Legacy of a top boss can be hard to handle for those who follow
RED
THE PASSING of Joe Kinnear last Sunday was desperately sad.
Like so many footballers of his generation, Joe ended up with dementia.
It’s something that needs to be seriously addressed.
Back in the day with Ireland, Joe and I hit it off from the start. It wasn’t hard, in fairness. Joe was full of life and a joy to be around.
Later on, we worked together on the bid to move Wimbledon to Dublin. It wasn’t to be.
He worked wonders at that club but he had a host of different jobs in football — all over the world.
Back in February 2004, Joe was announced as the new Nottingham Forest manager.
Joe wasn’t Brian Clough’s successor.
There were six other managers between Clough and him.
But one of Joe’s first moves was to take down photographs of Clough from the walls of the stadium.
It was a reminder that iconic managers cast a long shadow.
Joe certainly didn’t lack for confidence or self-belief but every Forest manager was being compared to Clough.
That wasn’t going to help whoever sat in the hotseat.
I watched the thrilling 3-3 draw between Real Madrid and Manchester City on Tuesday and it got me thinking about Carlo Ancelotti.
Greatest
To me, he’s comfortably one of the greatest managers of all time.
To do what he has done at AC Milan, Chelsea, Bayern Munich and Real Madrid is incredible. Ancelotti won manager of the year awards in Italy, Spain and France.
That’s some going.
But it didn’t really happen for him at Everton. Maybe some managers are just suited to massive jobs with great expectations.
When you succeed a top manager at a big club, expectations are always very high. Fans have nearly been spoilt by success.
There are certain things, though, that are very hard to replicate.
The chemistry between players and manager is always a big part of the mix.
The relationship with the fans matters too.
Look at the way Jurgen Klopp cultivated that at Liverpool.
A new man comes in and, straightaway, there’s a bit of distance — because of the newness — between him and the players and fans.
In the Liverpool case, an entire new coaching staff will be in place next season as well.
David Moyes has done a fine job at West Ham and he did an exceptional one over a long period at Everton.
But he didn’t even last a full season at Manchester United.
Was Moyes beaten down by the pressure of being in charge of such a massive club?
After all, there is a statue of Matt Busby outside Old Trafford and one of the stands is named after Alex Ferguson.
So, every day he went to the ground, Moyes was reminded that this is a massive club that expects great things.
Kevin Moran is fond of telling a story about Ferguson’s early days at Old Trafford, a yarn that makes it clear that Ferguson knew he wasn’t in Kansas anymore.
United was his fifth job in management when Ferguson succeeded Ron Atkinson on November 6, 1986.
He’d done wonderfully well at Aberdeen, in particular, winning nine trophies including the European Cup Winners’ Cup, beating Real Madrid in the 1983 final.
Group
A few months before taking the reins at United, Ferguson had been in charge of Scotland at the World Cup in Mexico.
They didn’t get out of that year’s Group of Death, managing just a single point in a group with West Germany, Uruguay and Denmark.
There had been controversy with Ferguson’s squad selection after he omitted Liverpool’s Alan Hansen, regarded as one of the best centre-halves in Europe.
Kenny Dalglish, the thenLiverpool player-manager, announced that a knee problem meant he couldn’t go to Mexico.
But speculation was rife that Dalglish had the hump over Hansen’s omission.
Maybe a seed for a future bitter rivalry between Ferguson and Dalglis summer.
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