Former Carlisle United coach Chris Blake, who swapped Cumbria for Finnish club IF Gnistan

Blake, 35, has been there for a year and a half and has relished the opportunity of experiencing a different culture, in life and football. “I was pretty confident of my knowledge and experiences with Blackburn, Sunderland and Carlisle,” he says. “If my next opportunity wasn’t going to be in England, I wanted something that was going to be ambitious and difficult.

“I would recommend it to anyone. Get out and experience it. It’s so good.”

Blake is in joint charge of Gnistan’s young players from under-12 to under-20, and also sits on a competitive strategy board for the first team and academy sides. It is a club, he says, with the twin aims of a) developing players for the first team and national sides, and b) fostering good participation levels.

There are differences and nuances to coaching and life in Finland that Blake had not anticipated, but this is the way he liked it after deciding to broaden his horizons when his most recent spell with Carlisle’s youth set-up came to an end.

“I decided to leave Carlisle at the end of 2019-start of 2020,” he says. “Just because, frankly, I wasn’t really enjoying it any more. It felt a bit rudderless.” It was a time when United was subject to top-level change, through the influence of Edinburgh Woollen Mill and their chosen director of football, David Holdsworth.

“I’d just had a daughter and wasn’t seeing her very much, and I decided to have a change,” Blake adds. “I had an opportunity to go and teach at Carlisle College, then Covid came along two months later and I knew it was going to be part-time from November [2020].

“I’d applied for a couple of decent full-time positions in England and hadn’t got them. Then this advert came up. ‘Finland’s meant to be the happiest place in the world’, I thought – so why not?”

Blake applied to Gnistan, which is based on the outskirts of Helsinki, and met club officials who explained their vision of developing their academy and growing the club. “I was really sold by it.”

IF Gnistan are in the Finnish second tier (Image: Other)

He was offered the job. “I felt it was an opportunity to apply some things I learned in England, and really challenge myself,” he adds. “You’ve got to deliver in a different language, different culture, different outlook on football altogether. I was maybe arrogant enough to think I could manage it.”

Making the move was easy in one respect but the initial mechanics were difficult. “The club made it really easy – I had lots of communication from the day I took the job. They really helped me with things like the local area, how to deal with tax and things like that.

“Dealing with Brexit, though, was difficult. You have to apply for residency now – it’s very different to being part of the EU, where you get a lot of access to healthcare and things like that. I had to wait quite a while, and it cost a bit of money. There were a lot of application processes when I got here, too.”

Eventually things fell into place and Blake began in his new environment. He says the first hundred days were very much a learning experience as he sought knowledge and advice from the existing coaches. “Then you have to roll your sleeves up and work – and find out what works.

“There are a lot of things I’d do in English academies that I thought were excellent ideas, but Finnish culture would suggest that’s more difficult to implement,” he says.

“It’s not a country that asks a lot of questions. If you ask somebody a question it would maybe take them a long time to think about it – they’d want to get the answer as right and clear as possible, whereas in England you could ask an academy kid what they would do in a certain situation and you’d get ten different answers and nobody would care if they got it wrong.

“One thing I didn’t know before I arrived is that there is National Service here. There is a culture around command. They’re comfortable with that, and I’d be uncomfortable around that, just telling people what to do.

“You have to find a blend that’s getting best out of you as a coach but also respecting the culture. ­There have been things that I was convinced would work, and they’ve fallen flat on their face. Other things, the players have been, ‘This is brilliant, can we do more of this?’ You become more sensitive to culture.”

Gnistan, which sits only three minutes outside Helsinki’s city walls, has moved between the third and second levels over the years but has recently established itself in Ykkonen, the Finnish second tier.

“Gnistan translates to ‘spark’ in English,” Blake says. “We would love to get the team into the Premier Division [Veikkausliga]. Maybe in a few years we’ll get there. There’s a lot of ambition in the club both to develop players and increase participation. We get between 6-800 people to first team games and the women’s team attract 150.”

Blake speaks to some of the young players at the Finnish club (Image: Other)

Ice hockey, Blake says, is the country’s dominant sport but football is growing. “Finland got to the Euros last year, which helped with overall interest, and the women’s team got to this year’s Euros too.

“People like Jari Litmanen are always on TV. Everybody knows about Norwich via Teemu Pukki, and I’ve found that people have a real, deep knowledge and love for the game. It’s a pay to play sporting culture, which can be quite expensive generally, but football’s one of the cheapest, which has probably led to wider participation.”

Life in another country brings inevitable challenges and fascinations. When asked how he is faring with the language, Blake laughs and says “terribly!”

“Finnish is really hard,” he adds. “You become really aware of the way people speak and the tonality, the speed. You start to learn how often they ask questions, how often they’re direct. You become more attuned without knowing the contents sometimes.

