time would prove McNeill entirely correct in his judgement, because what followed was, by any reasonable measure, the richest spell of McNab’s entire football life.
He made his City debut away at Crystal Palace on 27 August 1983, and from there he simply kept playing, season after season, becoming one of the most consistent and best-loved figures to wear the sky blue shirt throughout the decade. Not unlike Asa Hartford before him, McNab developed into the kind of schemer who could dictate a match’s tempo with a single pass, combining genuine craft with a willingness to put his foot in that made him popular with a support who valued industry every bit as much as invention.
Manchester City in the mid-1980s were a club perpetually short of money and often short of luck too, forever compared to their neighbours across town and forever finding new ways to make life difficult for themselves off the pitch even when things were going reasonably well on it, and into that slightly chaotic environment McNab brought a steadying professionalism that belied his reputation, earned earlier in his career, as a fiery and occasionally combustible competitor. He was never a passenger, never a player content simply to see out a contract, and it was that refusal to coast which turned what had looked, on the day of his signing, like an unremarkable and thoroughly unglamorous piece of business into one of the shrewdest pieces of transfer market business Billy McNeill conducted during his time at Maine Road.
The 1985–86 season brought a period of relative consolidation, City finishing fifteenth while McNab scored four goals in thirty-seven appearances, including two strikes over the Christmas period against Sheffield Wednesday and Birmingham City. Cup competitions brought disappointment that year, defeats to Watford in the FA Cup and Arsenal in the League Cup curtailing City’s ambitions early, though McNab did at least get to walk out at Wembley in March, when City lost an entertaining inaugural Full Members Cup final 5–4 to Chelsea.
The two seasons that followed, however, proved to be a period of genuine struggle for a cash-strapped City, and 1986–87 ended in relegation after a campaign in which the club won only eight League matches all season, manager Jimmy Frizzell’s successor having resigned as early as September amid the mounting difficulties. Amid all that turmoil, McNab was, by common consent, City’s most consistently impressive performer, ever-present through a miserable campaign and playing with an industry that stood out precisely because so much around him was going wrong, and the supporters rewarded him by voting him the club’s Player of the Year, a richly deserved honour given the context in which he earned it.
Relegation brought change at Maine Road, and the 1987–88 season saw the club blend youth with experience as several promising youngsters were promoted into the first-team picture. There were highlights amid an otherwise mixed campaign, not least a run to the quarter-finals of both domestic cups, Manchester City eventually falling 4-0 to Liverpool in the FA Cup and 0–2 to Everton in the League Cup, and McNab himself opened the scoring in the now-famous 10–1 demolition of Huddersfield Town in November, a match remembered for the hat-tricks scored by David White, Paul Stewart and Tony Adcock but which began with McNab’s own contribution setting the tone for the carnage that followed.
The Sky Blues were slow to find their feet at the start of the 1988–89 season, winless in their opening four fixtures, McNab scoring penalties in draws against both Walsall and Leeds United during that uncertain spell, but by the middle of December the side had recovered sufficiently to sit top of the table. Fourth-round cup exits at Brentford and Luton Town, both ending 3–1, put paid to any thoughts of cup glory that season, but the League form held firm into March, McNab again contributing important goals in 2–0 victories over Birmingham City and Plymouth Argyle, and although a late stumble meant City required a point from their final match at Bradford City to confirm promotion, that point duly arrived and City were back in the First Division.
McNab’s contribution to that promotion campaign was recognised twice over, the supporters voting him Player of the Year for the second time in three seasons and the Professional Footballers’ Association naming him in its Team of the Year for the Second Division, a fitting testament, if one may borrow the phrase loosely, to the consistency he had shown throughout a decade in which he had become one of the most reliable midfielders outside the very top flight of English football.
By this point he was into his thirties, an age at which many combative, box-to-box midfielders begin to feel the accumulated toll of a decade and more of tackles won and lost, yet McNab showed little sign of slowing, his positional sense compensating for whatever fractions of pace the years may quietly have taken from him, and his standing among team-mates only grew as younger players around him came to rely on his experience during the frantic run-in that finally secured promotion at Bradford City. Team-mates from that era would later speak of a dressing room in which McNab’s voice carried real weight, not because he shouted loudest but because his judgement, honed across stints at Tottenham, Bolton and Brighton before he had even arrived in Manchester, was trusted implicitly by players half a decade or more his junior.
McNab remained on City’s books through the start of the 1989–90 season, his final campaign at Maine Road bringing his total appearances for the club to two hundred and twenty-one in the League, with sixteen goals to his name, figures that placed him among the most heavily used and longest-serving players of that era at the club. His last appearance for City came away at Nottingham Forest on 29 November 1989, and shortly afterwards, in January 1990, he moved on to Tranmere Rovers for a fee of £125,000, the third six-figure transfer of his footballing life and a clear sign that, even in his early thirties, he remained a player clubs were willing to pay serious money to acquire.
