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Len Shackleton included a chapter in his autobiography that was blank, save for the title “The Average Director’s Knowledge of Football“. Fifty-three years on from publication, this week has seen more evidence that little has changed.
During the summer months of 2009, Portsmouth Football Club was subjected to a protracted and comical takeover reminiscent of that which Spencer Trethewy inflicted upon Aldershot in 1990. The outcome has not yet been as devastating to the club but there were considerable fears reported in the media that the club would be unable to survive financially, evidenced by a failure to pay players wages recently.
Throughout the summer, Paul Hart sat and watched helplessly as the best players were sold for fees in excess of £35m without funds being made available for recruiting replacements. Sulaiman Al Fahim concluded his ill-fated purchase of the club late in August, photographed in his personalised replica away top, seemingly feted as a saviour for the club. The protracted nature of the negotiations, and the emergence of a rival consortia no doubt exacerbated the takeover, left Hart with little time to pull together a squad for the 2009-10 season.
The club’s start to the season was unsurprisingly poor given the circumstances. Seven straight defeats in the Premier League came to an abrupt and startling end with consecutive four goal victories. From seemingly being cut adrift at the bottom of the division, the gap to safety had been cut. That cut no ice with the owners of the club; Paul Hart was relieved of his managerial duties this week.
Having survived the crisis this summer, Portsmouth needed stability. If that had meant the club rebuilding with a season in The Championship, it should have been a price worth paying. Instead, an instant remedy is being sought although the club is rudderless in the interim between Hart’s departure and a new appointment. The players though remain the same; whether the January transfer window will be an effective saviour for the next manager remains to be seen.
Premier League survival is the only thing that matters when faced with relegation, particularly if players contracts take no account of any diminished status bestowed upon the club through failure. Yet would the club have been better served by retaining Hart, especially in light of improved form which even with recent defeats, was vastly better than the opening seven games.
That Portsmouth have reacted quickly may yet turn out to be a masterstroke if they pull clear of the relegation zone. Such is the closeness in points totals at this stage of the season that three wins can elevate their position one place in the table if everyone else continues to take points off each other. It appears that consecutive away defeats have brought about Hart’s dismissal. However, victories at Blackburn and Stoke seemed highly unlikely on paper, let alone on the pitch.
In such circumstances, new owners often seek to bring in a ‘name’ manager. Avram Grant may well be a likeable man but is he the man to save them? Perhaps and time will tell. Yet with the paucity of talent within the squad, January wheeling and dealing is going to be crucial to their season. The sacking leaves an uneasy taste in the mouth. Hart worked hard throughout the summer in circumstances that may have forced others to consider their options and leave the club. His loyalty was rewarded with unemployment.
Should sentiment have come into the equation? The business side of the game probably dictates that it should not. The ego of a new owner automatically means it will not. Yet this will be the same owner who at points in the future will berate want-away players for their lack of loyalty “to a club that has treated them well“. The days of owners wanting their cake and eating it have yet to change. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.
The departure of Jose Mourinho is perhaps the most and least surprising event of the week. It has been coming for a while; when the owner and the manager of a club have a dispute, there is but one winner and rarely, if ever, is it the man whose responsibility of picking the team. With hindsight, it is easy to say that the self-styled ‘Special One’ has been angling for this to occur since earlier this year. He has been injudicious to a certain extent in all of the ‘fights’ that he has provoked; the mask of diversionary tactics utilised to its fullest extent, anything to divert away from his players, their weaknesses overlooked in the media whenever they have been exposed on the pitch. This parting of the ways with Chelsea though highlights his own failings as much as it shows Roman Abramovich in an equally idealistic light.
The Urban Legend surrounding Abramovich’s involvement with English football would have you believe that he fell in love with the idea of owning a club having attended the Champions League clash between Manchester United and Real Madrid. Would that it were so romantic. It is reasonably certain that he likes football; he would not have invested in CSKA Moscow were that not the truth, even if his ‘interest’ in the Russian club is masked through sponsorship. Monies put forward for the benefit of the national team are easily dismissed as ‘political’, currying favour with the current occupant of The Kremlin or his acolytes.
