More About 2003/2004
Robson has too much of the Jefferies about him for me
Bryan Robson is the new City boss and he is a good City boss I’m not sure I’d have picked him if I were Gordon Gibb.
Robson is a good boss. He did some good stuff and some bad stuff at Middlesbrough and he assistant Terry Venebles at England during Euro96. He got Middlesbrough to Wembley and the Premiership twice and more amazingly he managed to get some of the World’s most impressive players to the grotty Hell hole of Middlesbrough. If Luis Figo ended up in Manningham I would not be at all surprised. Robson must have used the Jedi mind trick when he convince Christian and Adriana Karembeu to live in the dark smog City.
If Bryan Robson comes to City in the save tidal wave of euphoria he had at the start of his Boro career and at the start of his first season in the Premiership with Boro we will be doing great.
If he does not, that is another matter.
Robson is more than a chequebook manager but he used the Boro chequebook to get himself out of trouble more than once and he is, after all, the man who signed Alan Boksic for for £63,000 a week. Likewise Robson is more than just a sick them on the field boss. His tactics at Boro were much more flexible than churning out the same 442 every week in an attempt to copy what goes on at Old Trafford.
On all these points Robson is good. What he lacks, for me at least, is the drive. He doesn’t need this.
Nicky Law needed to stay at City, how else would he get £210,000 a year. Ditto Chris Hutchings, Chris Kamara, Paul Jewell etc…
Robson, like Jim Jefferies, can walk away. Robson is a millionaire, he wants to show what he can do as a manager again and I want him to be great but when the going gets tough Robson, like Jefferies before him, can get going. I’m not saying he will I just think that every day he manages will be one fewer on the golf course for him. I compare that to the managers we have had who really had something to prove: The Chris Kamaras and the Paul Jewells and I know which one I prefer.
That aside Robson is the most qualified and experienced man to ever manager this club and let’s make him welcome by making some noise at Valley Parade for a change and show him the good parts of what he has taken on.
Back in the Geoffrey Richmond: Saint or sinner debate a phrase used to be used. It was sometimes RTG but could be RTS. The final character was not that important, the other two stood for rose-tinted.
The rose-tinted debate raged on the Internet Bantams mailing list and around Bradford for a few years and still bubbles under in all those places now. The idea was that one could look at City two ways. Firstly you could ignore the perceived pillage of Valley Parade and the club’s short route to the dump chute of administration by believing that everything would be all alright and the club was experiencing a dip in form. These people were ostensibly the rose-tinteds.
In opposition them in this sub cultural battle were the self-titled realists who saw everything going to Hell in a handcart and would countenance no call that anything at the club was anything other than incorrigible. These people had seen the future, and it was black.
Post-administration realists departed the field and claimed victory and it was hard to argue that on the whole they had been right about the future of the club come the slide from the Premiership. The club had gone bad and they had said it would. The fact that other developments which flourished were talked on with the same grim attitude mattered not, the prediction was for financial woe and so realists won, even if in the scattershot of the argument phrases like “This club will never produce a good player” were used at a time when Lewis Emanuel and Danny Forrest were pushing into the reserves.
Now the debate on the Clayton Omnibus as well as online is the future of Nicky Law, that he has none specifically, sides are drawn once more down similar lines but - and tellingly - they have swapped sides.
The rose-tinted have looked at Nicky Law and with a gulp of the realism they were encouraged to encompass they state that the problems at City are more than just to do with a manager who has the capacity to cock up tactically and see a shrinking gate, falling sponsorship and the trend of football to hogging the money at the top table of the Premiership and suggest, not unreasonably perhaps, that the last thing we want to do now is rid ourselves of a manager who while curious in some areas has strengths in others in favour of the lucky dip of the positions wanted adds and considering the bad experiences with bosses we have had in the past few years it’s no surprise they have that opinion. It’s realism of a sort.
The other voice coming up is from that camp that used the word realist as a badge. The “realists”, the same people who decried Geoffrey Richmond and called all bad have taken a leap away from reality. To “The Realists” the universal cure all is that once a P45 with the name Nicolas Ulysses Law on it is drawn up then City begin a new, that the weight of football and financial problems pushing down on Valley Parade are lifted by getting a guy who throws on more men fifteen minutes from time. The notion, when said out loud, is almost a definition of looking at a situation with a rose-tint.
So what is the point of all this? The point, dear reader, is this. The state that City are in now is bigger than Nicky Law, Gordon Gibb, the tactics on the field or the fans in the stadium and a change of manager would be largely cosmetic at this point. If changing manager after 18-30 months was the path to success then there would be European Cups at Valley Parade. It never worked in the past, why should it work now?
To use a popular metaphor City are a ship that hit and iceberg in administration and now we are sailing away from it bailing out water for all we are worth. Getting in a new manager would be polishing the brass as we sink.
Sacking a manager is the football club equivalent of snorting coke. It’s the instant rush. It’s the adrenaline kick. When you sack a manager you feel like a million bucks.
You get the old get out of the office he has been stinking up with recent performances and you get to command the back pages. You ge tot be the man doing things. This is not an attack on Gordon Gibb or any other chairman we have had. When I talk about us sacking a manager I mean everyone at the club from supporter to squad member, from chairman to char lady.
Everyone feels great because you get the heady rush of limitlessness. Show Nicky Law the door and who comes to replace him? The answer is limitless.
Recall sacking Chris Hutchings. Who could replace the manager? We heard Kevin Keegan and we know that Berti Voghts came in for the job and in the end we were all pleased with the top notch Scot Jim Jefferies who would lead us into the thick of the Premiership action with spirit and steel. Reality showed differently but such is the giddy rush of the sack. You got from our own limited manager, and all managers are limited in some way, to having not one but a million potential bosses all of which will deliver the goods if you give them the chance.
Sack Jim Jefferies and Stan Collymore could do great things for you and when Nicky Law was appointed no one really got excited but then again, every one got optimistic.
A new manager will bring in new players of course and they have the same effect as a new manager. Everything will be ok when the new players settle in. Remember how Juanjo was going to turn this club around? This is the come down.
The come down where you can convince yourself that the snort of the sack was ok because everything will be fine once the new manager beds in. In truth we are just blind to our new man’s failings for this come down - or honeymoon if you want - period. After all who had a go at Nicky Law for picking Andrew Not really a striker Tod over Beni Carbone then?
Sacking the manager gives us all a holiday from realism. It makes us all potential champions, the Premiership is always just a sacking away and of course such assumptions have no basis in reality.
With a huge debt still looming over the club we can not afford to deal in fancifulness and fantasy. We need reality.
A good case can be made that Nicky Law is not doing a good job at City but as with the excitement that greeted the flurry of signings in the Summer the replacement for Law will not be able to make a march for the Premiership.
The new players off the Summer we being made as World Beaters before anyone had seen them play - in a way BfB loves to do the same to kids like Danny Forrest, Kevin Sanasy and Peter Folkes - but in the end they were Luke Cornwall and Robert Wolleaston.
Likewise the new manager will not be a tactical genius of the man who makes silk purses out of so many sow’s ears that the club picked up. He will not crank up the production line of kids through the club and he will not be able to spin a multi-million pound transfer to clear the debuts from the club that struggled to get more than two million for Andy O’Brien from famously wasteful Newcastle United but for a time it will seem like he will do all these things and more and if that is what you want from your football, the quick rush without a thought for reality, then that’s what you can have.
You just get the manager’s contract, tear it up and stick it up your nose.