A couple of seconds into a conversation with Dave Horseman and two things become immediately apparent – the coach’s strong affection for football and his Bristolian credentials.
Last summer the Bristol Rovers coach was added to Matt Taylor’s backroom staff but it was frequently made clear that the 41-year-old was a club appointment, having never worked with the former Gas manager previously.
Geography made it a perfect next challenge for Horseman, who had spent a couple of months in a role with the FA following his sacking as manager of Forest Green Rovers in December 2023. The Rovers coach grew up effectively down the road from the Mem and has been based in Bristol throughout his coaching endeavours for family reasons, even if it has meant extra miles on the tank and a greater familiarity with England’s network of various motorway services.
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It is no secret that a tough sole stint in senior management at Forest Green has tainted Horseman’s credibility as a coach for those who aren’t willing to look into his career beyond a five second visit to Wikipedia. The reality is the Gas have a coach within their ranks with one of the best coaching, particularly youth, reputations in the country.
Horseman has previously gone on record to state that he has since decided that management is not for him, although the reasons as to why will remain private for the time being. However, as is rarely the case for anyone who becomes associated with the club, his brief time at Rovers has been anything but straightforward so far.
The 41-year-old arrived in the summer, having not previously worked with the likes of Taylor or his assistant Wayne Carlisle but emerged as the stand out candidate following a recruitment process for a new first team coach.
In late November and into early December, Horseman took caretaker charge for two games as Taylor took a leave of absence to deal with a family emergency. Those matches saw the Gas somehow progress to the FA Cup third round after a mammoth goalkeeping display from Josh Griffiths against Barnsley before the worst performance of the campaign so far led to a 3-0 defeat at Leyton Orient.
Taylor then took charge of one more game, a 2-0 loss at Birmingham City, and lost his job with Rovers 20th and hovering dangerously close to the relegation zone.
Horseman swiftly regathered the reins, still warm from when he had last picked them up, and oversaw a good draw against Wrexham and a decent display at Exeter City that wasn’t rewarded before Inigo Calderon stepped in to take charge.
It has been anything but straightforward for the Gas coach since his arrival in BS7 but it’s a job that allows him to do what he loves – coach.
“What’s probably been my biggest learning over this season is being adaptable as a coach,” Horseman reflected to Bristol Live. “So that’s probably been the biggest challenge for me this year, and getting to know new people.
“Obviously, although I did some interviews with Matt, and I ended up having a really good relationship with him, I didn’t know him at all, probably up to a week before the season started. And Wayne, although I’ve come across Wayne a couple of times, but never anywhere near a working capacity where I would say I know him.
“So obviously then you try and fit into their way of working, you’re trying to get to know a new squad, because I haven’t even had really time to think about that, and then try and add some value yourself.
“Coming from a completely different place, it probably would take time and obviously I’m not the manager. I’m just the third coach, if you like. You’ve got your manager, assistant and me. You’re just trying to complement without being a problem and that was tough. That’s probably the first time I’ve ever really had to do that because even when I went up with the first-team in Southampton, I knew the way we were trying to play and I understood that inside out.
“We were lucky we got through against Barnsley and then got a point against Wrexham and actually, against Exeter, if we were a bit more clinical I think we would have gotten three points. Then Leyton Orient was just a disaster but it’s really hard when you’re not building for the future.
“I’ve never ever been in a position where it’s just a short-term look after. Now I found that, probably in the last 20 years, one of the hardest 10 day stints over the two little periods.”
Eventually Rovers landed on Inigo Calderon after it became pretty clear that a recruitment search overseas would prove too complicated amid post-Brexit laws on work permits.
The Spaniard is the Gas’ first ever foreign boss and has made an immediate impression despite the role being his first in senior management, arriving from Brighton where he had been manager of the Seagulls’ under-18s.
Announced on Boxing Day, the timing of the recruitment process was far from ideal but Rovers and Horseman were in desperate need of clarity.
However, 10 points from eight games, plus the anomaly of a 3-0 FA Cup defeat at Premier League Ipswich Town, and improved performances have offered encouragement that the Gas can not only survive in League One this season but may have found a head coach that can oversee the progression that the club is so desperate to achieve.
Calderon doesn’t currently have a dedicated assistant with Horseman seemingly as close to one as the Rovers boss will get in the meantime while Kevin Bond has returned to the club for his third stint. For the Gas coach though, first impressions have been excellent.
