Tragedy and triumph: Scott Lindsey's life in football
The experiences that have shaped City's new head coach
Scott Lindsey takes over at York with the difficult job of following an extremely popular manager in Stuart Maynard. But this pales into insignificance compared to some of the challenges he has overcome in life. How have these experiences shaped his approach to football management, and what kind of style can we expect from his City team?
Growing up, football was an ever-present for Scott Lindsey. His dad Keith was a right-back who carved out a solid career in the lower leagues with the likes of Southend, Port Vale and Gillingham. Although Scott was still a toddler when Keith’s professional career ended, his ambition from an early age was to tread the same path. He traces this back to an occasion when, having been taken to watch Liverpool, he was shocked when Kevin Keegan and Ray Clemence came over to chat to Keith after the game having known him from their time together at Scunthorpe United. From that moment, Scott became fixated on pursuing a career as a footballer.
Scott was talented enough to be part of the youth setup at Scunthorpe, the same club his dad came through at, but he never made a first-team appearance and had to look to non-league for his first opportunities in the men’s game. He turned out for various sides across the Midlands before joining Bridlington Town, and it was while playing there that he was scouted by Gillingham. After impressing on trial, he signed for the Gills - then in the fourth tier of English football - and broke into their first team at the age of 22. Making his football league debut for the team where his dad had spent three seasons as a player was a happy coincidence.
When his first-team opportunities at Gillingham dried up, however, Scott made the move to Conference side Dover Athletic. It was here that tragedy would mark his life for the first time. His older brother Matthew was travelling back from watching Scott play for Dover when he was involved in a motorcycle crash: the accident claimed the lives of both Matthew and Scott’s friend and former teammate Alan Nicholls.
While Scott continued to carve out a career in non-league football for over a decade, he was understandably affected deeply by the loss. He said later that “I always blamed myself for it because he came down to watch me play and, if he hadn’t, that wouldn’t have happened.”1 His playing career perhaps never hit the heights it might have done without the difficulty of coping with his brother’s death and the subsequent strain it put on his family: his father Keith was devastated by the incident and passed away himself seven years later aged just 56.
