Exclusive: Gavin Rose opens up on Dulwich Hamlet exit, why side didn’t push on in National League South, Peter Crouch’s frustration – and academy issue

DULWICH Hamlet supporters might have spotted a familiar figure at Champion Hill recently.

It was his first time attending a game in more than three years.

He didn’t want to attract attention, so he had his hood pulled closely around his face as he took in the action.

It was a low-key return for Gavin Rose after he left the club in September 2022. Rose was in charge of the Hamlet for thirteen years. He led them into the Isthmian League Premier Division in 2013, and then into the sixth tier for the first time in their history in 2018.

In January 2022, Dulwich were second in the National League South table.

Yet eight months later it was all over. Chairman Ben Clasper said in a statement that the club had “decided not to complete and execute the contract extension for Gavin Rose’s role”.

Rose left the club immediately.

Now, for the first time publicly, Rose opens up on his departure. He gives his opinion on why the club didn’t push on from their position in the play-offs despite having the division’s biggest average home attendances. Rose talks about Peter Crouch’s role after the former England striker joined the board as an advisor in the summer of 2021. Rose reveals the highest weekly wage when the club were in the sixth tier and what some transfer targets were asking for. He discusses a sticking point over his ASPIRE Academy. And a lot more.

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“I haven't said much about the move from Dulwich,” Rose tells Southwark News . “I can say it now because there's no emotion there, but I didn't think the respect was given to us in terms of the work that we’d done. That wasn't just on the field, it was off the field as well. And you know, managers lose their jobs, that's not a problem. But I just feel that the level of respect and acknowledgement of the work that we'd done wasn't there.”

Rose and his assistant Junior Kadi had kept the side in the division for four seasons, breaking into the top half in the last of them with a tenth-placed finish.

Dulwich have had four managers since Rose left as they have failed to mount a promotion challenge since their relegation to the Isthmian League Premier Division in 2022-23, the season Rose left. They only survived relegation last season by five points.

Rose says he has been approached over a possible return since he left “through mediums but not directly through the ownership”. He adds: “It's not been a very warm relationship since I've left, from their side. So it didn't leave a very good taste. And I think probably because of their actions, it’s probably hard for them to come back and say, ‘would you want to come back in?’ So, yeah, I think that's probably the reason why not.”

Former Hamlet manager Gavin Rose (left) and assistant Junior Kadi. Image: Duncan Palmer Photography.

Rose and Kadi achieved success despite the the club’s entire future being in doubt in 2018. The club were forced out of Champion Hill by the stadium’s owner, Meadow, and had to play their remaining ‘home’ games at Tooting & Mitcham’s Imperial Fields. It was there they defeated Leiston in the play-off semi-finals and Hendon in the final to win promotion.

There was disruption for all clubs in 2019-20 when the league ended early due to the Covid pandemic.

The disruption continued into the following season when the league was again ended early, with all records expunged and no relegation or promotion.

Despite all of that, the Hamlet were in the play-off places halfway through the 2021-22 season. It was an exciting time, with Crouch on board and a camera crew filming for a documentary.

It appeared the perfect time to push on.

“I was never selfish really in terms of like, just doing what was right for me and what's right for the football team rather than the football club,” Rose says. “And, having the time again, I probably would be more selfish. But I always took on board what was going on in the background at the club, the struggles that were going on at the club. So when I'd go in and speak to the club, I'd sort of have one head knowing that maybe we can't go too far.

“We got to second in the league in January. And we had a squad of seventeen players and two of those were academy boys who had just come out of the academy, so eighteen [years old]. Realistically, they weren’t really going to play.

“We had the documentary with Peter Crouch. And the big strapline was the fact that it was Covid, coming out of Covid, got no money. So we’ve got to somehow put a team together. That was the documentary. In a sense, it was reality.”

