The type of football Sam Allardyce’s teams play may not always be particularly edifying but he has, once again, dragged one out of the mire to ensure their English Premier League status and in doing so once again stimulated the debate about the shortage of homegrown managers in that competition.
The Sunderland manager’s view is that more needs to be done to ‘protect’ English managers at a time when he is one of only three in their current top flight, along with Alan Pardew and Eddie Howe.
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Pardew’s Crystal Palace were almost dragged into the relegation zone and Howe’s gutsy little Bournemouth, who had to break the financial fair play rules to get into the Premier League, finished closer still to the drop, while with Scotsmen Alex Neill (Norwich City) and Eric Black (Aston Villa) at two of the three relegated clubs and Tony Pulis’s West Brom immediately above the trio of clubs managed by Englishmen, only his fellow Welshman Mark Hughes, among the seven British bosses in Britain’s top football competition, oversaw a team that ended the season in the top half, his Stoke City side finishing ninth.
What almost ended up becoming a separate competition among the sides in the bottom third of the table perhaps goes some way towards justifying club owners’ apparent view of British managers, but whatever the rights and wrongs– and it is worth noting that as recently as five years ago there were no fewer than seven Scots managing teams in that competition - there is a stark contrast with the situation in Scotland.
Just a couple of days before the latest airing of that debate it had been interesting to be at Lennoxtown for Ronny Deila’s final pre-match press briefing and, following Mixu Paatelainen’s sacking the previous week, get the out-going take of the last manager from outside the UK in our top division.
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The Norwegian’s football nous may have been questionable, but there were encouraging signs that he was attempting to champion cultural change that is long overdue in terms of the broader mindset of Scottish sport and Paul Le Guen’s on the following observations made a decade after his ill-fated Rangers reign, might be telling.
“I think it’s important to think that every player and manager coming into this country has a good purpose,” said Deila.
“They want to do something to help the country and help the club and it’s very, very tough because you go out of your comfort zone. Everything is unknown to you, so you have to look more after them than you look to your own and if you’re going to succeed with foreign players and managers you have to have a network around them.”
The difference is, of course, that to learn from overseas, as English football has done in the 20 years since then newcomer Arsene Wenger and Ruud Gullit were the only non-British managers in the Premier League at the end of the 1996-97 season, Scottish clubs can only afford those who are either far less experienced and/or in possession of lesser reputations than their counterparts south of the border.
It seems little coincidence that as the management balance has shifted in England so the number of British players in that top competition has diminished. However as Allardyce bemoaned the way that highly qualified English managers are overlooked so, not least in the wake of the example set by Claudio Rainieri and Leicester City, the opportunity that lies in such adversity appeared ever greater for the Scottish clubs, managers and players, if they can introduce the sort of attitude to collective responsibility that Deila, initially at least, appeared to be setting out to install at Celtic.
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If, in technical terms, Scotland’s coach development system is as good as we are repeatedly told it is and in the absence of evidence of the introduction of something catastrophic into the Scottish gene pool since the days when the great Liverpool, Manchester United, Leeds United and, indeed, Celtic, Rangers, Aberdeen and Dundee United teams were built around Scottish players and managers, we need to look elsewhere to establish the failings that have seen our game left behind. With stories relating to his players boozing having undermined the Deila project it is ever more clear that Scottish lifestyle as a whole is at the root of the problem which is worth pointing out again just as the Scottish Government has its latest go at sorting out its priorities.
Driven individuals, most notably the Murray brothers, may have risen above it, but the excuses made for failings in our highest profile team sports ran out long ago.
Deila was by no means the first incomer to recognise that, but the changes will have to come from within with Scottish football taking a lead and working with the whole sporting community, before we become properly receptive to the sort of methods and attitudes he and others have looked to introduce.
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