LOOK AT LEAGUE BOSSES IF YOU WANT NEW BLOOD

MILLWALL have the second lowest spend on players of any club in the Championship this season, just £800,000, and currently sit a point outside the play-offs. What a job Neil Harris has done. The same can be said of Chris Wilder at Sheffield United, whose squad cost £5.9million, making it the sixth cheapest. It is not only Neil Warnock who has worked wonders in that league this season. Preston may be 10th, but they are three points off the play-off places, with a budget for players that would leave them in the relegation zone — just £2.1m. Yet when the scramble begins for new managers in the summer, would any of the Premier League clubs even cast a sideways glance to the competition below and acknowledge the work being done there? Harris has a special bond with Millwall and that may be where he is most effective — but no one with a squad worth less than £1m gets to the brink of the Premier League without being able to coach. Harris took over a team doomed to relegation to League One. He led the club back to the Championship in his first season and they haven’t lost a league game since visiting Norwich on January 1. Every Championship form guide, over six, eight or 10 matches, has Millwall in the top three. British managers often complain about absence of opportunity caused by foreign appointments, but that hasn’t been the case this season. Sam Allardyce, David Moyes, Roy Hodgson, Alan Pardew, Paul Lambert and Mark Hughes have all landed Premier League jobs, mostly at good clubs that are doing poorly, but have potential if they can survive. Yet where are the opportunities for the young British managers like Harris or Wilder? If anything, they are being blocked, not by interlopers from leagues abroad, but by the lack of imagination of owners here, reliant on a short-list of the tried and trusted, if not always successful. Hughes went straight from almost taking Stoke down to doing the same at Southampton. Pardew left Crystal Palace in the cart and now West Brom, too. Some of the changes achieved the desired bounce, but not all and little radical has occurred. Largely, the experienced firefighter takes his club back to basics, abandons loftier ambitions and focuses on survival. Young players are sacrificed, defences are tightened up, draws are celebrated, gambles not taken. Meanwhile, a league below, Harris is beating a Hull team that cost £61.9m more and it barely registers. Unless he takes Millwall into the Premier League against all odds, how is a young manager of promise to get recognised? Pardew left West Brom in a dismal state this week and, with relegation as good as assured, it appears the club will wait until the summer for his replacement. One name from the Championship has already been linked. A good manager, who has done well on a low budget of £4.2m. Yet Mick McCarthy will be 60 next February. He has over-performed consistently at Ipswich to little understanding and, if funds remain as they are, the club will have more chance of going down without him next season. But why is McCarthy instinctively considered a better bet than Harris or Wilder? Management is often described as a merry-goround, but how does a coach without Premier League experience get on? Would anyone have taken a chance on Eddie Howe in the top division had he not got there himself with Bournemouth? Maybe that’s what Harris will have to do. Get Millwall promoted on £800,000. He would deserve a knighthood for that, not a crack at Stoke.