I have been meaning to blog about the Sam Allardyce affair for a little while and it’s good to finally share my thoughts. Football today at the top level is descending into a sham with un-realistic expectations being shared all the way through the league. For those who demand instant results from whichever club they support, here is the thing; it’s impossible for every club to win every game as in order for that to happen, someone has to lose, yet this burden sit on the shoulders of every Premier League manager. But the Wenger and Ferguson revolutions did not happen over night, they take years of management, of making a culture shift.
In a day job role, I’ve had meetings with the marketing people from some of the top clubs up and down the country and the ‘other world’ some of these people are living in amazes me. And that kind of culture will pervade right through the club and it takes years to make a shift towards a different world, which is what the Premier league has become since its inception.
Sam Allardyce was given 8 months to make that shift at Newcastle, a club that has not won a trophy for decades. Whatever your views on Sam as a manager, and personally I think he is an ‘okay’ manager who could have made an average team like Newcastle perform, he did have a long term strategy and plan which he had no real chance to implement. Such a plan requires people to change the way they think and as creatures of habit that does not occur overnight. Look at us an example.
How many games away was Curbs from the sack last season? 6-0 at Reading, 4-0 at Charlton, 3-0 at Sh*ff Utd, had the miracles at Ewood Park and the Emirates not occurred, I think we would more than likely be looking at a new manager. But Eggy rode it out with Curbs, gave him time to get his cultural changes across. We can now slowly see that in our football. It needs ironing out, but Curbs is teaching the lads how to grind out a result where before we would not have got one. The free flowing football, which we see glimpses of, can wait until we’re knocking good results out week after week.
I don’t believe for a minute that if Newcastle were grinding out results in a boring fashion but were top of the league, that the Toon Army would be complaining. Nor if the football was right but the results were not coming that they would be happy. Allardyce was trying to bring in his cultural shift, which even if it meant not beating everyone all the time, would have resulted in some good results some of the time, enough to keep an average club like Newcastle in its position. He was simply not given enough time to implement this.
And this is the burden that sits with every club that gets a new manager, not only has he got to change the way the players play, he has to change the way the people around him work too. From the tea lady to the members of the board, the old has to be cast out and the new has to be brought in. Most successful companies don’t make profit for 2 or 3 years before becoming what they are. It’s about time football chairman started to treat their clubs like businesses and less like Fantasy Football games. Fortunately for us, the Icemen appear to know that, and the cultural change at Upton Park is something we can be excited about, all it needs is time….
Update: Thank you for your comments so far and welcome to the Newcastle supporters who have dropped by. Just to point out that I have nothing against your team, even though the best memory I have of St James's Park is the line of supporters next to the away fans who weren't watching the game but were simply there to tell us what they were going to do to us afterwards, but I digress.
On the Glenn Roeder point, Roeder has no pedigree whatsoever in managing a Premier League team, I am not saying you could pick anyone to deliver a strategy and cultural change, but that there are people capable of it and Allardyce proved that at Bolton. Roeder is simply not up to the job and would not be able to deliver over a 10 year period, let alone a 10 week one.
Ourman - I think you provide a good dissection of your team and would not doubt you know the ins and outs of yours better than I do, but football is about opinions. Would you then say in all-confidence that under a different manager, Owen would be knocking them in for fun, Smith would be revelling in a settled role and Joey Barton would keep out of the wrong kind of headlines? All in the space of 8 months? If I draw an analogy with a club I do know about, Curbs brought in Quashie, Davenport and Boa-Morte in the transfer deadline, none of whom contributed anything significant to our survival and only one of which is offering up anything this season. Upson looked like the most over-paid crock last season but has been rock solid for us this time round. It took time for Curbs to get to know the players around him, show them how he wanted to play and now they are doing it is very slowly working, but it was not without its mishaps...
Further update: Ourman, I think you might have missed my point. I think Smith is an okay player and Quashie is not Premiership material, at best a useful squad member. But all managers, ours and Fergie included make mistakes. Massimo Taibi and Eric Djemba-Djemba are a couple of examples for you. But just because a manager has made these errors, does not make him a 'bad' manager. Bad managers are those who simply don't achieve, like Roder. As I say, I think Allardyce is an 'okay' manager who could have over time put Newcastle in a good position. But we'll never know and perhaps we shall just agree to disagree.
I see you now have Kevin Keegan, be interested to see what you think of that? Has he been working in the Premiership of late? I can't be horrible to the guy, as he was one of the more honest and forthright managers, but I'm not sure he is the right person to manage the likes of Viduka, Owen and Barton, guess time will tell...
