Yet More On Newcastle United

Ever get the feeling that you’ve been cheated?

It seems relatively certain that Newcastle United’s latest, greatest fan, Mike Ashley, is intent upon selling the club just as soon as a bidder with £200m in their kick rolls along. DIC, Liverpool’s somewhat unScouse wooers and pursuers, have already said “no.”

It’s all just a little bit confusing at first. After all, how much more could Ashley put into things than he already has? Not only is there all the shirt-wearing nonsense, all that riding to games in white transit vans and sitting in the away end at the Stadium of Light. There’s the constant liaison with fanzines and supporters’ groups, pledging stability and the long-term view. And of course, the injection of Keegan and Dennis Wise. The investment in youth and reserves. How does a quick sale add up to all that?

Little did I know it then, but I think I saw the answer a couple of years ago, and I saw it in London, in Piccadilly Circus to be exact. I’d given myself the excuse to escape Sutton for “town” for a day, ostensibly to buy some running shoes. Lillywhites, the old warhorse of sports shops, seemed like my kind of place, and if it wasn’t, well, the Sainsbury Wing was but yards away. One of those lovely big old London shops that Richard Curtis might send Hugh Grant into, that Woody Allen assumes are typically British.

I was expecting something with the atmosphere of the changing rooms in “Chariots of Fire”: what I got was one of those fly by night shops that open for six weeks on Oxford Street before the big boys move in. Everything was being sold out of crates or plastic buckets. The prices, when there were any to be seen, had been applied directly to the packaging in marker pen or else with the kind of stickly label that never really comes off no matter how gentle you are. There were no clear departments - I recall a rangle of cheap plastic swimming goggles in amongst some dusty tennis rackets next to a nest of vinyl footballs.

This was Mike Ashley’s Lillywhites. On the outside, the building made out to the others that nothing had changed. Inside, it had been trashed by chavs.

It’s about what you can do with a brand. It’s not nice, but it seems to work: Ashley’s spent £120m+ on Newcastle, and it’s a drop in the ocean. One alleged tactic is that of the closing-down sale: reopening shortly afterwards at a similar nearby site under a slightly different name. Another is to offer e.g. Nike at just above cost price, relying on related sales of own brand produce (which will have a hefty mark-up) to bring in inflated profits. All quite legal, and, one imagines, quite exhausting to operate.

You can’t quite do that with a football club, which is a different kind of brand. What you can do is make it look more like itself: more like Toon. So, get in a Toon manager. Play being the kind of chairman that fans would pray for. Appear to set up a proper management structure. It’s like restoring a house for resale: get the cosmetics right. Patch up the structure so it can hold together long enough to convince a buyer.

If this is what’s happening in the minds of Mort and Ashley, then it would explain some of the more mysterious decisions. Dennis Wise, for example. Or not keeping Sam Allardyce, which surely any chairman who was really thinking long-term would have done. Certainly Keegan. I don’t like phrases like “real football man” but these were not “football decisions.”

How could they be? Ashley’s shown no interest in football whatsoever in his life up until now, unless it’s been to sell shirts. And he’s bought the Premiership club furthest in geographical and cultural terms from his own background and upbringing (he hails from the football hotbed of Burnham in Buckinghamshire, and still lives in the Home Counties: he’s rumoured not to get on too well with other denizens of the north-dominated cheap sports gear industry).

No, something else is going on, and all the Keegan stuff is a smokescreen. Nothing illegal, and, frankly, it hardly represents a descent from the good old Freddie Shepherd days. But something else nevertheless.

Sometimes, It’s A Pleasure To Be Right..

Fans respect silence for Munich

Fans at Sunday’s Manchester derby immaculately observed a minute’s silence to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Munich air crash. There had been fears that some Manchester City fans would disrupt the silence ahead of their game against local rivals Manchester United. But both sets of supporters inside Old Trafford stood for the full minute without any interruption.

