Knowledge is power and Unai Emery is the gold standard of managerial nous. Gerrard would do well to follow his example STAN COLLYMORE
WHAT Unai Emery has done since arriving at Aston Villa in October is unbelievable.
As a Villa fan, I’m always a bit cautious when managers come in because you want them to be a success, but I’ve seen so many come and go.
I thought Paul Lambert was going to do really well, I thought it was ridiculous giving Tim Sherwood the job and I was very sceptical about Steven Gerrard getting it.
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When Steve Bruce got it, I just shrugged, while Dean Smith was great for what we needed – promotion – because he was one of our own.
So it has been an emotional rollercoaster for many of us, one we’ve been on for a decade now since Martin O’neill left. No one really knew what to expect when Emery got the job, either, because we knew he’d gone back to Spain and done well again after Arsenal.
But he’d still been a cartoon character the last time he’d been in England, what with the ‘Good ebening’ memes and all.
That may well happen again when he eventually leaves Villa because that’s the way it tends to go for managers.
In fact, the only way it won’t is if they’re a Champions League team when he does go and he’s leaving to take charge of, say, Real Madrid. We’ll see. But what we do know is that coming in to a team that is languishing in 15th and taking them to sixth in 20 games, setting a record by scoring in each of those games, is quite the feat and a reward for the positive football he wants to play.
He is making players better whereas his predecessor Steven Gerrard made them worse.
And what Gerrard has to do now is go away and work out what it was in his style that made certain players shrink.
In fact, Emery is showing not just Gerrard, but Frank Lampard, John
Terry, Ashley Cole, Scott Parker and all that the best thing they can do to become the managers they want to be is to go away and do their knowledge to the point they can’t do any more.
They need to go to Belgium, manage the Burundi national team for a spell, get to a point where they are up to their necks in badges.
Emery is making players better where his predecessor Steven Gerrard made them worse
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They need to go to Spain and shadow the coaches at Real Betis, Real Valladolid, doing it all off their own backs and under the radar so that no one knows what they are doing until they are armed to their teeth with ability.
In fact, if I was Gerrard, I’d be going back to Villa’s chief exec Christian Purslow and saying, ‘Look, I left on
Spurs players reimbursing fans who travelled to Newcastle last worry less about paying supporters back and more about paying
good terms, I know the players well, could I bring a notebook and shadow Unai for five or six weeks, talk to him about his methods? I’m not here as a former manager wanting his job back, I’m just here to learn so I can go on and add those things to my own career’.
If Gerrard and Lampard don’t do these things, then I’m afraid they are finished.
Clearly, there are differences in what Sean Dyche and Emery are doing at Everton and Villa to what Lampard and Gerrard did at those two clubs.
Which clearly means that Lampard and Gerrard are defective in something.
However, it doesn’t mean they have to be permanently that way, just that
they need to go on their own learning journey to try to get to their own level. For the big names, just turning up and being themselves isn’t enough any more.
And when you have a guy, who was almost a Mr Bean figure when he was last here, coming into Villa and sparking such a turnaround, it certainly serves as a big warning for all English coaches.
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What it says is that they have to get out there across Europe and do their knowledge to even be on a par with these guys.
Credit to Emery for the amazing job he’s doing.
weekend was a nice but empty gesture. Fans don’t want refunded tickets, they want performances. The club needs to people at the club to discharge their duties properly, starting with someone who can run the club from top to bottom.