Rose says he received a phone call one evening from Crouch, who had been to see the board. Crouch had told them sustaining their position wouldn’t be possible with the light squad they had. Rose says Crouch told him he was “devastated” after the board indicated that there wouldn’t be more backing. “He was, like, ‘what’s the point?’” Rose says. “He was politely wrestling with the fact that we needed to change the narrative, because we've got full crowds [after Covid], the team are doing well, what we need to do is give them some more money to sustain a minimum play-off push.

“The expenditure will go up if you go to the National League, naturally, because travel, hotel, possibly meaning going to full-time. So player budgets go up.

“Everything would have gone up, and in their mind, they're thinking, we're losing a bit of revenue, and then we're going to go up. That wasn't said to me explicitly.”

Rose says he went to the board after losing players to injury, but it was a similar story to the one Crouch had told him.

Rose says: “And to be honest with you, if I hadn't been at the club that long, I'd have been less emotionally tied and I would have left at the end of that season. That was basically just saying, it doesn't matter what you do, we don't want to go up.

“As an individual, I want to be successful. We've had two promotions already. Why would I want to stop at two? Realistically, me staying on at that time, in hindsight, was a mistake. Because I then realised until the club get this stadium move, they would never deem themselves in a position financially to ever want to go up to the next league.

“But that was never clear to me up until that point where we basically pushed the boundaries by getting to second with a squad of seventeen. And that's when it was like, ‘oh, we have to have this conversation now’.

“We all knew that when it got to a certain part of the season, the big teams started to reinvest. ‘Can we get a boy from the Conference who's going to score us ten goals and get us guaranteed in the play-offs or promoted?’ We weren't doing that. We were going the other way. We were getting lads who were just sort of, you know, doing well to be at the level.

“I learnt a lot. I’d been in that job a long time. You kind of become a part of fabric and you take on information differently. Whereas if I'd gone into a club one season, I’d be like, ‘listen, I don't care, I want to kick on. We've got a good group here. I need three players.’ But I was looking at it thinking, well, I don't want to kill the club. We've been in a situation before where the club could have folded. Because I'd seen all that, maybe they realised that I would be empathetic with those notions and stuff like that. So I took it on.

“I don't regret it. I don't regret taking it on because at the end of the day, when you're there that long, you don't want to see the club fold. You don't want to see things like that happening, not on my tenure anyway.

“I’m happy I took the right route but I think I should have probably in hindsight just said, ‘look, shake hands, let me now look forward in my career’, and go from there.”

Rose felt Crouch wanted to be more hands-on. He says: “The show wanted certain outcomes. He was there for football, he wanted the football side of it. He wanted to see if he could help develop what we already had and bring it on. But I think he started to realise that when some people say ‘yes’, they don't mean it.

“And he was getting a little bit dejected because he couldn't understand, why don't you want to push on? I’m here, but I can't really make an impact the way I want to.”

Dulwich Hamlet players and fans celebrate promotion in May 2018. Image: Duncan Palmer Photography

Rose and Kadi were also running their ASPIRE Academy. Rose says the Dulwich job felt like a full-time one.

“Definitely. If you want to do well, you need to be out watching games on a Monday, when all the under-21s play. If you don't do that religiously, you're losing anyway,” Rose says.

“If there's a midweek game, you need to be there. You need to go and cover that in person. Then you've got your analysis that you've got to do. And your resources at that level, you don't always have an analysis specialist. So you're not just doing it between a coaching team.

“It ends up being a full-time role.”

With no recruitment specialist, signing players was mostly based on having a strong contacts book.

“I think that was a big, big deciding factor in terms of if you want to stay at the top end of the Conference South or get in the National League, you need to have recruitment, you need to have someone who's dedicated and is responsible for the type of player that you want to bring in,” Rose says.

“When we were in the Ryman, our contacts were so extensive. We were getting players from the Conference South playing for us, players who'd just come out of League football.

"But as you go on, the Conference South becomes a little bit more professional, you can't just work on your phone book. It's not enough.

