How period as a journalist shaped Quique Sánchez Flores

At the age of eight, Quique Sánchez Flores would sleep with a radio under his pillow. “It was so I could listen to the sports shows and commentaries,” the Watford manager says. “I was completely crazy about sport, and it wasn’t just football. It was handball, basketball, tennis, hockey, rugby. I loved to follow every single sport and I started to understand every one of them.”

By the time Flores got to 15, he knew what he wanted to do with his life. He wanted to become a sports journalist. Happily for Flores, he would be talented enough to make it as a footballer and his career would take in 10 seasons at Valencia, two at Real Madrid, a curtain call at Real Zaragoza and 15 caps for Spain.

Flores is not a man to be discouraged easily and, having hung up his boots in 1997, the right-back – who was part of the Spain squad at the 1990 World Cup – finally lived the dream. Over the next four years he wrote for a clutch of newspapers, chief among them Marca, El Mundo and Diario de Valencia, and he also worked as a football pundit for Spanish TV and radio.

If things had worked out differently, Flores says with a smile, he could have been in the Wembley press box on Sunday, filing an analysis piece or overview on the FA Cup semi-final between Watford and Crystal Palace. Instead, his immersion in media life was temporary but the way he talks about the period shines a light on his personality and, as he admits, it helped to give him skills that would shape his approach to management.

“I tried to use the time as a part of my preparation for becoming a manager,” Flores says. “For me, it was very clear. I have a coach inside me and I knew that the period would be short but I wanted to use it well. I learned a lot because I focused completely on what I was watching and then I had to explain it or write about it.

“It made me a better manager, because you needed to make different angles when you were analysing. I remember when I was working for different programmes on TV or radio, I would take a copy of the match, go home and spend three or four hours analysing it. I’d write my notes and, afterwards, go in to cut and edit everything, so I have experience of that. It was really interesting work. The most fun for me, though, was writing articles, because I love it.”

When Flores does something, he does it properly. “Whatever I am doing, always, I need to do it well,” he says. And so, in his foray into print, he wrote his own stuff which, for a former footballer, is a rare thing indeed. Most of those who are bylined in England’s national newspapers lean on a ghostwriter, with a few honourable exceptions, including Alan Smith in the Daily Telegraph.

Flores, moreover, wrote live from night games, when deadlines are at their most unforgiving, and he has the stories of filing difficulties that strike a chord from the days before reliable stadium Wi-Fi added years to a reporter’s life expectancy.

“I’d do analysis during the game for the radio and when I’d finished I’d need to send my article for Marca or another newspaper,” Flores says. “I had to be very quick – 45 minutes, an hour, maximum. You had to send by email and I remember on many occasions the article would not send. ‘OK, don’t worry, try to send again,’ they would say. I remember the rush, the hurry. I remember this period very well.”

Flores wrote tactical analysis pieces and he says he filed more than a thousand of them. “A family member cut them out and kept them in an amazing book,” he says. “It’s an aunt of my kids. She has kept every article I have written in my life.”

The question is: was his stuff any good? Did it need surgery on the subeditors’ table? “No, not at all,” says Juan Castro, Marca’s international chief football writer. “Quique didn’t need a lot of editing. He writes in a really proper way, with no grammatical errors, and in a really brilliant way. He was one of the best among former players and I’d also say he has been the best commentator on Spanish TV in the last 15 years.”

Flores adds: “Sometimes, the editors needed to touch my copy, for grammatical bits, but the spirit, no. I don’t like that too much, because to change two sentences can change the spirit of the article.”

Flores talks a lot about spirit and emotion. He has made the point that he likes his Watford team to get on the ball in times of adversity and make three or four passes, not necessarily to threaten but to fire a good feeling. His writing style, he says, mixed “football with feelings”. It was not purely about tactical appraisals.

“I read a lot – [GABRIEL]García Márquez, [PAULO]Coelho, [MARIO]Benedetti,” Flores says, referencing some of the greats of South American literature. “In terms of sport, Jorge Valdano [the former Argentina international] writes amazingly and so does Ángel Cappa, who was the assistant coach when I was a player at Real Madrid.

“I love this style and I developed this kind of style, too. I like to look for these different kind of feelings. I was really sensitive with my articles. It was something really particular. When you write, it’s coming quick, so the screen is never blank. Always, you have ideas. When you stop writing, you look at it and say: ‘Oh my God.’ When you are writing every day, it’s like a train. The words are coming. But if you stop, for 15 days, you say: ‘Wow. Now, I start again.’”

Flores has helped to script a positive Premier League return for Watford. Thanks to an excellent start – they were seventh after the 3-0 home win over Liverpool on 20 December – they have never been in the relegation equation and when the FA Cup run is factored in, it is difficult to know what more Flores could have done, particularly when you consider the club signed 16 players last summer.

Managers, however, are nothing if not interchangeable at Watford. They went through four of them in a promotion season last time out and it has not gone unnoticed at boardroom level that since the high of the Liverpool victory, Flores’s record in the league has read: P17 W3 D4 L10. The semi-final against Palace will be Flores’s first visit to Wembley. It has the feel of a defining moment.

(Guardian service)