The British Coaches Who Made Armenian Football Believe

"Everybody had tears coming from their eyes. It touched me."

This is the way journeyman coach Tom Jones remembers the evening of August 21st 2007. It is not one he is likely to forget.

The former Swindon Town midfielder had visited Armenia for the first time only three months previously. But on this summer's evening, standing in the centre circle at Yerevan's Vazgen Sargsyan Stadium as the daylight faded and the national media looked on, he found himself caught up in the spiritual awakening of a nation's footballing consciousness.

First as an assistant to the late Ian Porterfield and latterly as caretaker manager, Jones was present at a moment of rare catharsis in Armenia, when a country shed the burdens of 15 doleful years and found in tragedy the tools to build a future for its national football side.

Porterfield, who first brought Jones to the tiny Caucasus republic, is better remembered for his heroics in Sunderland than the former Soviet Union. The Mackams midfielder scored the winner as the Wearsiders upset Leeds United to claim the 1973 FA Cup at Wembley, but after spells managing at Aberdeen and Chelsea the spirit of adventure had moved him to seek fresh challenges in the backwaters of world football. When he was diagnosed with colon cancer in early 2007 it was inevitable that he would reach out to his long-time confidant and bat-man, and Jones found his life transformed overnight.

"It was a horrible phone call really," recalls Jones, who had already had a spell working with Porterfield in South Korea. "Ian said to me, 'Look, I've got to go into hospital for this operation, but I don't want anybody to take the team bar you. I've squared it with the FA, what do you think?' So I got on a plane and went out there."

That was not long after Porterfield had been appointed Armenia boss, and the pair quickly set about transforming the fortunes of a side sitting 134th in the world rankings.

"Ian gave me the tapes to look at of his first few games in charge and asked me what I thought. I don't think I saw the opposition goalkeeper once." Armenia, relatively new to the international football scene, had developed a complex. "I spoke to Vardan [Minasyan, the assistant coach] and he said the team were frightened of losing by six or seven and embarrassing the nation, so they just sat back and defended. I said that mentality would have to change."

Much of what Jones saw on those tapes was taken from games when Porterfield had been on medical leave and the Armenian Minasyan had taken charge. But in the spring of 2007 Armenian football was the pits. The team had won just three games in three long barren years, and Minasyan had struggled to think outside of the ingrained narrative of inferiority and defeat. "Vardan was a fantastic organiser and administrator, but on the pitch his teams never had a shot on goal. So I came in and brought a different mindset; set up training sessions to be high-pressing, high-tempo, really getting in people's faces. I don't care who we're playing, just don't let them play."

Hardly an original contribution to the tactical lexicon, but inside of a few weeks Jones had identified something in Porterfield and Minasyan's squad that, with minor tweaking, could create ripples. A group of players used to being told that expansive, attacking football was the route to national humiliation were given a reason to come out and play.

"Until then all these guys had thought about was keeping the score down. So I worked to change the mentality, to get men forward and occupy the opposition back line. There wasn't to be anymore of just letting the opposition have the ball. Once the players bought into that mindset, we started to see a change."

The transformation was instant. On June 2nd Armenia won 2-1 in Kazakhstan – just their third away win in five years – before following it up four day later with an historic 1-0 win against Poland. "It was the first time the country had ever won back-to-back games," remembers Jones, "and it just gave Armenia and its football fans a lift like you're never seen.

"The next day I was walking through the park in Yerevan and there were people coming up and shouting 'Coach, Coach! Brilliant! Brilliant!' This had just never happened to them before."

It isn't difficult to see why the people walking in the park that day were excited by what they'd seen. Their team had just beaten a side containing players from the likes of Borussia Dortmund and Celtic led by a coach who, in Leo Beenhakker, had managed at a World Cup. But Armenia had their own star in the making – Henrikh Mkhitaryan, a young forward given his debut by Porterfield. Jones played a pivotal part in the early development of the man who would go on to become Armenian football's first household name.

"Henrikh was brilliant. His mum worked within the FA and both her and her son's English was perfect. I watched him against Lichtenstein in an under-21s game and of course he stood out," said Jones of the forward who would go on to smash the transfer record for an Armenian player when Borussia Dortmund spent €27.5m on him in 2013.

"Ian was always very trusting of me with young players; he said, 'that's your area of expertise, you can see a player when one comes along.' So when I said we needed to get Henrikh in the team sooner rather than later, he listened.

"He just looked like he'd been playing international football all his life, he was fearless. The way he would pick up the ball and run beyond defenders. I tried to tell people over here [in England] when I came back just what a player he was going to be. You just knew."

When Minasyan later went solo as head coach of the side, and Armenia were scaling greater heights than the country had ever known, he would look to Mkhitaryan as their talisman and main goal-scoring threat. But did Mkhitaryan make the revitalised side's high-tempo pressing game tick, or vice-versa?

