Crystal Palace are the first Premier League side to sack their manager this season after slipping into the bottom three. The potential replacements for Neil Warnock don’t inspire much confidence mind.
For Neil Warnock, what is almost certainly his last chance to prove himself as a Premier League manager is gone. He became the first top flight boss to be sacked this season earlier today, following a 3-1 home defeat by Southampton on Boxing Day which plunged Crystal Palace into the bottom three.
One win in 12, and a threat to Palace’s treasured top flight status, mean the veteran manager was certain to face scrutiny, but this dismissal seems particularly harsh given the situation Warnock inherited back in August.
The Eagles were last season’s big success story: rising to an eleventh placed finish under Manager of the Year Tony Pulis who rescued a team that had lost nine of its first ten matches and marched them steadily up the table. Pulis was a man reinvented, from the much-maligned long-ball merchant of Stoke City, known only for how dull his side were to watch and how many serious injuries they inflicted on players with some actual ability, to an astute tactician and football man. He got Palace thinking, acting and playing like a Premier League team, using the pace of the wide players at his disposal to run teams off Selhurst Park in exhilarating style. After leaving Stoke he was a modern day Alan Ball, as welcome as the new manager of your club as Nile Ranger would be as your new striker or Ant and Dec would be recording a new club anthem. Now he could have his pick of any job that comes up outside the top six.
But his union with Palace, and their flaxen haired chairman Steve Parish always felt uneasy. His initial appointment dragged on for a month, with both parties going their separate ways at one point only to return to the table when the Eagles had exhausted several other options. Parish is protective of a club he saved from administration, Pulis is a traditional English football manager who demands total control. To an outsider looking in, issues always seem to occur at Palace when anybody at the club becomes bigger or more important than Parish, or has a bigger media profile.
A parting of the ways always looked likely, even when Palace were ripping up the division last season, but few could have anticipated it would come just two days before the Eagles’ opening match of this season at Arsenal.
Once more, the search for a replacement became an unhappy saga that dragged on and festered. Parish wanted Malky Mackay to reunite with his former sporting director Iain Moody who had moved from Cardiff to Palace midway through the previous season. That looked like a goer as well, until Vincent Tan served an ice cold revenge dish, and the FA felt obligated to act, revealing that Mackay’s sacking in South Wales - universally seen at the time as a wild, harsh act from a megalomaniac foreign chairman with no clue about the sport - was in fact related to Moody and Mackay’s penchant to engage in vile, racist, thick-headed exchanges last seen on the cutting room floor of It Ain’t Half Hot Mum.
Parish then turned to Tim Sherwood, but as the loud-mouthed gilet enthusiast continues to labour under the misapprehension that six mediocre months minding the fort at Tottenham makes you a Premier League manager, able to dictate terms to established top flight clubs and ignore overtures from Championship sides, he turned the job down as he hadn’t been the first choice. A display of supreme arrogance, typical of everything we’ve seen and heard from Tactical Tim during the last 12 months.
In the end Warnock, who’d carried Palace to the Championship play-offs before a previous spell as boss was interrupted by administration, was a quick, easy, safe option for a club in danger of relegating itself before the season had even begun.
While returning to a club that had revitalised his love for the sport after a difficult departure from his boyhood club Sheffield United seemed like a no-brainer, you couldn’t help but wonder whether, once again, Warnock was taking a job for the wrong reasons.
You only have to listen to his tiresome baiting of referees to know that Neil Warnock is not shy of looking for a perceived injustice to absolve himself of blame, and doesn’t let it go easily when he thinks he’s found one. Despite seven promotions during his managerial career, he’s never quite managed to crack it in the Premier League.
Warnock will point quickly to the Carlos Tevez affair, where West Ham were able to illegally sign two fantastic players in Tevez and Mascherano to avoid relegation at the expense of Warnock’s Sheffield United in 2006/07. Had the two Argentineans not arrived at Upton Park, the Irons would have gone down, the Blades would have stayed up, and the transfers broke every rule in the book. West Ham eventually paid out millions in compensation, but it didn’t help Warnock in his quest to be a Premier League boss.
At Palace he felt he had a side good enough to get him back there again, only for a hedge fund who’d leant the club money to call it in and force administration and a points deduction - condemning themselves to a pence in the pound settlement in the process.
At QPR he built a spirited, talented side having taken over a shambles, and won the division in very fine style. But having done so with Ishan Saksena and Amit Bhatia above him at board level, he then found egomaniac Flavio Briatore retaking the reigns just as promotion was confirmed, intent on selling the now Premier League club for a profit and not keen to invest anything in new players in the meantime. Deals for Ashley Williams, Wayne Routledge, Gary Hooper and other slipped away, replaced by substandard cheap buys like DJ Campbell, Jay Bothroyd, Kieron Dyer and Danny Gabbidon. When a takeover by Tony Fernandes did go through on the eve of the transfer deadline, Rangers were cornered by barrel scrapings and chancers who knew the club was rich and desperate. Joey Barton and Shaun Wright-Phillips still remain today, leaching off the extortionate four year deals they were awarded. Anton Ferdinand, Luke Young and others have mercifully gone, considerably richer than when they arrived.
