Too Good for the English Game

Ole Gunnar Solskjaer might look like the sort of man who would walk in on his wife in bed with another man and gently announce “I’ll take myself off to the pub then”.  Reaching past them both to grab his jacket before gingerly treading towards the door.  But this is of course a nonsense.  The devilment in Solskjaer was clear to see as far back as 02/03, when Fergie stuck him out on the right wing to piss Becks off.  Solskjaer enjoyed a glorious half-season kicking the bejesus out of premier league left-backs.  It was as though the track rabbit had pulled a 180 and started lamping the greyhounds.

He’s an easy target at the moment though is old Ole Gunnar, and not without some justification.  Along with Gareth Southgate, he holds one of the two great managerial offices of state in this country.  Yet neither had so much as an ounce of pedigree when they showed up on interview day.  Molde, Cardiff and Middlesboro?  Places you could well believe were twinned with each other, but breeding grounds for the United and England jobs?  “Never put in temporary charge a man who, four wins down the line, you don’t want public opinion to force you into giving the role full time”, you might think. 

And yet, when all said and done, for two seasons Solskjaer acquitted himself well.  After the face-down-in-the-water debacle of the Moyes regime, the weirdness of Van Gaal and the misery of Mourinho, Solskjaer was a ship-steadying force for good.  A 3^rd place finish in his first full season followed by 2^nd place last time around (above Klopp, above Chelsea).  This is about as good as any sane United fan could expect.

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There’s a touch of the Insulate Britains about Solskjaer’s reign at Old Trafford.  Initially dismissed as a bit of a clown, his sheer resolve gained admiration in some quarters while driving others to the brink.  Solskjaer’s had his hands glued to Sir Matt Busby Way for nearly 3 seasons now, and every time you thought some bloke in a Ford transit van was about to violently knock his block off, he pulls through with another three points out of absolutely nowhere.

United’s ability to come from behind under Solskjaer has been really quite something.  The saucy red comeback boys have won a scarcely credible nineteen times from losing positions during his three-year tenure.  In many respects, the fortitude is to be admired.  But, as the saying goes, the superior pilot uses his superior judgement to avoid situations that require the use of his superior skill.  There’s not much glamour in securing a two-goal lead in the first thirty minutes of a game and killing the game dead, but you don’t half look professional.

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Unfortunately, nothing grows in the garden of Old Trafford these days and the cheerful Norwegian now finds himself being wheeled towards the palliative ward.  Hopelessly trapped between expectations and reality.  Anything higher than fourth place an impossibility, anything lower a calamity.  A calamity with added farce if “Lazarus man” Moyes beats him to it.  Comprehensive defeats against Liverpool and Manchester City are one thing.  A firm spanking by relegation-threatened Watford quite another.

It’s happening Ole, this is Sinatra territory.  The bonus track.  All that’s left is how you want the legacy to be written.  A little advice?  Summon the spirit of 02/03 old boy, and that glorious springtime whacking lumps out of Ian Harte, Mauricio Taricco and Alessandro Pistone.  Put some keys in your hand and go out swinging.  Toss a ball at Jonathan Liew and demand he do ten keep-ups.  Go in two-footed on a Custis.  Ask Jonathan Wilson to tell you again that one about how your 30-goal a season striker is somehow the issue with United at the moment.  Maybe you haven’t been a roaring success, but you haven’t been quite the dismal failure they would dearly like to paint you as either.  Treated the same, Ferguson would have had hoods over heads and be driving out into the desert by now.  It’s not your fault that journalists literally can’t think of anything else to write about at this time of year.

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After that, well, it’s into the sunset isn’t it?  Back to being a club legend.  Relax and enjoy the wild ride of United’s decennium horribilis; see where it goes next.  Will United executives finally start making decisions with their heads rather than their hearts?  Or is Phil Neville just around the corner?  Nobody knows, but then that’s part of the fun of structural decline.  This century’s already eaten up Debenhams, Thomas Cook and Woolworths.  The giants of yesteryear trampled by the Amazons, the Apples and those pesky sovereign wealth funds.  The future used to mean hope.  But time passes.  Possibilities decrease, regrets mount.  Better the warm cloisters of nostalgia than face up to the reality that Solskjaer is really only a symptom and not the root cause of Manchester United’s continuing decay.

