“Just one minute, one game in the Premier League would have been enough for me. That’s the only downside to it, that we never finished off the job with a group of players that were so close.”
When Jake Buxton first signed for Derby County in the summer of 2009, he came as the sixth-choice centre half. He arrived at Pride Park without fanfare, his only previous experience in the Football League coming when he captained Mansfield to relegation back out of it. He joined a side in financial ruin, with his contract more likely to be spent battling relegation than ever threatening to head the other way.
And that’s how things went for his first three seasons. Then, with one stooping header late into a March evening under the Derbyshire night, he played a very, very important part in transforming Derby County. In the process, he took his first steps to becoming a cult hero, one who would set his ambitions on the very real prospect of appearing with – and potentially even captaining – Derby in the world’s most famous football division.
The summer of 2009 was, in retrospect, a grim one at Pride Park. Billy Davies had thrown millions at Robert Earnshaw and Claude Davis, Paul Jewell had done the same at seemingly half of the Football League and Robbie Savage. The two had combined to leave a squad bloated beyond belief for Nigel Clough to pick his way through. The new man in charge set about isolating some, embracing others and pinpointing which multi-millionaires he’d be able to find a slot for in his new look Derby County. Savage would stay, Kris Commons too. Giles Barnes would go, just like Tito Villa and Martin Albrechtsen. The issue was that the outlays barely made a dent on the growing debt the club had worked itself into from three hopeless transfer windows.
Clough would embark on a two month spell, two months where he would do whatever he possibly could to build a squad and reduce the wage budget by upwards of £10 million. To do that, his search would take him deep into the pits of the Football League, even non-league. Saul Deeney would become a back up having been a sporadic starter at Burton Albion, Ben Pringle joined from Ilkeston and Lee Croft entered from Norwich. Then there was Jake Fred Buxton.
“I played for Mansfield Town and got relegated as captain. I took an awful amount of responsibility for the team getting relegated because I was captain and it dented my confidence. It affected me. I went into my shell, went to Burton and it was a bit like football rehab in a way.”
Clough had seen something in Buxton that others may not have done. At the time, his career looked like it would be over before it had been given a real chance to begin. But when Buxton was picked up from the despair of relegation by Clough and his then Brewers, it was the first step in a relationship like few others in the game. Simply put, Nigel Clough saved him.
“There’s something deep down inside that makes you wanna run through brick walls for him” says Buxton of the man he has played for at three clubs. “It’s not anything you can put your finger on, it’s just something he’s got that no other manager has had who I’ve played under. It’s just something he’s got that makes you want to give when you’ve got nothing more to give. When you talk about a manager of a football club, or more a gaffer, he typifies that.”
“There’s something deep down inside that makes you wanna run through brick walls for Nigel.”
Clough would immediately bring Buxton into his first starting eleven of 2009/10, a 2-1 win at home to Peterborough. In his first outing he even picked up the man of the match award. “From the last game of the season I played Torquay away and was then against 33,000 at home and getting man of the match, it was unbelievable for myself and my family. I got quite a lot of stick for what happened at Mansfield and it was a bit of justice in a way. But it only came through hard work and sacrifice to make the step up.”
Justice, all brought about because of the man’s determination. But that justice wouldn’t lead to a rosy career. Although it would begin with him as the apple of Nigel Clough’s eye, the career of Buxton would soon begin the descent into what looked like a fall back down the divisions. Despite 19 appearances in his debut season, injuries and new defensive duos meant he’d add just a solitary league outing to his tally. 20 league appearances in two seasons. It shouldn’t necessarily have been a surprise, considering his earlier knowledge that he’d be joining as the sixth choice. But by the summer of 2011, Clough could no longer afford a squad with six central defenders.
“I ended up missing 13 months through four or five injuries,” recalls Buxton. “Being any other club and any other age, I would have moved on to be a regular but because of the opportunities I got given and how much I loved being at that football club, I didn’t want to just walk out and try somewhere else.” So he didn’t. Buxton would stay and bide his time. He’d be ready to fight. That was the decision which changed his life.
Jake Buxton: football genius. Four words which became intertwined for three and a half seasons between 2012 and 2015. It started as a bit of irony, until he actually did become one. “We played Doncaster away in the following game and I don’t know if you was up there but I came out for the warm up and the stadium erupted basically” Buxton reminisces. “They erupted and that’s where the football genius song came about and it’s when I realised I’d changed a few people’s lives. That was it. The confidence I got from that just got bigger and bigger as the games went on.”
As it has for many before and after, it was a goal against Nottingham Forest which elevated Buxton to legendary status. But the situation it came in was one he could have scarcely imagined. “When Shaun raised his hand, we knew he was in trouble. It was horrible scenes and Shaun getting stretchered off was terrible. You come onto a game against your local rivals and all I was thinking was ‘don’t mess up, don’t cost us a goal’ and all the wrong things go through your head. I was just hoping to not concede really.”
