Time to admit it Sam... If anyone is blocking our best young managers it’s you!
IN the depths of David Unsworth’s post Southampton despair his old boss tried to lift him with a bit of career advice.
If Everton don’t appoint you then why not “earn your stripes” as a manager in the Championship “and then get yourself prepared for the big job?” suggested David Moyes before pointing out most of today’s young British coaches “don’t want to put themselves out and take a job because if this doesn’t work then they’re done”.
Moyes (right) was, of course, bigging-up his own CV. Reminding us how he landed the Everton job 15 years ago, when Bill Kenwright sacked the woeful Walter Smith and took a risk on his 38-year-old self who was earning rave reports with lowly Preston.
What Moyes didn’t list is the number of young managers plucked from the Championship by a Premier League side since. Indeed, how many young British coaches who prove themselves in the Premier League have landed “the big job”?
Maybe because you can count them on the fingers of an accident prone steel cutter.
With Everton and West Brom handing juicy contracts to Sam Allardyce and Alan Pardew, four of the five topflight appointments this season went to Brits with an average age of 61 and 21 Premier League jobs between them (the others being Moyes and Roy Hodgson). Add Mike Phelan and Craig Shakespeare last season and eight of the past 15 jobs went to British coaches aged 54 to 70. Yet only last month, Allardyce drew sympathetic nods from Richard Keys and Andy Gray in a Qatar TV studio with this self-pitying nonsense about the persecuted minority that is the British boss: “You’re almost deemed second class because it’s your country. It’s a real shame that we’re highly-educated, highly talented coaches now with nowhere to go. The Premier League is the foreign league in England now.” Really, Sam?
The truth is, it is elderly British managers, who are never off TV couches alongside their ex-pro chums, forming a collective appreciation of their genius, who are the biggest obstacle to young native coaches.
In the risk-averse, survival obsessed Premier League boardrooms, no one wants to take a punt on an Eddie Howe or a Sean Dyche, let alone a David Unsworth (left, bottom) were he to drop into the Championship and work wonders, when they can go for someone with a higher profile, who’s been round the relegation block a few times and will vow to knock underperforming players into shape and keep them in the Land of Plenty for another year.
So, please, let’s hear no more from the likes of Paul Merson about foreign geezers taking all the plum jobs and strangling the chances of young British coaches. Please, Allardyce, admit if anyone is making young managers second-class citizens in their own county it’s the likes of you.
If anyone is exploiting the obscene amount of money in the Premier League and clubs’ fears of missing out, it’s geezers like Big Sam, Pards, Roy and Moyesey demanding big bonuses to keep teams up as well as long contracts, ensuring if they fail there will be even bigger payday. Then another job.
Tony Pulis for Swansea by Christmas, anyone?