The Special K Revolution Thus Far

Newcastle United are going to owe Premiership survival to one thing come May. Their good start under Sam Allardyce. Indeed, that might look all very pollyannaish come the end of the season, because not a few of the clubs beneath them are better run and are capable of overtaking Toon with a little luck.

As I write this - before most of today’s matches have finished - Newcastle have just been turned over by Aston Villa. They are 12th with 28 points. That’s a full seven points above the relegation zone, which means that Birmingham, for instance, need to overhaul Toon by that much by May in order for United to go down. But 10th place is eight points away, which tells where they really find themselves.

The sheer dominance of the top three this season means that, as with other recent seasons, the results of the bottom five or so clubs are generally so catastrophic as to make trends hard to discern. But it’s my impression that Reading have most of their difficult ties out of the way already, and can concentrate on their football, which has been pretty good even in defeat at times. Sunderland are either good or bad, but do seem capable of scoring more than one goal a game. No doubt they are inspired by the Special Keano.

Likewise, Birmingham have been working their way through the top three lately, and they have a manager who feels a good fit for them. Bolton are impossible to call, but the Gary Megson who is in charge now looks recharged against memories of the man who worked so hard and often so unavailingly at West Brom.

No, if Newcastle are to stay up, I think they can thank Sam, early season results, and Wigan Athletic.

But I fear for them next season. Nothing in all of the recent analysis of the “new team” that Mike Ashley has pulled together gives me any feeling that any one of them genuinely knows what to do to improve the current situation. To be fair, and starting from here, as they have, it might not have been rescuable from the beginning.

A lot is said, and a lot has been said here lately, especially in the comments, about the need to organize a team. Before Allardyce arrived at Newcastle, the Toon fear wasn’t relegation, but boring football. I fear that that might have been a “Charlton” moment. You’ll remember, a couple of years ago, all of that talk coming from the Valley about Curbs not being the man to take Charlton to the next level, to help them kick on for Europe…

Whatever Allardyce may or may not be able to do, I think, and most honest commentators would agree, that he can organize a side if anyone can.

Although Newcastle were excellent for long periods in his last game against a Stoke side that are probably rather better than either Derby or Fulham, Allardyce didn’t manage to organize Newcastle into a functioning side in the time he had to his own satisfaction. He said so, and commented that he didn’t want the set of players he had to have his future in their hands.

This was taken to mean that Allardyce was blaming his tools. But what if he was right - what if there simply weren’t the players at Newcastle to produce what Allardyce wanted, let alone what the fans wanted? The squad looks OK on paper, but so did West Ham’s in their last relegation year. What if too many have lost interest, or never had it at Newcastle, or just aren’t good enough? What if they just don’t mesh?

Granted that Allardyce had had a full summer’s trading and a complete pre-season to work with, and things didn’t turn around, but I note that Newcastle’s slump began at about the same stage that Aston Villa’s did in Martin O’Neill’s first season. It takes time, and O’Neill had the advantage that Villa were desperate where Newcastle have been demanding. It’s easy to forget which club has won a European Cup. But not so hard to guess which is more likely to win another.

And yet, and yet. I look at the players. Milner - Owen - N’Zogbia - Martins - Given - Smith - Emre - Viduka - Butt - Barton - Duff. I’d back myself to do well with players of that calibre. Things must be bad indeed, and if they are that bad, is there any way for anyone to turn things around without the help of a post-relegation clearout?

Dennis Wise at Newcastle

So: the appointment of a manager who hasn’t seen a league game for longer than I have is followed up by the appointment of a Director of Football who not only has no experience of the job, but who - really, truly, honestly - isn’t anyone’s idea of the first step towards a continental style of management.

A continental style of management, which, a week ago, no one was told was coming. And which Keegan hardly fits.

Still, it puts to bed the idea that Mike Ashley is after a preservation-railway club, the kind of museum piece that will sell shirts to Anglophiles the world over. And, given the men he has chosen, it’s hardly the long-term Tottenham style of operation, which is beginning to bear fruit in north London. Nor is it the Arsenal/Arsene model..

I’m speechless, by which I mean, sotto voce, that I think it’s a case of wide boys collecting “real football men” for their beery, stripey northern train set.