It tends to be lost in the talk of ‘Ten Year Plans’ and Chelsea being self-sustaining within five years that Abramovich is first and foremost a businessman. Romanticising his involvement at the Club, portraying him as a benevolent investor is at best naive, more accurately delusional. The man is willing to pursue the glory associated with an English club winning in Europe but make no mistake, crunch time is coming; he wants a Return on his Investment. He may well have put the ownership of the club into his son’s name to protect its future. It is not an entirely altruistic step. If anything happens to him personally, no vultures can swoop to buy the Club on the cheap; they would have to pay more than a pretty penny to wrest the club from his family’s hands.
Motive though is perhaps the most perplexing aspect of his involvement. Yes, the money that can be made from football, particularly English football is certainly eye-watering. Why else would Glazer and co have invested in half of the top flight. Yet it is not the only reason. He does want success, he would not have achieved his own wealth were that not the case. However the size of the task ahead of him has, I think, hit him over the past six months. For two seasons, everything went Chelsea’s way in the Premiership. He could console himself with that whilst looking on in anguish as the Champions League evaded his grasp. Three semi-final defeats whilst favourites to progress to the Final hardly represents a guargantuan achievement. That he has spent £500m in pursuit of this dream is an indication that it is not an idle pursuit. Yet winning a Cup competition is more than pure skill. Each victor has their share of luck en route to the spoils. Liverpool dumped Chelsea out with a dubious goal and then won the trophy, well, no-one is quite sure how. Porto won the Champions League due to everyone of any note being eliminated beforehand. Porto beat Manchester United with a perfectly good Paul Scholes goal disallowed but of real consequence, there was no-one else in their scalps. Luck of the draw is an immense boost.
Yet Abramovich wants that but equally as important is the manner of victory. And in hiring Mourinho, it is probably certain that the style he craves could never be achieved. Mourinho is unlike Ferguson or Wenger. He builds his teams from a solid base at the back; the other two put their emphasis on flair and attacking technique, closer to George Graham in outlook. Yet he was a proven winner. Champion of Portugal, champion of Europe. Therein lies the rub; he traded flair for glory. The two are not mutually exclusive – Arsenal, Manchester United, Barcelona, Real have all proven that – but in Mourinho’s eyes, they are. The most telling example of that came after Arsenal won 5 – 4 at White Hart Lane. The ‘Special One’ dismissed it as a hockey score yet all fans and owners would rather win the League with a season of those results than one of 1 – 0 victories which makes the decision to hire him all the more surprising. Claudio Ranieri in his one season in charge under Abramovich gave him attacking football but curious tactical decisions. Mourinho was the polar opposite. Entirely rational but unattractive to watch. Success but no plaudits for the manner of victory.
Is Abramovich chasing the impossible dream? Financially Chelsea are a big club yet next week they will fall down the rankings as Arsenal declare results that will show them to be the second wealthiest club in Europe in terms of turnover. On the pitch, pragmatism must reign in flair at some point. To win the Champions League with verve and panache is rarely done; perhaps in the last decade on three teams have managed to do so. Abramovich wants the trophy twice in a similar time frame ignoring historical evidence that it is hard enough to win it once. How long any manager will last at Stamford Bridge without winning ‘Old Big Ears’ is up for debate. Style is as important as substance but one has to give way to the other to be totally successful.
There is a school of thought that managers of ‘Big Clubs’ are under the greatest pressure in the game. It is not proven, for managers of lower league clubs face equal stress in gaining promotion or avoiding relegation. Those counterparts rarely are given the media space to prove their stresses and strains whereas a Premiership manager ‘blowing up’ is always going To get airtime or column inches. To prove this theory, step forward Rafa Benitez.