Waiting aside his manager for 11 minutes as club captain Shaun Barker was stretchered off following a horrendous knee injury, the Sutton-in-Ashfield born lad had a chance, albeit in horrendous circumstances. Prior to that moment, he’d made a handful appearances off the bench, almost always a 10 minute defensive cameo that was dubbed ‘Bucko Time’. ‘80 minutes on the clock? Looking to defend a 1-0 lead? Bucko Time. But this night was different. Bucko’s Time.
“My brother went ‘you’re trending worldwide bro’ and I was like, ‘what do you mean?!'”
“I weren’t on Twitter or any social media but I can always remember my brother going ‘bro, you’re trending worldwide mate’ and I was like, ‘what, what do you mean?!” laughs Buxton. His header, a truly majestic scene that saw his collapsing frame stoop onto the end of a deep Ben Davies free kick, slowly nestled past a stricken Lee Camp. Away went the scorer, struggling to force his shirt over his head, before abandoning his Ravanelli-esque celebration in favour of a pile on in front of the East Stand. When the bodies got off him after 30 seconds of delirium, Jake Buxton ‘the back up option’ didn’t emerge. No, this was Jake Buxton, ‘football genius’.
From that night onwards, a life changed. Robbie Savage had endeared himself to Rams supporters by waving a scarf at the City Ground after a victory, while four goals from Grzegorz Rasiak in 2004/05 were the making of the Pole. But this was Jake Buxton. Non-league Bucko, the forgotten man. This was more than just a moment, this was vindication. All the years of despair and all the conversations he would have to overhear where he had been written off, they were all in preparation for this night.
“I’m a normal lad, mate” he pauses, adding once more, “I’m just normal. I got given an opportunity from non-league and I wanted to make sure I didn’t let it go. At times it felt like it was slipping away from me, but I still stuck with it and because I kept grafting and I wanted it so much, in time it just fell for me. I got a bit of lady luck, but I persevered.”
If Buxton’s goal that night at home to Forest was luck, everything that came thereafter was seemingly fate. He would see out the season as Jason Shackell’s central defensive partner, and it would be fate that meant come the start of the next season he would be in the early days of the newfound relationship with Richard Keogh. The signing from Coventry filled the gap left by Shackell’s departure and though Clough opted to bring in James O’Connor as possible partner for him, Buxton gave his manager, and his friend, no choice.
“I reported back that pre-season as fit as I could be, did the work over the summer and it was like restarting all over again. Not only was it the first bit of getting to the club and getting the opportunity, it was like I’d got another lifeline again to stake my claim to be a regular. We started off with Scunny (Scunthorpe United) in the cup and I got a couple of goals in that, then I scored in the first game of the season against Sheffield Wednesday. My confidence was on the rise and I tried to just grasp the opportunity.”
The goals certainly helped. Over the course of his Derby career, Buxton found the net 11 times, almost all coming from his unmistakable head. It comes from a ‘fearlessness’ as he describes it. “Sometimes the ball just becomes a magnet to me.” That was certainly the case in the two games he references and it was the same story late into the season at Elland Road too.
“I ran around the back of the goal and got spat on and a bit of stick” he chuckles. “Neil Warnock got sacked after the game and he told Nigel ‘tell Bucko thank you for getting me the sack’.” Still, if you’re sacking’s going to be caused by anyone, Bucko is a good option. Within just over a year he’d scored a winner against Forest and a winner against Leeds. Cult hero status: pending.
“I ran around the back of the goal and got spat on.”
Then Derby sacked Nigel Clough. Coming out of the blue, it hit the supporters for six, but nobody took the decision harder than Buxton. Upon receiving the news of the dismissal, he remembers feeling “lost”. A shambolic 45 minutes on a personal level at home to Ipswich just days later, coming after the announcement of Steve McClaren, had the centre half pinpointed as the likely first man out. Somewhere within Derbyshire, Nigel Clough received word that Buxton was struggling.
“I had a phone call and it was the gaffer, Nigel. He said ‘how are you, Bucko?’ and I said ‘I’m fucking struggling gaffer’, and he said, ‘yeah I heard.’ He had the decency to ring me when I was having a bad time to say ‘don’t worry about it, go in and apologise to the manager the following morning, tell him it was out of character. And if you work for Steve McClaren for six or seven years, take into account Burton Albion, you’d like to think you’d feel some sort of emotion for him if that was the case.’ So that’s what I did.
“I rocked up the following morning at 8am and went to see McClaren, Simmo and Steeley and I apologised and said ‘if you want to fuck me off with the reserves I understand, but if you do choose to pick me and keep me around I will give you everything I’ve got, because that’s all I know.’ And that was it.”
