Issue #24 of
Stand is out now; please get a copy, not just because I've got this bit in there about the inherently conservative cartel of middle aged bosses floating around the lower sections of the Premier League -:
Until
about 3 years ago I’d never heard of piñatas; now I’m sorry I did. The vision
of semi-feral children armed with baseball bats, crazy for corn syrup, dextrose
and gelatine, gorging on the innards of an obliterated, oversized, toy rabbit
makes me feel queasy and faint. My other half Laura reckons it would be better
if, instead of animal figures, piñatas were fashioned to look like Sam
Allardyce’s head; certainly, there’d be space for more Haribos than the bairns currently shake their pointy sticks at.
As
the father of a grown-up son without kids of his own, I am thankfully never
invited to children’s parties these days, which is fine by me as I dislike both
noise and infants. No amount of Allardycian piñatas could change that opinion. However,
I do, of course, remember the kind of terrible party games we endured in the
sepia tinged early 70s; Pass the Parcel,
Simon Says, Blind Man’s Buff and Musical
Chairs were the staple delaying tactics of the grown-ups, before they
unleashed a buffet, consisting entirely of Shipham’s
Meat Paste on Wonderloaf canapes
followed by a collation of Mr Kipling’s
finest, washed down with lashings of unhelpfully weak Quosh or flat Tizer.
Of
all those disparate, gleeful elements, the one that I remembered most was the
confusing use of Musical Chairs in a
football context. Reading my old fella’s Daily
Mirror, I’d feel a sense of alarm at Frank McGhee’s solemn pronouncement
that “clubs seem intent on a cut-throat game of managerial musical chairs.” Of
course, once I learned the semantic nuance inherent in metaphor, the penny
dropped and I realised the game, such as it was, involved loads of grim-faced
middle aged blokes with unconvincing combovers and nasty bri-nylon suits swapping
jobs; Ron Saunders, John Bond, Billy McGarry, Gordon Jago, Tommy Docherty and
subsequently Alan Mullery, Jim Smith, Ron Atkinson, Allan Clarke, Norman Hunter,
Dave Bassett and Mel Machin regularly drove in and out of middle-ranking
football club car parks, on bitter winter evenings, steering a series of
Vauxhall Carltons and Rover 3000s with the wipers on double time.
Every
so often after one of these alpha male dugout behemoths got their biannual p45 from
some lower third division sleeping midget or other, they sensed their time was
up, then packed their bags and headed off to earn a fortune from a sinecure in
Kuwait or the Emirates that left plenty of time for the golf course. As nature
abhors a vacuum, such departures created a vacancy for some ageing pro to step
up to the mark as player manager until the end of the season, more often than
not. The advent of this latest “tracksuit boss” would see breathless, fawning
articles in the Sunday tabloids and stilted, office-based interviews, intercut
with grainy footage from the training ground or a night match away to
Gillingham or Doncaster on Football Focus,
shown the day of a big local derby or fourth round FA Cup game, which the
leisurewear clad neophyte’s new charges tended to lose badly, precipitating a
post-match announcement that he’d be concentrating on managing full time from
now on. Obviously, he’d get the bullet in May and would then blag a two-year
pay as you play deal at Tranmere or Scunthorpe before drifting into obscurity.
Yes,
it’s amazing; managers, as well as players, did willingly cut all ties with the
game back then. These days, everyone from Thierry Henry to Clint Morrison gets
the chance to slip into a Paul Smith tin of fruit and state the bleeding
obvious on satellite TV three times a week. The 80s were a different world; Alan
Durban, after getting the boot at Sunderland and Cardiff in successive seasons,
ended up managing Telford Tennis Centre. Recently, Peter Jackson, ex of
Bradford, Huddersfield and Chester, ran a Care Home business with his wife. My
favourite was always John Barnwell though, and not just because he’s from the
same part of Newcastle as me; once he’d finished his stints in the storied hot
seats at Peterborough, Wolves, AEK Athens, Notts County, Walsall and
Northampton, he got the gig as Chief Executive of the League Managers’
Association; even now, aged 79, he’s the LMA’s Life President. It may not be as
high profile or as lucrative as Gordon Taylor’s stint as Eternal Leader, but
it’s a nice earner nevertheless. In defence of the Lowry connoisseur, the PFA
has a massive role to play in looking after players forced out the game early,
for whatever reason, or those who have struggles with their own internal
demons. Managers just need someone to shout the odds, so they get the compo
they’re contractually entitled to, as by definition, they are mainly
middle-aged, washed-up and fit for little else once their race is run.
Witness
the case of Brian Little; a legend at his only club Villa, he stayed on as a
coach when his playing days were cruelly cut short in 1980, aged only 26. He
moved on to Wolves in a similar role 4 years later, even having a month as
caretaker manager, before Bruce Rioch took him to Middlesbrough as assistant
boss in 1986. Little got his first permanent gaffer gig at Darlo in early 89;
he couldn’t stop them falling into the Conference at the end of that campaign,
but two successive promotions brought hitherto unknown pleasures to Feethams.
Leicester, having escaped a drop to D3 by the skin of their teeth, dispensed
with the dream team of David Pleat and Gordon Lee in summer 1991, bringing in
Little as a young, dynamic boss. He did well. Two gut-wrenching play-off final
losses to Blackburn and then Swindon were overcome with a third-time lucky
promotion, after seeing off Derby County.
