Of coaches and managers

THE start of the new English Premiership season was something of a disaster for Steve McLaren at Middlesbrough, Peter Taylor at Leicester and to a slightly lesser extent, Stuart Gray at Southampton. All three teams began not with a bang but with a whimper. McLaren's Middlesbrough losing all three games and inducing him gloomily to declare that there was a great deal to be done still, and to imply that may be it would be done by Christmas.

This from the very man who arrived from Old Trafford, where he has been first team coach to Manchester United, with a fanfare of trumpets. Where Bryan Robson had imposed, it seemed, lax discipline and half baked training sessions, he and his club having been pulled clear from disaster by the arrival of Terry Venables, who pushed Robson into the background and somehow saved Boro from relegation.

Terry could have stayed in place, but he didn't want to, Television called, even if the new ITV version of Match of the Day, wrested from the BBC after so many years, has so far been an early evening disaster. Bryan Robson, who had stayed in office largely because of his close friendship with club President Gibson, a young millionaire, went away at last and in came the new Messiah: alias Steve McLaren.

He had done impressive things at Preston. He had flourished under the protective aegis of powerful Alex Ferguson at Old Trafford.

But when it became plain that he was not going to take over United when Ferguson went, as he is scheduled to do at the end of this season, he opted to move away and be a manager at Boro.

Never, mind you, the easiest of tasks. In their over 120 years of existence, Boro have never won a major honour, though they did quite recently appear at Wembley in the FA and League Cup finals. The only tournaments they've ever won are the old FA Amateur Cup twice, late in the 19th century!

Under Robson's regime, the ever contentious Italian star-striker Fabrizio Ravanelli fretted and complained, ridiculing the training sessions, desperately turning to his old Italian club, Juventus, for training schedules he could follow alone. Even this season, in the early weeks, a new player at Boro was decrying the lax attitude to training which had preceded McLaren's regime. But what has McLaren achieved, after weeks of pre-season training and friendly games? Nothing but a dismal series of early losses which led to the collapse of morale in the Boro side.

Inevitably perhaps analogies have been made between the experience of McLaren and Brian Kidd, his predecessor as coach, number 2 to Ferguson, at Manchester United. Kidd was a highly successful adjunct to Ferguson with a club which in earlier years he had so successfully played for as a striker; celebrating a teenage birthday in 1968 with a goal against Benfica at Wembley in the European Cup Final. But he began to fret under Ferguson, not least one feels because it grew clear he wouldn't be nominated as Fergie's successor.

So he accepted the offer to manage Blackburn Rovers, where everything went wrong. All too quickly it became plain that however good a coach he had been, he was no kind of manager. Blackburn, despite all the money poured into them by their multi-millionaire patron, Jack Walker, slipped inexorably down the table of the Premiership and were relegated. Out went a humiliated Brian Kidd; now much more comfortably installed at Leeds United as coach, under the managership of one so well suited to the job, the Irish international centre half of yore, David O'Leary.

By the time you read this, Peter Taylor may well no longer be the manager of ailing Leicester City. They ended last season with nine successive Premiership defeats, and when they were beaten out of sight 5-0 at home by Bolton Wanderers, newly promoted, in the opening game of the Premiership season, things grew even worse. Poor Peter had been targeted by the bookmakers as the manager most likely to be the first to lose his job this season. Next came a 4-0 defeat at Highbury by Arsenal, the City's 13th successive loss away from home.

An experienced reporter wrote after that one sided game that Taylor was perhaps more suited to be a coach than a manager. He had in fact been a most successful manager of the England Under-21 side till most controversially levered out by Howard Wilkinson, the Football Association head of coaching, former Leeds manager, and hopelessly unsuccessful manager in place of Taylor of the Under-21s. Taylor then managed Gillingham most impressively, taking them into the Nationwide 1st Division. But it may well be true that he is best suited to coaching.

Stuart Gray was the Southampton coach when Glenn Hoddle, at the tail end of last season, ruthlessly packed in his managerial job and took off to manage Tottenham, the club for whom he had played with such distinction. It was an unappealing piece of behaviour but Southampton had to accept it.

Whom would they put in his place? Gray took over as a stop gap and things began disastrously for him, the team failing to score in game after game. Then, at the end of the Premiership, they took wing, beating both Arsenal and Manchester United at the old Dell - now left at last for a much bigger stadium: Where the "Saints" have lost their first ever match, and begun most unhappily. Is Gray another coach who's over promoted?

For there is a great difference. To put it succinctly, it's the manager who takes the flak as well as the credit, however much work the coach puts into it on the training ground. One of the most successful English managers of all time,

Brian Clough, who won the European Cup twice in succession with modest Nottingham Forest, never coached at all, hardly ever went to the training ground, but his influence on his players was huge. Kenny Dalglish, who won the Championship managing both Liverpool and Blackburn Rovers (the latter winning after some 80 years!) was no coach either.

Not long after the last war arose, the phenomenon of the so called track suit manager, who by contrast with his office bound predecessors, went out on the training pitch, suitably attired. Matt Busby at Manchester United was originally one of them. But there is always a danger of such a manager being sucked in too far, rather than keeping a sensible distance. It's easier to be a coach.