THE CV of a football coach is a lot more diverse than it was 20 years ago, when if you weren’t a former pro with hundreds of league games under your belt you’d be struggling to get a job in the industry.

These days failing to have had a stellar career in the game is no impediment to landing jobs on the training ground.

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Which is just as well for football, because if the game’s practice pitches were still a closed shop, the game would be missing out on men like Michael Jolley.

The man in charge of adding the finishing touches to Burnley’s Under-21 squad as they seek a playing career that passed him by, might have never played a league game, but he brings far more than footballing experience to Gawthorpe.

There are the highs, a Cambridge University education and a budding career in financial trading; and the lows, losing a close friend in the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center in New York while he was working in the city.

It’s been quite a journey from those days trying to make the grade at Oakwell for the 38-year-old.

“Football has always been the biggest part of my life and I wanted to be a footballer,” he explains.

“When that didn’t work out – I was released by Barnsley when I was 16 – I decided to throw all my energy into something else.”

The something else was economics studies. He picked it up quickly and spent three years at the Cambridge University college that produced alumni such as Michael Atherton and John Cleese.

Jolley rejects the word academic and said he just ‘worked hard’, but his time at one of the country’s two most prestigious universities is something he will never forget.

“I had to go for an interview and they set me certain parameters for the exams I was doing, I had to reach a certain level, which I managed to do,” he said.

“When I went down and met the professor for the interview, that was a really intimidating situation, but I came through that and got the offer to go.

“It was a bit of a culture shock for me. I was just a state school kid from Sheffield.

“It took a bit of adjusting to that way of living, but I learnt a hell of a lot and I was exposed to some situations that I wouldn’t have been otherwise.

“Football remained a huge part of what I was doing.

“I played for the university and I got involved with some coaching as well.”

Jolley twice represented Cambridge in the Varsity match against Oxford at Craven Cottage, winning one and drawing one, and he credits it for keeping him in touch with football during his studies.

He puts the decision to study economics down to his dad, who wanted him to understand how business worked, and Jolley found he had an interest in it, and could do the work.

When the time came to leave Cambridge in 1998 he was quickly picked up by one of the world’s biggest banks.

“What tends to happen is big employers come around and recruit the graduates, so I ended up being recruited by HSBC and I went to work for them in London, on their graduate programme,” he said.

“I became a junior trader on a desk and then after two years they sent me over to New York for a couple of years. Again, that was a different challenge but it definitely broadened me out in terms of exposing me to different types of experience.”

It was while in New York that he experienced tragedy.

Having arrived in the Big Apple 12 months earlier, Jolley quickly became friends with Italian-American Rob Horohoe.

“He was a broker, so I was a trader and would speak to him many times each morning and had spoken to him many times that morning,” Jolley said of his 31-year-old friend, who was one of 2,996 people to die on that fateful day.

“I’d been in New York about a year at the time and he was someone who had taken me under his wing and helped me to find my feet in the city, so to lose him was devastating.

“But I’m pleased for the memories I have got of him and for the time I had him as a good friend.”

Jolley was working around a mile from the World Trade Center when the attacks happened, and the events of that day act as perspective whenever the going gets tough, for him or his young charges.

“Without getting too deep, sometimes when I’m feeling down, or some of the players are feeling down, I’m a really big perspective guy, and I think: well my friend was given the most difficult choice imaginable,” he said.

“Sometimes we get upset about things that happen on a daily basis, but those of us working in football are really, really blessed and are lucky to be working in football, and I try and make sure I keep that perspective at all times.”

When asked who has inspired him during his career so far, Jolley name checks ‘the gaffer’, Sean Dyche, and his former boss at Crewe, Dario Gradi.

But there is a third person Jolley has taken inspiration from, the Mayor of New York at the time of the attacks, Rudolph Giuliani.

“The big thing that came through was the resilience of the people,” he added. “Giuliani spoke a lot about comparisons with London during the Blitz, the mental resilience and the fact people weren’t prepared to let the other side win.

“Mental toughness and keeping on when things are looking pretty bleak is something I’ve tried to carry with me.

“Setbacks and negative things happen to all of us; it’s about how you deal with it and how you react to it.

“That experience in New York and how New York reacted to what happened was a big influence on me.”

A financial trader in New York, Jolley was living a comfortable life bit he wasn’t satisfied.

There was a dream he wasn’t prepared to give up on just yet.

“I was always looking for a way to find a career in football but when I was leaving university it was a time when you had to have played football to get a job in football,” he said.

“In the last 20 years there’s been an explosion in terms of the roles and the open mindedness about who can actually add some value to some of these roles.

“Once it occurred to me there were some people breaking down those barriers I decided to switch back in my mid-20s and give it a go.

“I set myself some quite lofty objectives and I continue to work towards those to this day.”

Tomorrow: From Cambridge University to Crewe Alexandra thanks to a career change