Jim Ward is fighting fit two years on from a heart attack and isn’t quite ready to call time on his football career.

Ward hasn’t managed since leaving Ramsgate for the third time in January 2017, when he and brother Danny were surprisingly sacked.

It wasn’t the way the decorated Scottish boss wanted to finish but a health scare put paid to hopes of returning to the dugout.

He retains his great passion for football - marking his golden wedding anniversary by watching Ramsgate’s friendly at Maidstone earlier this month - and still feels he could have a part to play somewhere.

“I had a heart attack a couple of years ago but everything’s fine now,” said Ward, who turns 70 next April.

“I miss it. I come and watch Ramsgate and I’d love to get involved again, to be honest. Not as a No.1 but to help somebody out and give something back.

“I go and watch Ramsgate every Saturday, I’m involved a little bit, not on the playing side, just on the other side.

“I miss it, the banter, the changing room, I miss the whole lot of it, and you still feel you have something to offer. There’s people older than me in the Premier League, Roy Hodgson, and people like that.”

Ward spent 15 years at Ramsgate across three spells but his big regret in management surrounds his time at Maidstone between 2001 and 2003.

He delivered the Kent League double in his first season but was denied promotion due to issues with Maidstone’s lease at Bourne Park, where they groundshared with Sittingbourne.

The Stones finished runners-up in Ward’s second season, adding the Kent Senior Trophy, but he was sacked midway through the next campaign amid fan unrest.

Right through his tenure there was the promise of a new stadium from chairman Paul Bowden-Brown, who even took him round the site at Whatman Way that would eventually become home.

Ward was gone by the time planning permission was granted in November 2004 and it still took another eight years to build the ground, with Bowden Brown making way for Terry Casey and Oliver Ash.

“I believe I lost five league games in two-and-half years and got sacked, so that’s a funny one,” said Ward.

“I got two promotions that I wasn’t allowed to have and, to be fair, I blame a lot of it on the fans’ forum.

“The chairman, Bowden-Brown, was under a lot of pressure from the fans. It was terrible. You don’t see it so much now.

“What might have been. You can always think like that, and I bet Jay Saunders thinks the same.

“How far would we have gone? I’d have given it a right good go.

“I’d have given it every ounce of my ability and my concentration, everything that I had to offer, I’d have given it to the club.

“With the resources, I wouldn’t have thought it was difficult for anyone to come and manage because who wouldn’t want to play there?

“I know they’ve gone through a sticky time in the last couple of years but you can’t be great all the time.”

Asked if he ever thought the stadium would be built while he was manager, Ward added: “You’ve got to remember, I had Bowden-Brown, as much as I don’t want to knock him down.

“He brought me down here, we stood across there, he gave me the keys and said, ‘You and me are going to the Football League, it’s all here to be done, we just need the finances.’

“Of course, that wasn’t forthcoming. That was fairly late on in my tenure.

“I think I’d already done two years here and from my point of view I got promotion twice at Ramsgate and twice here and never got promoted.

“It was a bit frustrating but that’s football.

“Maidstone was my big chance. If they had everything they have now, it would have been great.”

Ward ran an all-conquering Hotel de Ville side in Thanet before moving into senior management with Ramsgate in 1996.

His first stint included the Kent League and Kent Senior Trophy double in 1999 and a League Cup success in 2001 but he quit, citing a lack of ambition at the club.

When he returned in 2004, months after being sacked by Maidstone, it was the start of the best period in the club’s history.

They won the Kent League and Cup double in 2005 and the following season landed the Isthmian Division 1 title at the first attempt and reached the FA Cup first round.

The good times continued when they reached the Isthmian Premier play-offs in 2008 and won the League Cup.

But that side broke up, as the best players moved on, and Rams finished bottom the next season.

After several attempts at returning to the Premier Division, Ward lost his job in April 2012.

Spells at Sittingbourne and Whitstable followed before Ward was tempted back to Ramsgate in the summer of 2015.

But he left a year-and-a-half down the line with Rams in the bottom five of Isthmian South.

“I went back to Ramsgate and got sacked,” said Ward. “It didn’t work out that time.

“You could never live up to the expectations we had the other times we were there. It was disappointing but that’s life.

“The first one was a great team. I still see a lot of that team.

“A lot of those lads played in the Paul Foley testimonial and I see a lot of them at golf.

“The second time we went through the leagues, the Kent League, Isthmian South, FA Cup first round. That was a great experience and it was always the same chairman, Richard Lawson.

"He’s as good a chairman as what you’d have.

“We got beat in the play-offs to reach the Conference but we lost our players and went down the next year.

“We didn’t have the resources or the money to keep them.”

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