Neill Collins: Roy Keane, Joe Cole & managing in Florida

Neill Collins helped Sunderland win promotion to the Premier League during his three years at the club

Roy Keane had been manager of Sunderland a matter of weeks when there came a knock at his door and in strode a tall, gallus lad from Troon.

Neill Collins was only 22, a strapping centre-half desperate to prove himself to the footballing colossus he now called gaffer. That weekend, he had played and scored in a 2-1 victory over West Brom. He had marked the hulking John Hartson "out of the game". Then he had been promptly dropped - and he wanted to know why.

"I thought, 'You know what? I'm going to go and see him'," Collins says.

"You can imagine a young player of 22 going in to see Roy Keane for the first time. I chapped his door, went in and just asked him, 'Why am I not playing? I think I deserve to be in the team.'

"To be fair to Roy, I left his office feeling a million dollars. He said I'd get my opportunity, and when Roy Keane gave you some kind of praise, you wanted to run through a brick wall for him. He respected my forthrightness in coming to speak to him as a young boy."

In treading a path from little Queen's Park to Sunderland, Wolves and the Premier League, playing under such bombastic characters as Keane, Mick McCarthy and Neil Warnock, and forgoing his twilight years on the paddock to become a manager in Florida virtually overnight, Collins has never shirked a challenge.

Now 36, he is in charge of the Tampa Bay Rowdies in the second tier of North American football, a role he assumed in the blink of an eye with a glowing endorsement from Joe Cole.

Here, he lacerates managers' tripe, describes dressing-room scraps and coaching away from the searing public glare of the British game.

'The punters get short-changed'

From the Keanes and McCarthys, Collins gobbled up every morsel he could, but he also saw traits that made him wary. He bristled at managers who would talk a good game while delivering bland muck on the training pitch.

"You'd train from Monday to Friday and you wouldn't do an awful lot of productive stuff," he says. "You'd come out on the Saturday and get beaten, you'd hear the manager speak afterwards about all the hard work you're doing. It's just rubbish, to be quite honest.

"I've played in some teams where we've gone into big games not prepared and when you get these punters coming to support you in their numbers, they're getting short-changed.

"With Nigel Clough, you'd find out the team an hour before the game. Formation? Could be anything. You could go to a 3-5-2 that you'd never played before. Players who had played the previous five games would be dropped; players that hadn't played in six weeks would be brought in.

"In big cup games, he was fantastic, we'd go to play Premier League teams with a freedom and we'd do well. But over a league season, I always found it caught up with us."

'They were rolling around the dressing room'

Mick McCarthy was an influential figure in Collins' career

There is a sensational - and infamous - online video of Warnock slaughtering his Sheffield United team at half-time some years ago, a rare glimpse into his savage den of quivering fury, volleys of profanity and flying spittle.

"For anyone that's been in a dressing room with Neil Warnock, that is a pretty average after-game inquest into what happened at a goal," Collins says. "I've seen much worse than that where it ends up in fisticuffs between players and staff.

"I remember one night at Swindon away, we came in at half-time and Matt Hill had said something to Nick Blackman, and before you know it, they're rolling around the dressing room.

"An even better one was when we went to play Watford. Darius Henderson was going back there for the first time since leaving to join Sheffield. Twenty minutes in, he got sent off. Darius is a big, big boy… at half-time, Steven Quinn, smallest lad in the team, is trying to take him on.

"Things like that were par for the course. It's not the end of the world as long as it's done with the intention of trying to win - you can move on quickly from it. If it's done as a personal attack, that's when the problems start."

'It was quite strange to leave Joe Cole out'

Since he was a boy, Collins had visited Florida with his parents, first to their holiday home, then as he grew older and started a family, a second house of his own. He would watch the Rowdies, formed 11 years ago, on his trips over, and jumped at the chance to sign for the club in the USL Championship.

Before long, he was captain, Cole was his team-mate and confidant. Then the manager got sacked and within a week, he was offered the job in May 2018.

"Joe Cole put my name forward to be manager," Collins says. "It was quite strange to go from playing beside Joe to then coaching him and leaving him out at times but there's a great respect for each other and we're still very good friends.

"He's won Premier League titles, played in Champions League finals, won 50-odd caps for England, but he was so humble. He did a great job of looking after the lads and trying to act as a leader without shoving it in anyone's face."

Joe Cole played under Collins at Tampa Bay Rowdies before taking an academy coaching role at Chelsea

'Standard improved immeasurably'

For all that managerial duties exact a relentless burden upon Collins, his wife and four children, life in Florida is idyllic. The American game is more relaxed because it lacks the history, fervour and profile of British football - it is a far less feral proving ground for a fledgling coach.

"The pressure here really comes from yourself and those around you as opposed to the media, which gives you a greater opportunity to learn than the pressure cooker of Scotland and England," he says.

"The standard has improved immeasurably. The amount of players and coaches that contact me about coming out here is phenomenal and not surprising because they can see the growth of the MLS and USL."