Being a professional footballer can’t be the most taxing life, can it?  Pick a colour for the leather interior of your Testarossa.  Watch Salt Bae bounce several ounces of salt off his forearm onto your dinner.  Ponder whether you’re going to skip the post-match handshake with Callum Robinson on Sunday.  The calm waters of being a supremely athletic youthful millionaire are rarely troubled.

Pity poor Marcus Rashford, then.  How easy is it to focus on passing drills when you’re mentally tethered to the 4.3 million children in Britain living below the poverty line?  What a burden.  Football might even seem a little insignificant by comparison.  And if that’s not enough, Rashford’s manager actually thinks he’s doing too much on the extra-curricular front.  Ole Gunnar wants less school-age dinners and more last minute winners.

“Marcus has done some remarkable and fantastic things,” Solskjaer told the press as Rashford returns from a shoulder operation, “… but now he maybe needs to prioritise his football”.  Oof.  That one hit harder than a Rashford tweet aimed at a Tory front-bencher.

In many respects, this was classic Fergie-inspired “concentrate on your football” rhetoric.  With Lee Sharpe, the job was to keep him out of the nightclubs.  With Eric, it was the away end.  With Rashford, it’s G7 summits.  Put that famished ten year old down, Marcus.

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It’s an interesting, if possibly unfair, point that Solskjaer is making.  The name Marcus Rashford certainly conjures up more on the social justice front than it does professional football at the moment.  But it’s equally thought provoking that, of the presumably many outside interests Solskjaer’s squad of players must surely have, this is the one that irks him.  Paul Pogba changes his hairstyle three times a day.  Cristiano Ronaldo’s life ambition is to star on the cover of Men’s Health every month.  Harry Maguire likes to holiday.  It’s hardly as though Rashford is skipping training to visit food banks.  What’s Ole particularly got against children sleeping on a full stomach?

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Chances are, being the masterclass tactician that Solskjaer is, the canny Norwegian recognises the deeper point for contemplation here; the Malthusian question emerging.  How good does Marcus Rashford have to be at football to help the most children?  The sheer scale of Rashford’s philanthropic endeavours depends to a very large extent on him continuing to have a successful top-flight career.  Playing for Manchester United adds seven figures of followers onto your social media account and provides a platform to change the world.  Some terrific charity work is undertaken in the lower leagues of English football, but the star striker of Macclesfield Town is unlikely to be granted an audience with Boris Johnson any time soon.

Imagine, then, the pressure on Rashford.  The stress.  Every below-par performance putting lives at risk.  Every missed chance a Findus crispy pancake that never makes it onto the dinner plate.  Football was never a matter of life and death regardless of whatever deluded nonsense ventured out of Bill Shankly’s mouth, but in Marcus’ case it just might be.

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The free school meals crusade certainly wasn’t a one-off gesture, that’s for sure.  Rashford is delving further into the world of social welfare, this time with a focus on getting more kids to read.  And while it’s, shall we say, interesting that someone so keen on literacy campaigning doesn’t seem to actually write any of his own social media posts, Rashford’s intentions are undoubtedly sincere.

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Maybe, for the best of everyone’s sake, Solskjaer is right to put up some boundaries on Rashford’s extra curricular activities.  “I” before “e”, but not on matchdays.  Relevancy is not a myth.  Divorce the sports star from the sport and you’re not left with much.  Kournikova taught us that.  And Attlee and Bevin didn’t have the distraction of midweek European games.

Mason Greenwood, Edinson Cavani, Jadon Sancho, Jesse Lingard, Anthony Martial and a certain Portuguese returnee are all competing with Rashford for places this year.  He needs to be focussed.  It’s impossible to say for sure how many packed lunches it would take for Ronaldo to forgive an over-hit through ball, but you suspect it’s a lot.  There’s only so many seats at the dinner table of the United starting XI and the reality, unseemly as it may be, is it’s performances on the pitch that will allow Rashford to have the greatest impact off it.

