Tramp the dirt down

12 October 2012 - England 5 San Marino 0

So Gareth Southgate isn’t sure what San Marino are for.

It’s desperately, desperately hard not to start this with the obvious rejoinder.  I won’t; I’ll leave any passing Middlesbrough fans to make the connection.  But Southgate’s attitude typifies that of most of the pundits during yesterday’s England game, and indeed much of the Twitter reaction.  That this game was a waste of time for England, a formality to be frowned through and ultimately completed like some football equivalent of a tedious work social.  And that San Marino basically had no right to be involved.  They shouldn’t be playing England.  How dare they.  They should keep below stairs and play Liechtenstein, the Faroes and Andorra on permanent repeat.

I’ve got a kneejerk negative reaction to this point because it’s one that makes its proponent into a footballing Andrew Mitchell, advising the “plebs” that they’d “best know their place”.  And like most, I’ve a soft spot for the plucky underdog.  But I think there’s a more reasoned reaction than the immediately visceral.

The argument seems to be that we should shut the “lesser” European nations,  hill-states, islands, principalities etc into their own little competition in which they could have their own little wins and not bother the big boys.  OK, perhaps there could be some kind of playoff between the weakest elite teams and the best of the minnows, but otherwise let’s shut them out.  They’ve proved over the years that they don’t deserve to be in top-level international competition.

I find this a very troubling argument.  To start with, where do you draw the line, and why?  In order for this proposal to make any difference, you’d need a good number of teams in the second tier.  So as well as the ones I’ve mentioned you’d want maybe another half-dozen at least. 

My concern is that inclusion in this group would hold nations back.  Perhaps there’d be a small positive effect for the fostering of, if not a winning mentality, at least a not-getting-thumped mentality in the teams from genuinely tiny places.  But this would be badly outweighed by the damage this could do to football development in some countries.

If we’d been selecting a group like this in the 1970s, for instance, then surely Turkey, beaten 8-0 by England twice in that decade, would be amongst the obvious choices.  But Turkey didn’t spend the next 35 years getting beaten 8-0.  They kept at it.  They kept playing the big nations and their results steadily improved.  Their players were spotted by the wealthy clubs who improved their standard by giving them elite training.  They qualified for Euro ’96, they lost every game, they came back to the Euros in four years, they got to the quarter-finals.  Then in 2002 they finished third in the World Cup, only ultimate winners Brazil able to knock them out.

Turkey simply wouldn’t have made that progress on the thin-gruel diet we seem to be proposing for minor nations.  They needed solids, and they learnt to keep them down.  Nations like Latvia, Estonia, Slovenia have all made genuine progress over the years.  All might have been contenders for the minor league in the 1990s.  All have made a good case for being considered “proper” football nations in the 21^st century.  None would have found 5-0 victories over San Marino particularly useful for doing so.  Indeed, a paradox is that our pundits despair that “we learnt nothing” from that game.  Yet they seem to believe that the least developed countries should gain the poorest education.

I know that most other confederations have a qualification system of (at least) two tiers.  Most other confederations, though, have issues that Europe doesn’t – size being one.  At just 10m square kilometres, Europe is a third the size of Africa, a fifth the size of Asia (once Australia is included, as for qualification purposes it is).  Most other continents simply aren’t as well-off as Europe, either, and their football associations certainly aren’t.  A few local trips per year probably seems a great deal more manageable for the FA of Burkina Faso, for instance, or Bangladesh.

The existence of two-tier qualification elsewhere, though, is handy in that it proves a case study of the lack of diversity it can cause.  At every World Cup we see the usual suspects from North America, from Africa, from Asia.  The US.  Mexico.  Nigeria.  Cameroon.  Iran.  Japan.  It’s incredibly difficult for bottom-tier countries to break through.  Of course in part this is a factor of these confederations being given so few qualification slots – but Europe’s panoply hasn’t meant an easy ride for the likes of Holland, England, Portugal or Russia, all of whom have missed World Cups in the last 20 years or so.

(South America, of course, has open qualification, everyone plays everyone.  And since 1994 only Venezuela from that continent haven’t made a World Cup.  They’re getting close this year and may well make Brazil 2014.) 

It’s a snobbish, backward, reactionary argument.  It arrogantly assumes that the rich will always get richer and the poor poorer, and seeks to entrench this even further.  This is of course the way of football since time immemorial – or “1992” as Sky Sports would have it – but in a world of Champions Leagues, parachute payments, and all the other ways football seeks to push gaps further and further open, let’s please keep this one little glimmer of egalitarianism alive.

