Bromley are a win from League Two – thanks to Gareth Southgate’s best mate

Andy Woodman (right) was best man at Gareth Southgate’s wedding, having struck up a close friendship during their Crystal Palace junior days – PA

Andy Woodman is at home, getting himself ready for Sunday’s National League play-off final at Wembley. And when the Bromley boss is asked how his nerves are ahead of the biggest match of his managerial career he roars with laughter.

“When you’ve got a family like mine where everything is chaos – my daughter is about to have a baby – then Sunday’s game is a release. I tell you what, it’s an escape for me from the crazy world of the Woodman household.”

Woodman, a manager whose outsized presence on the touchline oozes ebullience, is perhaps deliberately underplaying the significance of this game. For Bromley, as it is for their opponents Solihull Moors, this is a high point of history. Unlike last year’s play-off finalists, Chesterfield and Notts County, neither club has any league pedigree. The prize at stake is completely transformative.

Andy Woodman has had a transformational impact at Bromley – Martin Greig Photography

“Oh, it’s the promised land, the holy grail,” says Woodman. “132 years this club has existed and this is the highest they have ever been. Solihull will have the same feelings. Of course there will be nerves around the place, the fans will be nervous, the board will be nervous. But it’s something we’ve not shied away from. From July last year, we have given ourselves one goal and one goal only: to get to the EFL.”

Swapped Premier League for the National League

Sunday represents the apex of Woodman’s managerial career too, the culmination of a strikingly diverse coaching and playing background. He began as a goalkeeper in the Crystal Palace academy. And while he never played for the first team at Selhurst Park, there he made plenty of useful contacts.

Not least when, after playing for eleven different league and non-league clubs, including Oxford United and Northampton, he took a call from his old Palace mate Alan Pardew, asking him if he fancied being goalkeeper coach at West Ham. He did. And the pair got on so well, he followed Pardew to Charlton, Newcastle and back to Palace. When Pardew departed from Selhurst, Woodman took up a job at Arsenal. Then, in 2017, he was asked to become manager at Whitehawk, the Isthmian League side in Brighton.

Woodman (r) when working as Crystal Palace’s goalkeeping coach alongside manager Alan Pardew – Getty Images/Mike Hewitt

“People thought I was mad, leaving Arsenal for the non league,” he says. “But I wanted to manage and I thought I had the credentials. And funnily enough, my experience made it work. You’re talking to someone who played most of his career in the lower levels, then who coached at the highest level. There’s a nice mix in me. I felt I could get on anywhere and with anyone.”

Plus, if he needed advice on management, he knew where to turn. His oldest friend, the man who is godfather to his son Freddie, the Preston and former Newcastle goalkeeper, is Gareth Southgate. They met when they were both juniors at Palace and have spoken to each other virtually every day since with Woodman best man at Southgate’s wedding.

In 2004 he wrote a wonderfully warm book about their relationship, which won the autobiography section of the British Sports Books Awards. Called Woody and Nord: A Football Friendship, it tracked how they had remained best mates even as one played for England and the other for Thurrock. Nord, incidentally, was the nickname Wally Downes first gave Southgate at Palace because of his apparent likeness to Dennis Nordern (one for the teenagers, there).

Southgate’s influence on Woodman

“We’re best mates, we chat about everything, not just football,” says Woodman. “But sure, we talk football as all best mates do. We laugh because we have such similar moans, from very different ends of the spectrum. It’s good to chat to someone who knows what it is like. The thing about being a manager is everyone thinks they can do it better than you. Gareth tells me his postman reckons he could manage England.”

So will Southgate be there on Sunday to watch how his best mate fares?

“I’d have thought he was sick to death of Wembley,” Woodman laughs. “If I was Gareth I’d watch in front of the telly, glass of wine in hand. Relax. After all he’s got some quite important games of his own coming up.”

Woodman underplays the influence the England manager has had on his career, but he admits there is one aspect of Southgate’s approach he readily embraces.

“We both know how to treat people,” he says. “We’ve both played under managers who we’ve thought: that’s not the way to do it. We’ve talked about this and we agree the best way to get the most out of people is treat them with respect. Whether they’re the most gifted, like he deals with, or the not so gifted, you have to make them comfortable in themselves. It’s called managing.”

‘You set a team up not to play text book football but to win’

For Woodman that is particularly important. Bromley have a budget half the size of some in the National League. And while he is able to work his old contacts to bring in players (his central midfielder is Mitchel Bergkamp, Dennis’s son, who he knew from the Arsenal academy), he has never had the capacity to use money as a lure.

“No disrespect to our owner, who is absolutely superb, but our budget is the 16th or 17th highest in the league. We don’t get 9,000 crowds,” he says. “The budget determines what football we play. You have to bring in hungry players and set a team up not to play text book football but to win.”

Winning has been something he has done a lot since he moved to Bromley in 2021. He has taken them to the quarter and semi finals of the National League play-offs every year since he arrived and steered his team to victory in the FA Trophy in 2022. It was a triumph that was noticed. Gillingham that season offered him the manager’s job but he turned it down.

“It was very flattering but I didn’t feel it was right at that time,” he says. “Plus I know this is not a very fashionable word in football, but I had a sense of loyalty to the chairman, the fans and the lads at Bromley who had given me the chance. Now I’m in a position where I could become a league manager. With Bromley.”

And if he does overcome Solihull on Sunday, presumably the first call he will hope to take will be from his oldest mate Southgate.

“Are you kidding me? I’m hoping it will be from Man City, not bloody Gareth.”

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