Paul Tisdale has been discussing his reputation for sartorial elegance when the conversation turns to Liverpool’s visit in the FA Cup on Friday night and whether Exeter City’s manager will be sporting his 1950s-style pork pie hat. “Yeah, I will,” Tisdale says. “Although if it’s absolutely pouring down I couldn’t wear a proper woollen hat like that – there’s a point where stupid’s stupid. I’d have to put the wax hat on instead.”

The second-longest serving manager in English football, and arguably the best-dressed, knows where to draw the line. Aged 42, and approaching a decade in the job at Exeter, Tisdale is a fascinating character. He is a forward-thinking man with old-fashioned values, which means staying true to his word – Tisdale twice turned down the Swansea job because he promised Exeter he would complete a five-year cycle – and trying to win matches “straight and proper”.

He also looks the part. From tweed jackets and cravats to deerstalker hats, Tisdale has been there, worn it and got the Ted Baker T-shirt. As a leading ambassador for Ray Kelvin’s fashion label – the two are best friends after first meeting when Tisdale walked into the multimillionaire’s Covent Garden shop when he was a teenager at Southampton – the Exeter manager is capable of giving Jürgen Klopp a run for his money in the hipster stakes.

Unfortunately he has already lost the beauty contest. “My mother-in-law fancies Jürgen Klopp and that gives us a real problem,” Tisdale says. “My father-in-law is a Liverpool fan and has been for 60 years but he has now decided that he wants Exeter to win this game just to spite his wife because she fancies Klopp.”

Tisdale surely comes out on top when it comes to their style of dress. With his rather eccentric taste, the former Southampton midfielder has been compared to everything from an organic greengrocer from Shoreditch to a French cinema critic. Tisdale, though, is making much more than a fashion statement when he stands on the touchline.

“It means today is a battle and we’re bringing our best game,” he explains. “We’re going to show that we’ve got some confidence, we’re going to be innovative, we’re going to stand up and not be pushed around. We might be a little bit different but we’re going to start off with an air of optimism and we’re here to do business.”

Yet it still takes a brave man to don a pork pie hat while managing a professional football team. “Yeah, it does,” Tisdale says. “I remember the first time I wore the deerstalker hat, that was at Norwich six years ago, and I got some stick. I’d seen it at Ted Baker among the samples for future seasons, no one had a deerstalker hat then and I thought: ‘I’ll do that.’ That, or the cravat, or the pork pie hat or the tweed, ultimately it’s about saying: ‘We’re here, we’re Exeter’.

“I’m not speaking out of turn but we walk out the tunnel and I’ve made an effort and I’ve got some belief in how I’m presenting myself. You look in the technical area next to me and I feel one-nil up already – he’s got his tracksuit bottoms tucked into his socks.”

Tisdale is smiling but serious. Talking for more than an hour in the training ground office he shares with Steve Perryman, Exeter’s long-serving director of football, Tisdale is good company. He comes across as a deep thinker, erudite and conscientious, and it is easy to see why clubs higher up the ladder have tried to persuade him to climb a few rungs and leave Exeter behind.

With Tisdale it is not only a case of what he has achieved at St James Park – Exeter were in the Conference when he took over in 2006 and finished as high as eighth in League One in 2011 – but how he goes about the job. He is involved in everything from choosing the kit to booking hotels, never mind coaching and picking the team. He even negotiated the kit lady’s contract for her because “she’s so important to me and the players, so that’s important to the club”.

As for Tisdale’s principles, they are best summed up by the response he gives when asked what would happen if Exeter were beating Liverpool with a few minutes to go and whether his players would run the ball into the corner to kill time. “I’ve never uttered those words – ‘run it in the corner’ – in 10 years,” Tisdale says. “But I don’t think that is the biggest villain; the ball is in play, the player is not doing anything wrong – not that we coach that. There are plenty of other villains against football.

“By that I mean more contentious situations where the ball has gone out of play and the goalkeeper is wasting time or someone goes down feigning injury, or the ball rolls off the pitch and the manager pretends to pick it up and misses it. For me it’s about respecting the game. You hear talk about managers winning so ‘let’s kill the game’ or ‘game management’. All that stuff just takes minutes away from the supporters who’ve paid to watch.”

Tisdale suspects a childhood spent playing cricket may have partly shaped that outlook. He was a talented opening batsman, brought up on the idea that, “if you nick it, you walk”, and never wanted to give up the sport. Even now he is a member of MCC. “I managed to get myself into trouble by breaking my toe playing for a select XI against South Africa Under-19s, that didn’t go down very well. It was the day before pre-season started at Southampton. I thought that was enough.”

He spent seven years as a professional with Southampton before moving on to Bristol City, Yeovil and Exeter, with spells in Finland and Greece in between, yet Tisdale paints an unhappy picture of his playing days. “I enjoyed playing but I didn’t enjoy the professional game at all. I couldn’t see any light in it. I was in the wrong place. I didn’t fit,” he says.

“I don’t want to come across as too unusual because that does me a disservice; I’ve got a football element to me – I’ve been in the industry 25 years. But I was never myself as a player. My mind wanted to quantify and consider too many things. Actually, a lot of the time football is for those who don’t think too much and just play and be happy.”

After “stumbling into management” with Team Bath, the university team that reached the first round of the FA Cup in 2002, Tisdale took over at Exeter four years later and made a big impression. Yet the fact he is still with the League Two club – Arsène Wenger is the only manager currently working in the English game to have been in the job for longer – has led some to question his ambition.

“That’s a bit of a cheek,” Tisdale says. “I’ve had opportunity to leave, there’s been a couple I would have been very interested in but the timing was wrong and others where I don’t fancy working. But you can judge ambition in different ways. My ambition was to get Exeter into the Championship – that’s pretty ambitious.

“I put my heart and soul into the job and I’m loyal to the commitment. I don’t think managers can always moan. Clubs get rid of managers too easily but then managers leave clubs too easily. So it’s not all one way. I’ve done right by Exeter, they’ve done right by me. I can’t promise how long I’m going to stay here. It’s a different cycle to what it was before. But I’m not out there looking or desperate to move. I love it. I’m not greedy. I realise what a lot of football clubs are like. I’ve got a family and I enjoy where I live in Wiltshire.”

Tisdale talks with great pride about Exeter, where the supporters’ trust is the majority shareholder, and he makes a point of reeling off those involved when explaining how they have “built an incredibly respectable name as a community club in the south-west and as an academy club in terms of developing our players”.

It is not so easy, however, to say anything positive about some of the facilities at St James Park, in particular the cramped visitors’ dressing room where Klopp will deliver his team-talk. “It’s a completely shocking experience for anybody,” Tisdale says. “There’s one bog. We’ve had the showers run out before – we hope it doesn’t happen on the Liverpool day. We’re not doing this to piss them off. It’s a stand that was built for football 110 years ago. The home dressing room is probably marginally better because it’s 50% bigger but that’s it. We’ve been trying for years to knock it down and build a new stand, and actually the planning application has gone in. So we’re trying to put it right.”

As for the game and the presence of the television cameras, Tisdale ruefully makes the point that Exeter “know how it works” – last season they travelled to non-league Warrington on a Friday night for a first-round FA Cup tie that was broadcast live and ended in an embarrassing 1-0 defeat.

Whatever the result at St James Park, it is a safe bet that Exeter will try to play football and that any stick Tisdale receives from the Liverpool supporters for his attire will be water off a duck’s back. “Well, water off a good wax jacket,” Exeter’s manager says, smiling.