If not for the England national team, at least for Davide Gualtieri.

 

15 September 2012: Bristol City 3 Blackburn Rovers 5

First of all I want to be really clear that what follows isn’t supposed to be an excuse, or special pleading of some kind.  Abject defending aside I don’t feel that City’s performance on Saturday needs excusing – we took on an ex-Premier League side packed with players who’ve spent their entire careers at a higher level, a side that won at Old Trafford last season for God’s sake, and we nearasdammit matched them.  3-3 come the 90^th minute is something to be proud of, let alone the fact that we were equal partners in the best game played anywhere in the country this weekend.  I’ve never been less broken-up by defeat, and it was a long way from the sort of turgid half-game which we were losing on the hour, every hour 12 months ago, and which inspired this blog in the first place.  So no: nothing needs excusing.  Nothing needs apologising for.

But I do want to look at the makeup of our team, and that of the team we played.  Our lot consisted of a group of players who nearly dropped out of this division last year, augmented by freebies, cheapies (Ross insists we paid Manchester City £25,000 for Greg Cunningham – however much truth there is in that, it won’t have been a stellar figure) and one “expensive” player, Sam Baldock, we were only able to sign by writing off what West Ham still owed us for Maynard.

Blackburn Rovers, however, were playing top-flight football just a few months ago.  No, they weren’t playing it particularly well, and yes, they’ve lost Yakubu, N’Zonzi and Hoilett since then.  But they’ve also strengthened significantly – in fact, they’re the first relegated team in ages whose post-demotion first XI, on paper, looks better than their pre-demotion side.

So this weekend they fielded a front two of £8m Jordan Rhodes and  Nuno Gomes, who will have been on Champions League money at Benfica and isn’t likely to have taken a vast paycut purely for the chance to visit Blackburn Cathedral.   In midfield we saw Danny Murphy and Dickson Etuhu playing, and playing well – another pair who will have been on significant wages, this time with Fulham, and are unlikely to have seen them more than decimated for the love of the industrial north-west. (More terrace gossip, in fact, had it that Murphy is on £50k per week.)

It’s not just about who they brought in, of course, but with vastly reduced income they’re still paying for ex-England keeper Paul Robinson, once-coveted winger Morten Gamst Pederson, and Gael Givet – originally picked up from Monaco with, no doubt, a salary package to match.  Let’s assume (against all available evidence) that Blackburn are a remotely well-run club so had relegation reductions written into their players’ contracts – they’ll still be receiving well above the average for the division, and certainly more than we’re paying Cole Skuse or Richard Foster.

So the fact that they beat us isn’t that surprising.  Etuhu and Murphy were the midfield partnership in the 2010 Europa League Final, for God’s sake; their form hasn’t collapsed totally in the intervening months and they’re clearly still Premier League quality.  Etuhu in particular put in one of the best centre-midfield performances I’ve ever seen at the gate.  Equally, Jordan Rhodes is one of the best strikers I’ve seen of late, and there’s no shame in him scoring twice against us.  The fact that we came so close, and that I’d say our full-backs and wingers were on balance better than theirs, is a source of pride, as I’ve said.

The wider point is how this happens; how a team relegated in crisis doesn’t feel it needs to cut its cloth as dramatically as a team – us – starting another season in the same division.  We’re always being told how insanely valuable the Championship play-off final is, so why don’t teams relegated from the top tier act as though they’ve lost the £90m West Ham are reputed to have gained by getting there?

Of course, the answer is that they’re receiving parachute payments.  £48m of them over four years, to be precise.  Which is lovely for them.  And how altruistic of the Premier League clubs to give such a princely sum to a fallen member of their number!  Obviously they get a terrible rap.  They’re not as greedy as we’ve been led to believe.

Nonsense, of course; in fact, the top clubs are demonstrating yet again that rather than being a league of any kind, they’re just a squalid little cartel.  Not content with cutting themselves off from the 72 clubs they were originally affiliated with in order to keep a larger share of the money, they’ve voted to make it more difficult for any club outside the original elite to gain entry, supporting their former members financially to aid their return.  Aware that any of them could be next, they boost the chances of the few at the expense of the many.

Since they’re legally part of an entirely different entity to the Football League, it’s hard to see what the moral justification for poking about in its affairs is.  Sorry; this isn’t the Premier League’s competition to interfere with, and if the Football League had any balls at all they’d make refusing to accept these payments a condition of entry.

