Adshead knows he'll be asked that question again

John Adshead is hoping for ‘a hell of a result’ - for his team and in his battle with cancer. Picture / Martin Sykes

John Adshead arrives a bit late, looking a bit bothered and immediately starts barking at the dog which is barking at him.

He's not grumpy really. He just wants the dog, a Labradoodle called Jess, put outside. We're at Adshead's house, in one of the posh streets in Takapuna, his haven of "gentle, peaceful, serenity" where "nothing is an issue. Except the dog".

You don't expect him to be going on about serenity. At first sight - and as soon as he opens his mouth - you might mistake him for the sort of gruff, tough Lancashire lad-turned-footie manager of the telly stereotype.

And, frankly, if he was out of sorts, you could understand why. He's the manager of that beleaguered soccer team the New Zealand Knights, languishing at the foot of the ladder. And everybody keeps asking the same two questions: "Are you going to resign? Are you going to get the sack?"

He knows very well he's going to be asked again, but when I phone he says yes to an interview without any fuss. That he manages not to sigh, or look pained, during the later inevitable question says a lot about his good nature. It would have been much easier for him to have said that he was too busy, or couldn't be bothered, or that he had already talked about the topic ad nauseam, but fronting up must come somewhere near the top in his list of things coaches should do.

Either that or he really is unperturbed by the rumours he's been reading about in the papers for, he says, weekends on end. Put it this way, he says, he's heard it all before. "Been there, done that."

He is used to being unpopular. He is used to being a hero. In 1982 he was the coach who got the New Zealand soccer team to the World Cup finals. He was, in those pretty much pre-celebrity times, a celebrity. He was even on Hudson and Halls' cooking show, which is something I would have liked to have seen: the bickering, mincing Queens with the stocky, laid-back Adshead.

He has always been relaxed about being in the public eye; he's good at it. But he remembers that less than a year into his tenure as national coach back then: "The country was asking for me head." He was saved then, he says, by "wise and wonderful heads, and let's hope the owner and board are proven to be correct on this occasion".

He's heard this one before, too. When footie clubs in the UK hold a press conference to say they have full confidence in their manager, he's down the road. The Knights' management held such a press conference this week. "Yeah, yeah," he says, "that's one of the things we do make jokes about." The media was called, he says, to end the speculation. Now here I am sitting in his house asking him whether he has offered to resign. The answer, by the way, is "no."

He is an optimist, he thinks. "Well, where we are in the league at the moment, I think I've got to be. But I think I am, overall, in life." That, he thinks, is down to his parents, who were hard-working and poor. But they were jolly and sensible types and his dad used to take him to see any sport going. Adshead had a terrible stutter which his father coaxed him out of by getting him to recite. "It was things like Weatherly, Beverley, Doncaster and York. And that's all race courses." They used to go to the dogs and Adshead knew his dad had done all right when they took a taxi home from the stadium. Otherwise "you had to walk three miles to the tram station".

He left school at 14 and went fruit picking but got the sack for being too slow. He says he wasn't any good at playing football because he was, he thinks, lazy. "Somebody once said to me: 'You're too interested in what everybody else is doing. You should look at coaching'."

That was a long time ago and, despite the ups and downs, here he is still coaching. The first thing I ask is how he is. Meaning: How are you, given the level of speculation about your job? And meaning too, that his job looks like the worst job in the country and, at 63, why didn't he opt for a nice lie down?

But he takes it to mean his health and he says "it's good, actually, it's just these ruddy side-effects". He means from "the radiation seeds, the cause of the problems inside the body, you know". Adshead is undergoing treatment for prostate cancer, so obviously this is on his mind. He's not been sleeping, so he's tired and that's annoying him. "You know, when you can't do exactly what you want at any particular time, it really what's-your-names you." Other than being "what's-your-named" he is in good spirits because "the indications are that this is going to be a hell of a result".

Being an optimist is handy only if you are also a realist. He has talked about soccer as being "a real fantasy-land project". It's fantasy versus "the realism of life", he says. "I'll give you an example. In the Middle East they used to think if they bought a Brazilian coach, within a week the team will start to play like Brazil. That's the fantasy they have."

He coached in Oman for five years, the youth and junior teams, and his teams did very well and so did his bank balance. I make a reference to "the millions they were paying you" and he grins and says "I wouldn't call it millions". But "they appreciate success, let me put it that way". He's wearing one of his tokens of appreciation: a gold and diamond Ebel watch. "The Sultan buys them in hundreds, I think. That's the Sultan's crest on the back, and now and again, if you're successful, they give gifts."

He's come straight from training and this seems an odd bit of bling to wear with shorts and T-shirt. But it's fun, too, because it's a bit Footballers' Wives. Only a bit though, because, despite my insistence on the millions, the house is disappointingly unostentatious, except for the Omani silver. And perhaps the Labradoodle.

I ask him if he liked Oman and he says "what's not to like about it?".

So you have to wonder why he gave it up to come back and coach a struggling national team when he has, as he has already said, "been there, done that".

He has always liked being the underdog, but also because "in the Middle East you never know where you're going to be tomorrow or the next day".

Right, so he comes back to New Zealand, for much less money, to on-going speculation about whether he'll be down the road tomorrow. "Yeah, but the fact is ... the next job is retirement, whether it's tomorrow or in a year's time and that's a very nice peace of mind, thank you very much, to have. The next job is Mt Maunganui golf course."

Of course, he'd still like a hell of a result - in soccer as in health. "And I do have a massive desire to win."

We saw him on Thursday, and as we were leaving I asked whether he was going to be nervous about the game against Newcastle, due to be played last night. "God, no," he said. When I said, "Well, good luck," he patted me on the shoulder as though it was me, not him, who needed reassuring. It did rather feel that way and I left thinking that I'd kick a goal for him any day.