JONATHAN NORTHCROFT | DARRELL CLARKE INTERVIEW
Darrell Clarke: Ellie loved me so much she didn’t want to share the pain
Cheltenham Town manager explains the agony he went through at losing his 18-year-old daughter and how he is rebuilding himself and the club
Clarke is back in the dugout at Cheltenham
PETER TARRY FOR THE TIMES
The Sunday Times
Sometimes Darrell Clarke sees magpies and says: “There’s Ellie, there’s Ellie with her mate”. Sometimes he talks to her and that helps, but sometimes, when he’s back in Mansfield, it gets a little much. He visits the cemetery and there’s Ellie in one plot, his mum and gran together in another. “It kills me for days because I’m sitting at my daughter’s grave and I’ve got my daughter’s here and my mum and gran’s over here,” he says. “The whammy of it hits too hard.”
Ellie was Clarke’s oldest daughter. A year ago this week, either side of a home game with Charlton Athletic, he attended her inquest at Nottingham coroner’s court. She was 18 when she died — on Valentine’s Day, 2022. Police were
