New Howe of Fife head coach Niall Lear looking forward to going up against former club Falkirk
Having gone up against Howe of Fife during his five years as a player and later head coach at Falkirk, Niall Lear says he’s looking forward to crossing swords with his old team in the latter capacity with the Cupar club.
“I’ve played against Howe and coached against them, so it will be really interesting coming up and being in charge of them this year, especially with them being in the same league as Falkirk,” said the 42-year-old, named as successor to Stewart Lathangie as the Fifers’ head coach earlier this month.
“Howe are a club that are in a really, really exciting time.
“They seem to be really successful across the board, from juniors through to seniors, and the sort of proof of the pudding of that is both firsts and seconds getting promoted last season.
“They’re a club in really good health and I’m quite excited about coming up and being part of that.
“One thing that Howe do really well and one of the things that attracted me here is that they’re a real community club and something that those living locally get excited about and that’s what you want.”
Howe play Falkirk at home at Duffus Park on Saturday, October 18, and away on Saturday, January 31, weather permitting, with kick-offs at 3pm and 2pm respectively, and Lear, brought up in Glasgow, is expecting to see a few familiar faces lining up against his new team such as Falkirk stalwart Harry Russell, though his younger brother Finn, currently on duty with the British and Irish Lions, has long since departed for the likes of Glasgow Warriors, France’s Racing 92 and England’s Bath.
“Finn would have been there that last year that I was playing,” he recalled.
“He must have been 18 or 19 at that point, straight out of school, so we were really lucky to get him, but the majority of my time there was spent with his elder brother Harry, so it’ll be good to see him again.”
Howe, last season’s Arnold Clark National League Division 3 champions, kick off their new campaign in the next table up with two of their furthest-flung fixtures of the season taking them to Inverness and Dumfries and Galloway in the space of three weeks, the former being a 270-mile round trip on opening day – Saturday, August 30 – and the latter, two weeks later, one of 290 miles, but Lear, having been working outwith Scotland for the last six years as a physical education teacher in the United Arab Emirates and Norfolk, isn’t at all daunted by the distances involved.
“We’ve got our two furthest away trips in our first three weeks, “ he said.
“We’ve got Highland away to begin with, then we’ve got Newton Stewart away a couple of weeks later, so it’s a fairly full-on start, but we’d have it no other way.
“It’s a really good chance for the club to test themselves against two clubs that have been doing really well over the last couple of years, especially Highland.”
Lear is confident his new club have got what it takes not only to stay up after promotion but also to prosper against the likes of Kirkcaldy, Peebles and Berwick, citing their performance during their 38-30 national league cup loss hosting Falkirk in March as evidence of that
“Quite often when teams go up, they have more than enough capability not only to stay in the league they’re going into but also to compete in it, but they need the belief and mentality to quickly get to grips with it being slightly faster, slightly more physical and potentially a little more skilful and it’s just about making sure that all the players have the toolbox to be able to deal with that,” he said.
“Last season, towards its tail end, they played Falkirk in the cup and it sounds like it was a really close game, so the boys will need to look at that and think ‘actually, we’re more than capable of competing in this league’. It’s probably just about doing it consistently.
“I’ve been doing a bit behind the scenes – speaking to players, speaking to other coaches to make sure we’re all on the same sort of page about what we want to try and achieve and how we want to do it.
“It’s quite exciting. We’re at a point where I just want to get on the pitch, as will the players after a reasonably big break. It’s just time to get going again, isn’t it?”
Besides Falkirk from 2012, Lear, a former Scottish schools and under-18 player, has also turned out for Connacht A, London’s Rosslyn Park and Glasgow Hawks as a right-winger.