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If Pep Guardiola took over a Sunday league team, he’d lose his first game in charge 7-0.  He’d lose the second game 15-0 and call it progress.  What’s interesting is he might be right.

The inherited brilliance of his Barcelona and Bayern Munich teams concealed some important things about Pep Guardiola the football manager.  The first being just how bloody long it takes to grasp his system.  It took four years for John Stones to become a Guardiola player.  Gabriel Jesus might never get there.

There is no Plan B.  That’s abundantly clear.  The plan is the plan.  The ball is your daughter’s chastity.  The last vaccine in the care home.  It doesn’t matter if it’s bobbling and Liverpool’s front three are swarming all over you; find a pass.  It doesn’t matter if Jamie Vardy is charging full pelt and your self-assessment is overdue; find a pass.  Clear your lines and you’ll find yourself clearing your locker.

Other leeways will be granted.  It isn’t an enormous issue if you’re a defender that can’t actually defend, for instance.  Stick to the plan and you might never need to.  If you’re a midfielder, you don’t necessarily even need to be able to run.  And while it’s a bonus if the goalkeeper can stop shots, let’s just say Pep has more holistic plans in mind for you.  You can see now why Guardiola didn’t give club legend Joe Hart even a cursory ten games at the start of his reign to prove he was completely ill-equipped for the road ahead.  Dropping him at the outset was an act of mercy.

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Football used to be about space and finding the stuff.  Guardiola has collapsed this theory quite literally.  His players don’t spread out, they coalesce.  The temptation might be to think of Paul Scholes as a sort of archetypal Guardiola player, but those 35 yard cross-field balls of soaring beauty would have landed Scholes training with Benjamin Mendy and the reserves.  Sexless three metre passes are the order of the day; shorter if you can manage it.  Triple-A, risk-free balls to one of the two nearest options.  The exciting thing is this remains true even if you’re in your own crowded six yard box.

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I used to reflect on how hard City had to work to score a goal under Guardiola and compare it to how cheaply they gave them away, but I’m beginning to think this is just a necessary by-product.  When it goes wrong the Guardiola way, it blows up pretty quickly.  In his first year at Eastlands, when they finished 3rd, City were conceding the sort of goals that would catch cameramen out.  The footage would still be of a replay or a close-up when the ball hit the back of the net.  City would require a 47-pass move to equalise.  The same is still true today really, it’s just that City are managing to do an awful lot more of the latter than the former.

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I think you have to already be one of the best teams in the league to play the way Guardiola wants.  I really don’t think you get away with pushing your luck this far if you’re 16^th in the table.  Even at the Emirates, Mikel Arteta is steadily extricating Arsenal from the high table of English football trying to implement Pep’s ethos.  The Guardiola method is a finishing school for excellence rather than a general manual on how to play the game.  For most teams, it would be like a normal human trying to use an Olympic standard pole vault; it won’t work and you’re going to hurt yourself trying.

That’s not an issue for Guardiola though.  After a quick practice with the reserves, he started managerial life with Messi, Xavi and Iniesta.  He inherited a Bayern team that had just won the treble and his next move was to the Manchester branch of a sovereign wealth fund.  We’re unlikely to ever know what he’d do with Burnley.

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What is true is his Manchester City team are starting to look like the best side in Europe at the moment.  A sort of Mancunian Harlem Globetrotters who you feel are a fit De Bruyne and Aguero away from their best tilt at the big prize. 

In this system that requires the greatest level of nerve, the test will be how well Guardiola’s outfit handle the big occasions in Europe this year.  It will be interesting to see just how solid those six yard box rondos really are in the last 30 minutes of a big European final.  Mourinho-style pragmatism football is tailored to cope with this kind of pressure, alleviate it as best as possible.  By design, Guardiola’s system does not allow this luxury.  The players cannot put the burden down.  That’s not the plan.  They just have to learn to handle it.

