How Do Dortmund’s Reserves Manage When We Can’t?

At the end of last season, when Everton’s revival from the nether regions of the Premier League to eighth-place was rounded off with a defeat at West Ham, the owners, board and the fans didn’t want Big Sam Allardyce in charge any longer. They wanted more, better, different; another manager, basically.

They already hounded Marco Silva – Watford’s then manager – until he got his P45, but shortly after handing one of those to Allardyce, they finally got their man and were rewarded for their persistence and his patience. On Saturday, defeat on the South Coast at Southampton pushed Silva’s team into the bottom half of the Premier League.

Yesterday he was bemoaning the lack of spending, compared to the summer of Koeman in 2017 and saying that the club’s aim was to do better than last season – when they underachieved in both league position and perhaps more pertinently, in their style of play.

But what if the owners, board and fans don’t think that’s enough? What if they don’t improve? What then? Someone else, maybe?

The current trend is to go to Germany, or more specifically the reserve team pitches of Borussia Dortmund. Three managers have taken that track to English football now that David Wagner has been succeeded by Jan Siewart at Huddersfield, with Daniel Farke already pulling up trees at Norwich; it’s not unfeasible those two will pass each other in May.

The German model makes sense. Look no further than the top of the English Premier League and the impact of another ex-Dortmund employee, Jurgen Klopp. Southampton have gone a similar way too and suddenly, Germany feels like the new Italy, or Spain after that, as the place to go for top coaches.

But what’s happening to the British ones?

Did Everton’s tolerance of Big Sam (until he’d secured their top-tier status) and similarly, West Ham’s of David Moyes herald the end of an era? Has the old-style British manager had their day?

Football clubs are nothing if not followers of fashion. They want something more modern these days, and there is also no denying that times have changed. The Premier League’s emergence coincided with two of the longest and most celebrated managerial reigns in English football but the likes of Sir Alex and Arsene Wenger are unlikely to be seen again. No clubs, not even the ones they managed, are prepared to give anyone that much time and even if they did, their success was based on an all-controlling hand that just doesn’t work with today’s high-profile owners and the new generation of players that are less likely to take notice of them and are more ‘me before club before country’ than ever before.

It’s not to say the well is completely dry. Eddie Howe and Sean Dyche (both appointed in October 2012) are proving that the homegrown and long-term approach can pay off, as is Chris Hughton. Roy Hodgson has shown that you can save a team and keep your job. And even though it’s less fashionable with managers and coaches from overseas, even Mauricio Pochettino and Klopp are already beyond the three-year itch that usually accounts for Jose Mourinho.

Giving a manager time is one thing, but not panicking at the first sight of a winless run is important too. To be fair, Burnley didn’t blink when their early season form failed to tally with their seventh-place last time out, but then the manager had more than enough credit in the bank, and you suspect that Howe and Hughton would cash in too, if they needed to.

It’s lower down the leagues where it gets more brutal. Any club that holds their nerve when they get into a rut are in the minority. Hats off to Bristol City and to a lesser extent, Hull and QPR, for having a bit of faith this season. Others hire and fire at will. Nottingham Forest, my local club, had Brian Clough managing them for eighteen years. They’ve had 33 (yes, I had to count again and it does admittedly include some who were caretaker and others who did it more than once, but still….) since he stood down in 1993.

They aren’t alone, not even in their own city. Notts County seem to get rid any manager whose team loses possession.

But getting the right man in charge of the club’s first XI is not an exact science. Watford have proved that a non-home-grown and short-term approach can be equally effective.

What is clear is that the old guard, not exactly dinosaurs but the British managers whose names crop up time and again, are finding it harder to re-establish themselves at the top table. Some, like Alan Pardew and Mark Hughes, might struggle to get a job in the Premier League again while others have dropped down to find a new level in The Championship.

Steve Bruce, no stranger to the managerial-merry-go-round is one who always manages to re-emerge before too long at his speciality club type, the sleeping giant of sorts.  It’s currently working at Sheffield Wednesday and he’s not even there yet (he’s recovering from knee surgery). That’s another quirk of the managerial pot-luck in England; how can he be getting more of a tune out of the Wednesday players whilst absent than the previous manager could while he was at the training ground day after day.

