Mark Hughes was a feature of prime-time television on Monday, when BBC Two screened a documentary charting his time at Manchester United, Barcelona and Bayern Munich. Someone also sent him a clip of his last full game as a player, in the 2002 League Cup final for Blackburn. ‘Twenty-three years ago this week! Jeez,’ he grimaces.
Reminders everywhere that there really is no need, at the age of 61, for him to embark on a weekly routine which, on Monday, saw his alarm set for 5.45am and put him in his car at five past six, for a two-hour drive from Cheshire to British football’s most unenviable job, rescuing Carlisle United from a position two points adrift at the bottom of League Two.
He drives in silence. ‘No radio presenter talking about, “Why I just had cheese on toast”,’ he says. Just him and the M6 as he maps out the week ahead, broken by the brief preoccupation of charging up his car at Southwaite Services, six miles south of Carlisle. ‘I can’t get here and back on one charge,’ he says. He’s at the club’s Brunton Park ground by 8.30am.
He’s relating this in a chilly Carlisle Legends Lounge surrounded by images of the club’s mid-Seventies First Division side like Chris Balderstone and Bobby Parker — days long gone. Explaining how the alarm call is no hardship — ‘It’s probably only 45 minutes earlier than I used to get up’ — and how he’ll fill up his late afternoons and early evenings in Carlisle at the gym and perhaps a local restaurant, before returning after 8pm to the rented club house in the city centre where he stays during the week. More reasons to wonder why on earth is he here, signing up for all this?
It’s the hunger, of course. The same insatiable appetite for the game which had Wayne Rooney involving himself with training at Salford City within a few days of Plymouth Argyle sacking him on New Year’s Eve. Hughes had been out the game for nearly three years after exiting Southampton when the chance to manage League Two Bradford City came up in February 2022.
‘I didn’t really know if I’d have the energy and desire to do it,’ he says. ‘But I knew within the first week — oh, yeah, yeah, this is what I like! This is what I do.’
Mark Hughes, at 61, has taken on the mammoth task of trying to save Carlisle from relegation from the Football League
He sets his alarm for 5.45am and put him in his car at five past six, for a two-hour drive from Cheshire to Carlisle
It’s the hunger, of course, which keeps him going – having lost his job at Bradford at the start of the season
And even now, having lost that job after an indifferent start to his second season — it stung him, he says — he’s ready to pick things up again at the extremity of the Football League. ‘There’s only so many games of golf and padel you can play, aren’t there?’ he says. ‘This is what I’ve always done.’
The local scrutiny is greater this week, because near the end of it comes the trip to Barrow, a Cumbrian derby in the inhospitable surrounds of the tight little ground on the edge of the submarine-building town, where it is generally blowing a gale. Fans of that club, whose large Manchester-based playing component often just travel up for games, would delight in pushing Carlisle closer to the relegation door.
Hughes’s entire media discussion on Tuesday extends to nearly two hours but it is the same deference he’d have offered at Manchester City, Southampton or Stoke. ‘Let’s go for it,’ he says, before the first questions roll.
He arrives to talk slightly late. Individual discussions with players, trying to get tailored messages across, have overrun.
These meetings, you sense, are more significant than his 9am coaches’ meeting, deciding what to ‘present’ to the players, who are in at 10am, or the hour’s training he’s led from 11am. While the level of football is surprisingly high in League Two, Hughes says — ‘much higher than you imagine’ — it’s the decision-making that can be missing.
‘Technically they do everything a top player can do but the skill is being able to pick the right technique at the right time,’ he says. ‘For the most part they can all head it, they can all kick it, they can all run. But sometimes those decisions are incorrect and that’s why they find themselves at the level they’re at.’
There’s a risk of information overload too, he says. ‘I’ve found at this level players will take you literally. You will say in this situation you have to kick it to the right and that player will without fail kick it to the right on five occasions, even when on four of them it was the wrong time to do it. You must be mindful of that. “I’m telling you this but don’t take me literally every time”.’
‘I’ve found at this level players will take you literally’, Hughes says of his time in League Two
Carlisle are two points from safety at the bottom of League Two but survival is a real possibility
And then there are the consequences of Carlisle’s attempts to buy a route out of trouble under well-meaning new American owners, which has left them with 48 players this season, so many that Hughes is still working out who might do what, three weeks into the job. They signed 11 in January, to fit with the technical passing game which was manager Mike Williamson’s philosophy. Then, after a dreadful January, they sacked Williamson. ‘Being here now, it looks like a mistake — 48 is a huge amount,’ says Hughes. ‘But it was done with good intentions.’