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England goalkeeper Joe Hart was keen to meet the new gaffer and understand his plans.

For some reason, it’s a hard-wired rule of English football that pundits and co-commentators have to have played for one of the teams that are on the telly that day.  There’s no obvious logic for this – they’re either decent at the job or they’re not – but then there’s no obvious logic for the taxpayer paying Zoe Ball £1.3m a year.  Some things we just unthinkingly accept.

The cast is familiar at the top end.  Carragher for Liverpool, Gary Neville for United.  You might get a Crouch or a Hoddle for Spurs.  Obviously the well gets a bit shallow the further down you go, and eventually you find yourself taking them on trust that the man in the studio for the Burnley game is in fact Tom Heaton.

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I don’t know why this practice came about.  It’s not as though a player who played for a club 5-10 years ago has any special insight into the current team.  If they did, I suspect they wouldn’t be giving it away for free on Super Sunday.  Maybe TV executives think it will warm the hearts of supporters to see one of their “own” in the studio.  Either way, it’s a cruel fate that Manchester City get landed with Steve McManaman.

Always Steve McbloodyManaman.  Every single Champions League game for as long as I can remember.  For these precious years that City get to battle Europe’s elite, games are always played out to the backdrop of Steve McManaman, analysis escaping out of him like steam from an old kettle.

There are no positive associations between McManaman and Manchester City.  Even the press conference announcing his move to the club struck an oddly sour note.  McManaman’s nose was put out of joint by a line of questioning and he responded tersely, listing out all of the trophies he had won at Real Madrid.  McManaman concluded to his audience that he had nothing left to prove in the game.

Unfortunately for Manchester City, he was proven right.  McManaman played 35 games for the club and was shit in every one of them.  Didn’t score a single goal in two seasons.  Couldn’t run, didn’t look like he wanted to.  Just trousered one the best salaries at the club and then retired.  His ongoing relationship with Manchester City via the intermediary of BT Sport has now lasted many times longer than his actual direct association with the club.  Like the haunting spectre of a best forgotten ex-girlfriend becoming bezzies with your wife, he just won’t go away.

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I could have easily gotten over this by now.  Fifteen years of wishing Gary Neville would get swept away by the tide didn’t stop me swooning pretty much instantly once Red Nev took to the studio.  But McManaman’s just so bloody bad at this job too.  It’s as though the gears are jammed and he’s stuck in exasperation mode.  He’s never seen anything ordinary.  Listening to him observe a short corner is like a child describing Disney World.  I honestly thought the ball hitting the corner flag and staying in play against Olympique Marseille was going to tip him over the edge.  The acts of a game of football are rarely side-splittingly hilarious.  And yet, for reasons best known to himself, “Macca” chortles his way through ninety minutes plus stoppages like an ageing relative who’s just discovered memes.

Life isn’t fair sometimes, but you wonder if it has to be this unfair.  When a burglar defecates on one of your rugs, you’re left thinking what was wrong with just bagging up the iPads.  United don’t have Carlos Tevez co-commentating on their matches.  No-one’s inviting Sol Campbell into the studio for Tottenham games.  Why must City be singled out for such perverse suffering?

Indeed, it would be a bit less galling if Sky weren’t up to the exact same trick.  In a weirdly similar gambit, Sky have the temerity to wheel out Robbie Fowler as Manchester City’s “representative”; a man who also turned up at City overweight in 2003, several years past his best, was lazy beyond belief and picked up huge wages.  It’s as though television executives are on a bizarre but subtle crusade to highlight the mismanagement of the late-Bernstein era.

It all rather begs the question why we even have partisan pundits in the first place.  If the idea is that they’re lending us their expertise, surely they’re doing us a disservice if they strive for anything other than the strictest accuracy?  There’s no place for a misty-eyed retelling of the game.  Don’t flannel me with false positives if the truth is we were awful.  I need to know, man.  Gaslighting me into believing we deserved all three points isn’t doing me any favours.

