Gaffer was a one in a million

TRIBUTES PAID TO GARY LOWE

- MATT BADCOCK

GARY LOWE’S Hyde United may have been flying high at the top of the Conference North in 2011-12 but enough was enough, he had to pull his players aside at training and give them a stern talk.

“We used to go out literally after every game,” defender Luca Havern tells The NLP. “Most games we were winning. We’d all go out together and we’d always end up ringing Gary at 1.30am to sing down the phone to him!

“He pulled us one time at Tuesday on training and said, ‘Listen lads, I love it all, honestly it’s different class you’re all out. But you’re going to have to stop ringing me at halfone in the morning!’”

It’s a story that illustrates the kind of bond Lowe’s teams had. And why his sudden passing in Spain last week, aged just 61, has hit so many who knew him in Non-League hard.

David Birch captained that Hyde side to the title but by the time he arrived at Ewen Fields he had played more than 500 games for the former Woodley Sports boss at Curzon Ashton.

It was in an 11-year spell at the Nash that Lowe, a former pro at Crystal Palace and Manchester City, achieved some of his best moments in football. They beat Exeter City in the FA Cup first-round proper in 2008 and also reached an FA Vase semi-final.

Birch warmly recalls upsetting Lowe by turning him down when an approach was first made, preferring to stay at Glossop North End, where good characters. We were never on good money, we just had a good bond and a good changing room.