FC Halifax Town: Video analyst, psychologist and confidante - Paul Oakes on his role as goalkeeping coach

For Paul Oakes, the job at FC Halifax Town encompasses video analyst, psychologist and confidante.

Oakes joined The Shaymen in the summer, replacing Joe Stead when he left to join Leeds United.

“I think the main thing is your man-management,” Oakes said of the role.

“Probably the easy bit is putting the session on but it’s understanding your goalkeeper, what makes them tick, getting them to work for you.

“You’ve got your technical aspects but your psychological side is massive for a goalkeeper.

“Most of them will have the ability but it’s about how they deal with setbacks, so the man-management side is massive, psychology plays a massive part in goalkeeping.”

Oakes was in the army when he was younger and dabbled in coaching during his time in the military, but didn’t initially pursue it when he left.

“I went down a completely different path doing other jobs,” he said, “then I started doing little bits of goalkeeper coaching here and there, did my coaching badges and set-up my goalkeeping academy in Greater Manchester.

“I’ve got about 200 goalkeepers there, all different levels from kids just starting out to kids in academies - City, United, Oldham - all the way through to open age.

“The gaffer (Pete Wild) rang me just before the season started and was asking for a few keeper coaches, if I knew anyone, because he probably thought I was too busy.

“Then I put a couple of names forward who, for whatever reason, it didn’t quite happen, and then he said ‘do you want to come in and do pre-season?’ and I said ‘no problem’.

“Then it was like ‘look, the job’s yours if you want it’, and once I’d been in and absolutely loved it, I thought ‘yeah’.

“I’m absolutely loving it. I’m grateful for the chance, the staff have been absolutely excellent from day one.

“I enjoy coming into work, I can’t wait to get into work.

“And it’s a really good bunch of players.

“I work on a college programme as goalkeeper coach in Rochdale as well, coaching, and they’ve been brilliant because they’ve trimmed my days down.

“I normally do four days for them, so it was like ‘well, if I can just do the Monday and then focus my efforts on Halifax’ but they said yeah because it reflects well on them.”

Oakes says he “dabbled in semi-pro” as a player, but feels much more at home as a coach.

“When I left school I wanted to have a route into football, but I was too small to play in goal so I went into the military and played in the army quite a lot as a goalkeeper because I didn’t grow until I was about 19, 20,” he said.

“I loved playing in goal and when I came out of the army I went into a semi-pro club, Rochdale Town, to coach but ended up playing.

“I played at North-West Counties standard, coached, loved it and decided I preferred coaching more than playing.”

Oakes is currently doing his UEFA B qualification, which has been held up by the Covid-19 pandemic.

“You get a lot of keeper coaches who might want to go down the route of coaching the outfield ones, go into management, but I’m 100 per cent goalkeeping, that’s what I’m focused on,” he said.

Analysing the two players under his tutelage - Sam Johnson and Harrison Davison-Hale - Oakes said: “Sam’s been absolutely excellent, he’s laid back so I don’t think much affects him. He’s a chilled out character.

“We’ll talk about the matches, what can we do better, what has gone well.

“With Sam you don’t have to worry about him over-thinking things.

“With Harrison, who’s a younger keeper, he might need an arm round the shoulder to say ‘look, this could be better but try not to panic too much’.

“But Harrison’s been excellent, he puts a shift in and he’s keen to learn and wants to push on.”

Oakes believes the fact that Johnson is the established number one at the club has more positives than negatives.

“I think that helps a lot,” he said, “because if you’ve got who are chopping and changing and the manager’s not too sure on his number one - I was at a goalkeeper conference once and a lot of people were saying ‘you need one to push the other on and they need to know they’re not comfortable’, but Peter Schmeichel was like ‘no, I needed to know I was number one’, so I’m going to listen to Peter Schmeichel!

“I completely agree. That doesn’t mean Harrison won’t get his chance if he pushes on, but I think that helps massively.”

Oakes has no doubts that Johnson is capable of playing at a higher level.

“For this level I think he’s excellent,” he said.

“He’s obviously been a great servant to the club, the fans seem to love him.

“He’s having another good season. When I took the job I looked at a lot of clips at what we could improve on, what could be better and what he was good at.

“It’s not just focusing on what could be better, it’s about what’s good and let’s keep that ticking over.”

When asked what areas he feels Johnson has improved on, Oakes said: “We’ve focused quite a bit on his distribution, which I think has come on from what I saw last season.

“The vocal side of things, his organisation, that’s come on. you can hear it in the empty stadiums.

“He’s a lot louder, he’s organising a lot more from last season, which is a positive.

“And Sarg (Joe Sargison, first-team coach) has done a lot of work with him on that as well, trying to look at what else is going on.

“Sometimes keepers get judged on stats - how many saves they’ve made or clean sheets. But if you’re cutting off that danger at source and getting your defenders to deal with that through good organisation, sometimes you don’t have to make a save.

“His communication has come on so much.

“I know some people have mentioned crosses with Sam, but if you look at the King’s Lynn game, there were three crosses - he came for one and took it, he punched another one into a good area.

“I wouldn’t class that as a weakness.

“His kicking’s improved massively, he’s a calming presence, he’s not ranting and raving, and defenders like that, someone they can rely on.”

Oakes says video analysis plays a major part in pre-match preparation.

“The guys who do our Hudl (video analysis), whatever I ask for, they will send it me. So if I want ‘Sam - crossing’ for example, or ‘Sam dealing with backpasses first time’ they will break down everything from the season and send it me within the hour,” Oakes said.

“We have the information and it’s up to Sam if he wants that.

“So we’ll analyse the penalty takers for whoever we’re about to play, we’ll have a rough idea of where they’re going, but in a match scenario, if Sam feels like they’re not going to go that way, it’s completely up to Sam.

“Let’s say I say to Sam ‘I feel like it’s going to go into the bottom right-hand corner tonight’ and Sam goes to the left because he had that instinct, that’s fair enough because Sam’s playing the game.

“We give him the data but whether he wants it or not is entirely up to him, he can use it as he sees fit.”

Before Town’s disallowed game against Hartlepool on January 12, Oakes had spent the afternoon analysing all Hartlepool’s 25 goals up to that point 10-15 times each.

“Sam might watch them as well but sometimes he might think ‘that’s too much information, I don’t need that’, which is fair enough,” Oakes said.

“We’re not saying ‘you must watch this and this is what we want you doing’. It’s ‘this is the information, use it how you think it’ll benefit you’.”

Oakes says while the rest of the Town coaching team are watching the games from the dugout, he is usually watching Johnson.

“I’m looking at his starting position, listening out for the instructions he’s giving out to the lads in defence,” he said.

“Anything over the halfway line I’m like ‘right, come on, what can we do here?’.”

Oakes says it is a good feeling when something that has been identified and worked on in the build-up to a game makes a difference in the match.

“At Stockport away they had a chance from a cut-back, and we’d focused a few days before on cut-backs and reacting,” he said.

“What I wanted was for him not to step up and have less reaction time, you can’t affect it, so just drop and give yourself more reaction time, and he did.

“He held his position and gone down to his right and pulled off a really, really top-class save.

“But a few minutes later they hit an absolute screamer into the top corner!”