Lennie Lawrence insists retirement is not for him as steels himself for another promotion fight at the age of 77. Lawrence, who made his name as a manager in a near nine-year spell at Charlton during the 1980s and early 1990s before steering Middlesbrough into the Premier League, will spend Saturday afternoon in the dugout at the Prestige Group Stadium, the home of National League Hartlepool, with his sights firmly set on a securing a play-off berth.
By his own estimation, he has managed in around 1,200 professional games and has up to 700 more under his belt in an advisory capacity, but he has no intention of hanging up his tracksuit just yet. Speaking on the eve of Pool’s fifth-tier clash with Woking, Lawrence told the PA news agency: “Retirement is not for me. It’s not for everybody.
“It’s not for me. If you don’t do enough, if you don’t do whatever it is you do, you’ll vegetate.”. When Manchester United boss Sir Alex Ferguson announced his plan to retire at the end of the 2001-02 season, then Newcastle counterpart Sir Bobby Robson questioned what he would do at 3pm on a Saturday afternoon and suggested – with prescience – that he may not be able to go through with it.
It was a feeling shared by Lawrence, whose view has not changed during the intervening years. He said: “I spoke to Fergie – I was quite close to him at the time – I spoke to Fergie on the phone and I said, ‘What would you do if they come to you and said we really want you to stay on?’.