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Hope springs eternal of course, and new blood may be just around the corner for City fans.  Fresh from a managerial stint at Fleetwood Town, there’s no way Joey Barton is going to swerve the allure of prime-time punditry.  And by crikey we’ll get some searingly honest analysis for our buck then.  Barton has never shied away from speaking the cold hard truth, even when the justice system isn’t compelling it from him.

That’s for the future, though.  Before he can light up our screens, Barton still needs to be extensively media-trained and, ideally, taught how to count to ten.  For the present, on those big European nights, we’re wedded to sharing the experience with Stevie Mac.  A tinnitus-inducing hinge on an old door, speculating excitedly about some of the more basic premises of the game.  Wide-eyed exclamations on a sport he’s supposed to be familiar with.  An expert, even.  Although, judging by his time at the City of Manchester, you would never have known.

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Ever wondered how long a dream lasts?  A minute?  An hour, maybe?  What about 67 days?  That was how long Sam Allardyce’s England dream lasted before it spectacularly imploded in the puff of a tape-recorded evening meal.  A lesson learned the hard way: it’s not what you don’t know, it’s who you don’t know.

You hear of lottery winners who, drunk on their windfall, find themselves back in the same office chair eighteen months later.  Big Sam probably admires that kind of longevity.  Like a ball thrown vertically upwards, stopping only momentarily at its apex, Allardyce quickly found himself back in the middle reaches of the English game.

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There was something comforting about seeing Allardyce back on domestic duties at Crystal Palace.  Sam was in his natural habitat once more.  Back in the galleys, battling relegation and ironing out defensive frailties. 

Allardyce had no sooner returned to the civic stage than he was tearing into the Watford mascot, Harry the Hornet, demanding he be given a 3-game ban for mocking a Palace player for diving.  Utterly incensed and shaking with anger in the mixed media area, Allardyce implored the self-same Football Association that had shattered his England dream to take disciplinary action against a man dressed up as a bumble bee.  It felt like slipping on an old pair of trainers.

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A year at Palace was followed by a year at Everton.  Most people thought that was our lot for the Big Sam Experience, but after two years out of the rap game we’re being treated to a swansong.  He’s back, baby.  Chewing gum in the dugout of another unfashionable corner of England.  This time, it’s his hometown of West Bromwich.

You have to think this will almost certainly be Allardyce’s last gig and for that reason alone we ought to cherish it.  When all said and done, Sam is the very essence of English football.  Like the English game itself, he’s both a relic and an innovator.  A man who simultaneously brought us Jay-Jay Okocha and Kevin Nolan.  Beautiful yet ugly, like Mariah Carey.  There might be other managers who snigger and pretend to be baffled at the concept of the “West Ham way”, but it takes a special person to do so while actually managing the club at the time.

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Critics are already writing off West Brom’s chances of survival this season but I’m not so sure.  Sam’s on familiar ground here.  He’s got an entire team of players you wouldn’t recognise in the supermarket and a midfielder who recently scored an own goal from 25 yards.  And yet, despite this, West Brom managed to take a point off the reigning champions at Anfield in only his second game in charge.  Two more losses followed but the Baggies have now registered their first victory under Sam, a battling 3-2 away win at Wolves.  He’s only got to rein in Brighton and Fulham for fuck’s sake.  This is distinctly Allardyce-able.

Don’t forget, winning minor parochial battles is all Allardyce has ever known.  In his autobiography, Sam casually mentions that as a younger man on the Midlands dating scene, the love rival for his now wife was snooker player and fellow Brummie, Tony Knowles.  It was nip and tuck for a while on which way the future Mrs Allardyce would go, but Sam eventually ground his opponent down.  Just like he always does.

It’s a great snippet, reflective of a man whose best skirmishes were always resoundingly domestic.  Allardyce was never meant to be England manager.  Hot summer tournaments stuffed into a blazer were never going to be his thing.  Sam’s got no quarrel with the Viet Cong.  He just wants to beat the local snooker hotshot in a best-of-35 frame game of love and get the missus safely back down to balk.  Except now Tony Knowles is Brighton & Hove Albion and Lynne Allardyce is premier league survival.  

