If Deila thinks he’s got it bad, he should try being in Gary Neville’s shoes!
GARY NEVILLE reflected on his first job in club management. ‘Whatever happens in this next five months, people will want to put the word failure or success at the end of this,’ he said. ‘But I will put the words experience and lessons at the end of it, I think.’
And good luck with that. For while it was most certainly an experience when the seventh Barcelona goal went in at the Nou Camp on Wednesday, and while there are certainly lessons to be learned from the most sobering experience of his brief coaching career, Neville is unlikely to avoid the black and white judgment he clearly finds so gauche.
There is a moment when football stops being an exercise in theory, and it has been reached at Valencia. The club weren’t doing well when Neville arrived, but they weren’t doing as badly as they are now, and the alarming nature of the slump makes it unhealthy to continue with unquantifiable means of assessment.
Experience? Lessons? Neville is merely considering his own career with those evaluations. Valencia must work with other means of measurement. Points. Position. Aggregate score. This is the reality of football, and it makes the difference between success and failure rather more obvious.
At the moment, Neville is failing. He is failing because his team have not won a league game while he has been manager, and have just suffered their worst defeat in 23 years, and their worst in the Copa del Rey in 88 years. They are failing because Valencia were eighth when Neville took charge and are now 12th.
They are failing because Valencia have now lost their first league game at home since 2014 — and to Sporting Gijon, who are 16th, a point off the relegation places. They are failing because when Neville arrived Valencia were well-positioned enough for him to speak of qualifying for next season’s Champions League — and now the team are five points from relegation.
And, of course, t here are mitigating circumstances. There are always explanations for failure, and many stretch far beyond the remit of the manager. Squads are poorly balanced, investment is random, injury lists are debilitating. Valencia can’t get two strikers fit and have bought with the clarity of every struggling club. Yet that does not change the fact that games against Rayo Vallecano, Real Sociedad, Getafe and Gijon would all be considered winnable, and Valencia haven’t won any of them.
And while this is bad news for Neville, it i s not particularly encouraging for English football, either.
England, and t he Football Association, has a lot invested in Neville. He i s Roy Hodgson’s assistant and, some feel, potentially his successor. Neville plays this down, but if Hodgson remains England manager after t he European Championship — with the bar, as ever, set so low he can barely fail to clear it — then the FA will not need to make an appointment until after the 2018 World Cup.
By which time, it is to be hoped, Neville will have served his apprenticeship.
So to have stage one of that learning process go so grotesquely wrong really isn’t in the script. As much as he is an admired voice in the game, there will be no great appetite for an England coach whose club experience was little short of traumatic. It is not only Neville who will wish for his time i n Spain to be j udged using incalculable methodology if this run continues.
And that is the FA policy. Since Hodgson has been in charge, there has been a movement away from traditional evaluations — results, tournament progress — into yet more theory.
England are the best prepared team at a World Cup, or have a training camp that is second to none. They want credit for the t hings a f ootball t eam are supposed to do; putting on a good session, getting the logistics right.
Alex Horne, the former general secretary, said that Hodgson had succeeded merely by qualifying for the 2014 World Cup, and Greg Dyke, the chairman, guaranteed his job within minutes of England’s exit after two games.
Expectations have been lowered to the extent it is now considered crass to set a target that can be specifically measured. ‘The idea of saying: “It has to be the semis, the quarters”, we’ve gone past that,’ said Neville recently, as if these current woolly overviews were the height of sophistication.
Yet, as he is finding at Valencia, the old rules hold true for many. Shipping seven goals at Barcelona, or going eight games without a win in La Liga, is regarded as failure. Neville can still have his experience but his hosts are entitled to be unimpressed.
This is not England. In Spain, they still keep score.