The sack was once the last resort, now it’s the first...
IT COULD have been him. Sitting 17th in the table, on the back of a home defeat by Bournemouth and with one league win since August 19, Mark Hughes will be grateful not to have the same employment status as Ronald Koeman this morning.
‘People can press buttons to get rid of good people,’ said Hughes, ‘people who have proven themselves over a decent period. They bow to the immediate thinking, rather than looking at the quality you have.’
He’s right. If Stoke did sack Hughes, who are the board going to get who would represent a mighty leap forward. Carlo Ancelotti? Roberto Mancini? This is Stoke. They’re a good club, they’re a well-supported club, a capably run club — but they are not part of the elite. Thankfully, for Hughes, those in charge know their limitations.
Peter Coates has not become delusional since Leicester’s title win. He knows what his club is about. It would be very easy to burn through managers at Stoke, to have panicked this season after five defeats in six matches. Yet Coates seems to have a rather sensible, old school attitude.
Who out there is better for his club than Hughes? Seriously, who? In all likelihood, it would be another Hughes-type. An honest British coach who has had some good years and some bad years, because that’s what happens down the league. If Stoke could attract a famous name it would only be because that coach had messed up somewhere bigger.
In reality, that is how they got Hughes, considering he was once at Manchester City. Koeman might take the Stoke job now; but he wouldn’t at the time he left Southampton.
There will always be appealing left-field options. David Wagner at Huddersfield certainly has cachet after Saturday. Yet he would still be taking on Stoke. Some ordinary players. Some logistical limitations. He could have a fine season and then a disappointing one, because that is what happens unless you get the keys to Old Trafford.
Aitor Karanka looked very good at Middlesbrough, and then he didn’t, and was sacked. Such inconsistency comes with the territory. Wagner could still end up in a relegation battle at Huddersfield. If not this season, then the next. Does it make him a bad manager? No, it makes him Huddersfield’s manager.
So Coates knows what he has in Hughes. A manager who will play in a more entertaining way than his predecessor Tony Pulis, who can attract bigger names through his foreign connections, but not a revolutionary. Hughes isn’t radically different from Pulis and, let’s face it, his eventual successor won’t be greatly different from him. That is why the constant
clamour to sack managers makes little sense.
How many genuine revolutions do we see? Even the success stories are limited by the size and potential of the club. Marco Silva did well at Hull, but they still went down. Craig Shakespeare had a decent impact at Leicester but it didn’t last long. Paul Clement kept Swansea up, but nobody can guarantee they will be safe this year.
Sacking the manager was once the last resort. Now it’s the first, as Koeman is the latest to discover. Three of the teams in the bottom seven have ditched their manager, and we are not a quarter of the way through the season.
A club like Burnley that was relegated and kept faith with Sean Dyche is exceptional. Usually, owners do not wait that long. In the last five completed seasons, 10 of the 15 relegated clubs had already sacked the manager before going down. Two of those 10 were on the third incumbent for the season when they dropped, and two of the five bosses who survived left that summer. It did not used to be like that. Relegation was an occupational hazard at a small club, not the death knell for all involved.
West Ham went down in 1978. On the last day of the season they needed to beat Liverpool to be sure of staying up. It wasn’t a bad West Ham side, either — Trevor Brooking, Frank Lampard Snr, Alvin Martin, Billy Bonds, Alan Devonshire on the bench.
In front of a season-best crowd — gates locked long before kickoff — they lost 2-0. Wolves beat Manchester United, meaning it was as good as over. Yet on the terraces, in the stands, it never occurred that the manager should be sacked. The players came back out to the centre circle to thank the fans for their support and received a warm reception.
John Lyall was the manager, and would be next season, without question. He had won the FA Cup in 1975 and reached the European Cup-Winners’ Cup final in 1976. Who were West Ham going to get that was better?
Now, Claudio Ranieri can pull off the greatest feat in the history of English football at Leicester, and it isn’t even good for another year. Frank de Boer gets five games to turn the philosophy at Crystal Palace on its head.
Owners will cite the money at stake when a club falls out of the league, but that’s a poor excuse. There isn’t the same money in the Football League but owners are just as trigger happy. Oldham have burned through 23 managers, including caretakers, to stay in the same division, the third tier, for 20 years. ONE
newspaper’s take on Ipswich’s home defeat on Sunday was: ‘Norwich put heat on McCarthy.’ A graphic showed Ipswich’s league position on August 19 — second — and their 11th place now. Yet who thought Ipswich were going to sustain that start?
They have spent a fraction of the budget of most rivals in a league that is more competitive than ever, with so many big clubs vying for two guaranteed promotion places. Even 11th might be overachievement for Ipswich — yet somehow Mick McCarthy is under pressure for sitting mid-table.
That isn’t about the money, is it? Unless Ipswich’s owners think they deserve Premier League largesse for low-level Championship investment.
And it wasn’t about money at Burnley in 2015, either. Mike Garlick, Burnley’s chairman, will appreciate the Premier League loot, but he also appreciated that he wasn’t going to get better than Dyche — and if he couldn’t keep Burnley up, well, neither could a lot of people.
So Garlick and his board remained loyal and were rewarded with promotion, consolidation and an excellent start to this season. Dyche is now one of the names being linked with the Everton job — an irony considering he would almost certainly have been jettisoned three seasons ago had Everton’s owners controlled Burnley.
What Garlick gets, what Coates understands, is that without a significant upgrade, changing the manager is a shallow solution. Sack Hughes and appoint another just like him.
Bournemouth aren’t in the bottom three because Eddie Howe has suddenly forgotten how to coach. They are struggling because they’re Bournemouth and in a league with so many ambitious, wealthy clubs, sometimes this will happen. Say Leicester, having ditched Shakespeare, attract Dyche. Is it so unthinkable that there could be a season when they are once again fighting relegation? Of course not, it goes with the territory. Just as it does at the majority of clubs around the bottom.
When Lyall took West Ham down, it was their first relegation season in 46 years. The same club now has to rewind to 2011 to find the last time they went down, yet relegation is seen as a bigger calamity than it has ever been, and Slaven Bilic looks haunted on the touchline.
More than the money, the thin skins in the boardroom and unrealistic expectations beyond have created this climate. Instant gratification, red-button votes, in, in, in, out, out, out. There were 37,448 at Upton Park that day in 1978 and had they turned on Lyall, it would have made quite a racket.
Yet that is nothing compared to the noise owners imagine from the tens of thousands on social media, even if it includes many who might not ever visit the stadium or, in some cases, the country.
So Hughes is lucky that, at Stoke, his chairman chooses to tune this cacophony out. No doubt he’s had a miserable few months and it might not get any easier. But Coates knows what he’s got and, more importantly, what he could get, too. Not Carlo Ancelotti, that’s for sure.