This is Howe we can reclaim Sgt Wilko’s glory days
AS the constant reliving of 1966 testifies, anniversaries in English football tend mainly to embarrass.
This week we’re marking 25 years since Howard Wilkinson’s Leeds United won the title, or rather we’re mourning the fact that no English coach has got close to doing that since.
For those with memories long enough to recall four English managers (Bob Paisley, Brian Clough, Tony Barton and Joe Fagan) winning seven European Cups in eight years, that damning statistic feels like the opening line of a World Wildlife Fund appeal to save an endangered species.
Especially when you consider that today only five Englishmen have full-time managerial jobs in the Premier League, while of the Bundesliga’s 18 bosses, 13 are German-born.
Which is why, as Antonio Conte becomes the fourth Italian in eight years to manage the English champions, BBC Radio 5 live devoted a show to the question, “Will an English coach ever win the Premier League?”
It doesn’t look promising, but there are a couple of signs in Sean Dyche and Eddie Howe that the English manager should not yet be assigned dodo status.
On a wage bill of £33million (or £8m less than Manchester United paid Paul Pogba’s agent), Dyche (below right) is the first manager to keep Burnley in the top flight since 1975. A remarkable achievement at a small club, who only won promotion last season.
Howe continues to amaze. There’s a stat which shows that, in two spells at Bournemouth, he’s lifted them more places in the Football League than there are teams (43 positions in his first spell, and 54 places in this one, after they had declined in his absence).
But will either get the chance to manage a top-six club? Harry Redknapp (natch) thinks not. He told the BBC that soon every Premier League club will have foreign owners who have “heard of famous managers from abroad and they go and give them a job. Our lads never get a chance.”
Which brings us to another anniversary. Four months since Paul Merson ranted on Sky about Hull replacing Mike Phelan with Marco Silva: “What does he know about Hull? What does he know about the Premier League?” said the man who lasted three months in charge of Walsall.
Silva proved he knew more about
getting Premier League points than Phelan, Merse.
And Liverpool’s owners FSG proved foreigners are prepared to give a young British coach a shot at winning the title, Harry. Which Brendan Rodgers almost managed.
There are many reasons why the Premier League is dominated by foreign managers but the main ones are that our system doesn’t produce enough technicallyproficient coaches and our clubs have the money to hire ready-made, top-level experience from abroad. The way forward is not to blame our own paucity of talent on Europeans coming over here, but to ask why we need to hire them.
Why not pump some of those TV billions into a mass coaching programme, getting ex-players working full-time with kids from an early age? Why not encourage our coaches to work abroad, learning different systems and languages so that, like Paul Clement, their CVs have the same sophistication as the foreign competition?
In the meantime, let’s hope that 39-year-old Howe (far left) gets a top-six job which inspires other young English coaches.
Or that Steven Gerrard makes a rapid rise through the coaching ranks and inspires other retiring legends to choose a tracksuit over a TV pundit’s suit.
Let’s believe an English coach will win the title again, and the sooner we pull our heads out of the sand and stop blaming Johnny Foreigner for all of our ills, the sooner that day will come.