Football being the joy that it is, Football League teams have stubbornly refused to roll over, and a steady stream of newbies have continued to join the Premier League and even to thrive there.  The top clubs’ reaction to this, of course, has been to increase the level of the payments, presumably only planning to stop when the lower-league upstarts are kept down by the crippling weight of tenners on their broken shoulders.

I know.  Football having an uneven playing field is nothing new, and it’s a theme I keep returning to.  But there’s another aspect to this which ought to be at least as troubling.  The justification for the payments appears to be that clubs in the top flight have far more money coming in, make commitments of a commensurate nature and therefore need to be helped to meet those commitments on relegation or risk going bust.

The problem with this argument is that it encourages exactly the sort of wild spending that’s got the likes of Portsmouth in so much trouble.  Football clubs just keep going.  Give them money, they’ll do what Blackburn have done, and what Portsmouth did, and spend it.  In fact, they’ll spend more – Jordan Rhodes alone will have eaten up more than half of Blackburn’s payment this season.  It gives them a higher credit card limit, and they’ll max it out and then apply for half-a-dozen payday loans to deal with the interest.  Blackburn aren’t prudently using the payments to keep body and soul together while transitioning to an affordable squad, they’re spending them on building a new Premier League-worthy side.  One suspects that this is because they know that, if they don’t go back up, £48m won’t be remotely enough, they’ll go the way of a Pompey side  whose payments didn’t, in the end, do them much good.  They’re stuck.  Like anyone who chooses a maňana, maňana lifestyle they’re desperately hoping that tomorrow never comes.  They daren’t wake up stuck in the Championship or they’ll be in terrible trouble.

The game’s custodians should be trying to dissuade clubs from this sort of absurd gamble, not put in place mechanisms to make it easier to get away with it.  Sadly, while the vast wealth gap between the top divisions exists, clubs will speculate to accumulate – look at the debts Cardiff have run up going for promotion, and they were never in the elite to start with.  Everything is set up to create motivation for profligacy or recklessness.  All the talk may be of prudence, and FFP, but the very structure of the game militates totally against it.

Get rid of the payments.  Encourage teams to save as well as spend, encourage anyone remotely in danger of relegation to build a side they can afford next season whatever happens.  Don’t provide these mad incentives for failure.  And for God’s sake, if you have to have an uncompetitive, predictable top flight, at least keep your grubby fingers out of our Football League before it goes just the same way.

2012/13 - A season preview of sorts

I really like football.

There we are.  I said it.  I’m out.  I’m a football fan who actually likes football.  And I think we should be more prepared to say so.

There’s absolutely no question in my mind that we follow the greatest game on Earth.  It’s played everywhere, by everyone, in front of an audience of everyone else.  It’s not niche, it doesn’t require a horse or a boat or even a bike to play.  It’s egalitarian, and as such many of the players are from deprived backgrounds; the kind of backgrounds where a crippling lack of social mobility gives very few options.  But a game that can be played on your own walking down the road with a can of coke and a garden gate is a game that’s properly democratised.

And if the lowest possible level of the game is immensely satisfying, the absolute elite level can transfix like nothing else on Earth.  The way Lionel Messi, Andres Iniesta, Cristiano Ronaldo, Mesut Ozil, and co play the game, it has a combination of speed, technique, athleticism, collective brilliance, individual endeavour and balls-out excitement that you’d need to synthesise the best of an entire Olympic games to match.

Oh, sorry, was that a bit controversial?  Well, fine.  If I’m overtly kicking against the current countervailing sporting narrative – that the Olympics has taught football a thing or two – I’m doing it consciously, and I’m certainly not trying to paper over anything.

Because it’s impossible to love what I think of as pure football without acknowledging that there’s a deeply unpleasant side.  That the players can conduct themselves appallingly, as we’ve seen throughout a year that’s been pretty poor for the game’s wider reputation.  That the people at the top of the game can behave appallingly, whether that’s shilling for a 39^th game played abroad or stealing Cardiff City’s identity away from its working-class fanbase on a whim brought to life by a windfall.  That in order to follow football  properly now you have to know about things like Creditors Voluntary Agreements, the minutiae of European employment law, and the difference between a decision taken beyond reasonable doubt and one taken on the balance of probabilities.  I don’t want to call this stuff a distraction, because it’s too important to be diminished in that way.  But it’s become part of the fabric of the game and it’s made football a lot harder to unselfconsciously love.

