The Winner Takes it All

I must have been ten or eleven when I first pondered what made a good football manager. Seeing a progression of pre-literate types complete with sheepskin coats, blow-dried hairdos or both explain to Brian Moore on a Sunday afternoon in the 1970s how they “wuzz robbed” or “we won ‘em fair un square” after their charges had been soundly thrashed or triumphed in some encounter on a quagmire that passed for a football pitch suggested that intellect, sartorial elegance and charisma were not pre-requisites.

If you’ve not found the best of ‘The Big Match’ on ITV X, I can highly recommend it. I’m particularly fond of the January 1975 episode as my mum, late dad and me feature fleetingly in it.  Alan Stevenson had a minor altercation with some West London urchin I was standing next to, trying to retrieve the ball after a wayward QPR attempt on goal. I remember said urchin seemed to relish the encounter until some bothersome, bearded type came up and suggested he claimed he had been assaulted. The incident made the pages of the Evening Standard before fizzling out.

My ignorance of what’s involved in keeping a Premier League squad tuned was greatly improved after meeting Ian Woan a few years ago. He explained the level of detail and analysis expended on the squad by a considerable team, all overseen by ‘The Gaffer’. It was a real eye-opener: no Key Performance Indicator - from weight to heart rate, to distance run to ball-touches escaped scrutiny. All training sessions were videoed and this data-driven approach informed every future training session that started with being “on the grass” every day between 09:00 and 13:00 followed by more targeted exercise, treatments and so on.

And while it worked, it worked. But sweating (literally…) the assets can only ever work so long and it was clear by this time a year ago that this valiant approach had run its course. But then I recalled Sky’s unintentionally hilarious ‘All or Nothing’ series a few years ago and got myself thoroughly confused again…

Compare and contrast the exacting and pragmatic approach of Messrs Dyche & Woan with the utterly incomprehensible bollocks spewed out by Per Guardiola in his briefings in this fly-on-the-wall perspective of the Premiership-winning Man City squad. Pep has this lecture theatre where his charges would sprawl improbably long limbs over what looked like seats from the First Class section of a Boeing 747. Armed only with magnetic markers, a whiteboard and a felt-tip pen, Pep went about performing this baffling ‘Dance of the Hands’ while talking like a man undergoing an out-of-body experience. The blank looks of his audience were tempered by the occasional nod by them to give the illusion of comprehension.

It’s an easy trick and I’ve done it myself when working for Silicon Valley tech companies. They would fly us all out there twice a year and then drone on for three days. The only way of getting through the ordeal was to emote sagely on autopilot, scribble the odd note, while thinking about having dinner at Aqua (now closed, sadly…) in San Francisco that evening or riding a rented Harley up to Napa Valley at the weekend. It was intolerable otherwise….

The only obvious flaw with my jaundiced analysis of ‘All or Nothing’ is the spectacular results for Man City it produced. You might argue that the late Brian Sewell, the extravagantly gay, former art critic of the Evening Standard with no known interest in any physical activity (other than those that don’t bear repetition in these pages), could have managed that group of players and they would still have won everything in sight.

But led by Vincent Kompany, there was an eerie sense of a higher power at work. In the Amazon series and in other media interviews, Vincent always had the steady gaze and noble deportment of one born to lead and win. Unnerving his interviewers, his devastatingly straightforward answers often transduced their penetrating questions to the facile, while being courtly and polite at the same time.

So fast forward a few years and he seems to have imbued this same unshakeable confidence in Burnley while liberating the style of play to a point they are unrecognisable from twelve months ago. I recognise the infusion of talent in a series of astute buys is probably the key factor but seeing the rejuvenation of Cork, Gudmensson and Brownhill is evidence of a change in approach behind the scenes. Only Barnes remains obdurately the same as from the Dyche & Woan era and who would want him any other way?

I’ve only got to three matches so far this season so far. The splendid evisceration of Wigan away, the bizarre spectacle at Sheffield United when the wheels well and truly fell off in the second half like a Burnley team of old and then the drubbing of QPR at Loftus Road a few weeks ago. The scant highlights on ITV & Sky are not really enough to form a sensible critique, so I’ll leave this to my fellow scribes whose detailed insights are much more persuasive.

So, getting squarely back to the tangential, Bruce Springsteen occasionally performs ‘Atlantic City’ in his marathon live sets. Originally, this song was released on ‘Nebraska’, a low-fi, hard-as-nails, tour-de-force from 1982 that is much admired by the cognoscenti but hard to love. Like many of Springsteen’s songs, it’s a tale of the desperation of the underdog: the chorus capturing the singular joy the protagonist has in his otherwise thread-bare life:

Well, now, everything dies, baby, that's a fact

But maybe everything that dies someday comes back

Put your makeup on, fix your hair up pretty

And meet me tonight in Atlantic City

But elsewhere is an unnerving couplet. When performed live, he emotes it in spoken word and nails an uncomfortable truth about football and life in general:

Down here it's just winners and losers and

Don't get caught on the wrong side of that fine line

We have a winner in Vincent Kompany. He simply knows no other way. It's all relative of course and no way can the Dyche & Woan years be thought of as anything but wildly successful, beyond anyone's realistic expectations. But the question these years always posed was “What’s next?”

We now have the answer. What died on 22 May 2022 looks like it’s coming back. Just a bit faster than I think anyone expected.