The Spectator - The glaring mismatch in English football

 (personal underlines)

https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-glaring-mismatch-in-english-football/

The glaring mismatch in English football

Your starter for ten: who was the last English manager to win the top flight of English football? Treat yourself to a half-time pie and a mug of Bovril if you said Howard Wilkinson, who took the First Division championship with Leeds United in 1992, the final season before the formation of the Premier League. Since then nothing: now the top four teams in the country are managed by a Spaniard (Guardiola at Man City), a Dutchman (Arne Slot at Liverpool) and two more Spaniards (Mikel Arteta and Unai Emery at Arsenal and Villa). The only three English managers in the top flight are Eddie Howe at Newcastle (currently 12th), Sean Dyche at Everton (16th) and Gary O’Neil at Wolves (19th). Of the two national teams, the women are managed by Holland’s Sarina Wiegman and the men by the freshly arrived new boy from Germany, Thomas Tuchel, though he won’t be unpacking his bags till January.

The power and wealth of the Premier League clubs mean they are unwilling to take a chance on a novice Englishman

So what is going on here? Are there no English managers of international stature? Spanish managers might dominate the Premier League but there sure as hell aren’t any English bosses in La Liga. In elite European club football no English manager has won the Champions League or its predecessor for 40 years. Unlike the previous eight years from 1977-84, when English managers won the trophy seven times. Now the grim-faced politburo who run Manchester United have iced the long-suffering Erik ten Hag, but you can bet your mortgage his successor won’t be English. The favourite is the highly regarded Portuguese Ruben Amorim, riding high at Sporting Lisbon. Partly, the enormous power and wealth of the Premier League clubs and their owners mean they are unwilling to take a chance on a novice Englishman. Partly also there are too few coaches coming through the English system, just a fraction of the number in Spain holding Uefa’s top coaching qualifications. The best overseas managers, like Guardiola or Brentford’s Thomas Frank, have sports degrees too. Rather than some hokum about a football regulator, wouldn’t the government be better off trying to help English football sort out this glaring mismatch?

What an utterly dismal performance by England in the last two Tests in Pakistan. And how superb were Pakistan, especially their two spinners and their batsmen patiently accumulating big runs. England seemed to be disrespectful of their opponents, marching down the wicket and trying to whack the spinners into Kashmir; and contemptuous of the (relatively few) English fans who had taken the trouble to flog out there, only to see England humbled.

When even the Chef himself, Alastair Cook, said with more than a trace of disapproval that he couldn’t have batted like anyone in the England team – all seemingly incapable of dogged defence – because that was not how he was brought up, then perhaps something is wrong. Look at Saud Shakeel, who patiently built a score of 134, mostly in ones and twos, and steered Pakistan to a decisive first innings lead of 77. So what is going on? From what you see at club level and hear about ECB pathways, coaching seems to resemble the catastrophic teaching philosophy of the 1970s and 1980s: anything goes, there are no wrong answers, structure is oppressive, self-expression is paramount.

Some of the impulse behind this is positive (getting athletes to ‘buy in’ to the process) but it sometimes feels like a free-for-all. And so you see under-11s reverse sweeping before they can play a cover drive. Is this why our elite players seem to lack some of the traditional attributes like patience – and play in such an arrogant way? The Stokes/McCullum team is packed with talented players. Here’s hoping they can play in a way that allows those talents to flourish.