More About Sam Allardyce
The optimistic nature of the football fan should never be forgotten and - in the case of Stuart McCall as he ends his first six months in charge at Bradford City - is a powerful agent in making the more important shifts in the culture that when crafted can generate success.
The recently deceased John Harvey Jones specialised in turning around companies but even he would be impressed with the way McCall’s men have gone from eight defects to play off dreams since Boxing Day.
It is business turn around at the speed of light and it works. Most clubs in football struggle not for the want of ability but rather organisation and motivation. A bit of positive thinking can do a power of good.
Take Newcastle United as a prime example. The Magpies are blessed with players as talented as any in the Premier League - Owen, Duff, Smith, Martins and Geremi would not be out of place in any squad in the top flight - but they flounder because as ill fated Big Sam found they are gripped by a culture of defeat.
Indeed so gripped is St James Park in the notion that the club will always under achieve that they see no irony in describing the big chair there as a poison chalice. Recast as ‘a job at a team that could compete’ - and there are precious few of those - then the role may be more appealing.
Appealing or not the problem Sam was beaten by at Newcastle and McCall addresses at City is one of institutional memory. Put simply just as a player learns patterns to be repeated in muscle memory so a club retains habits good and - in the majority of cases - bad.
At Bradford City since the fall from the Premier League defeat has become the default setting and while players, managers, chairmen and almost everything has changed the institutional memory clings onto the negative culture.
Ask one of the tea bar staff if City will win and they will say probably not. When new people come into the club at any level they are tacitly invited to join this way of thinking.
Shifting from negative to something more bright is difficult but not impossible and Mark Lawn and Julian Rhodes are attempting manfully. The most significant move was bringing in The Legend McCall whose presence has been the most significant change in the culture of the club in recent years. His presence alone has stopped much of the negative thinking.
Indeed should Newcastle United be looking for a sign of the effects of having an Alan Shearer or a Kevin Keegan at the helm then they would do well to look at Valley Parade and McCall. It is not just the patience with which the Bantams fans stuck with the manager through that long period of defeats but the ease in which the mood of the ground was turned around.
Put simply with the club’s legend at the helm the supporters want to believe. That is a significant shift at Valley Parade.
Persistent change in institutional memory - to get a club to forget the (footballing) past and look forward - is a more difficult thing to master but Stuart is doing better than anyone at City in the last ten years. He is the shock to the system to change the memory.
Colin Todd went from Bradford City to manage Randers FC and complains about clubs - all keen to unearth the new Paul Jewell - go for younger managers rather than bringing in experienced gaffers.
Todd’s time at Bradford City is not well viewed but the former City boss would point to the club’s slump to League Two on his exit as proof of what a good job he was doing rather than a suggestion that he had been underachieving.
Indeed it would be hard to argue that City are a better team post-Todd although very few are not much more happy to see Stuart McCall in the dug out rather than Todd.
In a week where English managers have been founding wanting by the FA Todd’s example of going aboard to further his career is a revealing one. After his team’s 2-0 defeat by Everton yesterday Alan Curbishley bemoaned the inability for an English manager to get a job at a club that can offer Champions League experience.
Curbishley jumped ship from Charlton and ended up at West Ham just as Sam Allardyce went to Newcastle United with the idea that excelling there could get the fourth place in the Premiership that while previously a could do better season is now bigger than the FA Cup.
There managers could take a look at Todd’s example and set there sights away from these shores. Should Curbs set his sights further than the other side of that London and looked at jobs in places like Denmark, Portugal or France or even the Charltons of Italy and Spain then he and his peers could have returned to England a few years down the line with more varied experience than a decade at a sturdy, steady football league club.
Take a manager like Sven-Göran Eriksson who moved from Sweden after winning a double with IFK Göteborg onto a more respected league Portugal - and taking another double with Benfica before heading off to Italy and picking up another double and an armful of other titles and then - eventually - the England job, Jingoism aside it is no wonder that overseas managers are getting the better jobs in British football - they are prepared to take a few risks to further their career rather than sitting at The Reebok or The Valley until the blindingly obvious becomes apparent. Paul Jewell and Martin O’Niell take career risks for progression but even they do not think that the way to get a job at one of the clubs that plays European football is to manage a continental European club.
With risks comes failure - take a look at the Chris Hutchings style sackings on Rafa Beneitz’s CV before he got it right and got rewarded - but setting off the risk is the rewards of success.
Colin Todd will probably not be offered the England job but a good display with Randers could see him move about the Danish league and further around Europe augmenting his CV much more than a few more years battling the reducing budget at Valley Parade ever did.
Paul Jewell has ended up at Derby. Lens, Auxerre, PSG and Metz are four of the bottom five of the French league and a survival great escape in that League would be much more of a feather in the cap than even doing the same at Pride Park.
It would seem that in being banish to Denmark Colin Todd has fallen on a way to push his career back on track far better than jobbing around the lower leagues of English football.