And I feel hugely sorry for Newcastle fans. Much more of this, and no properly talented player - or talented coach, for that matter, and they’ll be needing one soon - will look at the place. If only Bobby Robson wasn’t so reduced by his recent illness.

Earlier in the season, I said that the biggest recent change in the Premiership was that powerful, wealthy owners were no longer able to allow their managers to manage - which was making the Premiership a dangerous place for coaching talent. Mourinho gone, Allardyce gone, Jol gone. Coming talent like Billy Davies gone. Rafa under siege.

All of that must ultimately impact on the field of play. We’ll see it first at St James’s Park.

Newcastle: An Astonishingly Stupid Idea

UPDATE: also see George Szirtes’ contrasting view here and here.

British football can choose, if it likes. But there are only two options. Either determine to develop the most skilled young players in the world, and the most intelligent, groundbreaking tactics. Or go for that heady, nostalgic, quick fix, with its underpinning of panic and fear.

Slaven Bilic, the university-educated manager of Croatia, thinks we’re going for the second:

I don’t understand why you played Austria four days before such a crucial game. I thought it was disrespectful. You don’t play Austria away before a proper game, the key game. But we didn’t beat you because you didn’t respect us. We beat you because we are better. In the games, the qualification, we were a better team than England. End of story. We were better and we still are.

So it was, and yet it turns out not to have been humiliation enough. Capello got the England job just in time. Were the selection process to begin again now, the little-Engerlanders would win the day, and we’d be off around the passion-and-commitment mulberry bush all over again. Capello always did have to win every game at a canter to keep the purblind off his back, but now that Keegan has returned to Newcastle, his early months are going to be all that harder. Let’s hope that he really doesn’t care about the press.

Make no bones about it - Newcastle are going to throw the kitchen sink at the opposition for the rest of the season. The bottom four are quite bad enough to stave off any thought of relegation, and with Arsenal up next in the FA Cup, that competition’s gone. It will look quite good, although not “good” as we define the word for Arsene Wenger’s beautiful team. It will look English, in the way a steam preservation railway looks English. It will look like revival.

In the summer, Keegan will be out looking for defenders again, but already the voices will be raised about how if this kind of thing can work for Newcastle, why can’t it work for England, who are playing “like Italians”..

Let’s be quite clear about this. Keegan’s reappointment at Newcastle is a terrible, terrible idea. I can’t imagine what Ashley and Mort were thinking - unless, and this is all too possible, they were thinking that he was the only man capable of contemplating taking the job on.

There is no evidence that the new owners of Newcastle have any idea at all about turning the club into an institution capable of winning trophies. They have just fired the one member of their staff who did. And replaced him with someone who, by his own admission, hasn’t seen even a Premiership match in a number of years. And then asked him to decide whether or not to have the club’s big hero, a man with no coaching or management experience and no unusual insight into the game, as his no. 2.

And look at Newcastle’s shopping list. Jermaine Defoe, Wes Brown, Wayne Bridge, Shaun Wright-Phillips. All well-known names, all not quite the best in their positions. Arsene Wenger’s first signings for Arsenal were men you’d never heard of. You know about Patrick Viera and Emmanuel Petit now. Nor had you heard of Thierry Henry - at least, you hadn’t heard of the version that Wenger managed to produce. Had Chelsea not moved first, perhaps Nikolas Anelka would have been on the list. Whose protegee was he again?

No, Newcastle can only say that Keegan has arrived to bring back the good old days. The “M” word is flying about. When you hear “Messiah” on someone’s lips, it means they’ve let go of all reason, and they have a mob at their back. Who want past glories restored.. although it’s 51 years now since Jackie Milburn left, and in another ten years no one at St James’ Park on a Sunday afternoon televised match will have seen him play. Newcastle are the first Premier League fans to be nostalgic about a team that won nothing beyond what would now be called the Championship.