McClaren wouldn’t necessarily ‘fuck him off’ to the reserves but he’d be out of the side for the next game at home to Leeds, and Watford away he’d be sat on the bench. Keogh and Zak Whitbread became McClaren’s chosen two from the off. “He (McClaren) said, ‘right you’re not playing, you’ve massively overachieved to be at the level you are at, I don’t see your future here and you’re on the bench but you’re not wanted.’ The club said I was available and could go. I thought that was the end of my time.”
But remember the fate he had against Forest? Thanks to years of diligence, patience and understanding, it would return again.
“Some players would be straight on the phone to their agent to find out how much pay up they can get, but I didn’t know any other than just to try my socks off in training. Even if I weren’t gonna play, I still went out onto the training pitches to do the best I could do. I didn’t know how to throw the towel in. Even though he said I weren’t gonna be part of his plans, he knew I weren’t gonna be a problem.”
When it all threatened to crash down around him, those words from Nigel Clough did just the job of recalibrating Buxton and restoring the mindset that he’d carried through his career thus far. At Vicarage Road, Whitbread would go down and McClaren would be forced to call upon Buxton. It was his last resort, evidently. He soon went into the loan market for Michael Keane and Andre Wisdom, two McClaren type players. None of this ‘do the ugly stuff’ type of defender.
Neither would get a chance at centre back. Wisdom would be forced wide, future England cap Keane would be sat on the bench. “I built up a bit of a relationship with Simmo even though I didn’t like the man at the start. But my relationship with McClaren was still frosty. I thought he wasn’t having me and was trying to get people in. He brought Keane in to try and replace me, Whitbread, Wisdom, but what they didn’t realise was they were just fueling the fire for me to have another challenge to break and I buzzed off it and that opportunity.
“I can’t really remember a point where McClaren engaged me up until after Christmas.”
“I can’t really remember a point where McClaren engaged me up until after Christmas. He brought in a lot of video work and analysis after the game, doing unit work. At the start I wasn’t in any videos. If I made a good block or did a good header defensively, I wasn’t being put in the videos. I think that was part of his strategy to say ‘right, I’m not giving Bucko any light praise because I want to replace him.’ And we got to around Christmas and because my performances had been good and I’d kept others out the side, Wisdom went into right back because Adam Smith was struggling.”
With that, Buckenbauer was born. This man who was only ever an afterthought, even a butt of jokes for many moons of his Derby career, became one of the best ball-playing defenders Derby has ever seen, and it happened almost overnight. The turnaround from the defender who McClaren first watched to the one entering 2014 was unfathomable. Even Shaun Barker, by now beginning to sow the seeds for his return to the training pitches, was aghast.
“You saw him emotionally kind of crumble in the Ipswich game” recalls Barker, “and that showed you his views on Nigel and the decision. After that moment you saw Bucko at his best period in his career. He was a head it-kick it centre half that was right footed, and all of a sudden he became a left sided centre half that was pinging balls 80 yards crossfield with his weaker foot. That’s something we saw and someone who became a cult hero because of his values, his look, how he talks and conducts himself, that commonness he provides, his relatability. And he carries a plastic bag to training. That’s what makes Bucko.”
As Derby reached Wembley, Buxton reached his peak. Immense in the wins against Brighton in the semi-finals, he was one of the first to drop to his knees when Bobby Zamora did that horrible thing he did in the 90th minute. The camera panned from Buxton to Keogh, Keogh to Buxton, picking up whatever footage it could of the two men in tears. It was a cruel, cruel pinnacle for the playing career of Jake Buxton. But the fact it was the pinnacle, a Wembley final with a chance to reach the Premier League, speaks volumes of a man picked up for nothing from non-league. A man so often overlooked, mocked, ignored.
Now he was idolised, worshipped. People were buying Derby shirts and requesting the name Buxton on the back. A clip of him pirouetting through the Sheffield Wednesday midfield went viral, just as the shoulder barge on Simon Cox did.
And he brought a carrier bag into training and Derby County supporters went crazy. Heart emojis were all over the place. It was peak Buxton, the fan favourite. Mr. Derby County. “When you leave for summer, you pack up your bits and whoever looks after your boots, Davo (Jon Davidson, kitman), you get your boots at the end of the season in a black bag and when you report back, you have to bring your boots, trainers, flip flops and whatever. Instead of sending you a brand new bag or nipping to Louis Vuitton for a nice holdall, I picked up my nearest plastic bag from the kitchen drawer and it’s just something that took off. But that’s just normal to me.” Pause here to consider Buxton entering Moor Farm with a Louis Vuitton man bag.
That summer of 2014 was new for Buxton, because he was wanted. Genuinely wanted. Nigel Clough and Sheffield United came calling as he looked for a replacement for Harry Maguire, but the fact Sam Rush and Steve McClaren were keen to hold onto their man spoke volumes about the turnaround. McClaren himself wanted Buxton out upon his entry, now he couldn’t think of life without him. It wouldn’t last.