“Really positive,” Horseman declared. “What’s clear is he has a real philosophy and also a way of training it. It’s probably more what I was used to previously in terms of at Southampton, we had a playing style philosophy throughout the club.
“So in terms of the way he wants to train his philosophy like that, it’s really easy for me to understand that and then it’s just trying to help him get to know the lads, get to know the way of work and get to know the league because the league is a tough league.
“It’s stuff he probably wouldn’t know, which I’ve got some experience at now, and yeah, I think probably the last couple of weeks, people have seen, not always with the results, but some positive signs leading to probably, I’d argue, our best performance of the season against Peterborough.
“When the new manager comes in, you’re trying to make him understand that you’re here to help support in any way possible,” he added. “Not stepping on any toes.
“They clearly want to put their stamp on it football-wise and everything else and, although you want to say, ‘well what about this? What about that?’ You have to let them support them and be there.
“I think I’ve done that and I’ve got a pretty good relationship early on with him and he’s been really good, particularly on a match day. There’s a lot of conversation going now and the iPads going off and we’re trying this a lot more tactical which I do absolutely love.
“But building relationships is key with fans, owners, new managers. It’s been the challenge of being here, for sure.”
Rewind 18 months or so and Horseman was about to take his first venture into management when an eye-catching opportunity presented itself up the M5 at Forest Green.
The now-41-year-old was manager of Southampton B at the time, the former title of the south coast club’s under-21s side, and had stepped up to assist with the first team for the remainder of the 2022/23 campaign as the Saints endured relegation from the Premier League with former Reading boss Ruben Selles entrusted to take charge for the remainder of the campaign.
Although the plan was to always return to his role in charge of Southampton B, the summer of 2023 proved to be hectic to say the least as numerous different potential avenues for a next step arose for the Bristolian before eventually landing on Forest Green.
“I was always planning on going back to the B team, I knew that anyway and I loved it,” Horseman insisted. “Some of my best memories are with the Southampton B team.
“What ended up happening, I went on holiday and I got a phone call from Ruben offering me the assistant manager job at Reading. So Jason Wilcox [then-Southampton chief] comes in and in week one of his job he gets a phone call from Reading approaching me to be their assistant manager. I was in Ibiza so it probably wasn’t the best time to make a decision.
“So Ruben was down to the last two for Inter Miami with Messi and had just been offered the Reading job and I would have gone as assistant manager to one of those two. I don’t know where I wanted to go. I was more than happy to go to Reading because I really like Ruben. He’s brilliant at what he does.
“After a couple of days, I was flying back. I was actually then starting to read up on Reading and realised it’s in a little bit of a mess at the moment. I’m not in a financial position where I could go a month or two without getting paid, so I turned that one down.
“The following week, a friend of mine, Gary Probert, put in a word for me to Forest Green who had just sacked Duncan Ferguson.
“So week two or three, we’ve basically just gone back to pre-season at Southampton and I get the second approach. I’ve been approached by Reading and approached by Forest Green. It looks like I’m tagging my CV around everywhere. I never applied for anything. I then had a little bit of a falling out with Jason Wilcox in the short-term because he thought I was desperate to get out and I was more than delighted to stay.
“I eventually went down the process, got the Forest Green job. I think we had roughly like eight days until the season started. Maybe more.
“What I, probably stupidly, didn’t do was research the squad. They’d got relegated the year before. They’d won six games in League One. The year before that, they got promoted to League One but in the second half of the year they had relegation form. So they had 18 months of losing.
“I never knew any of that, stupidly. It’s your first job, you probably need to know that. And it was the same group of players, who were the best lads, but clearly changing a losing culture, much better people than me have never done it without changing lots of the squad.
”So I go in. The lads were amazing, they bought into it. Cut a long story short, we had 72 per cent availability the whole time I was there. The average in League football is around 81, 82 per cent. Now that’s fine, but we had the 72.
“When your best seven players were all injured, look at, for example, the best in the world. Pep, at the moment, with a few injuries, ain’t winning. Ange, who is way better than me, isn’t winning. It’s not an excuse, it’s the reality of the job that, if you get loads of injuries and those injuries happen to be all your best players, you don’t win.”
