Wolves at the (trap)door

It is always heartening to see a black football manager appointed in the English game (I wouldn’t know much about leagues in other federations to comment, though it was sad that at the World Cup in South Africa in 2010, all the countries from the African continent that qualified replaced their native coaches with foreign ones – a fallacy borne out by only Ghana doing well).  There are precious few of them – too few – and they need to get a break to bridge the gap.  Affirmative action as they have in other sports would face resistance in the England where chairmen are results-obsessed.  But when they do make the step up, they can be quite successful, usually because they’ve had to scrap more than white contenders. Birmingham City and Charlton Athletic are upwardly mobile under the two Chris’s Hughton and Powell.  Hughton also did well at Newcastle United until he was brutally and unfairly sacked.  In the future, it will be hoped that black players of today will occupy plenty of managerial posts of tomorrow.  Patrick Viera for one seems to be on course for that.

This is why it is a good thing that Wolverhampton Wanderers have appointed Terry Connor as interim coach to the end of the season.  If he keeps them up, he deserves the job on a full-time basis.  A welter of white candidates reared their heads and then ruled themselves out when a permanent position was not immediately forthcoming, no doubt thinking of the dents to their own reputation were they fail to keep the Old Gold up and then relieved of their responsibilities.  Connor has been at the club since the last millennium and has no trouble in stepping into the breach to help the club with which he has become so familiar.

Yet that familiarity may become a problem.  When a different gaffer takes over, they’ve usually been brought in from outside and you get the ‘new manager bounce’.  The players recognise that this guy only knows them in passing and they bust a gut in training and on the match day to justify their place in the planning of the manager.  In most cases, it lasts a few games and then tails off as the squad suss out the boss as to whether he is any good or no better than the previous incumbent.  But the Wolves team are aware that Connor knows them inside out.  Why should they try any harder for him than they should for the departed Mick McCarthy?  Taking a hammering at home from bitter local rivals West Bromwich Albion undermines a player’s self-worth and their belief not just in the manager but the entire coaching set-up.  Steve Morgan acted perhaps on the example of the visiting West Brom under Roy Hodgson who came in at roughly the same period with the team struggling and elevated them to mid-table safety.  Hodgson, however, was an outside introduction.

I hope Connor does well, repeating Hodgson’s feat.  Having no previous managerial experience isn’t a sign that one is not good enough – it hasn’t stopped white candidates being allowed to make the step-up, such as Nick Barmby at Hull City, Gianluca Vialli at Chelsea or Andy Hessenthaler (first time around) at Gillingham, to name but three of many.  One has to start somewhere.  It is Connor’s intimacy with the squad, usually a plus, that may fail to lead to improvements in performance and possibly culminate in relegation.  The example of Steve Kean floundering at Blackburn Rovers (bar Yakubu’s goals) since taking over from Sam Allardyce looms large.