“At the start of the season everything was fine, but I then got a knock and had to miss a couple of the games which I was frustrated about because I was playing with an injury. Then I got the red at Forest and a few things started to creep in then. He weren’t happy with the red card. We had Rotherham away and drew 3-3. We played Rotherham, I had a little lad up top causing me problems and I could see there was doubt in the manager’s mind about me. We played Leeds at home and I scored two, then the following week we had Birmingham and he pulled me the following game and said ‘I’m leaving you out for Albentosa’. We were top, I’d just scored two and I was a bit ‘wow’. It was mid-February I think and the excuse was he had him pencilled in for this game from when I got off the plane but yeah, that was the first big argument I had with Steve.”
It would be the beginning of the end for both Buxton and McClaren. The relationship which began volatile wouldn’t make those depths again, but it sure as hell wouldn’t improve. Injuries and loss of form in the eyes of the manager meant he’d pursue new central defenders. There was Raul Albentosa who was, as one interviewee recalls, ‘a bit Spanish’. He also had no insoles. Ryan Shotton always veered towards the haphazard side and the January signing of Stephen Warnock didn’t offer much more. Cyrus Christie too continued to struggle the deeper the season went on. A defence struggling to gel and a side missing both a protector in front of the back four and the talismanic Chris Martin, Derby collapsed with a final day 0-3 loss against Reading to drop out of the top six.
“McClaren had been at a level which was a lot greater than I’d played at, worked with superstars and he did improve me as a player. I’ll always be grateful for that.”
“As a head coach, he was the best I played under” remembers Buxton of McClaren, who was sacked weeks after that defeat. “He’s someone who really excelled out on the grass tactically and the training methods he did were tremendous. He’d been at a level which was a lot greater than I’d played at, worked with superstars and he did improve me as a player and I’ll always be grateful for that and he made me believe I could hit the heights of a top Championship player. But as a manager and a person, he wasn’t Nigel.”
The days of Buckenbauer were brought to an end with the departure of McClaren. More injury problems meant he would almost never feature under Paul Clement and by the time Nigel Pearson would take charge (via Darren Wassall), he was back to being the back up to the back up. By now, he knew he had to leave for the good of his career.
“I was hot around 13/14, still okay 14/15 and then the interest was top Championship. But the following season you’re looking at Preston’s, then the next season it weren’t as strong interest. The longer I left it without playing, I’d be looking at a (side like) Coventry or similar. I left it as long as I could leave but I was looking for more security at the time and that’s when Nigel Pearson said he wouldn’t stand in my way.
“I was gutted. I never said bye. It didn’t feel real or like I was leaving. I went up to Wigan for the medical, but I came home and said I wasn’t sure I was doing the right thing. I was desperate not to go but I was 31 and had been offered three years in the Championship, got pushed into a corner really and couldn’t stay any longer without any sort of security. I didn’t wanna go and I do miss it.”
Buxton would venture the furthest north of his career and joined Wigan Athletic. A year there, where Buxton would skipper the side, culminated in more interest – from Derby. “I got a call from the owner (Mel Morris) to see if I wanted to come back and I went to meet Gary Rowett and have a coffee. He told me they were signing Curtis Davies and I’d come back as a player/coach or in a development role for younger players. He asked if I was willing to hang up my boots, but it didn’t sit well with me and I went away and agreed I’d go to Burton with Nigel.
“It took me two weeks to make a decision on whether to resign for Derby or go to Burton and it all hinged on the fact of wanting to play football. I said to my wife ‘I’ll say to Gary that I still want to play’ and it was a decision that I had to come to terms with myself. And I wouldn’t go back on my word with Nigel and shaking hands.”
That decision, a little down the line, led to where Buxton is today. Appointed the Burton Albion manager in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, he would take over when the man he learnt so much from stepped aside. Today, the man who will now wear a suit (is Jake Buxton a suit wearing manager?) on matchdays is embarking on his new life. At the time of our interview in late 2019, Buxton spoke about his pride in being allowed to train the under-15s back at Moor Farm alongside his playing days with Burton.
For him, it’s been a huge progression since that chat. But it was almost natural, wasn’t it? How can you not be inspired by a man who has defied so many odds to get to where he did in the game? Even during our calls, I would put the phone down and thick ‘wow. What a man.’ And if I, a relative nobody, can think that, imagine being a young player. Imagine what he can do.
Pride: The Inside Story of Derby County is now available to purchase from the DCFC Megastore and to pre-order online from all book retailers. From Stefano Eranio and Colin Todd through to Harry Wilson and Gary Rowett, it’s the story of Derby since 1995 by those who know it better than anybody. And it’s foreword? Jake Buxton.
Pride 