More About Jim Jefferies
Nine years and change ago I started this here boyfrombrazil.co.uk website about a club that was aspiring to be in the Premiership. It was lead by a dogmatic, bluff chairman and had a team of exciting players under the eye of new, young manager Paul Jewell and while everything around the club is utterly different there is one constant in the fact that from that day to this there has been a rumbling underbelly of a concept that Bradford City would be improved by a new manager.
The history books of this club never include the talk against Paul Jewell - he is airbrushed to perfection - but at the time there were plenty of voices suggesting that if City wanted to be a serious contender for a Premiership club the season after the anticipated play-off failure of 1998/1999 then they would have to appoint a “proper” manager. During his time in the Premiership Jewell did not enjoy the universal support he is credited with now.
Chris Hutchings enjoyed no support and a change of manager from him to anyone would be an improvement except - of course - it was not and Jim Jefferies quickly had the same murmurings which became a cacophony and on and on through Nicky Law who must be sacked or we would be relegated but Bryan Robson got us relegated and on to Colin Todd who would take us down so had to go but of course we went down…
At the moment there are people talking about the qualities of Stuart McCall and Wayne Jacobs. People saying “I know he is a legend but…” and drifting off into some discussion of if the gaffer “knows what he is doing” as if football management were a map and a route could be planned through it.
There is a definition of insanity that has it that repeating the same action and expecting different results is the mark of that condition. Honestly - after trying a rookie, an experienced manager, a young guy who had done well in the lower leagues, an England captain, an jobbing football man - does anyone still believe that the solution to all City’s problems is in sacking the manager and appointing the best CV that comes along? That train of logic is so feeble as to question the capabilities of anyone who would suggest it.
Experience of following this club has told us that the next manager is never the answer.
Move back to the days of Paul Jewell and Chris Kamara and we see a club strong on infrastructure and leadership with continuity at the heart of it. This is not to suggest that Geoffrey Richmond had everything or anything right just that when he did things well the club did well and when he started to misstep badly the management changes helped not one jot.
City’s next manager after McCall will be no better. Jose Mourinho is not waiting to take over and if he was - as Avram Grant shows - management changes are the stuff of tweaks and not sea change.
All of which gives unnecessary oxygen to the idea that McCall is somehow an inferior manager to those around him in the division or other managers who currently have the job at 91 other clubs. He is young and learning and he makes mistakes but he also has triumphs. Criticism of the manager is plentiful but for every mistake there is a credit unsaid. Stuart McCall brought in Peter Thorne, Kyle Nix, Scott Loach just as much as he signed up Alex Rhodes.
For every curious set of displays by Paul Heckingbottom - he has struggled since signing full time - there is a success story like McCall’s handling of Joe Colbeck who is started to show real quality and consistency.
Likewise understanding the season was dead sometime ago McCall allows Rhodes the chance to show what he can do - not much in this writer’s opinion - as he looks to offer contracts out for next season. To sack a manager at this point is like sacking him for losing pre-season friendlies.
Sacking managers is just a bad idea - experience shows us that - sacking this manager goes past bordering on ludicrous and calling for him to be sacked is akin to vandalism of this football club.
As with Kevin Keegan at Newcastle it seems that being a legend is not what it used to be and Keegan and McCall get a couple more games before the firing squads are assembled. Legend is a fan applied title and the respect they given is the behest of supporters. What does it say about our supporters as some try chop away the legs of our “legend” as he takes his first steps in management?
What would it say about the supporters if we let the louder agitators in our community be heard louder than any other voice? This is especially the case when that voice makes all the sense of a stick being hammered around an empty bucket of swill and is just as sensible. A case could have been made for sacking some of the managers of the last nine years but the majority of dismissals are mistakes compounding mistakes.
All the voices who called for Nicky Law to be sacked never comment on Bryan Robson’s failure to turn the club around. The people who said Colin Todd should go do not accept the blame for the relegation to League Two.
Stuart McCall and Wayne Jacobs should be in charge at this club. End of story.
Prefacing this by saying I like The City Gent and Chris Armstrong who runs The City Gent website we at BfB were interested to see that website use it’s front page to make a case for the prosecution against Colin Todd calling for the City manager to be sacked.
The content of the article runs through a damning list of “crimes” and makes it clear that Todd should be held accountable for the teams performance - a view I personally thing always lets the team off with ineffectual displays but one I respect the writer’s right to hold.
However such talk is neither especially interesting or especially new. Indeed City fans need only cast minds back to October 2003 when the same comments were being made about Nicky Law.
That those comments may - or may not, depending on your opinion - have been proved true is hardly important. What is important and what would be needed to convince me that the Todd Out protests had enough merit to be worth supporting is an answer to the questions asked back when Law was sacked.
For all the talk about from City fans about the relative merits - or lack of merit - of Todd and his position at the club I have yet to hear anything approaching a convincing argument which tells me that sacking this manager would not be as ineffectual in halting City’s decline as axing Law was.
Genuinely curiously I wonder why would sacking Colin Todd improve the club any more than sacking Nicky Law? Or Jim Jefferies? Or Chris Hutchings? Why would the next manager turn our fortunes around when Bryan Robson’s arrival did not? Or when the return of popular coach Terry Yorath as manager in 1988 could not?
By anyone’s yardstick - including the one Colin Todd applies to Sven Goran Eriksson - Todd would be overdue the bullet from the vast majority of jobs in football. What I am interested in - and what we as supporters of this club should be interested in - is the future of the club beyond the short term buzz of a sack and search.
How will the job of managing Bradford City be different for the next manager than it is for this one and it was for the last one, and the one before that, and before him and before him?
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.