NUAFC 1968-2018

1998
Meet the man who's coached a team of soccer giant
killers. Roy Pilott talks to Jeff Coulshed.
"You wanted to play for your team, not Everton, not
Arsenal, your team."
- Jeff Coulshed
"For starters, Coulshed, we'll get a new mug of you
for this -- you've stopped perming your hair, and the one we
used this week is five years old." That's a blow for
the Ngaruawahia coach who's managed to con non-soccerites
for years that he still looks like the long-lost older brother of
the Bee Gees.
I proffer a copy of the latest copy of Bruce
Holloway's soccer fanzine Sitter. It contains a clipping from
the Oratia club programme -- a scathing attack on Coulshed
over his choice of adjectives during an after-match speech
last month. And I've asked his age.
It's a bit rough on an old bloke who's just introduced
me to wife Judy as "the son of the only referee I've ever been
scared of".
You don't need kid gloves with Jeff Coulshed, coach
of a genuine fairytale football team.
He is, as someone suggested to me, a bit of yer Arfur
Daley. And his team, my son, is playing in yer semifinal of
the genuine Chatham Cup in Dunedin tomorrow.
Last weekend Coulshed was careful to mind his pees
and queues during the after-match speeches.
His effort, which included presenting the ref with a
pair of thick-lens specs, was more entertaining than the
match.
The ref saw the funny side and put the specs on. It
didn't happen like that at Oratia.
230
15 AUG 1998 , Edition 2, Page 15.
Joker on the Park
Coulshed is unusually serious for a moment.
"You know it was done in jest -- Billy Connolly gets
paid millions to do it; I get fined."
Connolly might counter that he knows how to adjust
his routine to suit the audience.
But they're a down-to-earth bunch at Narra, and
Coulshed, in his fourth season there, fits in nicely. He's
moulded a team of youngsters and club vets. They're proud of
the way he ignored football mercenaries and told those who
offered to play for money to look elsewhere.
Coulshed’s coaching path to the Cup semi-final has
been unconventional.
He is the reluctant coach -- who wanted to play until
his body said no more.
But he was thrown into the fray with a relegated
National League side, Hamilton, as Kevin Fallon's successor
at Muir Park in the late '70s. It kept him off the park for two
years.
He got Hamilton back up, but missed playing. So in
order to play and coach, he took over the Waikato women's
team in 1982 "because they play on a Sunday".
By the time he finished playing and was tapped
by Ngaruawahia, he had taken Waikato to the national
women's title twice, gone around the world with the under-19
and under-21 sides and coached the full national women's
squad.
"I got more enjoyment out of coaching Waikato to a
top four place and then two titles than from any other soccer
I've played," he says. "I don't see that ever being surpassed,
because the players were so dedicated."
It was dodgy knees which ended Coulshed's playing
days, though it had looked more likely that it would be an
ankle. Go back to the early 1960s and he was a young Orral
lad who loved supporting Everton -- but had dreamed of
playing for his home team, Skelmersdale United, since he
was 7.
"You wanted to play for your team, not Everton, not
Arsenal, your team," he recalls.
He did it, earning a fiver a week -- only to stuff up
his ankle and see his career at the White Moss Road ended.
Two years later a winger called Steve Heighway had
his shirt. If that means nothing to you, go and ask a Liverpool
fan.
"In those days you got injured and they made you put your
foot in hot water -- there was no x-rays."
Coulshed was so depressed his dad Arthur told him
to emigrate.
He came to New Zealand as a panel beater rather
than soccer player, and spent two years in Wellington before
heading for Auckland -- and getting no further than Hamilton
East's Riverina Tavern.
In the mid-1960s you only needed an English accent
in the Riverina to get an invitation to play on Saturday.
It was the start of the second phase of his career.
Doctors found he had broken bones in his ankle. They fixed
the problem and he ended up playing for Technical Old Boys
-- who won the Chatham Cup in 1968.
Apart from spells in Australia with Hakoah in
Sydney and Macedonia in Melbourne, he has been in
Hamilton ever since.
In 1969, when Skelmersdale got to a non-league
final at Wembley, Coulshed went home to watch them in the
semi-final. He never made it to the game. Arthur Coulshed --
who once played league for Wigan -- had a heart attack on
the morning of the game and was dead before kickoff.
Coulshed Jr gave his charges a similar scare 14 years
later in 1983 when he collapsed as he talked to the Waikato
women's team before a match. It was a brain haemorrhage.
Judy Coulshed was told to get there quick because