CLEMENT’S CRIME? BEING BRITISH

ON January 3, when Paul Clement was appointed manager, Swansea were bottom of the Premier League. So were Hull City, on January 5, the day they recruited Marco Silva. Clement was Swansea’s third manager of the season, not including caretakers, and he got one good break. On the day he took charge, a Swansea team picked and managed by Alan Curtis won 2-1 at Crystal Palace. So Swansea actually had 15 points by the time Clement took his first game. Even so, in steering Swansea to safety he has averaged 1.35 points per match; from 0.75 before. Silva has also done a decent job at Hull. Even so, he could not prevent their relegation yesterday averaging 1.23 points in his 17 games in charge. Paul Merson wasn’t right to dismiss him, but he wasn’t entirely wrong that a British coach could have done as well. Would Gary Rowett have kept Hull up, for instance? We will never know. Yet while Silva has been linked with jobs at Southampton, Watford, West Ham — even Arsenal — Clement is tipped to take over at, well, nowhere. He was previously assistant manager at Real Madrid, Bayern Munich and Paris Saint-Germain after Carlo Ancelotti worked with him at Chelsea and rated him highly. Yet now he’s a Swansea man. That’s his level. See if he can keep them up next year, too. And the year after. And when they finally get bored with him, or he slips up, he’ll just be another failed British manager. Useless, aren’t they? That’s why they never get the top jobs. That’s why they never get to work at Olympiacos or Sporting Lisbon. They’re just not sophisticated like Silva. And we return to Sam Allardyce’s old chestnut. If he was Paulo Clemente, do you think he might have got a better offer this summer?