Since his departure from Forest Green in December 2023, Horseman hasn’t had the opportunity to share his side of the story publicly.
The Gloucestershire outfit were eventually relegated to the National League after Horseman’s replacement Troy Deeney lasted just six games before current boss Steve Cotterill came in and has since steadied the ship and looks likely to lead them to promotion back into the Football League this term.
“Up to probably the last four weeks before I got sacked, we’d actually ranked, pretty much in the top eight for about 20 different criteria,” Horseman added. “We conceded too many goals. I had no centre-backs. We didn’t score enough. I had a striker who was a brilliant lad but had scored one in 60 and was my main number nine. So it was like, as good as a coach I think I am, I’m not that good, I know it.
“So, that all went on. I was told all the way through about changing the playing philosophy and the playing philosophy was there for all to see. It wasn’t my opinion, it was factual from ‘Statsbomb’.
“So, unfortunately I lost my job and, based on results, rightly so. Based on performances and actually the performances up to a point and then some of the training that would have taken place had made a big impact, very harsh.
“Probably the bit I didn’t do was I only met Dale [Vince] really two or three times and he’s a good guy, but probably what he was being told by other people probably wasn’t the reality of what was going on and by the time I met him, it was already a mess.
“I went in too late where, by the time the players that we needed to change the squad around and we had the budget, like the week I signed, they’d already signed four players in that week that I wasn’t aware of and one of them I wouldn’t have signed and I told them and they went ahead and signed him anyway.
“So, when you’re a first time manager, you have to deal with all that. There’s much better people than me who have failed.
“It hurt and I speak to Lou Carey all the time who was my assistant and a brilliant coach and an amazing guy. He’s probably been hurt a lot more by it than me.
“If I’d have been told it’s just about winning and I would have had a chance to actually build my squad I think I would have definitely won games in that division. I never had it and then because of that you lose and you’re the ex-Forest Green manager and the truth of the matter is I think we’d just gone into the relegation [zone] but, Gillingham on the Friday, where all those players were coming back.
“So the six games Troy had, all these players were back. We lost to Blackpool in the FA Cup on the Tuesday night and I’d left everybody out ready because we then had games over Christmas where we thought we could pick up points and we were nowhere near cut adrift. They actually ended up far more cut adrift than when I left them and with a much better squad than what I had and I lost my job.
“Because of that, I think all the 20 years of working with elite players and doing a really good job kind of gets chucked out the window just because you lost. I’ve never told my side of the story and when you look at it, I have seen some amazing Forest Green fans around. Guys have turned up and asked me to sign shirts and I love the fans, I love the place and I genuinely hope they get promoted this year because there’s so many good people there and some of the lads that are still there tried really hard for me. I had no complaints with the players, just we needed to keep the best ones on the pitch a bit longer.”
When Horseman referenced elite players, there’s a list of names that he has coached that have made it to the top level far too long for these purposes. However, the easiest way to identify some of the first class players the Rovers coach has worked with is by dissecting his time at Southampton.
A total of over 10 years at Bristol City across two spells either side of nearly three at Watford predated Horseman’s arrival at Saints in summer 2019, taking charge of the club’s under-21s side which was rebranded to the ‘B team’ a year later.
As the former Southampton B team manager stated, leading that side brought some of the best memories of his career. Players such as current Saints starlet Tyler Dibling, Bayer Leverkusen winger Nathan Tella and a number of opponents that have come up against Rovers this term like Charlton duo Kayne Ramsey and Thierry Small and former Blackpool loanee Dom Ballard were just a couple of the array of players that came through and have gone on to enjoy professional careers at good levels.
However, it was his brief stint as a member of the first team coaching staff in the Premier League that offered the most fascinating anecdotes.
Saints were headed for relegation from the top-flight following an 11-year stay, punching above their weight to survive for a number of seasons. They had sacked former RB Leipzig and current Wolfsburg manager Ralph Hasenhuttl that November, a couple of weeks shy of his four-year anniversary at the club, who had instilled a variation of the Red Bull model of playing. The Austrian’s successor Nathan Jones, now of Charlton, then lasted a mere 95 days.
Ruben Selles had been brought into the club that summer as a first team coach and was a bit of a nomad at that point having worked at sides in his native Spain, Greece, Russia, Norway and Denmark. The Spaniard had taken interim charge following Hasenhuttl’s departure and then once again after Jones left in the February.
