Closed shop

ALAN CURBISHLEY, the able young manager of Charlton Athletic, has deplored what he called the closed shop in Premier League managers; as evidenced by the fact that no sooner had Gordon Strachan been sacked by Coventry City, Peter Taylor by Leicester City, than there they were, respectively, new managers of Southampton and Brighton. Curbishley called it "a little bit of a merry go round," adding, "perhaps it shows that the pool of managers that can do the job is getting smaller and smaller."

Well, that's one way of looking at it, though a contentious one. A few weeks ago the irrepressible Barry Fry, manager of Peterborough United and once the manager of Birmingham City, in somewhat xenophobic mood, deplored the appointment of Continental coaches in England and demanded that managers be recruited from non-League clubs. As one who came up through the non-league ranks himself, including a spell at doomed Dunstable, he had, perhaps, an axe to grind. Nor, as one who for many years advocated the appointment of European coaches here, can I agree that they be banished. Yet Fry surely has a valid point.

Not that managers of non-League clubs could or should hop straight to the Premiership, but that the career, as Napoleon once had it, should be open to talents. If indeed the pool, as Curbishley believes, is shrinking, perhaps it is because promotion from the lower regions of the game is far harder than it should be.

It is especially significant, even ironic, that in a football ambience as ferociously professional as Italy's, managers can rise to the heights of Serie A from the most obscure beginnings. Arrigo Sacchi was, of course, the prime example of this. When he joined his little local amateur club Fusignano, near the Adriatic, he was scornfully but profitably told that he was so useless a footballer that the best thing he could do was to coach the juniors.

This he did with such success that he rapidly advanced up the pecking order. An impressive spell as coach to Fiorentina's juniors led to his appointment as the manager of Parma, then far from the power it is today. He almost got them from, Serie B into Serie A, but did well enough to be recommended to Silvio Berlusconi, who plucked him out of the chorus and made him manager of AC Milan. When he sat in the chair at their headquarters, Sacchi recalled, he couldn't believe that it was happening.

But as we know, he won the Championship with Milan and later took Italy all the way to the 1994 World Cup final where they lost to Brazil only on penalties. His famous dictum was, "You don't have to have been a horse to be a jockey."

Now at Perugia there is the remarkable Serse Cosmi, another manager to have come triumphantly out of left field, a passionate figure on the touchline, all waving arms and baseball cap. Surviving in a job where casualties are so many, under the explosive President, Gaucci.

Serse was thus named by his father after the brother of the famous cyclist, Fausto Coppi. Never much of a footballer, he played for a little local team near to Perugia run by his father, but says he truly learned about the game when playing for the juniors of the rival city, Ternana: under a coach called Omero Androani. From him says Cosmi he learned how to prepare the tactics of a team so that they became almost automatic. He wants, he says, to base his tactics on "vertical" passing, but not before space has been created. He likes the concept of the old school attacking centre-half. His training exercises are elaborately calibrated. He is adept in resuscitating the careers of gifted players, who have fallen by the wayside.

When he took the team over last season, no one gave him long to live. But he confounded scepticism with victories against the bigger clubs. Last summer, he had to sell three of his stars including the ex-Everton centre back Materazzi, now a full Italian international, to Inter. This season he's been obliged to sell a key midfielder, Liverani, the first black player to be picked by Italy, to Lazio. Yet the team remains afloat.

Cosmi paid his dues chiefly in his five years with the Arezzo club, taking them from the non-League so called "amateur" competition all the way to Serie B. Would such a manager get his chance in England? As things stand, it seems unlikely; yet such coaches by the time they come to the major Leagues, have truly learned their trade. Hence, there is indeed a tendency towards Buggins' Turn. Either to appoint an experienced manager who is out of work, to over-promote a coach who isn't managerial material, or to take on a well-known ex-player, who may never have coached, let alone managed, at all. It should surely be resisted.

An exception to the rule is Martin O'Neill, in the sense that the former Nottingham Forest and Northern Ireland midfielder didn't initially capitalise on his playing career, but went to little Wycombe Wanderers where, well after he had established himself as one of the most promising young managers in Britain, he stayed on, till finally deciding to manage Leicester City; with still greater success; and greatest of all Celtic, where last season he so triumphantly over-turned the supremacy of the eternal Glaswegian rivals Rangers, to run away with the Scottish Championship and take Celtic back into Europe.

There can be no doubt that O'Neill, who had a university education in law at Queens University, Belfast, did well initially to watch and wait, learning the business thoroughly before moving up the scale.

In Germany it has long been the norm for would be managers, however dazzling their playing careers, to be obliged to pay their dues lower down the scale. Though the system was undermined when Dr. Kaiser, Franz Beckenbauer, was put in charge of the German national team with no managerial background at all; only for Franz to take the team to two World Cup Finals!