Very few of the 48 are fit enough to play 90 minutes so he’s been trying to arrange ‘bounce games’ against other clubs to assess how much workload each might take. ‘It’s hard to get teams to come this far at this time of the year,’ he says. Despite all those signings, he seems to lack a serviceable striker.
Part of Carlisle’s appeal to him was the American owners. Relegation rivals Morecambe, who this week reported £1.2million losses, would kill for proprietors like that.
Tom Piatak, millionaire owner of a Florida freight transportation business whose family bought the club in 2023, is so taken with the ownership experience that he and his wife spend a month here at a time and have bought a house in the city. Carlisle were comfortably top of a shortlist of five possible clubs to buy because of the fanbase which, even in their current predicament, sees 7,000 through the turnstiles, and the huge catchment area.
The Piataks have transformed parts of the stadium. There’s a new fanzone. Eight new executive boxes have emerged in a space behind the East Stand which had lain untouched since Michael Knighton’s chaotic ownership in the Nineties. The club could have filled them three times over.
Talks are well underway with the council about taking a 99-year lease on land which will become a new training ground.
It’s the football which has been the disaster. ‘We’re obviously not pleased with that. I’m shocked we’re 24th in the league,’ says Piatak, who is reluctant to utter the word ‘relegation’ and sees Hughes as a way to avoid it.
‘The chance of Mark coming here three or four years ago was next to nil,’ he says. ‘When he expressed interest, we decided we needed to execute and get it done as soon as possible.’
Hughes has seen it all – from a player at Manchester United to coach at Manchester City
The stadium has been transformed by Carlisle owners, but the football is the problem right now
Piatek, who flies in with his wife from Orlando to Manchester, taking a train or car north, seems to have signed up to the Cumbria experience as much as the hope they will eventually make money.
‘It consumes us,’ he says. By Thursday afternoon, Piatek is making the drive south from Carlisle to Barrow, over the M6 Shap Summit and west through the southern Lakes, with the snow-capped peaks glittering in the sun.
The team bus is not far behind and by 7pm, Hughes is leading his players through a sheet metal door and into spartan surrounds where an agricultural gate forms part of the division between fans and pitch. The spirit of the club motto — ‘Be Just and Fear Not’ — will be needed here.
Carlisle have brought an exuberant travelling band of more than 900 — their full away allocation — whose banner: ‘We are Carlisle. From the North’ seems like a statement.
But Barrow know a bit about North American investment, too. Their shirt sponsor is the Newfoundland and Labrador province of Canada, looking to attract Cumbrian shipbuilders from here for their own region, and they start the game with a fury that leaves the distinctive silver-haired figure of Hughes looking forlorn in the away dug-out, below pitch level.
A BBC Radio Cumbria commentator’s description of the game as the ‘Cumbria Classico’ is sounding increasingly ironic when a goal of technical precision unexpectedly materialises for Carlisle.
It is scored by Michael Dennis, a former Arsenal academy player signed for the rest of this season from MK Dons two weeks ago. The strike seems to motivate the away team who bring some of the greater physicality, missing all season, that Hughes had been drumming into them.
As the incantatory sounds of ‘Mark Hughes’ Blue and White Army’ strike up from behind the banner, 21-year-old goalkeeper Gabriel Breeze commands his area as if he had been protecting it for years, and captain Callum Guy starts winning the midfield battle on an unpredictable pitch.
After seven added minutes, Carlisle seal a 1-0 win and Hughes is on the pitch, embracing his players, saluting the fans who celebrated like a group who had previously witnessed one win in 10.
Hughes led his side to a vital 1-0 win over Barrow on Thursday – relegation rivals will have noticed the score
‘It’s great fun, isn’t it? When it goes the right way, there’s nothing like the feeling,’ he said after the game
In the comfortable football land Hughes is so familiar with, there would have been a press conference at the end of the night, but as the clock ticks towards 11pm, he just wanders down the tunnel and stands in some compacted mud on the edge of the pitch to discuss this night of nights.
There’s a problem getting one of the radio station’s clip-on microphones to work so he takes it and attaches it to his roll neck shirt himself and it’s after the radio and TV interviews have concluded, in the biting cold, that he allows himself a smile.
Yes, this win would have registered with the other relegation contenders, he says. ‘They’ll realise that maybe we’re on the march to a certain degree. We’re coming. We’re coming hopefully at a pace. Let’s see what happens.’
And yes, this is precisely why he is here, at the extremity of British football, still trying to win games after all these years.
‘Yeah. People scratch their heads and wonder why I’m doing it but it’s this,’ he says, looking out across the field.
‘It’s great fun, isn’t it? When it goes the right way, there’s nothing like the feeling. It’s nothing like when you’re a player but it’s the next best thing. Why wouldn’t you want more of this?’
