Jack Cudworth has known club football all of his career, having coached Sam Johnstone and Jordan Pickford, but jumped at the chance to coach Chinese Taipei.
The Chinese Taipei Football Association is a century old in 2024 and its current national team stands 166th in the men’s FIFA rankings sandwiched between Myanmar and Cuba. If that set of bare statistics doesn’t mean much to the casual onlooker, then it was probably quite the challenge for their new goalkeeping coach Jack Cudworth.
Goalkeeping is truly universal and connects parts and places across continents. After all, a former keeper for Chinese Taipei was once nicknamed the Taiwanese Buffon. Cudworth has spent his entire football career allied to clubs in the north of England and Wales until this global opportunity came calling.
“It’s a big honour to be representing someone’s country and I’ve always wanted to do international football,” Cudworth tells Goalkeeper.com a few weeks after his first camp with the team. The 34-year-old is an engaging interviewee and it is easy to see how his man- management skills and enthusiasm for this role will bring unquantifiable positives to the squad. His development approach can certainly be applied beyond the metrics of goalkeeping.
“It was a talent identification session and the manager wants an attacking, young and energetic team. I’ve been impressed with the standard to be honest. You only have to look at who came before me to understand that. They had Dean Thornton first-team goalkeeping coach at Southampton, Darryl Flahavan, who played for Crystal Palace and Bournemouth and is now at Plymouth as GK coach, and David Rouse, formerly at Manchester United and Stoke.”
The strong English links continue with manager Gary White, who has extensive experience managing clubs in China and Japan, and has taken on the national job previously. It is obvious that the former goalkeeper, who once had a trial at Carrington, is really enjoying the role. The golf course next door keeps his handicap honest but there’s always a domestic thread to a story when the subject is from a town known for British vehicle manufacturing.
Cudworth has come a long way in air miles, but his own journey between the sticks was more short haul. The common thread that ran through most half of his coaching life was Deepdale, a place he revisited just a few months ago for the first game of the Championship season.
“I was born in Preston. My children were born in Preston. It’s a really good community that looks after its own. The club liked my character too and they could see something in me as I made sure that everything was done correctly from cleaning the boots to leaving nothing undone.” Those values are in-built and part of the circle of life for goalkeepers.
Playing wise, it was quite a small window for Cudworth who had to readjust his sights when he was let go by the club “I was very unfortunate as I thought I was good enough to get the pro contract. I got released from Preston at 18. I think I was one of the last wave of goalkeepers who didn’t have a full-time academy GK coach. I missed out a bit there.”
There was a silver lining in the cloud though: “When that happened I got an offer of goalkeeping coach there with Dave Timmins, who took Joe Hart at Shrewsbury, and then Andy Rhodes. We used to coach on Mondays and Wednesdays when we were apprentices. I did that in conjunction with playing part-time for Welshpool when I just wanted to play games. I was then due to sign for Peterborough in 2009 but fate has it that Darren Ferguson was sacked at the time and that didn’t materialise.”
So a pathway had been established for the Leyland lad to pursue something he preferred. “I’ve always been more drawn to coaching if I am honest. I managed to create a below-average playing career,” he adds rather self-deprecatingly. Maybe it was meant to be given that Lilywhites legend Andy Lonergan was in front of him at Preston.
“I would never have got a scholarship in this day and age because I was hopeless at kicking the ball. ‘Lonners’ joked that how could I be a coach if I couldn’t kick, although I did work hard to improve that side of my game. The demands of the goalkeeper with the ball at your feet in the modern game are now through the roof for players - but coaches also need to match the standard.”
Cudworth might not have had the high-level career he would have liked between the posts but he was part of the fabric of Preston in going from assistant to first- team goalkeeping coach at a club he spent almost half of his life at in some form. He’s worked with a who’s who of top Premier League and Championship keepers. Jordan Pickford, Sam Johnstone, Chris Kirkland and Anders Lindegaard are just some names from his former client list.
“I was probably one of the first assistants. It wasn’t the norm then. Nowadays, you see most Premier League teams have a main goalkeeper coach who will take the number one and the assistant will take the number two and number three. Back then, we were literally the only ones who did all of the pre-match stuff and warm-ups.
“I remember there was an absolute entourage - six of us warming up with Alan Kelly, myself, the kitman and the three goalies. It worked. If you looked at the level of performance from Jordan and the rest.”
The level of performance is now like “night and day” in terms of the approach to goalkeeping over the last 15 years. Cudworth’s last first-team club role was at Wigan before he departed this summer. He spent some considerable time with the highly rated Sam Tickle who made his Under-21 England debut under Lee Carsley earlier in the spring.
Tickle has reportedly sparked interest from the likes of Arsenal in late August, but Cudworth first saw the 22-year-old in the driving wind and rain down for Warrington Rylands against Stafford in the Northern Premier League. “It was a horrendous night, chucking it down and he kept coming for every cross and he dropped a few. Non-league uses these Chryso balls and when they get wet, they are like a bar of soap. I thought I like this lad.”
The rocks and stones – and the sheeting rain – are where some goalkeepers are made. Warrington’s game won’t feature on the highlights reel with an attendance of less than 300 in the seventh tier, but it was an important step to show Tickle had the necessary cojones. “I could see he had balls, so to speak!”
The amenable Cudworth knows the importance of goalkeepers beyond the box. “I am a big believer that your actions can affect the opposition. The way you carry yourself or, as with Sam, when he sees that ball hanging in the air he’s going to claim it.”
Leaving nothing to chance is a good philosophy even if the goalkeeping gods don’t always call the shots in your favour. For now, Chinese Taipei can count themselves lucky to be in such good hands.