“You need someone who's dedicated and looking at, ‘right, this is what I've got to do, this is my scope. I know what the parameters are wage-wise, and I'll put these to you.’ We never had that, so we would have to literally just work with the networks that we had, do the best we could.

“In the Conference South, the performances were up and down. One year we'd be okay, next we'd be down. Because recruitment-wise, we were working off the summer when really you should be doing that throughout the season, thinking about next season. You should be trying to offer two-year deals. We were never in that type of place where you could get that sort of stability and you could have that foresight going forward. So it would always be: stop, season's finished, start again.

“That isn't a way of success at that level. At the Conference South and above, there needs to be more strategy with recruiting players, with length of contracts, with everything.”

Was the role stressful?

“To be fair, I don’t really get overly stressed,” Rose replies. “I’ll take things on board. I’d been at the club thirteen years and I realised that there's a lot of ups and downs in football and you just kind of ride the crest of a wave, really. So I didn't really get too up and down, stressed out. There were times where, obviously, because I'm a winner, there are times when you do lose it a little bit. That's just football management and those things happen. But in general, not really.”

Naturally, at a level where most of the players aren’t making enough money to support themselves or their families but dedicating a lot of time to the club, there were issues off the pitch as well.

“There's a lot of scenarios where players have got into debt,” Rose says. “They would speak to me about things like that. Some of them even basically asked us to forward their wages just so they were able to get through and then they'd repay us and all sorts.

“You have to have a lot of understanding for a player at that level, players might have three or four kids. So the wage wouldn't be enough. They'd need the supporting wage, wherever they worked. We definitely had a few who would come in and say things were tight.

“At the end of the day, if you're struggling you're not going to be able to perform that well. And we had a few lads that struggled to perform well when they were under stress. We always tried to encourage lads that there would be confidentiality. No one will know about it. Even down to club officials, I tried not to let them know the gravity of what was going on just because I didn’t want [the player] to be viewed a certain way or [for it] to be held against them.

“There were times when we had to go to a club and say, ‘look, this guy's in this problem, we need it to be kept confidential’. And it was. But these things can be massive indicators in terms of players' performance levels dropping. I think that's where you have to show that you're not [just] their football manager. You're there to just help them understand. No one wants to be in a position like that. And you have to have the empathy to manage them through that, you know.”

Rose says the highest weekly wage paid to a player was £800, which included around £200 for coaching at ASPIRE. The highest wage the Hamlet were asked to pay a transfer target was £1,200 a week. “That didn’t go very far,” Rose says. Rose heard that some clubs in the National League South were paying players £2,000 a week at that time.

“There were some really big budgets,” Rose says. “We never want to pat ourselves on the back, but looking at it now, how did we even compete with some of these clubs? Even when we were in the lower leagues, there were one or two teams bankrolling it. Maidstone weren't bankrolling it, but the type of money they had compared to everyone else was bigger than everyone else. Margate had a team a few years back, they were just going crazy bankrolling it. So we always had that [to compete with]. And then when you get in the National League South, you have a lot more teams that are just, not so much they're bankrolling, they're just capable. They've got the money. But it was a massive difference to the teams that are just sort of middle of the road, bottom end. The others, you couldn't catch them.

Peter Crouch at Champion Hill. Photo: Liam Asman

“You couldn't compete with the type of players they were trying to get. Once you speak to a player and they say, ‘oh, I'm speaking to this club’, you just wouldn't carry on. Because you knew you were never going to win that bidding war. And the type of player that you start going for is a player that you think wouldn't be on their radar, probably because of his age, his lack of experience.

“[The big clubs] wanted ready-made players. We were maybe looking at a lad who's come out of a professional environment, hasn't got loads of years [of experience] but the potential is there. You're teaching them on the job whereas the clubs that had the money were having seasoned players who played three, four hundred [Football] League games. The manager didn't have to really coach them.

“ Don't get me wrong, I quite liked the aspect of still nurturing players. But it was a difference when you have to coach players through all the time and the opposition managers, they're sitting there, they don't have to do that.”