Maybe it is neither experience or youth that’s a factor but new methodology. Bruce’s managing from afar is quite unique but not as much as the tactics employed by wily Marcelo Bielsa, at his clubs, and in the spotlight now he’s taken Leeds to the top of the second-tier.

As well as watching opponents in over fifty previous matches (yeah), he also likes to know as much as he can about the opposition’s players; such as how they take corners and what are they eating in the training ground canteen?  Fail to prepare, prepare to fail, as they say.

On the other side of the 6’ wire-fence that’s been cut by pliers, is Frank Lampard, the manager cut from the ‘recently retired, ex-Premier League superstar and England international’ cloth. He’s lucky in that he can start fairly high up the pyramid and have access to half of Chelsea’s U-23 team, but up in Scotland, Steven Gerrard is making a good fist of his first job too and finally giving Celtic a run for their money.

In the lower reaches of the 72, Sol Campbell has got the manager’s job he craved – if maybe not at the club he craved – and is winning games with Macclesfield while it’s reported that Paul Scholes is in talks about taking the hot seat (I’m contractually obliged to use at least half a dozen management clichés in this piece) at Oldham.

Joey Barton, a little less illustrious but no less hard-working is also starting nearer the bottom than the top and in the fourth-tier, leaders Lincoln City went to the non-league (where they were at the time) and a school teacher in Danny Cowley – showing that extensive league experience isn’t a pre-requisite and proving Stan Collymore’s theory that ‘unless you’ve played the game, you aren’t in a position to talk about it’ isn’t necessarily true.

One of the hardest ways to go about it, in my opinion, is to turn to a former player. It’s a hazardous a route for both parties as that special bond and mercurial status are put at tremendous risk. Forest’s 33BC (beyond Clough) is the prodigal son, Martin O’Neill; he of two European Cup winners’ medals in a ten-year career during Old Big ‘Ed’s reign.

It’s dodgy ground. As Stuart Pearce found out, hero worship as a player only gets you so far before you deemed as clueless as the last incumbent. Get it right though, and you can become a God. Wally Downes, Darren Moore, Neil Harris (ridiculously the longest-serving Championship manager and he’s not yet reached four years) and Steve Lovell are all proving or disproving that right now.

Even my own club, Walsall, brought in legend Dean Keates (two promotions rather than European Cups) to placate restless fans and he’s quickly discovered that past glories give you an extra few months at most. But then our previous manager went from Whitney to Whit-less and far more horrifically vile names – despite being at the club for fifteen years – when results went downhill.

It’s a sentimental risk that can pay off handsomely but is always only three or four successive defeats from turning sour. Ole Gunnar Solskjaer be warned. Which brings me to the penultimate type of appointment. The fan.

Villa are still in transition with lifelong supporter, Dean Smith in charge (they’ve also got an ex-player helping him so they’re spreading the risk) but it’s working well at Sheffield United with Chris Wilder.

As fans, they are ideally placed to know what it means to those paying for tickets, but even if they make decent managers, fans rarely make good recruiters.

Ipswich fans, doing ‘a Charlton’, decided that they didn’t want to spend season after season in the Championship with Mick McCarthy steadying the ship so got shut of him. And it’s worked; their seventeen-year spell in the division will soon be over. And I bet the tight git never paid for fans to go to away games either.

Every time a manager is sacked, a club has that difficult decision on where to go next. Do they promote from within? Pluck someone from a lower league or if they are in real trouble, do they go for the fire fighter?

Big Sam, ‘Mad Dog’ Martin Allen – every league and division has them when it gets tough and everything, and everyone else, you try has gone to shit.

But as Chesterfield have found out, you have to wait until the latest possible moment to get maximum effect. That’s usually that point when there is just enough time to avoid relegation and too little time for the fans to realise quite how bad the football is.

But you can always get rid of them in the summer and start again, right?

words Darren Young, D3D4 columnist