“Resilience”. That’s the trait Neil Harris values most highly in his teams.
Fittingly, Cambridge United are showing just that.
They are bouncing back from relegation to mount a serious promotion charge in League Two.
This week, after a 14-game unbeaten run, they responded to a shock loss at bottom-club Harrogate Town on Saturday to beat Crawley 3-0 on Tuesday night.
“That was a team with real mental and physical resilience,” says Harris proudly, during a call with Sky Sports from the club’s training ground to mark his January manager of the month award.
Resilience, though, is a characteristic which he believes the Cambridge squad badly lacked last season.
“When I took over at the end of February, I knew the team was getting relegated,” Harris says bluntly.
“We were always getting relegated because the team had no backbone. The team had no resilience. The club didn’t have resilience in it. And that’s what we’ve had to bring in.”
Harris’ return for a second stint as Cambridge boss was accompanied by the arrival of Mark Bonner as director of football. Together, they oversaw a “summer of change”.
Harris pays credit to Bonner and the club hierarchy for helping to enable “a complete culture shift”.
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Highlights of the Sky Bet League Two game between Crawley and Cambridge
“People have a smile on their face and enjoy [the environment at the training ground] but they come and work hard and there’s accountability and demands and standards,” says Harris.
After a steady if unspectacular start to this season, Cambridge stepped up their level in November and are reaping the rewards from the reset. Their form has propelled them into the mix for automatic promotion and, after the midweek action, they sit fourth but just two points off second. They have the best defence in the division.
Notably, Cambridge have more points than the three other clubs relegated from League One last season combined.
The struggles of Crawley, Shrewsbury and Bristol Rovers – who Cambridge face on Saturday – underline the good work Harris and his team have done – and also that a positive response to their situation at the end of last season was not a given.
“It’s extremely difficult to bounce back,” explains Harris, who pulled off a similar recovery during his first managerial role at Millwall. Now, over a decade into his career in the dugout, he is overseeing a similar shift at Cambridge.
“It was probably end of March, start of April, and I said, ‘We won’t look like this next year. I won’t do this next year. I won’t have this culture. I won’t have this injury list. I won’t have this staffing mentality or player mentality. I’m not here for this’,” says Harris.
“I made a promise to the owner that walking back into the football club, he’s entrusted me to run his football club, and I’ll put it in the correct manner and make sure we have a winning culture here. And that’s what we’ve driven forward.
“And again, praise for Mark Bonner and the recruitment department as well for the amount of effort that went in and the bravery that went into it because we have made wholesale changes and we are getting our reward at the moment.”
Cambridge United have the best defensive record in League Two this season
Harris’ principles which are driving the change are rooted in his “strong but fair” family upbringing and then the “hard values” of his football upbringing at his first professional club, Millwall.
But Harris says he is also trying to bring “humility” to his management, to guide the younger players at the club, and notes the perils of negativity on social media impacting players in a way which did not happen when he first stepped into coaching.
“It’s crazy,” he says. “Social media drives ownership. It drives the media. Social media drives everything in it. The negativity drives it all.
“My job is to control the narrative as much as possible to make sure that negativity doesn’t seep through into my squad or into my football club.”
Managing the message to his players is also a key challenge for the run-in. Harris has been involved in three promotions as a player and head coach and says calmness and consistency are key.
“It’s a real mix between driving all the time, demanding all the time from the players, but also getting the balance between stepping back at the right time,” Harris explains.
“You can’t just hammer, hammer, hammer all the time. You have to make sure you put your arm around somebody at the right time. Getting that balance right is really key at this stage of the season.
“But then also trying to be consistent with your messages. You don’t have a good run and then just rip it all up and move six players out. You have to make sure you keep calm as well. I think that just comes with experience.
“It’s that calmness that we lose a lot in football nowadays. It’s making sure that we keep control of that on a daily basis.”
Watch highlights of Cambridge United vs Bristol Rovers on the Sky Sports website and App on Saturday evening.