Rose - understandably given the amount of time he was at the club and the number of players he worked with - takes his time when asked who was the best player he managed. He picks out Erhun Oztumer, the 5ft3ins attacking midfielder who had dropped out of professional football after a spell in Turkey before Rose signed him in 2012. After two brilliant seasons at Champion Hill, Dulwich sold him to Peterborough United. He went on to play for Walsall, Bolton Wanderers, Charlton Athletic and Bristol Rovers before moving back to the Turkish Super Lig in 2021.

“He was giving away so much in terms of his height and size, but he was an unbelievable technical player,” Rose says.

There was another issue with the club that fed into the feeling of being under-appreciated.

Rose and Kadi set up ASPIRE in 2002 and more than 60 players went through it to become professional footballers, including Ethan Pinnock, who has played over 100 times in the Premier League for Brentford. Rose says it made the club just under a million pounds.

ASPIRE was run as a separate business, incurring all the costs such as providing facilities, kit, equipment. The Hamlet benefited by getting players such as Pinnock and then transfer fees and subsequent sell-ons.

Rose says the club “wanted to pull down the funding from what we were getting for the kids and then pay us through that” but without proving any benefits to the Academy. Rose adds: “We couldn't understand why they didn't understand that they weren’t bringing anything to the table. Other than saying, ‘oh, you're using the club's name’. Well, using the club's name, we sold just under a million pounds worth of talent.

“Other clubs at non-league level provide facilities, kits, et cetera. We did all of that individually, privately. And the only thing we did was use its name.

“The club wanted to run the business where all of the education and all the money that came in for the education went through the club and then back to us. We were like, yeah, that's fine, but what are the club going to do? What are the club doing to warrant that? And this was sort of going on for a little while, which is quite sad actually, because we'd always produced players for the club. There couldn't be any argument that there wasn't a benefit to the club. It was a massive benefit to the club.

“So it was quite a shame that the club sort of took that stance.”

Rose was on a rolling contract at the time he left. The Academy impasse complicated talks, but Rose feels the club used that as an “opportunity to move me on”.

Rose says he was owed severance money but when he saw the club’s offer he thought, 'wow, after thirteen years'. "It was really quite a bit of a shock, actually, that the club sort of behaved in that manner.”

He was advised by his agent and lawyer not to walk away and a financial package was agreed. Part of the agreement was that he couldn’t manage another club in the short term. Rose and Kadi had had offers from big clubs at non-league level during the times when the Hamlet were struggling with off-pitch problems, but felt it was the right thing to do to stay on and try to guide them through.

Rose has since had job offers. He admits he didn’t have the appetite to go in somewhere straight away anyway after his long spell at Champion Hill. Especially not a club that might have said, “look, we don't have much budget, you're going have to try and work miracles”.

He has had job offers but nothing that has fit and he has also had interviews. ASPIRE closed in the summer. Rose has worked in the academy at National League Sutton United. He is also working in property and has his own portfolio.

Rose had never watched a Hamlet game as part of the crowd.

“It was good to see it from that lens. I thought it was a really nice atmosphere,” he says. The team did well and won on the day, which is great. After the game, I did say hello to the players, some of the players that I knew and have managed over the years. And the manager. He was with me for a period, he needed some experience at the time and I brought him on with us. So I know him well. [Assistant manager] Junior James is there who came through my academy and was working with me in the first team. It was nice to see them.”

Rose has no bitterness towards the club.

“I understood that the club had a lot of difficulties, they had an idea of what they were trying to do in the long run,” Rose says. “They were trying to think about the new stadium, how that could look. I understood all the things that they were trying to do and what they were trying to achieve.

“But also at the same time, for me as a manager, we want to win, we want to go out on the weekend and we want to get three points. All these other things, yes you've got to take them into consideration, but I think that we had to take a lot of things into consideration that probably our opposition managers didn't have to take on.”