If you were asked to guess the highest-scoring teams in the top four divisions, you would pick Manchester City straight away. Norwich would not take too long. A bit of thinking would lead you to Luton. But a team you might not get but are right up there with the most prolific in the land are Bury.
The Shakers are the entertainers of League Two, with 85 goals in all competitions this season, playing with a gung-ho style that looks good fun but is probably not a relaxing watch for their supporters.
Since the turn of the year they have beaten Morecambe 3-2 having been three-up inside the hour; drawn 3-3 with Lincoln; beaten Oxford United 5-2; won 4-3 against MK Dons having been 3-1 down with 18 minutes left; and won 4-2 at Accrington having been two behind at half-time. The comparatively low-key 1-0 victory at Exeter this past weekend might have been medically prescribed to regulate collective blood pressure.
All of this is down to the manager, Ryan Lowe. A club hero who scored 72 times in three spells at Gigg Lane, spearheading their last two promotion campaigns, Lowe was dragooned into the manager’s chair twice last season, his two caretaker spells sandwiching Chris Lucketti’s calamitous 10 games in charge.
Lowe could not stop relegation but, having been given the job on a permanent basis, decided in the summer to do things his own way. And his own way is frantic, attacking, cavalier football. “Because I was a striker,” Lowe says, when asked why he chooses to play this way. “I loved scoring goals, wherever it was: whether it was on the pitch or in the back garden with my little lad. My assistant Steven Schumacher was a goalscoring midfielder. We loved playing an attacking style and most of the successful teams I played in had an attacking style.”
If that seems a bit risky for his first job at a League Two club – after all, it is one thing to try something like this with Premier League resources but another in the bottom tier of the Football League – Lowe says: “I’ve said a lot of times, ‘Why can’t Bury play like Liverpool or Manchester City?’ I think it’s the best way. You look at Barcelona, City, Liverpool: everything’s risky, isn’t it?
“People talk about philosophy but I wanted to instil a winning philosophy. We thought that just by outscoring teams we’d have more chance of doing that. I won’t change my style of play. There’s no point. At the moment we’re doing OK with it and you’ve got to stick with the way you do things. I always felt I wanted to do things my way and, if I’m not successful or it doesn’t work out, then at least I’ve tried my way. I was a striker. If you’d put me at centre-half, I’d be no good.”
Lowe settled on his system – loosely speaking a sort of 3-1-4-2 with two No 10s (usually converted wingers Jay O’Shea and Danny Mayor) and attacking wing-backs – after it went well in pre-season against Liverpool. “When someone like Jürgen Klopp compliments you on your style and your system, for me that was a big thing to say: ‘Let’s keep working on it.’”
Klopp is just one of the big names Lowe has picked the brains of. The Liverpool manager stuck around for a beer after that game. Lowe had found out what his favourite brand was and got a few bottles in and he has also spent time with Rafa Benítez and Brendan Rodgers. A trip to see Pep Guardiola is in the diary. “I’ll take as much information off anyone that I possibly can. I’m not saying I know everything – far from it. But I am saying I want to know everything.”
Steven Gerrard is another. The two men have been friends since they were in the Liverpool youth set-up and now here they are, taking their first swings at management at the same time, albeit under rather different levels of scrutiny. “We’ve been speaking lately quite a bit because we’ve just signed Jordan Rossiter from Rangers. Stevie’s in the public eye but he’s doing a fantastic job. I’m under the radar a bit because we’re not as big as them.”
Lowe emphasises that the most important thing to nail was Bury’s recruitment in the summer, particularly after the mess of last season when they finished bottom of League One. “We had some players who didn’t fulfil their potential, which resulted in getting relegated. We had to get rid of those players. We needed to freshen things up. I wanted players who had a little bit of passion about them, who could get bums off seats at Gigg Lane, because it hadn’t happened for a while. I wanted to change the culture of the football club, from selfishness, complacency, arrogance and a blame culture.”
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In some ways it is surprising Lowe is here at all, having been the man at the helm when the ship went down. The club could not have been blamed for giving someone else the permanent gig. Equally, the experience might have discouraged Lowe from taking it.
“If it had been any other football club, it might have put me off,” Lowe says. “But this is my club, so it didn’t. I wanted to bring the good times back to Bury, to the people who deserve to have good times. Slowly but surely I think we’re doing that.”
The Guardian Sport
