Liam Manning has squeezed an awful lot into a coaching career for a man of 36: academy coach at Ipswich, head of the Under-23s at West Ham, Director of Coaching at New York Red Bulls, head coach of Lommel SK, head coach of MK Dons. Different roles, different clubs, different countries, different football cultures.
But roughly the same results; this is a career played out in double speed. Manning got a three-year visa to work in New York, earned a promotion and was offered the head coach job in Belgium after 12 months. He took Lommel from bottom of the league to third in his first season. Having finished 19th and 13th in their last two seasons, Manning has MK Dons in third after eight months in charge. If they can beat Rotherham this weekend, they still have an outside shot of automatic promotion.
Unsurprisingly, Manning points out that rapid rises are almost always platformed by hard work. When starting out in his early 20s, full-time jobs were thin on the ground. He worked five nights a week and at weekends, coaching boys and girls teams for £2 a player, shadowing academy coaches and watching as much academy football as he could. He did his coaching badges and then his UEFA licences. He read and he studied and he planned potential coaching sessions.
Moving between clubs and countries, particularly before you have established yourself as a household name in your field, strikes as an incredibly risky move. It only takes one job to go wrong, one bad experience, and you might drop off the radar a little and set yourself back years. Manning sees it differently.
More from Football
Chelsea are about to morph into Man Utd, suffering in the shadow of Middle Eastern wealth04 March, 2022
From Tuchel’s future to potential investors, the key questions answered on Chelsea takeover04 March, 2022
Teams on patrol and tanks in stadiums, meet the Ukrainian footballers caught up in war04 March, 2022“I feel incredibly fortunate to work in this game and have a full-time job,” he tells i. “I work really hard and it’s stressful and there are plenty of challenges, but we should feel privileged. So when something like New York comes along, there’s a slight concern you might become a little ‘out of sight, out of mind’. But then there’s life experience and adventure while working in a high-profile organisation and the chance to improve myself as a coach.
“When you look at how diverse academies are, it has to be helpful to have some of that world experience yourself. I spent so many years at Ipswich that even coming to West Ham opened my eyes. Being brought up in a different area makes a player and a person different. In New York, I was working with so many different nationalities that it changed me as a coach, for the better.”
For such a young head coach, Manning does appear to have a clear philosophy for how his teams will play. MK Dons rank second for possession in League One and like to press intensely high up the pitch. One of the reasons Manning was so attracted to the job is that this matched the type of football they played under his predecessor Russell Martin. MK Dons also had a history of developing young players, fitting Manning’s expertise. Earlier this season, he picked a team for a League One fixture with an average age of just 22.6.
“It all takes a long time to come together,” he says. “As a youth coach you just copy. You copy sessions you remember from your own time as a player from mentors or coaches who resonated with me. I was 21 and in the first three to five years all I did was copy.
“And then you get your formal education and your informal education, which involves watching a lot of football and football training, listening to conversations, being challenged by people. When you go through that process you begin to sculpt your own philosophy of how to develop a player and how you think your teams should play. But that takes years, not months.”
Yet when I ask Manning about tactics, and what a Liam Manning team looks like, he moves away from that concept. Rather than a set style or a prescriptive way of instructing players to operate, the key lies in an empowerment of decision making. If the 1990s witnessed the fitness revolution and the 2000s the tactical revolution, perhaps now we have entered the era of individual autonomy that combines to create a team that thinks for itself.
“My biggest thing is players making good decisions,” Manning explains. “Decisions are often taken away from players because we are scared of them making mistakes. But we have to teach them to make the right decision in the right moment rather than having a set way of doing anything. If you teach them a possession-based game, say, and then a player makes a run into space but they are ignored because they have been taught to keep the ball, you have taken away their ability to make the right decision.
“And then look at it from a motivational point of view: having the empowerment to make decisions is such an important tool for players’ confidence. Underneath that you establish a psychological safety net, so that if they make a mistake trying the right thing, it’s ok. It’s not “just go and play football”; we have an incredibly clear framework. But within that there is freedom of expression.
“The game is an invasion game; every single time you play it and every situation within it looks slightly different. It is within those areas of grey that you have to problem solve. And that’s for them to do, not me. They might get it wrong sometimes, and that’s fine. Because then it’s our job to coach you to help you and get it right in future.”
Manning is clearly a football obsessive; his staff are the same. He uses a line about “working hard to relax”, which is both deliciously oxymoronic and yet perfectly describes the lot of a football manager. Having a young son gives him perspective of what really matters, but in the next beat he is describing waking up at 2am thinking about match plans and training. It is hard to switch off when you’re chasing perfection in a sport where perfection doesn’t exist.
But then you get the sense that Manning sees hard work, like the job itself, as a privilege rather than a challenge. Having never quite made it as an elite footballer, coaching has enabled him to stay in a game he loves and has already taken him further, quicker than he had envisaged. At every club he works at, a duty of care exists. Get that right and the only way is up.
“You have a responsibility when you join a club to leave it in a better place than when you found it,” he says. “We work incredibly hard for that. If we leave anything here, it’s leaving a culture in place that allows whoever comes next to appreciate what we did. There’s a lot of short-term thinking, but you have a duty of care to think of the long term. If you leave facilities, processes and the playing squad in a better place than when you started, that will always be appreciated by the fans and the community. They are the ones who matter most.”
from Football | News and analysis from the Premier League and beyond | iNews https://ift.tt/lBW9Xpk
Post a Comment