Dyche’s similarity to Clough more than just an impression
Burnley’s manager is a fine mimic of the Forest legend but – like his former mentor – he knows the value of how his work is seen by other clubs
Sean Dyche can do a very fine impersonation of Brian Clough when the mood takes him, forefinger in the air and always that famous salutation, “Young man!” – which had the useful effect of expressing warmth while also putting its subject firmly in his place.
The Burnley manager speaks in a kind of awe about Clough and his ability to project his personality right across the game in an age when there were only three channels on a television set. Dyche was an apprentice and young professional in the last days of Clough’s Nottingham Forest era, sometimes on the team bus, occasionally able to catch a pre-match team talk drifting through a half-open door into the corridor where the young ones would crane to hear.
When Burnley got to fourth place in the Premier League on Tuesday night with their 10th 1-0 win of 2017 on a
£27 million wage budget,
Dyche was fulfilling the dream of every club owner. It was a version of what Mauricio Pochettino has given Tottenham Hotspur over the past few years, a Premier League lifehack that defies the old rule that insisted only a supercharged investment changes the status of a club.
The question is how far it carries Burnley and then how far it carries Dyche himself, a lot more sophisticated a manager than the old perception of him as simply a former lower-league centre-half with a general disregard for the benefit of a post-match Strepsil. Although he is going nowhere for now, there is no doubt that Dyche’s name and suitability is being discussed at a range of Premier League clubs, all of them planning for their perpetually uncertain futures.
Those clubs will be asking themselves whether Dyche can one day do the same for them, whether the methods that he has refined in five years at Burnley are transferable to another club and another set of pressures. It is not enough these days for a young manager to be successful on his own terms – he has to meet the exact specifications of whatever project has been conceived.
Just as Burnley is often cited as the perfect fit for Dyche, he will be aware that the next one is likely to demand him to bend to its demands.
It could be said that Dyche runs Burnley, or at least his opinion is sought on just about every part of the operation. For instance, even with their recent success, they have not courted publicity like a non-league chairman on FA Cup third-round day because the manager is of the view that if the likes of Arsenal or Liverpool do not behave that way, there is no need for Burnley to seek a pat on the head.
He runs the recruitment with the help of chief scout Martin Hodge and a trusted band of advisers whom he calls upon for opinions, including his former manager John Duncan, who led Chesterfield to the FA Cup semi-finals in 1997 while they were in what is now League One.
Dyche pre-dated Duncan at the club and when the latter first took over in 1993, took a long time to believe in his new manager.
“We had a group that was just all right and he made it into something way beyond that,” said Dyche recently about his time under Duncan. “At first, I thought, ‘We’re average,’ and then later I thought, ‘We’re a good side.’ I marvelled at that. I saw that there was a skill to that.”
Dyche has done the same at Burnley, developing Tom Heaton, Michael Keane and Jack Cork into England internationals and playing a key role in two more, Danny Ings and Kieran Trippier, who made their debuts having left the club. The next might yet be James Tarkowski, who had to wait for Keane’s departure to make his mark and, along with Ben Mee, could be the reason that Gareth Southgate has been at three of the club’s past four games. Dyche is also a manager who demands of his players a level of conditioning that has prompted many at the club to make a distinction between what they consider to be fit, and “Dyche-fit”. It has transformed Steven Defour’s career in the English game from the Belgian in a team of chiefly British and Irish players who was prone to being substituted around the hour mark, to a man who now regularly plays 90 minutes.
This has proved transformative, and a young English manager has taken the club farther than they can have ever expected on one of the league’s smallest budgets. Yet when the Everton and Leicester City jobs came up this season, no one made Dyche an offer he could not refuse. That is not to say that one or both did not make discreet inquiries, but none pursued Dyche with the single-mindedness that, for example, Everton once did Ronald Koeman.
It may yet be a legacy of what happened to the single most overachieving British manager of the previous decade, David Moyes, a man whose drive and attention to detail kept an impecunious Everton relevant against much wealthier opposition. His subsequent struggles at Manchester United and beyond have made some more reluctant to trust the relative success of coaches as a guide to how they might do on a bigger stage.