At
this point Brian’s reputation couldn’t have been higher in the East Midlands,
but in November 1994, the Messiah became a very naughty boy when he left
Filbert Street to replace Ron Atkinson at Aston Villa. Even worse, Leicester
went down that year. Little won his first trophy in March 1996, leading the
Villains to a 3-0 League Cup triumph over a frankly awful Leeds side, which
basically ended Howard Wilkinson’s credibility at Elland Road. Strange how
things pan out thought; two years later, in February 1998, Little left Villa
Park with his team in the bottom half, citing burn-out, taking 6 months out of
the game, much of which was spent touring Spain on a vintage Triumph Bonneville.
Supposedly
reinvigorated, Little was a popular choice as Stoke City manager for the 98/99
season, with his sole aim being promotion back to the Championship. Everything
looked great at Christmas, with Stoke top of the table, having won 14 of their
first 20 games, but the New Year was a disaster, as form disintegrated. A
shamefaced Little quit in May 1999, having seen The Potters stumble so badly
that they missed out on a play-off place. Surprisingly, West Brom from the
division above, hired Little almost immediately, but there was no fairy-tale
return to form; instead of chasing promotion, the Baggies battled to avoid the
drop and the greying and increasingly gaunt Geordie was shown the door in March
2000. He was never to manage above the bottom tier again, showing that the law
of diminishing returns applies to football managers, same as everything else in
the world of entertainment.
Within
a week of leaving The Hawthorns, he was back in work at Hull City, where he
lasted 2 years; the first one saving them from relegation and the second signified by
stultifying lower mid-table mediocrity. After a short break, Tranmere was his
next port of call, with predictable results; avoiding relegation, signing new
players, totally underachieving and throwing in the towel come next spring.
Same thing happened when he spent the 2007/2008 season in The Conference in
charge of Wrexham and 2009/2010 in the Conference North with Gainsborough
Trinity. If it’s March, it must be time for Brian to flee the nest. Where could
he go after that? The scarcely credible answer was Jersey, where he did win the
second trophy of his managerial career; the Murratti Bowl, an annual
competition against Guernsey, before leaving immediately and never managing
again, preferring to take a back-office role at Villa where he may well still
be. Suffice to say, aged 64 and with a baffling array of redundancy payments
and a CV as long as one of his press conferences, Brian Little won’t be looking
for a job any time soon. After all, he’s already had 10.
Perhaps
the most obvious incidence of musical chairs providing jobs for the boys was
back in 2001 when Trevor Francis left his beloved Birmingham City; his
replacement was the subsequently itinerant Steve Bruce, who was placed on
gardening leave by his employers Crystal Palace for a month, before he took up
the role at St. Andrews. His replacement at Selhurst Park? None other than
Trevor Francis. Although, on the subject of convenient appointments, I was
always amused by Sir Jack Hayward’s superbly frugal decision to replace Graham
Turner with Graham Taylor, to avoid the need for a whole new set of monogrammed
training kit.
With
all the recent brouhaha about the Toby Carvery Dads’ Army of Allardyce, Hodgson, Moyes, Pardew, Pulis and no doubt
Mark Hughes in the fullness of time, getting plum jobs their reputations
scarcely merit, a year on since Marco Silva being offered the Hull job was seen
as a slap in the face for all British bosses and a death knell for the domestic
game, it is worth pausing to think. If we can dismiss the fact Roy Hodgson
appears to bear more than a striking resemblance to Private Godfrey or that, as
much as he’d love to be him, Pards is just too lower middle class to play the
Sergeant Wilson role, there is a degree of truth in the popular criticism of
these managers. None of them play expansive football. All of them are supremely
convinced of their own abilities. They’ll all have Harry Redknapp’s number saved,
in order to give him a quick bell for advice if the need arises. Though none of
them (even Pards) makes me want to retch in the way John Gregory did. However,
at the end of the day, you know these appointments are pragmatic decisions made
on the balance of probability; almost certainly Everton and West Brom will stay
up and, in the eyes of most fans, that is really all that matters. Welcome to
the Rafa Benitez school of eye-bleedingly tedious football for the sole purpose
of accumulating 40 points and an annual opportunity to be humiliated in front
of your own fans by Chelsea and Man City. Two cheers for the meritocracy eh?
But
surely there must be an alternative? Southampton and Watford swap their foreign
coaches more often than Dave Mackay changed his socks, and they’re permanent
top 10 residents. No longer do the Saints and Hornets entrust sweating, aged,
Brexiteers in liniment and Famous Grouse stained bench anoraks with the
medium-term future of their multi-million-pound businesses. They don’t want Les
Reed, Chris Hutchings or Micky Adams talking about Alf Ramsey; instead, they look
to the continent, for the guile, panache and brio a foreign appointment can
bring.
And
perhaps so should we. However, try not to mention: Remi Garde, Ole Gunnar
Solskjaer, Frank de Boer, Felix Magath, Velimir Zajac, Alain Perrin, Rene
Meulensteen, Bob Bradley, Francesco Guidolin, Christian Gross, Jacques Santini,
Egil Olsen, Pepe Mel or the man who inspired this article; Andre Villas Boas,
who has quit his job with Shanghai FC, in order to compete in the 2018 Dakar
Rally.
Yes,
we’ve certainly come a long way from Harry Redknapp at the entrance to an
unspecified training ground in the south east, engaging reporters in witty
repartee, with his head sticking out of his open Range Rover driver’s window…
