Soccer: John trusts in Southend FC

There are hot-seats, there are white hot seats, and there is the chairmanship of Southend United Football Club.

John Main is the man now sitting on that upholstered inferno. John can take the heat. He just loves being where he is.

At 55, he finds himself in a dream that is dreamed by many, achieved by the few, even among the rich. John's zillionaire friends from the City gaze wide-eyed at the man from the Blues.

"I'm a lucky man," he says, and his blissful grin is that of a premier league winner rather than a third division relegation. "This is the only job in the world I want."

Yet he finds himself in this ultra-coveted job more by accident than by grand design. John was a prosperous member of the London Stock Exchange, and a specialist in property company reversals.

After the death of his first wife Vanessa from cancer, John threw himself into his involvement with the Billericay-based property firm Martin Dawn.

"Football didn't come into the vision when we set out," says John. "The plan was to build up a property company."

Then Martin Dawn was approached with what looked like a sound enough commercial proposition -- to buy up the Southend training ground, then lease it back to the club for £72,000 a year.

Then the property men started to "look at the facts and figures -- and the situation terrified us."

They came to a conclusion that was hardly hot news to several thousand people in Southend: "In our opinion, the football club was bust."

It is an all-important fact in John Main's personal history, and possibly the history of Southend United, that the smart property boys from Martin Dawn could have walked away at this stage.

Instead they went in. John disregarded his own advice -- local property groups should not become involved with football clubs.

And it's hard not to believe that the chance of sitting in that hotseat had something to do with it. "You're 55, you think things are fairly mapped out, and then something like this comes along," he says, with wonder.

A further source of happiness is his second wife, Lorraine, whom he courted on long car journeys, returning from Blues' away matches.

There are those, inevitably, who have their suspicions about the role of a property company in the Blues scheme of things. John is at pains to reassure them.

"I'm in here for the long term," he promises. "I ask people to trust me. We're not pulling the plug on the football club or treating this merely as a property play. What we're trying to do is secure the future of this club."

He has already put his money where his mouth is, bringing in the illustrious West Ham boss Peter Storrie as chief executive.

The sense of commitment is enhanced by John's own transformation from property to football. "I'm not directly involved in the activities of the property company now," he says.

"I'm parked in Southend for the next five to 10 years and my job is genuinely to rebuild the football club." In short, he has gone native.

He is anyway steeped, "body and soul," in football. As a youngster, living in Forest Gate, he played for West Ham Colts and Leyton Orient. "I was alright, and I did have some ideas of being professional," he says.

But "the year that I joined West Ham, Martin Peters also joined. It stood out right away that he was different. I was in a pot with lots of other kids, Martin was something else."

So John went in for a different game. He joined the Stock Exchange as an office boy, and made his way up in the classic style of an East End kid from poverty row.

"My father died when I was young and, while I don't want to labour all the old East End stuff about lack of money and tough times, that was us," he says. "Kids from my background, when they see an opportunity, they take it. We listen and we learn."

It was also typical of the East End lad that his greatest ambition, and one that he duly achieved, was to move his old mum out of the East End and into the glades of Epping Forest.

John feels that his talents and skills boil down to one thing -- understanding people. That was what mattered in the City, and that is what counts at Southend Football Club.

"When people say that I haven't got experience of football management, I just say that I know what people are all about. I know about passion and emotion."

The new style of management is astonishing those more used to elitist bosses and stuff-you-mate attitudes.

The new chairman will swoop onto ticket queues and give impromptu guided tours of Roots Hall to fans standing there.

Fans are invited for drinks in the office and told "you're more entitled to be here than I am." In his scant leisure time, John goes shopping in the Roots Hall market, bearing off plants for his garden in Theydon Bois.

True to the principles of the old City where "my word is my bond," the word that springs most frequently to John Main's lips is trust.

"What I say, I mean," he says. "I know that once the trust factor goes, you might as well pack up and go home."

Worldly experience and years of blues at the Blues counsels caution and wariness. Yet a deeper instinct tells you indeed to trust John Main.

This, after all, is a man who right at the start of his career as a football executive has pronounced his own epitaph.

This is it: "If I wake up at three in the morning -- which I'm doing quite a lot at the moment -- I know at least that nobody can accuse me of not doing my best, of not throwing myself heart and soul, into this football club."

Football crazy - John Main at Southend's Roots Hall ground

Picture: STEPHEN LLOYD

Converted for the new archive on 19 November 2001. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.