PART SIX
At Prenton Park Neil McNab went on to make over one hundred first-team appearances, and it was with Tranmere that he added the one major domestic honour missing from his collection, appearing in two Associate Members’ Cup finals at Wembley Stadium and winning the first of them in 1990, when Tranmere beat Bristol Rovers 2–1 to lift the trophy in front of the famous old twin towers. The following season, 1990–91, brought further individual recognition when McNab was named in the PFA Team of the Year for the Third Division, a remarkable honour for a player by then well into his thirties and proof that age had done little to blunt either his reading of the game or his appetite for a contest.
By 1992, with McNab´s time at Tranmere drawing to a close, McNab embarked on the well-travelled final chapter familiar to so many footballers of his generation, moving between clubs with the restless energy of a man who simply could not imagine life without a match to play in. He spent time on loan at Huddersfield Town, making eleven outings for the side, before returning north of the border for a spell at Ayr United, where he notched up four appearances, and then a similarly brief stay at Darlington, where he again made four appearances.
In October 1993 the strong-running midfield combatant crossed the Irish Sea to join Derry City, making his debut for the club that month and going on to make thirteen appearances in the League of Ireland, a fresh footballing culture entirely and one that must have felt a world away from the packed terraces of Goldstone Ground and Maine Road, yet one he approached with the same combative professionalism that had characterised every stop along the way.
The League of Ireland during the early 1990s was a competition still finding its feet financially, crowds smaller and grounds more modest than anything McNab had grown used to across two decades in England, but the standard of football, and the passion with which it was followed by those who did turn up, offered him one more reminder of just how universal the game’s appeal remained wherever it was played, whether in front of fifty thousand at White Hart Lane or a few thousand at the Brandywell. In 1994 McNab returned to non-League football in England with Witton Albion, amassing twelve appearances, before crossing the Atlantic altogether to turn out for the Long Island Rough Riders in the United States, bringing to a close a playing spell that, taken as a whole, spanned more than two decades and very nearly six hundred senior outings across Scotland, England, Ireland and North America.
It was in the summer of 1994, even as those final playing appearances were still being racked up, that McNab’s life took a natural turn towards coaching, for he re-joined Manchester City that year as Youth Team Coach, a role that allowed him to pass on two decades of hard-won footballing knowledge to the next generation of players coming through at Maine Road. He remained in that post until 1997, when managerial upheaval at the club cost him his job, a fate that befell a great many Manchester City employees during that particularly turbulent period in the club’s history.
He subsequently moved on to Portsmouth, where he worked within the club’s youth development set-up, continuing the coaching education he had begun in Manchester and building further experience of developing young players away from the media glare that surrounds first-team football. Then, in October 2002, came the opportunity that would define the second half of McNab’s working life in the game every bit as much as Maine Road had defined the first: he was appointed manager of Exeter City, taking charge of a club that had already been through two managers that same season, John Cornforth having departed and Eamonn Dolan having overseen a caretaker spell, and a club whose form and off-field stability were both giving considerable cause for concern among its supporters.
McNab was forty-five years old and had no previous experience of management at any level when he took the Exeter job, a fact that made the appointment something of a gamble for a club already struggling on the field and facing mounting suspicion about its governance off it. The Grecians had started that 2002–03 campaign badly, and with two clubs facing relegation out of the Football League altogether for the first time in the competition’s history, the pressure on whoever occupied the manager’s office at St James Park was considerable.
Results did not improve significantly under McNab’s stewardship, and as concerns about the club’s ownership and finances continued to mount in the background, he was relieved of his duties in February 2003, after only four months in the job, and replaced by former Preston North End supremo Gary Peters. There was a modest upturn in form under Peters, but it proved insufficient to prevent Exeter’s relegation from the Football League as the wider troubles engulfing the Devon outfit finally came to a head. McNab’s brief spell in management therefore ended in disappointment, though it is worth noting that he inherited a club already in considerable difficulty rather than one he himself had steered into trouble, and few managers, however experienced, could have turned Exeter’s fortunes around in the short window he was given.
It stands, too, as a reminder that the qualities which make a footballer outstanding, the reading of a game from inside the eighteen-yard area, the split-second decision over whether to close a man down or show him onto his weaker foot, do not automatically transfer into the very different discipline of running a side from the touchline, particularly a club as beset by boardroom uncertainty as Exeter City were during that unsettled winter, and McNab, for all his playing pedigree, was given neither the time nor the stable footing beneath him that any first-time manager would need to make a genuine mark.
After Exeter, McNab largely stepped back from the professional game in England, though his enthusiasm for coaching young players evidently never dimmed, for between 2008 and 2013 he took charge of several youth teams at the Chiefs Futbol Club soccer association in the United States, passing on to a new generation of American players the same blend of technical instruction and competitive edge that had characterised his own playing days. It was, in its way, a fitting way for a footballing life to wind down, McNab ending up doing for young Americans exactly what he had once done for young players at Manchester City and Portsmouth, quietly building the next generation rather than seeking the spotlight for himself.