Steve McLaren: England manager 2006-2010They finally got it. England have finally got what they want.
No it's not the world cup, that one can wait. But with the FA's appointment of Steve McLaren as head coach, England have finally got themselves an English manager.
To the anglophiles, this probably restores some vague idea of national pride - in an era when England can take little patriotic joy even though Arsenal have scaled the dizzying heights of European glory, it must surely come as a balm to purists and nationalists alike that the new face of the three lions is a true blue Englishman.
To the England fan uninterested in passports or tradition - as is the case with the many abroad who have made England their footballing motherland - this appointment will come with mixed feelings and lukewarm love. For all the FA's propaganda, McLaren's tenure at Middlesborough has surely been at best a decent CV for the England job; at worst, it is a catalogue of a man who has repeatedly failed to bring the best out of a misfit collection of senior and talented players.
Season after season, McLaren's Middlesborough has been tipped to finish strong - top six has been a word spoken in the same breath as names like Viduka, Hasselbaink, Mendieta. Yet, the former Man United assistant manager has on each occaassion come unstuck. His transfer policy is what cynics will call shabby - and while buying players is a thing of the past for him now, identifying potential and ability to spot ability isn't.
Still, international management is hugely different from its club variation, and the hopeful among us might go as far as to say that McLaren's average club record suggests he might be better suited for the international stage. Eriksson himself was a heavily decorated club manager before his troublesome tenure as the English boss. Managers like Wanderley Luxemburgo and Giovanni Trappatonni are evidence that success in domestic leagues does not necessarily translate into international nuous. That having been said, there isn't much of a flipside: managers who have excelled internationally (and by excelled, I mean reaching the final of an international tournament) in spite of a boring club record are extremely few and far between.
The jury is of course still out on McLaren - it should be until the curtain falls on his Euro 08 campaign. At least, for now, we can all go to sleep easy and read football stories other than who is gonna be the next manager. Perhaps when Arsenal field a team with no Englishmen for the Champions League final, and should they win that way, the pundits won't scald them so heavily. Perhaps if the Premier League continues to welcome a glut of international journeymen, the papers won't chide them so fiercely. And perhaps if all the managers in English clubs one by one became French and Spanish and Portuguese and Dutch, the writers won't bite at them so violently. Perhaps because they know, at the back of their minds, that somewhere in the backrooms of the English FA, England is still represented somewhere.
No it's not the world cup, that one can wait. But with the FA's appointment of Steve McLaren as head coach, England have finally got themselves an English manager.
To the anglophiles, this probably restores some vague idea of national pride - in an era when England can take little patriotic joy even though Arsenal have scaled the dizzying heights of European glory, it must surely come as a balm to purists and nationalists alike that the new face of the three lions is a true blue Englishman.
To the England fan uninterested in passports or tradition - as is the case with the many abroad who have made England their footballing motherland - this appointment will come with mixed feelings and lukewarm love. For all the FA's propaganda, McLaren's tenure at Middlesborough has surely been at best a decent CV for the England job; at worst, it is a catalogue of a man who has repeatedly failed to bring the best out of a misfit collection of senior and talented players.
Season after season, McLaren's Middlesborough has been tipped to finish strong - top six has been a word spoken in the same breath as names like Viduka, Hasselbaink, Mendieta. Yet, the former Man United assistant manager has on each occaassion come unstuck. His transfer policy is what cynics will call shabby - and while buying players is a thing of the past for him now, identifying potential and ability to spot ability isn't.
Still, international management is hugely different from its club variation, and the hopeful among us might go as far as to say that McLaren's average club record suggests he might be better suited for the international stage. Eriksson himself was a heavily decorated club manager before his troublesome tenure as the English boss. Managers like Wanderley Luxemburgo and Giovanni Trappatonni are evidence that success in domestic leagues does not necessarily translate into international nuous. That having been said, there isn't much of a flipside: managers who have excelled internationally (and by excelled, I mean reaching the final of an international tournament) in spite of a boring club record are extremely few and far between.
The jury is of course still out on McLaren - it should be until the curtain falls on his Euro 08 campaign. At least, for now, we can all go to sleep easy and read football stories other than who is gonna be the next manager. Perhaps when Arsenal field a team with no Englishmen for the Champions League final, and should they win that way, the pundits won't scald them so heavily. Perhaps if the Premier League continues to welcome a glut of international journeymen, the papers won't chide them so fiercely. And perhaps if all the managers in English clubs one by one became French and Spanish and Portuguese and Dutch, the writers won't bite at them so violently. Perhaps because they know, at the back of their minds, that somewhere in the backrooms of the English FA, England is still represented somewhere.
[get this widget]
0 comments:
Post a Comment