And yes the Olympics was magnificent.  Yes, it’s hard not to fall for the likes of Farah, Ennis and Wiggins, not to prefer them as national ambassadors to Rooney, Terry and Ashley Cole.  But let’s not forget that the week before the Olympics we were thinking, rightly, about Games lanes taking London’s infrastructure away from its citizens, about a private company making volunteers sleep under bridges, and about the potential to be thrown out of the stadium for wearing a T-shirt with Pepsi on it.

Football has the same problem that anything brilliant, popular and successful has.  It’s homogenized, corporatised, marketed.  The first-hand experience is taken away from the public and sold back to them piecemeal.  A tiny minority make all the money and everyone else is exploited, the lumpenproletariat with their Sky subscriptions paying everyone else to take it further and further from the community experience it should be. But this isn’t unique to football.  This is how capitalism works, and the most popular sport on Earth will always be the one that most vividly demonstrates the system’s major iniquities.

It’s naive to suggest that there’s something inherently wrong about one sport and inherently right about all the others. Naive, too, to suggest that one set of contestants are genetically worse than another. Football’s wealth and power encourages an insular community, a closed shop with its own rules, but one that’s under minute scrutiny at all times.  No other sport on Earth is like this.  Our Olympians don’t have that structure around them so of course they’re more accessible; they aren’t used to adulation so of course they’re more genuinely bowled over when it comes along.  If running, or canoe slalom, or dressage had the same exposure and the same money riding on it, you bet it would develop the same personality crisis as football.  The same cause would create the same symptoms.

And if football was played out of the spotlight, for lower stakes, emerging only at times when it’s easy for the nation to get together, then you’d have... well, then you’d have something very similar to women’s football, I’d say.  A game played in a better, more Corinthian spirit (the Corinthians themselves were amateurs, of course) – although as the stakes raise in that game it naturally becomes more like the men’s.  I’d never seen a female football player do the ubiquitous “that was a dive” ref gesture until the USA-Canada Olympic semi-final this year.

Let’s not pay too much attention to the commentators decrying the players’ absent morals until their newspapers and TV stations stop making money by setting them up, buying stories, printing and broadcasting salacious, demeaning crap.  Let’s not pretend that the narrative our media gatekeepers draw up is anything other than part of the problem, that setting up a protagonist only to watch them fall hasn’t been part of storytelling since Homer.  Let’s ask questions.  Let’s not accept the dichotomies that are set up for us.

And let’s enjoy the football this season.  Yes, we’ll probably have to do it uncomfortably, against a background of whatever unpleasantness Richard Scudamore, Dato Chan Tien Ghee, Sepp Blatter and co have cooked up for us now.  Yes, sometimes we’ll feel demeaned by being party to it.  Sometimes we’ll want to stop.

But let’s not forget that the thing at the centre of this late-capitalist perfect storm of greed and avarice is still one of the greatest things human beings have come together to do.

And let’s try not to be worrying about relegation by April, City.  That too.

9th April 2012: Bristol City 3 Coventry City 1

So a second win in two days.  48 hours which had felt like the pivot on which the entire season would turn.  One game live on TV, one game played in front of our first home sell-out in years. At the most crucial possible point in the season, when the stakes were at their highest, after one win in 13 games, we did this.

How?

Ask ten City fans and you might well get ten answers; I’m going with Derek McInnes’ use of the squad.  We’ve known for a long time that the squad is too big, overloaded in certain areas and causing decent, expensive, players to be left out every week.   Over this weekend, McInnes triumphantly converted this deficiency into a major plus, rotating, resting, involving a total of 17 players.  The 17^th of them to appear, Yannick Bolasie, had to wait until the 82^nd minute of the second game for his chance and scored within a minute.

It was a masterpiece of squad use.  Not simply because it meant that over that weekend the right players were picked at the right time for the right game – although of course that was important as well.  What selecting such a good proportion of the squad for such crucial games does is make it clear to every player that they’re involved in the fight.  They’ve got a stake in the team’s fate.  It’s not a question of a defined starting 11 and then such players as the manager deigns to bring in when one of the superstars is missing.  Everyone has responsibility.  Everyone has a part to play.  And staying up, if we do so, will be a team effort.

