A throwback to when managers weren’t robots

There are football managers and then there’s Neil Warnock.

At 77, he has returned to the dugout once again, this time at Torquay United, confirming that retirement for Warnock is less a life stage and more a hobby he occasionally experiments with.

And it didn’t take him long to get back to his old ways.

“It’s a surprise for me to be here today,” he said. “I thought I would have been at Tottenham or Forest or somewhere like that. I could do a better job, but they never asked me.”

And with that one statement he managed to remind everyone why football has missed him.

Modern managers are usually about 38 years old, dressed in black designer outfits and speak exclusively in sentences that sound as though they were generated by a football-themed version of ChatGPT.

They talk about ‘game models’, ‘verticality’, ‘turnovers’ and the ‘process’. If you asked most of them what they had for breakfast they would probably tell you it was part of a long-term nutritional project.

Warnock, on the other hand, has wandered back into management like a man who popped out to buy milk and accidentally took charge of another football club.

This time it’s Torquay, which sits roughly seven divisions below the Premier League and several light years away from the modern game’s obsession with data dashboards and tactical flowcharts. None of which will bother Warnock in the slightest. His tactical game plan has historically been getting his players to run around a bit more and stop being useless.

And yet the man has eight promotions to his name, which suggests that sometimes football doesn’t need a 200-page tactical thesis or a laptop full of analytics. Sometimes it just needs a grizzled Yorkshireman pointing at a whiteboard and asking a group of players why they appear to be playing like they met five minutes ago in the car park.

Warnock belongs to a nearly extinct (if not extinct) breed of football managers who are actually entertaining to listen to. His press conferences have never been media-trained exercises in saying nothing. They are events. You never quite know whether he is about to praise the opposition, insult a referee, or recount an anecdote from 1993 that somehow proves the entire football world is against him.

Modern managers rarely say anything memorable. Warnock once said: “I thought the referee had a good game… until he blew his whistle.” It is difficult to imagine Pep Guardiola or a Mikel Arteta risking that level of honesty when their media department is hovering nearby with a tranquilliser dart.

So yes, it will only be temporary. Warnock has been retiring on a semi-annual basis for about a decade now and he will no doubt go back to his gardening sooner rather than later.

But his brief reprise has served as a great reminder of what football is missing these days – managers with personality.

Modern managers speak in sentences that sound as though they were generated by ChatGPT

Don’t cry Wolves

For most of the season, Wolverhapton Wanderers have looked like a team whose relationship with the Premier League was coming to a polite but inevitable end.

Results have been awful, confidence totally shot, and the table has stubbornly kept them glued to the bottom like a piece of chewing gum on a shoe.

Which makes their recent run all the more delightfully confusing.

Seven points taken from Liverpool, Arsenal and Aston Villa is the sort of form normally associated with teams chasing the Champions League, not the Championship. Beating Liverpool, drawing with Arsenal and seeing off Villa would be impressive at any stage of the season. Doing it while sitting at the bottom of the table feels faintly surreal.

Rob Edwards deserves enormous credit for that. Managers in his position often look like men trying to plug holes in a sinking ship using sticky tape, optimism and an unknown centre forward from the under-18s. Edwards, instead, appears to have convinced Wolves that they might as well go down swinging.

The result has been a team suddenly playing with freedom, aggression and a faintly reckless sense that if they’re going to lose their Premier League status, they might as well take a few giants down with them.

Unfortunately for Wolves, football seasons are not judged on a three-game burst of enthusiasm. The damage done earlier in the campaign still looms large and the gap they have to bridge remains stubbornly wide. Great runs are wonderful things, but they are far less useful when they arrive several months too late.

Still, there is something oddly encouraging about the timing of it all. Relegated teams often limp to the finish line looking broken and defeated. Wolves, by contrast, suddenly look organised, competitive and capable.

And if they do end up dropping into the Championship, they will go down as a side that appears to have rediscovered itself just in time to become the overwhelming favourite to bounce spectacularly back.

Eight goals,11 trophies, zero mercy

English football managers love to tell us that the game is a results business: win matches and you keep your job, lose them and you are out on your ear.

It is one of those brutally simple truths that coaches repeat with the weary tone of someone explaining gravity. And it’s hard to argue with it as a rule of thumb.

However, things seem to work a little differently for managers in South America.

Take the curious case of former Chelsea player Filipe Luis, who has just been sacked by Brazilian club Flamengo despite the minor detail of winning his last match 8-0.

Yes, eight.

In fact, if you include the previous leg, Flamengo had just completed an 11-0 aggregate victory. Most managers would assume that kind of scoreline buys you job security, a few celebratory drinks and possibly a weekend away with the chairman’s wife.

Instead, Luis was asked to clear his desk.

What makes this all the weirder is that Luis hadn’t exactly been presiding over inconsistent chaos. Since taking charge 18 months ago he had won 11 trophies and boasted a 70 per cent win rate, a number most managers would happily tattoo on their foreheads.

And yet apparently that still isn’t quite good enough in South America.

The official explanation revolves around a disappointing start to the new season and defeats in a couple of cup competitions. Which in Brazil, it seems, carries roughly the same professional consequences as setting fire to the stadium.

English managers often complain about the pressure of the Premier League, where a couple of bad weeks can suddenly have chairmen reaching for the eject button.

But compared to Brazil, it looks positively relaxed...

E-mail: jamescalvertmalta@gmail.com

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