For anyone not a Newcastle fan, and I’m married to one, it’s hard not to be reminded of the passion-and-commitment rubbish that was flying around in the weeks before Steve McClaren’s appointment as England manager. It’s there again, around Newcastle. But this time, there is no question whatsoever of “a manager who understands English players” because Newcastle can’t survive on England players alone.

Keegan’s almost successful 95-6 team was, as most Premiership sides were then, heavily native. Harper, Hughes, Warren Barton, John Beresford, Alan Shearer, Les Ferdinand, David Batty, Rob Lee, Paul Kitson, Peter Beardsley, Keith Gillespie - not all English, of course, but all British. Only Pavel Srnicek in goal (who was at Newcastle before Keegan and, but for Allardyce, would have been there to welcome him back), David Ginola, and that epitome of blood-and-thunder football, Faustino Asprilla, came from non-Anglophone countries.

It won’t be like that now. Newcastle’s current squad is still more British than most, but, Owen aside, they aren’t of the required quality. To win titles and cups requires world class players. Last season, Chelsea won the League Cup and the FA Cup - and in the latter, they beat title winners Manchester United in the final. In terms of depth and strength, Newcastle are nowhere near this level. Neither are another side managed by an ex-England manager, Manchester City. But at least Ericksson spent his “time off” energetically scouting Europe for the “good unknowns” - the likes of Elano.

What’s more, Ericksson is blessed with the ability to restore confidence in players. Darius Vassell is returning to something like his old self. Michael Ball is thinking of an England return, at least to the squad, after squandering the bulk of his career. And, before Sven, who’d heard of Joe Hart or Michael Johnson outside of City? We know who they are now.

When Keegan himself left City in 2005, Danny Mills is alleged to have brought champagne to the training ground:

“I felt training under Kevin wasn’t up to the standard it should have been. The quality was poor. There were lots of little things I felt needed to be put right. Discipline could also be a bit lax.

Michael Owen, a better player by far than Danny Mills, was inspired by Keegan when Special K was in charge of England, and four years later, wrote:

He seemed the complete package. But if it was for some players, it wasn’t for me. I assume the manager had conveyed to his staff what he thought of me and plainly it wasn’t complimentary. I felt I was being singled out… there was so much pressure on him he needed a scapegoat - as soon as he said one negative thing about me it led to another one and then it became a habit. Looking back on the Keegan era, one main feature stands out for me. It made me question my footballing ability for the first time in my life. And, yes, it scarred me. I used to go into games believing that the opposition was scared of me and that nothing could get in my way. That feeling, that belief, evaporated at times when I played under Keegan. Certainly it was a dark phase in my career. It made me more sensitive and self-protective.

And Rob Lee has pointed out that, whereas players of his generation idolized Keegan, young men of today do not.

Keegan’s reappointment displays every single error of the kind that has held English football back for so long:

1. The inspirational manager: “Belief” quickly evaporates if it isn’t based on reality. Arsene Wenger really does know what he’s doing. So, evidently, does Alex Ferguson. So does Sam Allardyce, and I put his obvious lack of real regret at being out of Newcastle down to his realization that he wasn’t working with grown-ups but wealthy kids who think they’ve bought a train set. Keegan’s appointment confirms that suspicion.
2. Restoring old glories: As has been rehearsed ad infinitum in the recent football press, you can’t go back. Successful second stints are so rare, and none have led to FA Cups or League titles. Where is the evidence that Keegan can buck this trend?
3. Passion and commitment: Passion and commitment loses to skill and strategy nine times out of ten. And it just isn’t a unique attribute of British football. Passion and commitment just aren’t standout features of British football - saying that is like asserting that King Arthur still has an active role in domestic politics. Let Slaven Bilic tell you about British football:
   

   I saw you at the European Championship in 2004 and your team was brilliant,” he said. “Should have beaten France, easily beat Switzerland, slaughtered Croatia and you play Portugal in the quarter-finals and you are leading 1-0. And then Wayne Rooney gets injured. And you sit back. And you have been sitting back ever since.

   2002-4 was a rare period when England did not sit back: I’ve been screaming at television screens since the late ’70s watching it happen again and again.

