The four clubs threatened with the drop this weekend have made the same mistakes on their road to ruin
Penny wise, pound foolish
Cheap-skating on essentials is never sound economy and it certainly does not pay for Premier League football clubs to cut cash corners when appointing new managers. Unfortunately this is precisely what Newcastle United and Sunderland have done this season.
When Roy Keane walked out on the Wearsiders in early December, Niall Quinn was inundated with applications, many of them from decent technical area operators, but Sunderland's chairman instead opted to promote the unproven, but relatively cheap, Ricky Sbragia from first-team coach. At 52, Sbragia had not only never been a manager but freely admitted he did not really want the job. The Scot's honest doubts about his suitability for the role have since been justified and just last week he admitted "my naivety has cost us".
Similarly, Mike Ashley's decision not to seek a proper replacement for Joe Kinnear the moment Kevin Keegan's short-term successor discovered he required triple heart bypass surgery in early February has left Newcastle's owner contemplating the gargantuan cost of relegation. Believing Chris Hughton, another natural coach but never a "proper" manager, could somehow muddle through beggared belief but it was not until 1 April that a lightbulb suddenly went on in Ashley's head and he invited Alan Shearer to take over. With just eight games remaining, though, "the messiah" arguably arrived too late.
Budget slashing at Middlesbrough has not done much good either but, with the banks anxious to reclaim their debts, the Teesside club have not exactly had a great deal of choice. After all, in February, when Hull enjoyed a jolly over in Dubai, Gareth Southgate was told the most expensive bonding break to which Boro could stretch was "a couple of days on Redcar Beach".
Divided dressing rooms
Once it became apparent that Michael Owen, Newcastle's captain, commutes to training – giving Nicky Butt a lift – by helicopter from Cheshire most days, warning bells clanged. Quite apart from the alarming carbon footprint involved, that suggests a serious emotional disconnection with the club, city and region whose hopes they represent.
Boro's David Wheater may still make regular trips to the bingo in his native ÂRedcar but too many ultra-wealthy, over-protected, north-east players live in hermetically sealed worlds and fans are entitled to wonder just how much some of them care. The revelation that certain Newcastle players only started turning up on time for training when Shearer began docking 10% of their salaries for every incidence of tardiness seems telling.
Equally revealing were recent comments from Stoke's former Newcastle defender Abdoulaye Faye, who has enthused about the infinitely superior team spirit and community involvement he now experiences. It is no coincidence that there has been repeated talk of dressing-room schisms at Sunderland, Newcastle, Boro and, to a lesser extent, Hull City.
The ego has landed
The best managers harbour very big egos but, like Sir Bobby Robson, disguise them cleverly. Alan Shearer is currently following Robson's example at Newcastle, but Hull's Phil Brown has let his run away with him. While Brown refuses to admit regretting his infamous Boxing Day half-time team-talk on the Manchester City pitch, he recently mused on the perils of pride and admitted: "OK, I was probably due a fall – but not as hard a one as this."
Quite apart from alienating some of his players, who recently snubbed his invitation to a day out at Chester races, Brown has also rubbed up some fellow managers the wrong way. "Phil's far too noisy," said one. "We didn't like the way he talked himself up as a future England manager when Hull were doing well last autumn." For all his faults though, Brown is actually rather likeable. He may well spend the summer reflecting on the meaning of "hubris" and "schadenfreude".
A different kind of ego arguably undid Roy Keane, whose Sunderland reign came unstuck when he discovered he was not the new Brian Clough after all and could not handle the triply disruptive Pascal Chimbonda, Djibril Cissé and El Hadji Diouf. The dressing rooms at Sunderland, Boro and, above all, Newcastle were replete with players whose self-opinion far exceeded their talent.
Oh and Southgate should never have been vain enough to think he could be the man to trim Mido's waistline - let alone believe he was smarter than an Egyptian with an answer for everything. Mis-directed as his undoubted intelligence is, Mido was Boro's best striker. The moment in January he was loaned to Wigan and Marlon King arrived on Teesside represented a sizeable nail in Boro's coffin. Then there was Southgate's misplaced, if kind of admirable, belief he really was the 'new Arsene Wenger' and that his faith in youth, pace and purist passing would somehow prevail.
Lack emotional intelligence
The brutalistic "Like it or lump it" school of man-management is pretty much de rigueur in the hard-nosed retailing and financial habitats where Ashley and Ellis Short, Sunderland's new owner, made their fortunes. What that pair did not realise is that Keegan and Keane were not company yes men but idiosyncratic, insecure egotists whose talent, creativity and pulling power just about made them worth the hassle of employing.
But where Ashley and Short should have indulged their managers and given them the odd metaphorical cuddle, the former sowed the seeds of Keegan's September resignation by appointing Dennis Wise above his head, while Short became overly fixated on Keane's reluctance to answer his telephone calls and spend a full working week at the training ground.
Keegan and Keane are flawed managers but Newcastle and Sunderland were better with them at the helm and the boardroom suits should arguably have compromised. Both men's transfer policies were unrealistic, but more subtle owners than Ashley and Short might have introduced the necessary modifications while avoiding outright civil war.
Suspicion of skill
Many of the best things about Hull this season have been conjured by Geovanni's clever feet. And yet quite apart from his personal differences with a Brazilian who serves as a lay preacher in his spare time, Brown frets that the man with the penchant for spectacular goals is not a "systems man", prepared to adhere strictly to pre-arranged gameplans and thereby frequently leaves him on the bench. If only their manager had been bolder and Geovanni afforded licence to improvise a bit more, Hull might just be safe.
Similarly, at Sunderland, the sweet-passing Andy Reid creates a high percentage of chances but Sbragia has sidelined the, admittedly not über athletic, Dubliner on the grounds that he is hardly an identikit modern midfielder. What Prozone does not tell you is that when Reid plays well, Sunderland invariably win. Sometimes pace and energy can be less important than imagination and incision.
Buying wrong 'uns
All four clubs have a horrible penchant for buying badly, with the examples too numerous to mention – think Fabricio Coloccini at Newcastle, Afonso Alves at Middlesbrough and David Healy at Sunderland – but Hull were particularly badly stung by the £5m, £50,000-a-week January acquisition of Jimmy Bullard from Fulham. After barely playing 30 minutes for Brown, the excellent midfielder suffered a career-threatening injury. Sheer bad luck? Not quite – Bullard had a history of serious knee injuries and Hull opted to overlook potential problems highlighted by scans taken during his medical.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/...taylor-newcastle-hull-sunderland-middlebrough
