The ManicaPost
THE Premier League has become the most respected British brand, according to a recent report by polling company Populus. While such findings should always be taken with a pinch of salt, they made for interesting reading.“Our research shows that of the many effective advertisements the UK has for what it wants to say about itself modern, successful, exciting, open, inclusive the Premier League is the strongest,” read one excerpt.
Even though we’ve become accustomed to the Premier League being the richest and most marketable league in the world, this is nevertheless a staggering development considering that, less than 30 years ago, English football was essentially the backwaters, banned from competing in Europe because of hooliganism problems.
As such, its reinvention has been quite spectacular and has, more than anything, been driven by importing foreign players and, more crucially, managers, like no other football league.
At present, just 20 percent of Premier League managers are English, a considerably lower figure than other major European leagues. Eighty-five percent of Serie A coaches are Italian; 70 percent of La Liga coaches are Spanish; 75 percent of Ligue 1 coaches are French; and 61 percent of Bundesliga coaches are German. Even expanding “English” to “British” only takes the Premier League figure up to 35 percent.
Further, the Premier League has depended upon foreigners for tactical progress since its 1992 inception, which makes it troubling that there has recently been a backlash toward Manchester City manager Pep Guardiola from English coaches and former players.
After Saturday’s 4-2 defeat at the hands of Leicester, there was a curious reaction from pundits. The vast majority were critical of Guardiola, with many others saying something along the lines of: “If Guardiola were X, he would be hammered for that.”
Robbie Savage used Manchester United’s Jose Mourinho, a man to whom English football is well-accustomed, as “X” and also threw in a mention of West Brom’s Tony Pulis for good measure. Ian Wright went straight for “English” as “X,” with Harry Redknapp finishing one sentence: “He’d have got slaughtered.” The point is, though, that Guardiola was “slaughtered.”
This repeated accusation of double standards, when English/British managers are compared to their foreign counterparts, is by no means a new phenomenon. In 2000, then-Bolton manager Sam Allardyce suggested his background would hold him back when it came to pursuing higher-profile jobs.
“I have never seen myself being offered a job by a top Premiership club for the simple reason that I’m not high-profile enough and I don’t speak with a foreign accent,” he said. (At that point, just four of the 20 Premier League clubs had a foreign manager, making the complaint somewhat misleading.)
It was a refrain that Allardyce repeated in 2012 with his infamous “Allardici” comments and one that has now been taken over by Burnley manager Sean Dyche.
“Jurgen Klopp came in and played a 4-4-2 and let’s run really hard and press,” Dyche said. “People thought it was incredible; wasn’t Sean Dyche doing that years ago when he got here? Oh well.”
But pressing isn’t just about running hard, it’s about doing it at the right times, positional intelligence and forcing the opposition to pass in a certain direction.
Dyche knows this and his own side occasionally do something similar, which means he was just rubbishing the work of an opposition manager, seemingly because Klopp is (A) foreign and (B) understandably getting praise as a double Bundesliga winner and someone who appears to have quickly transformed Liverpool.
“Antonio Conte came in at Chelsea and he got commended for bringing a hard, fast, new leadership to Chelsea,” Dyche said. “This involved doing 800-meter runs, 400-meter runs and 200-meter runs. Come to my training and see Sean Dyche doing that and you’d say, ‘Dinosaur a young English dinosaur manager hasn’t got a clue!’”
Whether or not it is true, it is difficult to consider this remotely relevant to anything, and it’s particularly baffling considering Dyche wasn’t branded this way at all.
In 2014-15, Burnley were widely acknowledged as a well-organised side defensively. But they also went on a disastrous run at the end of the seasons, in which they scored only three times in 12 matches. As such, some criticism was inevitable. — espnfc.
