The Name Game

Last updated : 29 May 2004 By Richard Oldroyd

Terry Venables - didn't throw his hat in
I can’t reveal my source, because he told me in confidence, as you would tell an ordinary fan with no particular reason to know. But he told me that, almost definitely, it would be Ronnie Moore.

Or Steve Cotterill. Or Brian Flynn. Or Eric Black, John Ward, or any of the other associated names. Someone else told me it would certainly be Steve McMahon, or failing that, Phil Brown.

In fact, what nobody realised when Barry Kilby indicated he intended to restructure the club, was that our progressive new coaching regime was to be so intense the job would be shared by the12 different applicants who are guaranteed to get the job.

Burnley is a small town in football terms, a town where the football club is a common denominator. It is a staple topic of conversation in the pubs and bars of the town. That, inevitably, means everyone knows Barry Kilby’s window cleaner, and rumour spreads like wildfire – sometimes substantiated, sometimes not so.

But what it does, definitely, mean, is that as I write we do not yet know who the new man is to be. By the time you read this, we may do so, since an appointment would appear to be imminent. It seems safe to assume that those sorts of names are under the consideration of the Turf Moor board, but there may yet be others of which we are unaware.

It has been interesting, as the saga has developed, to study the reactions of people to the names in the frame. Barry Kilby has declared himself ‘delighted’ with the standard of applicant, and indeed some of those names mentioned above are acknowledged within the game as truly excellent coaches.

Yet not one enjoys the unanimous backing of the Claret and Blue faithful. The reasons for this lack of consensus are many and, sometimes, contradictory.

Brian Flynn, for example, has seen his stock fall since the last time this decision stood to be made. Whereas then he was widely admired for the job he had quietly done in consolidating Wrexham as a division two club, now he appears to have been pigeon-holed as a lower division manager - despite relative success both at the Racecourse Ground and at Swansea – whose long stint in North Wales marks him out as lacking in ambition.

Steve Cotterill, by contrast, stands accused of being too ambitious. His crime is to leave Cheltenham, where he had done an outstanding job, to the number one job at Stoke, only to be lured by Howard Wilkinson to Sunderland with the prospect of coaching in the Premiership and ultimately succeeding to the top job at the Stadium of Light.

The common black mark among all those linked with the club is that they are not big names, a curious complaint in the circumstances when you take into account the fact that at this moment in time Burnley are not a big club. It was always unlikely that Terry Venables would throw his hat into the ring for this particular job.

In any event, this has always struck me as a curious complaint. Managers always tend to do better when their reputation is smaller than the club they arrive to manage: it gives them something to prove. Alex Ferguson was not a ‘big name’ when he joined Manchester United; Arsene Wenger certainly wasn’t when he arrived at Arsenal.

This thought struck me when the list of candidates for the Liverpool job, included many of the so-called ‘supercoaches’. No mention of Sam Allardyce, who has done such a good job with so little money down the road at Bolton, but mostly those whose stock is highest – like Martin O’Neill and Jose Mourinho. Is the next great manager not just waiting to come out of the hat? Few managers are born with their halo already polished.

In many ways, I’d be disappointed if a bigger name was linked with the Burnley job. What I do know, and am very glad to see, is that the likes of Flynn, Cotterill, Brown and Moore are regarded within the game as excellent coaches. Only last week, Harry Redknapp cited Cotterill as an example of a top young British coach.

Somewhere amongst those names and many others in the lower divisions – almost unmentioned in this saga is the name of Dave Penney, the man who has dragged Doncaster from the foot of the conference to the second division in no time at all – is the next Cloughie, Fergie or Wenger. Remember the time when Allardyce himself would have been deemed below Burnley, after he had been sacked by Blackpool. Bolton then took a punt on him, and it paid dividends.

Big names are not necessarily beautiful. But whoever it is to be, the waiting is almost over. I’m nearly sure of it – I was told so in the pub last night.