Bristol City vs West Ham: How a trip to South Africa has helped City go places

Gruelling pre-season work set up Cotterill’s promotion challengers to face West Ham

(Getty Images)

Not many League One teams went to South Africa for pre-season, and not many League One teams are left in the FA Cup. But Bristol City are different.

This is a club who started the season with a 22-game unbeaten run and who are in second place now only by goal difference. They are on the brink of the final of the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy and Sunday they host West Ham United in the FA Cup.

Behind it all is a mixture of big money and local values, billionaire owner Steve Lansdown and manager Steve Cotterill. Lansdown paid to send the team to Botswana and South Africa last summer. Cotterill puts the sustained success of his team, six months on, down to that trip.

“A lot of what has been built this season has been built on that pre-season,” Cotterill said this week. He means “the camaraderie, the closeness” formed on tour, the “humbling” experience of visiting an orphanage but also the “out of this world” fitness work done at Rustenberg – England’s training base for the 2010 World Cup – with the players. “We were pushing them to breaking point, and some days were probably a bit crazy. But we managed to get them there.”

Sam Allardyce's high flying West Ham travel to Ashton Gate on Sunday (GETTY IMAGES)

When Bristol City train at home they do 350-metre runs in sets of four or six. In Rustenberg, at altitude, they did 15. “It can’t beat you,” said Cotterill. “Your times might slow down but it can’t beat you. It can only beat you if you give in. It’s the same with this season now. The first 10 games of a season at any club pretty much take care of themselves. It’s sunny, the nights are light, the pitches are nice. Work starts as a manager from 10 to 12 games in, to games 36 or 37. Then the light nights are back, the weather is changing and the players have booked their holidays. They’re thinking, ‘Only eight or nine games left’. If you have taken them that far, they can see it, they can’t give in.”

Cotterill, of course, is not a man who would ever give in at anything. He is just over one year into imposing his personality on a club which was flirting with the fourth tier when he took over. “The values have always stayed the same, wherever I’ve been,” he says. “Treat the place like it’s your own. Don’t piss on the toilet seat. You don’t do that at home.”

After 35 games of his first full season, Cotterill is confident that the right culture is finally in place. “I don’t need to say anything any more. The discipline is there. I don’t give them a load of rules and regs. If it’s right to do it, then you do it. If it’s wrong, why would you do it? I’m a little bit of old-fashioned like that.”

Cotterill was brought up 45 minutes outside of Bristol, in Cheltenham. Lansdown, who has put £50m into the club he supports, wants to transform sport in the city and is spending £40m on redeveloping Ashton Gate. These local values mean an awful lot to Cotterill, whose relationships with foreign owners have never worked especially well.

“There’s so much of a foreign influence in our game,” Cotterill says, listing his difficult experiences with foreign owners through his career. He still resents how he was treated by the Icelandic owners of Stoke City in 2002, he suffered three owners and two administrations at Portsmouth and was quickly dismissed by Fawaz al Hasawi at Nottingham Forest.

Cotterill had a very brief stay at Nottingham Forest (Getty Images)

Now, Cotterill describes that sacking as “the best thing that happened to me”. He toured the world, watching football. Then, he got the call from Lansdown to transform Bristol City.

Cotterill admires Sam Allardyce – “he’s tough, very thorough and honest” – for turning West Ham United around and dragging them out of the Championship. Now, he has his own team back facing the right way. They should return to the Championship and, with more investment from Lansdown, they can continue to climb.

“The city is big enough,” says Cotterill. “Swansea and Cardiff have done it, they are only an hour or two away. Steve Lansdown has got the money, and he’s a winner, don’t worry about that.”

The fifth round of the FA Cup might be beyond them, but that is beside the point. “We have played really good football this year,” Cotterill smiles. “We haven’t got gone anywhere looking for a draw. Winning isn’t everything but trying to win is.”