Craig Harrison: From shutting off the world to taking on Europe

Thankfully they didn’t. The clouds lifted, enough at least to begin a new path with the help of current partner Danielle in her hometown of Chester.

Just not in football, Harrison still – as he puts it – “poisoned” by his experiences, not even watching games on TV and instead spending days on projects renovating and selling properties.

But then he turned 30 and serendipity took over, starting with a surprise birthday party.

With Danielle organising the celebration, the band she booked had let her down and, by chance, former Wrexham midfielder and keen amateur guitarist Gareth Owen was in the duo who answered an SOS to provide the background music.

Over a few beers, talk naturally turned to football. Owen, then player-manager at Welsh side Airbus, needed an assistant.

“I wasn’t interested,” Harrison recalls. “It still took a couple of weeks before he rang again, we met for a coffee, and he talked me around into saying ‘Let’s give it a go’ and I was helping out with training a couple of times a week.”

The chain reaction that led to that Fiorentina touchline had begun.

Within the year, Owen left. Harrison, with the poison gone, was moved up to manager, hurriedly booking himself on to a Football Association of Wales coaching course to try to complete the required badges.

It started with him being “a typical, arrogant ex-footballer” not interested in listening to classroom coaches, but he soon became fully invested.

Within three years Harrison was managing the Welsh champions TNS, conscious players such as Wales’ Steve Evans were little more than a year his junior, but embracing the new path he had not looked for.

With attractive football, silverware and a world record 27-match winning run, that road soon took him to Hartlepool, recently relegated from the Football League, but – in keeping – it didn’t go to plan. “Horrendous” is how Harrison puts it after being sacked within seven months.

“I was always going to take my family there with me and Danielle was fully supportive, as she always has been,” he says.

“But they had the gall to demand that commitment to bring my family 200 miles with me – and yet within seven months I was being told by the same owner nothing was going to be paid. The telephone bills. The heating. The players. Me. One game at Dagenham we had to play in our away kit and didn’t have any training gear because of a laundry bill.”