   Our players do NOT have more passion and commitment than foreign players. And it’s not the manager’s fault. And, as for the British fans.. get over yourselves.

   Bilic also has this to say, about the influence of the league: he’s echoing Herbert Chapman..

   …if you have the best league in Europe, there’s the danger that you won’t have a great national team. For the best league in the world you need the best players in the world - and that makes it a problem for you. I read something in FourFourTwo about the Arsenal team that won the FA Youth Cup. People said they were going to be a great team but they all had to leave to play football. Justin Hoyte is one of the few still there. There’s no way that would happen in Croatia. I didn’t play Modric and Corluka because they played for my Under-21s. I did it because they played regularly for Dinamo Zagreb, against Arsenal and in the Uefa Cup.

   To sum up, I prophesy that Newcastle fans will enjoy the rest of the season - the team will attack constantly for the remaining 16 games, and will win some of them impressively. Over the summer, there will be a lack of signings of the quality required to challenge the top four, and some significant players will leak complaints to the media. Pressure will mount in the new season, as the club will have something to play for again. But the team just isn’t good enough, and neither are the tactics, and the league position will mimic that of the last few years.

   I don’t want to look any further than that as it’s all too depressing and stupid. Bilic says it better than I can:

   With you English, you always have to find excuses. Rather than saying you weren’t very good, the easiest thing was to blame McClaren. The whole story became, ‘It’s all due to McClaren; if we’d had Capello we’d have been top’. Everyone, including the players, did that.

   So England, and so Newcastle.

   Links
   Bilic in the Times
   Bilic in the Independent
   Michael Own on Keegan: The Guardian and Daily Telegraph
   Rob Lee on Keegan in the Independent
   

West Ham 2006-7

So now we have to add racist chanting from fans to the stories of gambling, a dressing room dividing along racial lines, underperforming players, illegal transfers and goodness knows what else. I regret it all. Like many people, I have second and third and fourth teams, sides I have a soft spot for for a variety of reasons, usually centred on one moment in that team’s history. West Ham are one of mine, and here’s “my” West Ham in action, back when they seemed, to an eleven year old boy, to be an attractive, warm, family club:

Those days always seem on the verge of resurfacing. How many ex-West Ham players now play at international level? The names roll off the tongue: Lampard, Ferdinand, Defoe, Joe Cole, Michael Carrick - and there are quite clearly more to come, especially once this nightmare year has finally ended.

Relegation might at least free them of the kind of mockney media hanger-on, the kind that used to attach themselves to Chelsea in the ’90s, who have been littering the airwaves with trash talk about life in the shadow of the Boleyn. I don’t mean Russell Brand, who seems to be genuine about it. Is Iain Dale? His West Ham blog (no link - not worthy of one) reads like a literate parody of the genre:

Whatever happens, we’re West Ham. We stick together through thick and thin. We are, as the title of this blog says, West Ham till we die.

Is he serious? Does he mean this? Do they deserve it, in any sense of the words you might choose?

For a while, West Ham have been used as an exemplar of the kind of small, plucky local club with local players which isn’t into money and displays the traditional values and so on and so forth. No citations - but you know you’ve all seen and heard this stuff, especially in and around the FA Cup Final last year. As usual, when “traditional values” are referred to in English football - the traditional values that are almost certainly historical and sociological hokum, it all ends in tears and violence. The club’s been purchased by foreign millionaires, the players, though genuinely local in some cases, couldn’t care less, the fans (some) are racist and the football’s falling apart. Against Spurs on Sunday, trouble flared as West Ham’s early lead evaporated under pressure.

On the positive side, the darkness is always deepest. For once, I suspect that the vote of confidence is an honest one, and that Curbishley will be given free rein to rebuild. I don’t think there’s much of a More Than Mind Games curse, so let me say that I fully expect him to be there in four years time, in charge of a harmonious, successful club challenging for European places. Oh, and he’ll look four years younger, too…

Martin Samuel on English Managers

Ignorance, cowardice, and for the exception to the rule, a glass ceiling.

