Premier League teams do not always do what their managers promise – as Blackburn and Manchester United have shown
Fibber of the week award this week goes to Steve Kean, of Blackburn Rovers, winner by a short brass neck over Sir Alex Ferguson of Manchester United. Both managers promised their teams would not lie down in important league fixtures last week, only for said teams to fail to register a single shot on target in 90 minutes.
For United, leaders of the Premier League at the time and eight points clear a couple of blinks ago, that was a particularly uncharacteristic mistake and one that could prove extremely costly, depending upon whether or not Manchester City remember to have a few shots at goal at Newcastle on Sunday. Fergie said beforehand that he never sends out teams to play for a point, which is fair enough given the way United have played these past couple of decades, though it would appear he sometimes sets out his side to stifle rather than strike at the opposition.
We all know what happened at the Etihad, and it is easy with hindsight to argue that exhuming Park Ji-sung and leaving Danny Welbeck on the bench was a mistake, but bear in mind that United lost by the only goal of the game, and that a moment of lapsed concentration at a set piece, so Fergie did not get his tactics utterly wrong. Had City failed to score, and they were not exactly working David de Gea all night, Ferguson would have been lapping up rave reviews the following day and probably claiming afterwards that there is more to winning trophies than attacking all the time.
No one expected Blackburn to attack all the time at Tottenham either, but given what was said beforehand, and considering the club's perilous situation in the drop zone, it was only reasonable to suppose they would try to attack some of the time. Here was what Kean had to say on his club's survival chances before the game. "We are not setting ourselves a points target, the challenge for us now is to try and take something out of each one of our remaining games," the manager said after the 2-0 home win against Norwich. "Do that, and we give ourselves a chance. We know we have to go to some daunting places, but we have won at Old Trafford and drawn at Anfield this season, and that gives you both experience and self-belief."
Both the results at Old Trafford and Anfield involved Rovers actually scoring a goal (at United they won by scoring three) yet this self-belief and attacking threat seemed to evaporate at White Hart Lane, where Spurs have not even been playing all that well of late. If the Blackburn plan to take something out of the game was a version of parking the bus, whereby every player stayed in his own half for the entire game and Rovers managed to escape with a valuable point, then one could at least understand the logic. But once Spurs took the lead after 22 minutes it was then incumbent on the visitors to change their plan and fight back to parity, not stay in their own half as if nothing had happened and then yank Yakubu Ayegbeni off before the end.
The sight of Anthony Modeste coming on for Yakubu with 20 minutes left seemed to sit squarely at odds with Kean's pre-match philosophy. The French substitute has yet to score a league goal since arriving in January, whereas it was Yakubu's goals that helped Blackburn to their famous win at United on New Year's Eve. Doubtless Kean would argue that he wanted to keep his star striker fresh for the now vital home game against Wigan on Monday, though precisely because Rovers have failed in the original plan to take something from all their remaining matches even a win against Roberto Martínez's revitalised side may now not be enough.
Should Rovers go down Kean will be a strong candidate for fibber of the season, what with attempting to talk his way out of a drink-driving charge and explain away all the various unscheduled absences of Blackburn players that have bedevilled their attempts to climb away from trouble, but sometimes the hidden half-truth can be as outrageous as the full-blown whopper.
Hodgson's home fixture
It is becoming clear that the Football Association wants the new England manager to base himself at its new training complex in Burton upon Trent. As far as can be gathered there is no stipulation that Roy Hodgson must live in the Midlands, but since he has effectively been doing that as West Bromwich manager anyway there is no great problem. The point is that when Burton is up and running the FA seems to want an England manager knocking about the place to give it an air of authenticity and impress the junior ranks, yet this is not something it made a big deal of in the job adverts.
Not that there were any job adverts, of course – I merely speak figuratively – yet you can see why Pep Guardiola and José Mourinho were not given much consideration if the small print involves a change of locale from Barcelona/Madrid to Burton. Sven-Goran Eriksson used to have the run of Soho, and from all accounts he enjoyed it immensely. Fabio Capello had to put up with a shift of office to the more severe environs of Wembley, but at least he could still base himself in London and spend all his non-match weeks flitting as he pleased between the capital and home.
Reading between the lines on Hodgson's appointment, those days appear to have gone. The job description seems to have subtly changed, with England no longer willing to pay £6m per annum for some panjandrum to preside from a distance over a dozen matches a year, but seeking a more hands-on leader figure for all levels of the game not only to look up to but actually bump into should their paths cross at St George's Park. Perhaps Capello will be the last of the autocrat leaders for a while, and Hodgson will be the first of a more holistic, value-for-money type, paid to immerse himself in not just the 11 players at the very top of the English football tree but the whole structure, root and branch.
If that is the case, Hodgson seems the ideal candidate, once he has got this tricky business of competing at Euro 2002 out of the way, and one can immediately start to see why the FA never thought of Harry Redknapp as the shoo-in everyone else did. It is even possible to speculate that having seen at close quarters how narrow were Capello's parameters for his £6m salary, the FA was unconcerned about his resignation and determined not to go down the same road again. No one could complain about that, there was enough criticism of Capello counting his money in his ivory tower and not even bothering to learn English, and a lot of it was directed at the FA for appointing him.
If this is a new way of seeing the job then bring it on, but ultimately the success of the new direction will stand or fall on the success of the Burton complex. No one doubts it will be a state-of-the-art complex situated in the middle of the country and therefore convenient for all levels of national excellence to use, but will England use it?
Will they use it as they at present use Arsenal's London Colney, as a convenient training facility within the M25 from where they can hop on a coach to Wembley? They will at first, of course, the FA are not going to open a £100m complex and then have the national team ignore it, but if England are always going to play at Wembley and always going to train at Burton then the two centres seem too far apart for convenience. While both facilities might be world-class, the stretch of motorway that runs between them is not.
Burton would have been a perfect location had the new national stadium been constructed in Birmingham or the Midlands, but it is not ideal for Wembley. In addition to all the other things in his in-basket at present, Hodgson is in charge of making this bold but possibly misconceived experiment work. Read More
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