Everton, Leeds and Burnley in fight for Premier League survival

LONDON: One is an American in his first few months in English soccer. Another is an interim coach thrust unexpectedly into his first experience of top-flight management.

The other was not long ago an elite player vying for the biggest trophies in the game.

The men leading the three clubs - Leeds, Burnley and Everton - who are engaged in a tense fight to avoid relegation from the Premier League are far from the typical managers English teams would once default to in a crisis.

Like Sam Allardyce or Tony Pulis. Beenthere-and-done-that managers in their 60s, with decades of top-flight experience, and a supposed ability to organize a defense and eke out enough points to keep a team up.

Instead, the boardrooms of struggling Premier League teams have bucked the trend.

Take Burnley, for example. Less than a month ago, the club’s American ownership made the surprising move to fire Sean Dyche, the longestserving manager in the league and a man whose pragmatic approach defined the team. He wasn’t replaced by someone renowned as being a survival specialist - or a “firefighter,” as they are sometimes termed - but instead Mike Jackson, who had been coaching Burnley’s under-23 team for the previous nine months and had very short stints as a manager in the lower leagues in 2014 and 2020.

Jackson has changed Burnley’s style of play, with a more atacking mindset bringing three wins and a draw from five games and a shot at survival.

Then there’s Leeds, which brought in American coach Jesse Marsch in February following the tough decision to let go of a popular manager in Marcelo Bielsa, who had brought the team back into the Premier League ater a 16-year absence and, like Dyche, had established a unique approach that stopped working.

Marsch’s preferred style - atacking and heavy-pressing, having been embedded in the Red Bull project for the last seven years in roles at New York, Salzburg and Leipzig - didn’t seem to chime with what was needed at Leeds in a likely relegation scrap.

What Marsch has actually done is tighten up at the back, even if a series of defensive mistakes contributed to a 2-1 loss at Arsenal on Sunday to drop the team into the botom three.