You would think that the affable Spaniard had nothing to be concerned about; investing in excess of £40m this past transfer window and getting some sort of immediate return on it ought to have made him the happiest manager in the league right at this moment in time. It seems that this is not the case. Having complained rather too vociferously that the whole of the footballing world was against him because Manchester United had it too easy in signing Carlos Tevez and then the dastardly Scot, Sir Alex, would not sell him Gabriel Heinze, Benitez then decided that the Premier League had allowed the TV companies to put Liverpool’s title chances at risk by scheduling them to appear on the small screen too many times in the opening weeks, adversely affecting the psychological and physiological routines of the players as they would not be in a settled routine for kick-off times. That there is now no such thing as a settled routine is neither here nor there in Rafa’s parallel universe.
This week though he returned to the fray with the observation that the Premier League ought to help more with fixture scheduling this weekend in particular, because Liverpool have another lunchtime kick-off. Reading his comments earlier this week, you would be forgiven in thinking that Liverpool were the only victims in this particular footballing crime. Yet they are not. Everton and Manchester United will be at half-time as Liverpool commence battle at Fratton Park whilst the North London starts as those two reach the interval. Benitez is unfortunately deluded himself if he thinks the football authorities even remotely care about his whinges. They have sold their souls to the Broadcast media and are now powerless to remotely challenge the rescheduling of a season, their only saviours are the various Police Forces who ultimately sanction the changes.
That Benitez is vocal about such a seemingly trivial matter in the great scheme of things is the best indication of the pressures he feels that he is under. For Liverpool having the 1970’s and 80’s in living memory is akin to the wait United and to a lesser extent, Arsenal, had between their title wins. Benitez raised the bar himself by delivering the Champions League. If they do not win a major trophy this season, he will find himself under considerable pressure to deliver next season or be replaced. It is tactically astute to dampen expectations by claiming all and sundry are against you; the problem is that he has not fulminated a cogent argument for any outside force impacting on potential failure. You are left wondering if Benitez himself actually believes they can win the Premiership?
No, Dear Reader, there is not a misprint in the title. Shame on you for thinking so.
They used to say that you had to be mad to be a Goalkeeper. If that is the case, then you must have to be a Certified Lunatic to be a Manager. At some point, all of them go mad; competely stark raving Bonkers. And they do it in a very public manner. It can be the only reason that anyone would voluntarily put themselves through such stressful circumstances.
There are those who habitually do so, Neil Warnock, visibly lost his cool on a number of occasions, seemingly on the most trivial of decisions. Well, obviously they were not trivial to him, otherwise he would remain an Sea of Tranquility in an Ocean of Chaos. There are those who lose the plot under provocation; step forward Mr Keegan. And there are those who do so to rile others; Ferguson, Mourinho and Wenger all have used the Press to get under the skin of a rival, and still do so. These jibes range from humourous – Wenger to Ferguson when describing their teams, ‘everyone thinks they have the prettiest wife‘ – to those that are just outright offensive – Mourinho accusing Wenger of being a voyeur with the resultant threat of legal action.
So why put themselves through it? For the vast majority, football is all that they have ever known; it has been their career since being marginally more than knee-high to a Grasshopper. And yet, with a few exceptions, the Premiership teams are managed by those who you could only describe as ‘Solid’ or in some cases less than that, former players. The reason for that was touched upon by Robin van Persie in an interview with The Sunday Times this past weeken; discussing Thierry Henry and Marco van Basten, he commented that when they received a good pass, they thought little or nothing of it because such a pass was well within their capabilities. When the pass failed, they did not understand for the same reason.
And the apparent inability of some of the great players to become great managers fails for that reason. There is an apocryphal tale which concerns Glenn Hoddle, then Tottenham’s manager, who had apparently better skills than a large number of his charges and could not bridge that gap. The thing with those who have peaked once already is that they may not necessarily have the burning desire to reclimb the mountain. Those whose career was perhaps more limited have the desire to achieve still, perhaps feeling that they did not do themselves justice as a player.
Of course there are those who buck the trend and have successful playing and managerial careers but in the future, such will be their financial security that they have no need to enter coaching or management unless they have a burning desire to do so. After all, turning up and criticising players for an hour or two on a Saturday evening, spending the rest of the week playing golf is a far easier option.
