Napoleon, baseball caps and Sheffield Wednesday: 82 minutes of first impressions with Tony Pulis

The 62-year-old Welshman, arriving with the reputation of his tabloid caricature, is well-known to undertake a good number of his press conferences stood up, edging towards the door and generally giving off the image of a man who wants to be elsewhere.

Adorning a baseball cap and club-crested sportswear, Pulis goes from media call to media call giving away only what he wants to give away, they told us. He gives no quarter and he knows what he’s doing. He’s a little bit.. gruff.

And sat after a press call that lasted 82 minutes and took in questions from local and national media, radio, TV and us with the words, the feeling is that the warnings were only partly accurate.

Pulis was warm, engaging and at times genuinely funny. He seemed happy to venture into areas beyond football and made a point of calling each quizzer by name. Gruff he was not. And he was not wearing a baseball cap.

That cap-wearing, straight-talking, journalist-munching Welshman is perhaps the image that the immediacy of social media and 24-hour news soundbites projects of a manager into his 11th managerial tenure.

It may well prove to be the case, of course, especially when the cut and thrust of Championship football takes hold, but the initial chinwag presented a much deeper impression.

If there was one word to describe Pulis, it would be confident. His booming voice directed questions he didn’t want to ask as far as it could and when pressed, he was up-front in saying he didn’t want to answer them. Stepping into a new club, speaking to a new media? He’d done this all before.

He offered glimpses into his personal interests and how he spent the 18 months between the Middlesbrough job and this; touring the world, reading and dipping in and out of radio work.

He spent time driving to and from the battlefields of South Africa, he said, scratching travel itches he had not had time to satisfy as he went from Stoke to Palace to West Brom.

On the dime of a French newspaper, he travelled to Corsica to revel in the memory of Napoleon and spent time with Canadian enthusiasts dressed as 19th-century soldiers. He read about Ernest Shackleton and allowed his mind to drift to the Antarctic plains he discovered.

He mentioned Sheffield United once, twice, three times unprompted, daring to admit he was admiring of their success and that of his friend Chris Wilder, saying his outset dream was to stand in the dugout of a Premier League derby.

Praising ‘them down the Lane’ isn’t a media strategy many would attempt on their first day as Wednesday boss, but then again few would enter into a conversation about the hanging beams of a journalist’s 15th-century home, spotted over their shoulder and brought up in an attempt to divert from a question about the length of his contract.

The break has done him good. There’s was a warmness and an honesty to Tony Pulis that might have been missing a touch from his predecessors.

That’ll go down well with supporters, you feel. On the media side, there’s a feeling that appointments with Tony Pulis will be rarely be dull.

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