Ben Pugh left a coaching role at Ipswich’s academy to try his luck in the Caribbean and has defied expectations
Ben Pugh’s living room floods with light as he lifts the blinds to reveal a view that, more than ever in these times, makes the onlooker pine. “It’s paradise, I feel very lucky,” he says, gazing out over an azure Caribbean. “Sometimes I have to pinch myself a bit that I work in a
Job that gives me such a sense of fulfilment and challenge, and live in such a beautiful place.”
It is a blissful scene but Pugh’s place in the sun has been hard won. He did not know exactly what he was getting into when, at the end of 2018 and a year shy of his 30th birthday, he left a coaching role at Ipswich Town to take over at Academy Sports Club in the Cayman Islands. “I thought it would be a life experience even if it went badly,” he says, but instead things moved in the opposite direction. Seven months later he was appointed head coach of the
British overseas territory’s national team; this week he will supervise
World Cup qualifiers against Surinam and
Canada, beginning with a trip to the former on Wednesday, in a twist he could never have envisaged while working his way through the youth setup in Suffolk.