The greatest of all the managerial myths is the sloganeering tyrant who terrifies his players into winning
This week Sir Alex Ferguson recalled how his first purchase as a manager was for �100 from a �2,000 budget he had been given to increase the size of his East Stirlingshire first-team squad from precisely eight. In America, as the Super Bowl approaches, much is being made of Vince Lombardi's motivational aphorism: "Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing."
In his biography of the great patriarch of the Green Bay Packers, who face the Pittsburgh Steelers in Dallas tonight, David Maraniss calls the obsession with victory "the black addiction of the brain" ? a phrase he finds in Bertolt Brecht. Lombardi's compulsion was later hijacked by the American right to promote a Darwinian view of life.
Without meaning to, the king of the northern winters offered Republicans plenty of opportunities to appropriate his work. His talk of "the American zeal" for winning was easily absorbed by the pioneer psyche. But as Maraniss tells us in When Pride Still Mattered, the "winning isn't everything" schtick traces to a John Wayne movie called Trouble Along the Way. The more you study the great managers the more you see that "the black addiction" is merely the public face of a more varied and interesting compulsion.
The link from Lombardi to today's other big slice of melodrama is, of course, Bill Shankly, who was surely pulling our leg with his assertion that football was more important than life or death. While Ferguson was celebrating more than 2,000 games in charge with the League Managers Association, Fernando Torres was telling us "romance is dead" while simultaneously promising not to celebrate if he scores for Chelsea against Liverpool at Stamford Bridge. Torres fell into this contradiction trap because his profession requires him to be both a champion to the masses and a ruthless, selfish goal-getter who is available to the highest bidder. The El Ni�o moniker speaks of innocence and crowd adulation. But his move to Chelsea for �50m in the week that Gary Neville retired after more than 20 years at Manchester United reveals a much deeper truth. The one-club player is an "extinct animal", to quote Howard Wilkinson from the LMA celebration.
If allegiance is dead, or dying, it can only be good for us to think more penetratingly about why managers manage and players play. Neither is in the business of validating our precooked ideas about what their motivations are, or should be. The first time you hear a top player speak of "driving to work", rather than "heading to the training ground to plot a Premier League and Champions League double", mild shock ensues ? but then you remember footballers are not cartoon heroes but mere lucky sods with all the usual worries and flaws.
Lombardi was not solely a martinet, any more than Ferguson. The greatest of all managerial myths is the sloganeering tyrant who terrifies his players into winning or inspires them with banal exhortations. However strong the leader ? and Lombardi, Matt Busby, Shankly and Ferguson were all immensely authoritative ? the pact between players and manager is preserved by the latter knowing what he's doing, and the former going along with it.
Tom Brown, a Lombardi-era Packers safety, tells Maraniss professional footballers "are basically lazy guys. We want to take the easy way out. We are so far superior. We've always been better. As nine-year-olds. Ten-year-olds. We were always the best athletes on the field. We probably got preferential treatment from youth coaches and all the way up. So we never really had to give 100% effort."
Thus the "winning is the only thing" mantra becomes an attempt to force players to strive to win, not to be invincible, as the phrase implies. It is a way of screwing effort out of talented people, in an age where some young footballers could stop at 25 and never work again. Lombardi would provoke his players, screaming: "Defy me! Defy me!" on the training ground. To him hate was "fire", but he understood the other side, too, sermonising about the "love" in his team. The essence was: you are lost without the man next to you, without that unity and trust.
In that way the best managers are the cleverest manipulators. Their quest is to find people who embody parts of their own character, as Gary Neville (cussed) and Eric Cantona (regal) did for Ferguson. Speak to managers now and they understand less and less about their players, as a species, which is why they rely more and more on personal favourites, on trusted allies.
The challenge up here in the grandstand is not to see players as our personal representatives, living out our failed dreams, but as people with essentially personal motivations who have fallen into a giant vat of chocolate and are stuffing themselves, in line with human nature.
As Torres and Co tuck in, the manager retains one inviolable asset: his enthusiasm, his love for the game, which works better than fear. As Ferguson spoke to younger colleagues who had come to pay tribute, you could still see the eager boy in him, after 2,023 games. Maybe enjoying it is the only thing.
Ashton indiscipline a blot on landscape
For a long time England's rugby renaissance seemed timed to coincide with the arrival of Godot on stage, but the improvement detectable in last autumn's Twickenham internationals was again apparent in Cardiff on Friday night, if we ignore the kind of indiscipline that bedevilled Martin Johnson's first year or so in charge.
The willingness of some England players to stick hands in rucks or otherwise concede penalties right in front of the referee points to a certain arrogance, or lack of thought, or both. Plenty of praise has been heaped on Chris Ashton for his impact on the wing so now Johnson will dump a little manure in the interests of balance. The laws of the game apply to young stars as much as to battered vets and Ashton will be reminded by the England coach not to offer the opposition gift?wrapped points.
Another concern is a loss of momentum late in games. The new England are still not good at pacing themselves over 80 minutes. But there is real thrust and purpose to their best phases. Toby Flood is the catalyst. At last England have a reliably adventurous fly-half.
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