If he is proven right and a world-class performer lay wasted in the reserves of a club who were sinking deeper into relegation quicksand because his managers lacked the invention to make use of him, the shortcomings of certain English traditionalists will have been exposed.

Can you guess who that refers to before clicking the link?

Mourinho and Beckham

I won’t allow myself to feel old until the Pope starts looking young, but nevertheless there is the feeling of the end of an era today. What Beckham has announced today is his effective retirement. Around him, the United States MLS will find a sort of maturity, as the millions of young men playing football in North America begin to feed through into the professional clubs. Good thing too: it’s the third attempt at a professional league there, and what they have now is on a reasonably sound footing. The British will never accept that the United States is entitled to its own take on football, for all that our own has often worn a hideous face (no American Heysel, I notice) and Beckham won’t be able to change that. Let’s see if Google picks this up, that “soccer” is an English word, coined in response to its twin slang “rugger”.

I was sorry when Beckham lost his England place so close to 100 caps. I felt it was done out of cowardice rather than spite. If any England midfielder was to be dropped on the grounds of performance, then Beckham was hardly the main candidate. Beckham was a sacrificial goat, dumped to show that McClaren was “his own man.” What a horrible phrase that is, in that context. Dropping Beckham showed the complete opposite.

Michael Owen aside, who else has given more to the national team since 1998? Everyone can name great Beckham performances - can anyone name a Lampard one, or remember anything from Gerrard beside his goal in that 5-1 in Munich? To say nothing of his formidable highlights reel for Manchester United, and the suddenness of his absence after he left.

His failure to act the traditional English footballer - displaying that pre-eminent English heresy, an interest in fashion - has cost him every ounce of not-worth-having goodwill here. But it wasn’t long ago when his presence or absence in an England shirt was thought to be decisive - and he won that status the hard way. Enjoy America, David, and thanks for the memories:

Do we have to lose Mourinho too? I’ve flagged this possibility here before. But it seems to be coming closer now. If I were a Chelsea supporter, I’d be worried. What Mourinho has done at Chelsea - pull an effective team together from what was an expensive but disparate group - is not within the capability of many coaches. The Chelsea authorities are treating this man’s talent, his intelligence, his football knowledge, with a degree of contempt that is hard to believe.

If Peter Kenyon is serious about building Chelsea as a global brand, then he needs to recognise one central fact. Global football brands are all about successful football clubs. That means winning things. No amount of marketing, touring, website building (and I should know about that one), or whatever has half the impact of trophies. Nottingham Forest are still a huge name in football on the back of their two European Cups. Winning trophies for Chelsea means backing Mourinho. His successor isn’t going to be in the same trouble as the poor soul who eventually succeeds Ferguson at Manchester United, but he’ll still find himself in front of a group of players - especially the English ones - who’ll know that things, for them, will never be the same again.

Mourinho’s outspokenness is said to have lost Chelsea the friends they need if they are going to fulfil their G14 ambitions. If that’s the case, then those ambitions are in conflict with the need for actual football success. I suspect JM’s apparently random “outbursts” as having one big and deliberate purpose. They keep the focus of the headlines on him, not on his players. When things aren’t going well, it keeps the spotlight off them and reduces the pressure on them. The outbursts also serve to disturb their opponents’ concentration.

Should Mourinho leave, on the back of bad relations with his board, it will be a first in his career. He has always taken care to regard directors and other club officials as effectively part of the team, with whom his relations need careful management. A Ferguson or a Graham would always see the board as a problem - people with influence who knew nothing about football. That Mourinho isn’t getting on with the board now means that something substantial has gone wrong: Ballack? Shevchenko?

Chelsea’s loss, and English football’s loss, anyway. Here’s what I wrote about Mourinho in 2005.