But Warnock did get results in the top flight with QPR. He won three of his first six away matches at Everton, Wolves and Stoke. Since he left, Rangers have played 37 away matches in the Premier League under two different managers and only won two of them. There was a 1-0 home victory against Chelsea as well and when he was sacked in January Rangers were outside the bottom three - his target for the campaign.
Warnock believes, and Fernandes has since admitted, that agents and representatives - Kia Joorabchian chief among them - got in the ears of QPR’s keen but naïve board during a potential transfer for Chelsea defender Alex to Loftus Road, and advised the manager was replaced by Mark Hughes. What happened next needs no recap for QPR fans, but one can only imagine how furious Warnock was watching his side dismantled like that by Hughes, who did a far worse job but wasn’t sacked nearly so quickly or readily as he had been.
You could tell the frustration in his next move. Despite saying QPR would be his last managerial job before retiring to Cornwall, he pitched up at Leeds, a club he’d always previously hated, and a club that still hated him. Leeds have been so badly run for so long that their supposed potential exists solely in the minds of lazy journalists who think a tatty, creaking Elland Road stadium, a bit of history, and 20,000 people at home games means they’re some sort of sleeping giant. Warnock, like lots before him and plenty since, found it a fallacy and couldn’t shift them out of the Championship.
During a recent victory against Liverpool Warnock was filmed punching the air in delight as the goals flew in. "That’s why you can’t stay away isn’t it?” came a typically sycophantic post-match question from a television droid. Warnock agreed. It was bollocks. The Palace job offered an opportunity to prove himself at the top once more, and he’ll again say he took over a bad situation and was sacked too soon. The injustice will burn in him once more. Warnock wants to retire a proven Premier League manager, and believes that Carlos Tevez, a hedge fund, and Tony Fernandes have unjustly denied him that chance. He appears motivated by pride and revenge, not some addiction to that feeling when the ball hits the back of the net. If that were the case, why all the talk of retiring after he’d established QPR in the Premier League?
Sadly, there’s a growing body of evidence to say that, at the highest level, Warnock isn’t quite up to it. Carlos Tevez not withstanding, Warnock had said publicly his Sheffield United team was safe after beating West Ham 3-0 six games from the end of that season, and then when they needed a result from the final two matches away to a poor Aston Villa side with nothing to play for and at home to fellow strugglers Wigan they couldn’t beat either. I always remember him fielding a ridiculously defensive set up at Villa Park that day which included three centre halves and two full backs. They then lost at home to the Latics on the final day.
At QPR the takeover was a nightmare, but he still signed dreadful players on colossal wages that split his dressing room. His faith in Joey Barton in particular got him a knife between the shoulder blades and little else. At Palace this year the defence which Pulis made so difficult to score against has been porous. Many of the problems have been looked over by those focussed on the "games that matter” because Yannick Bolasie and Wilf Zaha have been playing well, and they beat Liverpool. But, overall, they’ve been undeniably poor. Cleaerly lacking a goalscoring centre forward, Palace loaned out Glenn Murray to Reading where, in a poor side, he's scored eight goals in 17 matches.
Warnock probably signed his own death warrant after losing to Southampton on Boxing Day when he put down a collapse from 13 wins and five draws in the second half of last season to three wins in 18 league games this term down to luck. "Palace had a lot of luck last year, I don't see us having much luck this year," he said. Never his fault.
Palace’s problem now is replacing him - something they have not been particularly good at under Parish. Neither of the top two options looks appetising at the moment. Either go cap in hand to Pulis and give him everything he wants, or go cap in hand to Tactical Tim and try to rub enough lotion into his pride to make him believe it was a dreadful mistake he wasn’t the first choice back in the summer. Watch out for Sherwood in his new Christmas gilet, with his ego occupying the seat next to him, in South Africa Road tomorrow afternoon. Former Porto boss Vitor Pereira is tipped but looks risky. Don’t put it past them to leave Keith Millen, a frequent caretaker in recent years, in charge until the end of the season. Dougie Freedman, who was doing a good job here before foolishly thinking he had better prospects at heavily indebted Bolton, has also been tipped for a return.
All in all, an unenviable position.
Links >>> Official Website >>> Holmesdale site and message board >>> BBS site and forum >>> Five Year Plan fanzine >>> Palace Echo news site >>> Croydon Guardian local paper >>> Hopkin Looking to Curl One - blog
The Twitter @loftforwords
Pictures - Action Images