It’s easy to win as a team; the other side of the adage, losing as a team, is harder, and recovering from defeats is very often what sets champions apart from contenders.  The fact is however that it’s impossible to lose in any other way – OK, Sylvian Distin might have conceded possession to Luis Suarez in this weekend’s Cup semi-final astonishingly cheaply, but that incident alone didn’t cost Everton the game. They lost it because of their timidity and overall poor play, allowing Liverpool to put pressure on defenders in the top third until the breakthrough came.  That Distin was culpable for the specific breakthrough was immaterial; the team was culpable for the fact that there was a breakthrough at all.

This all goes back to my argument that you can’t pick out a single incident in a game and say “that’s where we lost” apart from in very unusual circumstances. The weakest team on the day nearly always loses.  It’s very rare for a superior team with a superior team ethic but a single weak link to lose, just as a single superstar can’t win anything alone.  This, by the way, is why it’s madness to use winning a World Cup as any sort of yardstick to measure Lionel Messi against the other greats of football history.  Not just because such a calculation elevates Kleberson above Cruyff, but because this isn’t tennis or the 100 metres.  Teams win things.  Maradona was part of a fine group in 1986 – Ruggeri, Valdano, Burruchaga and all – and it’s a trite, but no less accurate, observation that Pele’s 1970 Brazil side was one of the greatest in football history.  When somebody can turn the impressive raw Argentinean materials into a cohesive unit, perhaps Messi will win the World Cup, but that won’t change how wonderful he is.  His contribution as part of one of the greatest units in history, Barcelona, has already amply demonstrated that.

It’s interesting that the Championship currently contains the antithesis of all this in the form of Doncaster. A place where as every cameo’ing star, once a Premier League player now a newly-minted journeyman, comes in, a hard-working stalwart of Donnie’s successful Championship past drops out.  Where’s the motivation to play well if you can be chucked out of the team as soon as Willie McKay’s phone rings?  And what stake do players there only to put themselves in the shop window have in Doncaster’s survival?

I guess “very little” must be the answer to both of those questions because Doncaster went down without the smallest cry.  There’s a cliché about the size of the fight in the dog being more important than the size of the dog in the fight, and while it’s easy to sneer at simplistic, unquantifiable measures of performance like “passion”, “desire” and “wanting it” there’s no denying the importance of determination and morale in a battle at either end of the table.  Doncaster had their heart ripped out; McInnes got his transfusions right and ours continues beating.

31 March 2012: Bristol City 1 Derby County 1

A relatively action-free 1-1 draw sees us drop into the relegation zone.  Another poor performance. Another turgid afternoon at Ashton Gate.  I’m going to do the only thing I can under the circumstances.

I’m going to defend the club’s hiring policy.

Before I start, I want to be completely clear about what I’m doing.  I’m not, as such, defending the manager (it’s pretty standard that managers at the bottom of the table get unfair criticism – he was barracked at the weekend for making a very smart substitution – but a lot is also fair, and it’s reasonable to ask why we don’t get the level of performance we got against Southampton and Burnley in his honeymoon period any more).  Neither am I defending the Board, who have also come in for a great deal of criticism.  I am saying, however, that whatever happens this season and whatever happens to Derek McInnes, he was exactly the sort of manager the club should have appointed.

(I might extend that argument into a defence of Keith Millen and – why not? – Brian Tinnion’s appointments as well.  I’m a perverse sod and I’m in the mood.)

We’ve been “between managers” more often than most clubs in the past few seasons so I’ve become very familiar with the arguments rehearsed about which type of manager to appoint.  For the sake of wordcount I’ll oversimplify these types to just two: the pro and the tyro.

The pro has been there, seen it all, done it all.  Has he managed in this division?  Has he managed in this division?  Only for 700 games, son, and four hundred in the top flight as well.  He’s probably a man of the old school, he’s got a play-off victory and/or a League Cup final under his belt, and he probably left his old club under somewhat disappointing circumstances.  After Millen left, a lot of people wanted Dave Jones to be offered the job and he sums up the “pro” perfectly.

The tyro is a good fifteen years the pro’s junior and he’s quite probably never managed at this level before.  Either a very decent player or never a player at all, he’s got his own set of tactical plans, his own views on how the game should be played and around a hundred pretty successful games as manager under his belt.  His credentials at this level are very limited but he’s on very good terms with his current club.  Derek McInnes clearly falls into the “tyro” category.