Not Alan Pardew’s Hubris

It’s impossible not to feel sympathy with Alan Pardew, sacked by West Ham yesterday. It was never a comfortable berth for this talented manager, and with the exception of a short period last season when his side were playing the best football outside the top four, he has had to live with calls for his head throughout his time there. He joined them only three years ago, when they were a disjointed and failing Football League club on the way down - he leaves them with a talented team built cheaply and astonishingly quickly, a team who - but for some falsely-rewarded Gerrard grandstanding - would have won the FA Cup. He’d even won them European football.

In the first ninety years of their history, West Ham had only five managers. They’ve had another five in the last sixteen years. And here comes the sixth.

This is a prime example of a situation in which it’s hard to blame the manager. For most of this season, he’s had a takeover bid hanging over his head whose prime mover promised to fire him on day one of the new regime. One of his principal players, Yossi Benayoun, was close to members of that attempted take-over, as were the two Argentinian imports Mascherano and Tevez. His captain, Nigel Reo-Coker, is reported to be fed up at West Ham - and that shows another problem facing Pardew: his very success has reminded his players, or certain of his players, that there are bigger, “better” clubs that they “should” be playing for - and that the prizes West Ham can offer are not worth fighting for. There’s not really a lot Pardew could do about that - and he’s not the first manager to face the problem (it struck Brian Clough on at least two occasions, 1970-1 being the prime exhibit). Beyond magicking West Ham into Real Madrid, or dropping all of his best players - he had no options.

Player hubris, and that other kind of financial hubris that the game’s increasing prosperity is attracting in from outside business, have done for Pardew, and this situation does not reflect in any way on his qualities as a coach. The Charlton fans who are calling for Pardew to be appointed at the Valley pronto are right. If that happens, and there is no hint of it at present, they may well be getting the better half of the deal.

The rumour is that Alan Curbishley is the man, on the grounds of his success at Charlton (and a moment’s silence, please, for all of those Charlton fans who, on 6-0-6 and the internet, said that “Curbs” had had his day and now it was time for the club to kick on) and Curbishley’s unconcealed enthusiasm for the club. Sven Goran Ericksson, according to reports this morning, has been told that he is not a candidate.

So, having ruled out one of Europe’s most successful club and international coaches, West Ham are appointing a man who is a former player and a club supporter who - given time and forgiven relegation - brought Charlton to something almost, but not quite, approaching the Jimmy Seed glory years. These are worth recalling in this context: in 25 years from 1932 to 1957, Charlton won promotion to the First Division (1936), finished 2nd in the First Division (1937), 4th (193 and 3rd (1939). In those last years before World War II, they were the most consistent team in the country. Their crowd numbers averaged over 40,000 over a season, something only 11 clubs have ever achieved, and their stadium was the country’s biggest. During the War, Charlton won the “War” Cup and appeared in other finals, before appearing in a proper FA Cup Final as losers in 1946 and winners in 1947.

Curbishley’s achievement was to take the ruins that such a club had been reduced to by 30 years of bad management and make of it a decent sustainable small club. It’s a revival of a sort, helped by the fact that Charlton’s time as one of the genuinely strong English clubs has vanished into a memory hole.

What he’s facing now is something completely different. His previous relegation battle had little of the armageddon overtones the new television deal have added to the psyche of the bottom three this year. At least he faced it with his own players. West Ham’s players - some of them aren’t even really West Ham’s - aren’t of his choosing and may well not be of his own mind. Given Curbishley’s preference for persuading uncultured, unintelligent players to produce cultured, intelligent football, rather than rat-in-a-bag fighting killerball, he has to snap his new team into that top-half mode immediately, with concomitant results, or… and one wonders how long he’ll be given if things don’t get better from the very beginning.

What’s frustrating about the whole situation is that West Ham are always on the verge of building a tremendous side. Just when things are starting to go well - everything falls apart. Add Michael Carrick, Joe Cole, Rio Ferdinand, Jermaine Defoe and Frank Lampard to their current squad and - it hardly needs to be said, does it?

