Do managers count?

Alf Ramsey was arguably the only truly influential and certainly the most successful manager England have ever had.

Sitting in the Press Box at Stamford Bridge at a recent Chelsea match, I found myself talking to a young colleague about the England managerial role and who might succeed the flaccid overpaid Sven-Goran Eriksson. He gave me a tolerant smile and asked me whether I thought it really mattered. Well, does it; at club or country level?

My mind goes back just over 50 years when I was living in Rome and working for the local sports daily, the Corriere Dello Sport. Each day I lunched in central Rome with Domenico, then the Lazio youth coach and the man who discovered Bruno Conti, destined to be picked by Pele as the outstanding player of the 1982 World Cup in Spain. One day who should be lunching there, but the celebrated Hungarian coach Bela Guttmann. He had just been sacked by Milan, even though, at that point, the club were leading Serie A! With justifiable bitterness, Bela said that when he next signed a contract, there would be a clause in it: not to be dismissed when the club is at the top of the league! He then told a splendidly significant story. Some years previously, he told us, Lucchese, the Tuscan team, then briefly playing in the top division, had to play a difficult game in the North against mighty Juventus. On the rail journey there, their unfortunate manager died.

Panic and despair! How could any Italian team take the field without a coach! Desperately the directors rang around the peninsula till at long last they found a manager available who arrived just in time to sit on the bench. Against all the odds, Lucchese forced a draw, at the conclusion of which, the players carried the manager off the field on their shoulders!

That Italian players have an almost superstitious reverence for the coach is plain enough. Yet another image comes into my mind. The final whistle after extra time of the 1966 World Cup Final at Wembley. The tearful little England right half, Nobby Stiles, socks typically around his ankles, no teeth in his mouth, tells the England manager, Alf Ramsey: "You won it, Alf! We'd have been nothing without you!" As one who covered that World Cup and saw all the games played by England, I could hardly disagree. Ramsey was arguably the only truly influential and certainly the most successful manager England have ever had. The players adored him, trusting him completely. His wingless wonders tactics may have been in essence negative, he may have exalted work rate above flair and technique, but there can be no doubt that the teams he fashioned in that World Cup and in Mexico four years later were highly efficient and strongly motivated. You could hardly imagine an England defender saying as one did when England were knocked out of the last World Cup in Japan by a 10-man Brazil. At half time he said, "We needed Winston Churchill, but we got Iain Duncan Smith." Meaning the then prosaic leader of the Tory party. At the time of writing, Eriksson, the eternal survivor, is alas due to take England into the World Cup 2006 Finals with a successor imminently due to be appointed. Judged on what happened in Japan and in 2004 in Portugal in the European Championship finals, England, under Eriksson, will get no further than the quarter-finals and if they reach them, will be given neither inspiration nor tactical insight by the Swede. Does that mean Eriksson makes no difference? In a negative sense, I'd say that he does, with errors of strategy and selection and a complete inability to inspire his teams.

Then I think back to his predecessor Bobby Robson who managed England with a measure of success in the World Cups of 1986 and 1990, and with anything but success in between in the European Championship in West Germany. Utter humiliation, all games lost, including the first in Stuttgart against modest Ireland.

With the passing of time Robson has become what you might call a revered elder statesman. He was no doubt a lively and effective manager of Ipswich Town even if one of his key players, the left sided Dutch midfielder, Arnold Muhren, spoke scathingly of him. In charge of England, in those two World Cups, my own chief impression was of his luck.

England made a shocking start in Mexico in 1986, when Robson insisted in the first two games on fielding his namesake, Bryan, though he knew his shoulder was constantly being dislocated; and had told what even he admitted was "a white lie" about it, when the shoulder went out in Los Angeles in a pre-tournament friendly versus Mexico. Only when the shoulder went out yet again against Morocco and Ray Wilkins, dismally pedestrian in midfield, had been sent off for throwing the ball at the referee, did the players make their preferences known, and the newly built team revived, unlucky to be ambushed by the Hand of God goal by Diego Maradona.

In Italy in 1990, even Robson was heard to say after England scraped through to the semi-finals after beating Cameroon in Naples: "We've got here, I don't know how." His players had persuaded him to use a sweeper defence after he had resisted it for years past. After the Cameroon game, when Mark Wright was injured and had to come out of the sweeper defence, a relieved Bobby remarked, "A flat back four saved us." Ron Greenwood, who has recently died at the age of 84, beyond doubt inspired and galvanised West Ham United with his innovative methods, providing Martin Peters, Bobby Moore and Geoff Hurst to the England team, which won the 1966 World Cup. But when he was later pulled out of disillusioned retirement to manage the England team himself, it wasn't the same Greenwood. So managers do make a difference; for better or worse.