Jobs4Football meets Jamie Day
In May 2018, Jamie Day, left his role as Assistant Manager of Barrow to take charge of the Bangladesh National Team and Under-23s. Fast forward three and a half years and the Englishman is currently on temporary leave with his fate set to be decided in December.
To Day’s surprise, he was replaced by Spanish coach Oscar Bruzon just one week before October’s South Asian Football Federation Championship, a tournament in which Bangladesh finished 4th in the group behind Maldives, Nepal and eventual winners India.
The 42-year-old said: “I thought I would do the SAFF championship because we had been working towards that for the last year so that was something I was looking forward to and you know a week before the competition I didn’t really expect to not be doing it but there had obviously been other discussions that had taken place.”
The former England Under-18 International first found out of he wouldn’t be in charge for the tournament through the local TV station. He said: “The first bit I knew about the decision was seeing it on the news that I had been put on temporary leave and a local Spanish coach at the top team in Bangladesh was taking over for the next two months. While that was all going on the secretary sent me a text message to basically say you’re not in charge of the competition next week.”
“To find out like that was obviously disappointing but we know these things happen in football, but it was a little bit out of the blue.”
Under his guidance, Bangladesh put up its best ever performance in the 2018 Asian Games, where the team shocked everyone by beating powerhouse Qatar and drawing to Thailand to help them reach the round of sixteen for the first ever time, which sparked a renaissance in a cricket dominated country. They then went on to achieve bronze at the South Asian Games a year later.
The London born Day has a contract with the Bangladesh Football Federation that is supposed to run until August 2022 but it looks like Day’s time as permanent manager will come to an end.
Barrow to Bangladesh – National League to National Team
“I’m really happy with the time that we have been there, in the three and a half years we made history at the Olympics when we first took over, we qualified for the next round of The World Cup and The Asian Cup so there has been a lot of positives. We had around 15 players in the squad that we gave international debuts to over that period who have come on and really progressed well so there have been far more ups then downs.”
“I think all of us staff wise can look back and say we have made a real progression there and we would have liked to see if we could take it a little bit further.”
Out of his control, Day has had to deal with the difficulty of the Covid-19 pandemic which made it hard for him travelling back and forth from his home in the UK to Bangladesh, where he would have to stay for longer periods due to lack of flights. He would also have to quarantine whenever he got back, making seeing his family more difficult during an already worrying time for many. In September 2021 he also had to deal without his assistant coach who didn’t make the trip for two games in Kyrgyzstan, all of this whilst trying to continuously adapt to a new country, new culture and new way of doing things.
The former Bournemouth player when discussing adapting to these changes went on to say: “It was a fantastic experience but from the point of coaching and managing players it is completely different there’s a lot of factors you have to deal with, you know religion being part of it, different mentality to how European lads think, trying to negotiate with the federation on things that you want and things you can’t have and work out how you can try and get that.”
“There are scenarios you have to deal with, so I think it makes you a better man manager in trying to solve these situations and keep players happy. There were other times we didn’t have enough equipment and so you’d have to adapt a session around this but again you have to think on your feet so from a managerial point of view I learnt an awful lot from that experience, and I would happily work abroad again.”
Whatever the outcome, there is no doubt that Bangladeshi football is in a better place now then what it was before Jamie took over and it won’t be long before he is back managing, whether that is abroad or in the UK remains to be seen.