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West Brom lie 19^th with a -27 goal difference, but the gap to 17^th is only five points.  Allardyce will need to squeeze every last inch out of Prozone and Sammy Lee to ensure his record of never losing top-flight status stays intact.  Do it, and his legacy will be secured. 

Allardyce spent years dreaming of the Albion job.  Admittedly, the Albion in question was England, not West Brom.  But that’s by the by.   You can’t dwell on regrets at Sam’s age.  His pint glass of wine is half full, not half empty.  Real actors can perform on any stage.  And Big Sam’s got his premier league ballet shoes back on for one last twirl.

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As the temperature looks to dip below freezing tonight, it’s important to remember that a great many sex workers would have died this winter if it wasn’t for the generous contributions of Kyle Walker.  The plaudits have all gone to Marcus Rashford this pandemic, and rightly so, but while Rashford has dominated the front pages with his impressive social conscience on school dinners, Walker has been quietly doing his bit too, ensuring that vital income streams do not dry up during the biggest crisis this country has faced since Steve McClaren’s England reign.  Marcus looks after the kids, Kyle takes care of the mums.  Together – and I’ve thought of a nifty phrase to coin this – they are a CITY UNITED.

It doesn’t end there though.  The North-West has been at the footballing forefront of all things Covid-related.  Back in April, Liverpool F.C. took the brave decision to swallow their pride and furlough support staff.  Sacrificing yourself at the altar of dignity and asking for a hand-out isn’t easy at the best of times.  Imagine, then, some of your payroll earning six figures a week and still having the courage and humility to ask the UK government to step in and pay the wages of your less well-off employees.  Gutsy stuff from the red side of Stanley Park.  And having humbled themselves to exaltation, I feel confident in stating that Liverpool must have subsequently gone on to vote against the greed-soaked power-grab that was Project Big Picture in October without needing to fact-check the matter.

Others are turning their mind to the solution itself, the vaccine.  The great play-off berth back to normality.  It’s here that Sean Dyche is dipping a visionary toe.  Dyche might look for all the world like a mid-ranking UKIP politician – an image not exactly helped by managing Burnley – but it’s all a clever bluff.  The son of a globe-trotting management consultant, Dyche is erudite and thoughtful, and having kept Burnley in the top flight of English football for over half a decade, possibly also a genius.

Dyche’s view is that, once key workers, the elderly and the vulnerable have been given a shot of the good stuff, professional footballers should be next in line.  It’s the sort of statement that you initially dismiss as ludicrously self-entitled, then you start to see the merits of, and probably end up concluding somewhere in between.

The logic of the Ginger Mourinho’s health pitch is as follows: in order to continue playing at the moment, premier league footballers are being tested anywhere up to four times a week, at very considerable ongoing cost.  If that money could be channelled back into the national health system instead, there is a compelling economic argument for having footballers vaccinated early.  And that’s before taking into account the difficult-to-measure but undoubted psychological benefits to the millions (billions, really) who derive enjoyment from watching premier league football.  As we all know too well, the show is only precariously on the road at the moment; the sword of abandonment hangs heavy over the 2020/21 season.

The problem with Dyche’s argument is it slightly misses the point that the fifty year old who dies because Jay Rodriguez was given the vaccine instead of them probably won’t feel all that consoled by Burnley charting course for a sixth straight season in the top flight (impressive, as previously mentioned, though that is).  And while I’m no expert in mental health, it’s difficult to imagine anyone’s psychological lot being improved by the knowledge that Monday Night Football has blood on its hands. 

As it is, these strange times continue for now.  Football, the world, and an army of home boozers keep soldiering on with no obvious finish line to aim for; a bit like forced entrants in the world’s shittest bleep test.  “Catch it, bin it, kill it” used to be the Conservative Party’s policy on immigration, but these days they’re deploying the slogan for health reasons as well.  Here’s hoping they get the ball under control soon.

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