When people talk about the strains of football management, I remember Colin Harvey, my old boss at Everton, during his struggles to sustain the success we’d had under Howard Kendall. I’d go up to his office sometimes for a chat and could see the pain on his face. He was genuinely distraught at what was going on.
David Moyes is another manager who’s had his fair share of pain – in his case since leaving Everton – and he’s done so well to bounce back in the way he has at West Ham. David is seen as a manager whose teams are efficient and don’t necessarily have the flair but he’s gone into situations where he’s had to grind out results and build from there.
At Manchester United, that worked against him because people couldn’t see him playing really fast, attacking football – the Man United brand. I found that unfair as he had used flair players. He worked with Wayne Rooney and signed clever creators like Mikel Arteta and Steven Pienaar. Yet the common perception was of a solid manager who’d taken a club up the table but hadn’t won anything.
Personally I think Moyes wasn’t right for Man United, but not because he’s a bad manager. I just believe some managers are better with a tight budget. Today, with the pandemic, the wealthiest clubs are moving further apart from the others so you almost need two types of manager – those trusted with big money and the rest.
In Moyes’s case at West Ham, he’s showing his ability to build a team who can compete brilliantly on a limited budget. Just look at Tomáš Souček, who came from Slavia Prague. Like Tim Cahill at Everton, there’s a hunger and a goal threat from midfield – he has seven already this season including, I’m told, the joint-highest in the league from set-pieces.
What I don’t like is the incredible snobbery from people who judge managers on this idea that there’s only one way of playing. Moyes’s approach is based on honesty and hard work and sometimes players don’t like that; that’s not what today’s football is supposed to be about. I see something similar with Sean Dyche at Burnley. He plays a different way and is slightly more direct but there’s nothing wrong with getting in people’s faces and making it a horrible game for them.
We should applaud it because he’s asking questions that opposition teams aren’t used to. Maybe the Premier League needs a bit more rough and tumble and honesty and physicality as I’m sick of teams coming out and tapping the ball 300 times and everyone going, ‘This is brilliant’ when sometimes two passes will do.
Not so long ago Dyche looked like he was in trouble but he’s still there and so is Chris Wilder at Sheffield United – yet Frank Lampard has gone from Chelsea. My question for any club owner right now would be: how can you judge somebody so harshly on what’s not a real season? It is not real football now. Some players need the fans to perform. There is fundamentally something missing and that’s why we’re seeing weird results and inconsistency.
For me, Chelsea should have said, ‘We’ve not got any fans in, it’s a strange situation – let’s give you to the end of the season’. Instead, because they have so much money they go, ‘I want a new toy’. My only question mark against Lampard was that in a job like that you need some experience around you. I’d bet Boris Johnson has never spoken to John Major – to his detriment – and looking at Lampard’s coaches, I don’t think he had that experience.
Ultimately, I do have sympathy for managers. We should look at the people who put them in the job in the first place as so much in football comes down to recruitment. The human side is underestimated too. There’s this idea that football should be played on perfect pitches by perfect people but you never get people that are perfect. They mess up.
As a manager, you have to create an environment where people feel safe, where they can improve and be themselves. To create that atmosphere isn’t easy with 25 egos plus the manager and coaches. You get sniping in the dressing room, on the training ground and outside – and it seems worse now when chairmen and directors speak to players and some players think it’s alright to call and complain about the manager.
With money, today’s players have that power whereas when I played, Howard Kendall had the power because you wanted to be in the team on Saturday. God knows how many injections I had to play, but you had them because you wanted to play as that could mean a £350 win bonus to help pay off the mortgage. Nowadays they don’t worry about that and for managers it’s made the job even harder.
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