‘Why is the world so judgmental?’ Ian Holloway on painting, metal detecting and his 1,000th game

As Swindon manager hits dugout landmark he reflects on his ‘rollercoaster’ life and why he would be first to go in a nuclear attack

Ian Holloway is trawling through pictures of his artwork on his phone. “That’s Pep [Guardiola],” he says. “Threw that one away, punched a hole through it because I didn’t like it.” Vibrant, acrylic paintings of Brian Clough and Jürgen Klopp soon appear on the screen. Another, inspired by Leonardo da Vinci’s Lady with an Ermine, is of his wife, Kim, and their chihuahua, Ernie. “I couldn’t get her face how I wanted it, so she’s taken that over. I lost that one.”

There are drawings of Sir Alex Ferguson and Johan Cruyff, the latter puffing on a cigarette, a canvas of Walter White, best known as Heisenberg, and one of the Joker, which is on the wall of his son Will’s tattoo parlour in Bristol. “That’s what I was going to do. I wasn’t going to come back to football, I was going to do paintings for people. I had 100 people asking me online: ‘Can you do me a painting? How much will it cost?’ We went to see the Francis Bacon exhibition in London. Oh, what a weirdo but my God it was incredible. Art is just a wonderful thing.”