“We do speak a lot of English. In the education I do, we get Finnish speakers to translate things, and we find somewhere in the middle. I understand a little bit more to listen to than speak.”

The lifestyle in Finland is to his liking. “It’s similar to Cumbria in that there are lots of trees and lakes…and it’s quiet. Finland’s very big if you look on a map, but there are only five million people. There’s a lot of space. Helsinki has about 650,000, and that’s quite spread out.

“Helsinki itself is busy but doesn’t feel so busy, if that makes sense. My daughter’s three and, when we walk down the city centre, she can walk by herself, I don’t have to hold onto her hand. It’s about as big as Newcastle, I think, but not as intense.

The club is situated on the outskirts of Helsinki (Image: Other)

“The sauna is a massive cultural thing. I really enjoy that. It’s quite an active culture and there aren’t so many cars on the road. You go around the city and people are running, cycling. There’s a decent relationship with nature and activity, and the outlook on life is generally quite calm.”

A bottle of beer, he says, can be as much as nine or ten euros. “Things like eating out aren’t so cheap. But things like transport and energy are. You can get around quite easily on trains, and you can easily get a ferry to somewhere like Tallinn in two-and-a-half hours, which a lot of people do for the weekend, and get onto mainland Europe easily. And Helsinki itself is beautiful, on the sea. You might not associate it with Nordic countries but there are some beautiful beaches, looking out onto the Baltic.

“We’re going to Lapland in October – taking our daughter to Santa’s village. In terms of holidays, a lot of families have small cottages, with minimal electricity, next to lakes or in forests. I visited one of them, a couple of hours north of here, and it’s very peaceful. You can have a barbecue, have a dip in the lake for a swim, do nothing, enjoy wasting time.

“I’ve been about six miles from the Russian border too, to the east. A couple of the big football teams are there.”

Was it…tense being so close to Russia at this moment in time? “People are aware of things, but I don’t think anyone’s stressing out. The government are prepared if they need to be. Because everybody has this National Service, you have a load of adults of a certain age who seem very calm about the situation, if they need to help in whatever way they are required.”

National Service, he adds, sees Gnistan lose many of their under-20 players at certain times during the year. It is not a pitfall Blake experienced at Carlisle, where he was involved in the development of a number of notable young players.

Blake worked with a number of top young players during his spells with Carlisle United's academy (photo: Stuart Walker) (Image: News & Star)

Blake was assistant coach to John Mavis when Dean Henderson came to Carlisle at under-nine level, and he went on to coach the future Premier League star at older ages. He was there when the Blues came down narrowly in favour of offering Jarrad Branthwaite a youth team deal (“if he’d got a no, it would have been the worst decision the club had made in a long time”).

Others include Kyle Dempsey, Jack Ellis, Liam McCarron, Josh Dixon, Josh Galloway and Owen Moxon, who was released before returning impressively to Carlisle at 24 this year. “I coached Owen at 15-16 and remember having that discussion about him, at a time his knees were hurting.

“It was a close one. He’s done unbelievably well. It’s nice to see lots of lads I was lucky enough to coach who are playing not just professionally but at places like Workington and Penrith.”

The supremely assured Henderson is the most memorable. “He’s a top keeper,” smiles Blake, and yeah, he’s a confident lad. I think if you asked Dean, he would say he should be Real Madrid’s number one keeper and Ballon D’Or winner, and it should be renamed the Dean Henderson award!

“It’s good to see him playing Premier League football every week again. It’s fantastic for the club [Carlisle] to be part of his journey.”

Blake says the pathway for young players in recent times means more credit should go to former academy manager Darren Edmondson than he receives. “He trusted people like me and David Wilkes to push a lot of young Cumbrians at the time. Eric Kinder and Mark Birch then continued the good work, with the north east lads like Sam Fishburn and Nic Bollado, adding value to the youth team.

“I also think Steven Pressley, although it didn’t work out for him as manager, was good at showing there was a pathway. Things have flourished from there.”

Blake has since branched out from there and defied the old assumption that English players and coaches are too stuck in their insularity to try another culture. “There aren’t so many English coaches out here in Finland – maybe because of the growth of EPPP, there are more full-time jobs than there have ever been in academies.

“But I’d recommend it to anybody. I’ve learned lot about myself. We’ve been deliberate in trying to employ the best people we can at the club, regardless of nationality. We’ve got a Greek guy, a Portuguese guy, two Spanish lads…I’m picking up all sorts from them, as well as the Finnish guys.”

Blake has only returned to Cumbria once since his move, but keeps in touch with friends back home as well as listening to Carlisle United’s games. He does not know how long his Finnish adventure will last, but will always be glad he opened his mind to it.

“I’m delighted the club gave me the opportunity,” he says. “It’s a cliché, but every day is a different challenge, and I’ve relished trying to manage my way and work through that. It definitely makes you a better person, richer for the experience.”