FOR ALL THE fluff and glitter that surrounds the game now, and for all the new ways we’ve found to discuss it, every aspect of football management will always come down to one single, overarching issue: when you tell that room full of men what to do, will they listen?
Traditionally, we’ve always believed that there is an omertà in place inside the dressing room: a Las Vegas principle that demands that whatever happens within it, stays within it. This is demonstrably untrue.
Even if incidents of startlingly accurate boot-kicking (Sir Alex Ferguson) or nude head-butts (Tony Pulis, and good luck getting that image out of your head) don’t leak out to the press, the vow of silence is only valid until the retirement of anyone who was in the room at the time – at which point autobiographies are written and everything is apparently fair game.
We know that there are managers who can motivate men to startling feats of derring-do with just a blast from their larynx, but we know too that there are managers who would struggle to convince a kitten to chase a piece of string. Gareth Southgate’s description of Sven-Göran Eriksson at the 2002 World Cup spoke volumes about the Swede’s dressing-room manner. ‘We expected Winston Churchill. Instead we got Iain Duncan Smith,’ he said, destroying both Eriksson’s reputation and lazy assumptions about the political awareness of footballers in one fell swoop.
You might expect the biggest names to have the biggest impact on players, but it’s not always the case. There are few names in football more illustrious than John Charles. A legend in Italy, where he was known as Il Gigante Buono (The Gentle Giant) by besotted Juventus supporters. A world-class central-defender and a world-class striker, he remains one of the greatest British players of all time. So you would expect him to have quite an effect on, say, the Hereford dressing room in the early seventies.
Alas, no.
‘I’ll tell you about John Charles,’ said David Icke (yes, that David Icke, he was a pretty decent goalkeeper in his time). ‘We were expecting a pep talk and John Charles comes in, he bounces a ball up and down and he says, “Right, come on, lads. We’ve got to win this.” And then he stopped for a moment and he said, “Well . . . we don’t have to win this. But it would be nice, wouldn’t it?”’
They didn’t win it.
This is an extract from Iain MacIntosh’s book The Football Manager’s Guide to Football Management and can be purchased here.