Selles asked Horseman to assist his backroom team with the now-Hull City manager eventually asked to take on the job for the remainder of the season with players such as James Ward-Prowse, Romeo Lavia, Theo Walcott and Kyle Walker-Peters some of the regulars at the time. Their first game? Chelsea away.
“It was incredible,” the Gas coach reflected on his spell working with Southampton’s first team. “To be honest, I never really had much to do with Ruben because he was always the first team coach but I always dealt with the managers there. Maybe the assistant managers.
“Ruben asked me, he watched the teams play at Southampton and what had probably happened, we’d gone away from the Red Bull type style and probably me and Carl Martin knew it the best because we’d been there the longest and we were lucky we got a coaching education from him.
“He asked me to go in and I remember, probably the most surreal thing in my life, a really proud moment overall. We had a B team game at home against Stoke on the Friday night. So he asked me on the Thursday and so I did first team training with Southampton and we were preparing for Chelsea on the Saturday at Stamford Bridge.
“I said, ‘perfect, no problem.’ I’ll do the first team in the morning, the B team in the afternoon and then Friday night I’ll do the game before travelling down to the hotel and then be with the first team Friday night, Saturday. It wasn’t that long really.
“We beat Stoke but we were always going to. We were on our way to winning the league with the best team. I think we had seven England internationals and a Belgium international.
“I then travelled to the hotel and I’ve never stayed in a better hotel except maybe the Lowry in Manchester. So I drove my car down, stayed at the hotel and then one of the physios took my car to Stamford Bridge in the morning and I went with the first team and I remember going on the bus. It was only a mile from Stamford Bridge and I realised how big an occasion just getting to the game is. There were just roads covered in fans.
“We drove in, played the game and you could feel the speed and intensity and I remember after two minutes Mason Mount hooked it over our left-back’s shoulder and hit a diagonal to Noni Madueke. In the blink of an eye this attack is happening and now you’re trying to solve the problem because that can’t happen again.
“I went from an under-21s game which was good to, I knew Premier League players were amazing and obviously Chelsea are one of the best but to seeing it, well then you’ve got to solve the problem.
“Anyway, incredible. Somehow we won the game 1-0. Prowsey scored and after the game, football-wise, I’ve never felt a feeling like it. Really good. We were probably going down but it gave us a little bit of a chance.
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“Then that was it for the next two weeks. The following week, train with the first team. I had to give away a few sessions with the B team. We then beat West Brom on the Friday night away which set us up for the league title really and then I would do the first team.
“I was lucky. I went to Old Trafford, we drew 0-0. Went to Leeds, we lost 1-0. That place was incredible. Went to West Ham, drew with Liverpool, drew with Tottenham, drew with Arsenal 3-3 at the Emirates. That one was particularly good because the truth of the matter is, I did the out of possession stuff that day and we thought that [Aaron] Ramsdale would take a chance splitting us, so we wanted to give them a chance. [Carlos] Alcaraz nicked the ball in about 30 seconds and scored and then Theo [Walcott] countered a few.
“That atmosphere, when they played North London forever, my watch constantly told me the volume was too loud. I’ve never felt intensity like it. The most intense team we played against that season was Arsenal because they had to win because I think Man. City were starting to pull away. We probably killed the league for them really.
“Then Man. City we lost but they were just the most incredible and then the best tactically was Brighton. We were unlucky.
“I was really lucky. I wish I went to Anfield because that place is special and Tottenham away. But that second half of the season, just to see the level of like Trent [Alexander-Arnold] and Kevin De Bruyne and these people. I don’t think you appreciate them until you’ve got to try and find a way of stopping them.”
Fast forward to the present day and Horseman has been at Rovers for six months but there have surely been days where it has felt like six years.
Football is, and always will be, a vicious beast that can throw up any unpredictability within a moment’s notice; the 41-year-old is well aware of that. But right now he is enjoying what he labelled his best work-life balance where his commute is measured in minutes as opposed to hours, allowing him to also be a dad.
The hope now is that, with new head coach Inigo Calderon in charge, the club will enjoy a period of more stability than what the past 18 months or so have thrown up while experiencing the progress that the ownership are so desperate to oversee. The plan for Horseman, until he is told otherwise, is to be a part of that progress in BS7.
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