"He was certainly a bonus," concedes Jones, "but the change in mentality that we brought to the team, which Vardan learned from us and then carried on, that was what got the team out of that negative spiral."

Poland was a watershed moment for Jones, Porterfield and Minasyan but events were about to take a tragic turn.

"Ian's health was deteriorating all the time. He wasn't getting better. Then he phoned me when he was in Brompton Hospital in a very bad way and he said that the only game he wanted to see through was the Portugal game [on August 22nd]. That was his only target.

"Two days before the game they flew him out there. I'd been doing all the coaching up to that point, assisted by Vardan." It was the following day that football in Armenia came alive.

"It was the day before the Portugal game, we'd just finished our training session for the day at the stadium. All the media were there and everyone could see that Ian was struggling. He had a colostomy bag and god knows what else. He could barely stand. Then he got everybody together in the middle of the pitch and he said 'link hands'. He got everybody with hands up in the air and he said, 'This. This is for us. Together.'"

It's only later, when Jones talks about the day that Porterfield passed away, that the poignancy of that moment at the Sargsyan Stadium becomes really felt. It was exactly three weeks later on September 11th, while the team were preparing for a friendly in Cyprus, that the news came through.

"We were told on the morning of the game. Vardan and I had to call a team meeting with the whole committee and the President [of the FA] present and we had to break the news to the players. There were a lot of tears. A lot of tears.

"The players really didn't want to play the game but I just thought it was what Ian would have wanted. But no-one's mind was on the game, we lost 3-1 and it was horrible. Afterwards we had a meeting and I just said, 'Look, we can't allow that to happen again. All that we've built together is going to be lost.'"

How better to respond than by channelling the legacy of the man who had made the resurgence possible? Porterfield's final game had indeed been the Portugal match – a sterling 1-1 draw against Cristiano Ronaldo and co. marking a fitting end to a life dedicated to the game – but now there was the small matter of first protecting and then building on the foundations he had left.

"I make a point of never trying to copy anybody," says Jones as he remembers the home game with Serbia, one month after Porterfield's passing. "But I got them all out on the pitch before kick-off, we got together in a circle and and we raised our hands together and we said, 'This is for us.' The stadium went absolutely berserk. Everyone in that ground was completely together, behind us and in memory of Ian. It was incredible. We drew 0-0 but it should have been 10-0."

A trawl through the archives confirms the accuracy of Jones's memory, if not his numeracy. There can rarely have been an international fixture so one-sided, with Armenia squandering chance after chance against a side boasting such European heavyweights as Branislav Ivanovic and Dejan Stankovic. The following day Serbia coach Javier Clemente, once of Spain, was sacked, such was the superiority of Jones's Armenians as they played for the memory of a manager they had adored.

Four days later came Belgium but by then the physical and emotional strains of the previous month were beginning to show; a brave rearguard action was undone by a late own-goal, the final cruelty at the end of a brutal trauma for the young republic. Jones still has the hand-written team-sheets.

He also has two slightly battered and worn photographs. They show Porterfield near the end, thin and unsteady but brimming-over with pride as he celebrates with his players in the bowels of the stadium after the Poland victory. They are the last pictures that Jones owns of his friend alive.

It's as far as the story goes, for Jones at least. After defeats to Portugal and Kazakhstan he returned to Swindon, proud but with regrets. "After Ian passed I asked the federation time and time again, what do I have to do to get this job, but never got an answer." Instead the federation opted for the Dane Jan Poulsen, but only when former assistant Minasyan was given the top job in 2009 did Porterfield and Jones's legacy begin to bear fruit.

The historic 1-1 draw with Portugal. A frail but proud Porterfield, and Jones, can be seen at 01:20 while the Armenian anthem plays

Under Minasyan Armenia won nine out of 20 competitive internationals – a win ratio without precedent in the country's football history – as the coach stuck to the high-tempo, high-pressing philosophy he had learned from his foreign mentors. Europe came virtually to a standstill in June 2013 as the team won 4-0 in Denmark, to go with victories in Slovakia and the Czech Republic. The mighty Italy were held to a 2-2 draw. In February 2014 Armenia ranked 30th in the world, a rise of more than 100 places from when Jones had first touched down in Yerevan.

Even at the height of the team's new found success Minasyan was never in any doubt about where the impetus for change had come from. "I learned so much from Ian Porterfield. Not only his sporting approach but his human touch are things I hold very close to me," he told the Armenian press in December 2012 as the country targeted its first ever World Cup finals appearance.

Legacy is a difficult word in football. As money talks the influence of individuals is waning, and the angle for the little guy to punch upwards is narrowing. Perhaps Ian Porterfield and Tom Jones were the last of a dying breed: two football men with big hearts and broad horizons ready to take a punt on the unfashionable and the unexpected. There are certainly worse ways to make a living.