For all the differences, there’s one major similarity as well.  Neither the pro nor the tyro comes with any sort of guarantee.  And City fans should know that more than most.  A lot of us liked Keith Millen as a person and really wanted him to succeed, but as full-time manager he never really convinced, and is now a failed tyro looking for a second chance.  But we were more excited when Steve Coppell, the pro of pros, was hired.  Surely nothing could go wrong; surely this was as close to a sure thing as you get in Championship football?

Two games, a lot of money out the door and six goals conceded later, he was gone, and the ship has been sinking ever since.

It’s typically City to try two approaches and fail with both, but I think it’s to the club’s credit that (unlike the British-foreign-British-foreign 180 degree turns performed by those who hire the England manager) after Millen was rightly dismissed the hiring policy didn’t change.  We hired once more based on promise rather than achievement.  Damn rightly.

Let’s take a look at the top of the Championship, shall we?  Nigel Adkins’ Southampton and Brian McDermott’s Reading are starting to pull away from Sam Allardyce’s sputtering West Ham.  Allardcye falls pretty squarely into my “pro” category with McDermott being a clear “tyro”.  Adkins isn’t quite either – he left Championship Scunthorpe to manage then-League One Southampton, but he clearly saw it as an upwards move, rightly seeing his chances of success in the medium-term as greater with the South Coast outfit.  It’s the same calculation Simon Grayson made when leaving Blackpool for Leeds, except Adkins has pulled it off with more success.  So I think he counts as a “tyro” too, success with a smaller club getting him the chance with a bigger one.  (This by the way is where I mention that I quite vocally wanted him at City after Gary Johnson left.  If only I’d been on Twitter back then.)

Southampton are well-bankrolled, but they’re still essentially using the side that got them out of League One – West Ham have a squad of Premier League players recently garnished with Ricardo Vaz Te and our own Nicky Maynard, at reasonable expense.  Reading have a lot of money now, but of late have been working on the same budget as many mid-rate Champions League teams, and lost both Matt Mills and Shane Long in the summer.  What those two clubs are doing to stay ahead of the big boys is tremendously impressive.

Let’s look at the Premier League.  Yes, that old pro Alex Ferguson looks like he’s going to take the title (although if I was really cheeky I’d claim that he was a tyro when brought in from Aberdeen, and since he’s at the same club it’s another result for the tyro camp) but the two managers who’ve taken the most plaudits are Brendan Rogers and Paul Lambert, neither of whom have ever managed at this level before and both of whom were appointed on the back of success with lower-league clubs.  QPR, who came up with the others and have been managed over the season by two pros in Neil Warnock and Mark Hughes, are doing considerably less well and may be back in the Championship next year.  You might even use Newcastle to back up the argument here – Pardew’s the least tyro-like of the lot but he’s still managing a considerably bigger club than his previous employers (Southampton, funnily enough) could claim to be.

Of course you can accuse me of cherry-picking examples and of course that would be fair – it’s not escaped my attention that around us in the relegation battle are Michael Appleton’s Portsmouth, Dean Saunders’ Doncaster and Andy Thorn’s Coventry;  tyro-led clubs all.  But while I’m clear that a tyro-only hiring policy certainly doesn’t guarantee success, when it works, when the right man is attached to the right club, the results can quite clearly be spectacular.  Barcelona, managed by the most successful tyro in world football right now, might agree – they’re certainly coming out on top regularly against Real Madrid, whose manager’s returns seem to diminish as he moves from tyro to pro.

The hiring of Derek McInnes was a great example of the club getting in someone who looked as though he was about to do something impressive, on the basis that it would be nice if we were the club which benefitted from it for once.  (It’s exactly the opposite of our worst managerial hiring decision in years, overlooking David Moyes in favour of Tony Pulis.)  Even Keith Millen was on paper a decent shout.  He’d done well in caretaker charge and the chairman clearly saw something promising in him.  It didn’t work – they don’t always – but the principle was more than OK.  Even Brian Tinnion, whose appointment baffled me at the time and who was an unmitigated failure as boss, makes a tiny bit of sense in this light.  His replacement Gary Johnson, our most successful boss in decades, may have been long in the tooth to be a tyro but he was on the upward trajectory that characterises the type.

Steve Coppell, then, was the exception, and while debate will rage about how much his tenure is affecting us now the man’s spell was pretty much a disaster for the club.  The tyro policy is, I think, the right one, and should McInnes not last the year (although I hope he does, whatever league he has to rebuild in; he needs his own summer and his own chance) then I’d be quite happy to see his replacement be a young star or a promising, to coin a phrase, Conference manager.