This particular implosion is all the more upsetting for it having been preceded by genuine success without any of those stellar old boys. It is solely the result of the destructive pull of new money. I’m reminded of nights in front of a computer watching Hale-Bopp disintegrate before plunging into Jupiter never to be seen again. It’s supposed to be a good thing, isn’t it, when huge investment arrives? because now we can compete with the Chelseas.. but listen as hard as you like, there’s no enthusiasm for it at West Ham - or at Liverpool, or at Everton, or even at Newcastle.

I’m ending with a prediction. Pardew’s sacking is the start of a very unstable period at the top of the English club game. We are not going to be able to recognise a significant number of clubs as “themselves” for a few years - and DC United, AFC Wimbledon, are going to find themselves company. It’ll settle down in the end - after all, our club game survived two world wars, scandal, football hooliganism and years of financial drought. That unregarded inner strength will pull it through this, and, as ever, the properly-run clubs with sane boards and effective managers will trump the gold-rush teams. Just watch what happens to Chelsea when Mourinho leaves.

Jose, Cech, Reading: Did It Work?

An email to the Football365 Mailbox suggests that Mourinho’s kicking up rough about Petr Cech’s treatment at Reading was all about distracting attention from his team’s preparation for the match against Barcelona. I agree… to some extent.

When it comes to getting ready for big games, Mourinho is Clough’s man. Keep your players distracted, be a lightning conductor for the press so that they are left in comparative peace, don’t let them obsess or dwell on what’s to come. If Mourinho’s abuse of Reading was with that in mind, it worked superbly. As the email says, we’ve heard almost nothing all week about Lampard’s form, or Shevchenko’s - and the substitute, substitute goalkeeper was able to gather himself in relative seclusion.

And it’s what he’s done a hundred times before. His “war” with Arsene Wenger was all about taking the rod away from his players and onto his own back (and it had the advantageous side effect of making the Arsenal manager look weak in front of his own players) - and everyone will remember Jose predicting, correctly, not only the Barcelona line-up of two years ago, but the name of the referee. (He failed to predict his own team on that occasion, but even the most astute of punters etc.) So if the Reading comments had the same result in mind, it wouldn’t be anything new.
And yet, and yet. Contrary to what the press would put forward, Mourinho does not have a track record of tasteless lying to cover up for his team. He does have one for apologising when he has spoken out of turn (Wenger received an apology for the “voyeur” remark and has never proffered one for his many occasions of blindness to the behaviour of his players).

On the last occasion Mourinho was seen to have behaved thus, it was once again Barcelona week at Stamford Bridge. He criticised the referee (it turned out that he was hardly alone in his opinion of the man’s abilities, or in his feeling that nepotism and not talent had pushed that particular man in black forwards). He accused Barca of visiting the referee’s dressing room at half time (which turned out to be true, long after). Chelsea failed to back him up - and very nearly lost their manager.

Mourinho is now one of those men who the English love to hate - he’s a moaner, apparently, that blackest of sins! and he “drags Chelsea’s name through the mud” (he does? as much as his Chief Executive, or his Owner?).

I suspect his unpopularity comes not from these things but from a darker place: jealousy - of his talent, his close family, his talent for the memorable phrase, his looks, his money… dislike of his failure to play up to English fantasies of the “old fashioned” manager (the “old fashioned manager” was a corrupt, incompetent tyrant: Busby et al were anything but old fashioned).. dislike of his failure to be English. Dislike of his willingness to take risks - dislike of his success in living up to them. So long as he sounds like Ray Winstone, the English are willing to hero-worship a clever rogue - they’re even willing to have him as England manager. But don’t be handsome, don’t be articulate, don’t be intelligent, don’t be right..
I’m just not sure that his complaints about Cech’s treatment are media management - or that, quietly, long afterwards, as ever, he might not prove to have had a point. I mentioned the other day that I had had Cech’s injury. My ambulance, once the police (who at that point were still convinced that I’d fallen over drunk and was only claiming to have been mugged) could be persuaded to call it, took an hour to get 100 yards up the road from the Royal Free to Hampstead Police Station. The Reading ambulance men have complained about Mourinho - but he didn’t complain about them. One day, just perhaps, long after it’s all forgotten, he might prove to have had a point.