To barely stifled guffaws of laughter from the pubs of Shepherds Bush, Mark Hughes has successfully landed another Premier League managerial position at Stoke City. How?
Seeing Mark Hughes standing there - awkward smile re-affixed, Stoke City scarf raised above his head, van with ‘Hughes Out’ plastered across the side already in the club car park outside – it’s tempting to surmise “only in football.”
If they’d released Dr Harold Shipman early so he could take up a post as leader of the Northamptonshire Heartlands Primary Care Trust I doubt you’d have found many well-wishers pointing to his exemplary record as a GP before he developed a taste for altering wills and nudging patients over the edge before their time. You wouldn’t find Royal Caribbean Cruises picking the phone up to the captain of the Exxon Valdez and asking if he fancied a stint in the passenger game once he’d tired of drunkenly obliterating vast swathes of Alaskan wilderness. And you’d probably do more than simply raising an eyebrow if you sat down for a discussion over a bank loan with the manager of your local Nat West only to find Nick Leeson looking back at you from the other side of the desk.
In the real world, cock ups of the magnitude that Mark Hughes presided over at Queens Park Rangers matter.
The League Managers’ Association would tell you that they matter in football as well. It recently revealed that 55% of first-time managers in the UK never found another number one position after being sacked. Nicky Law, who has UEFA coaching badges coming out of his ears, had to drop down as low as Buxton when, after success at Chesterfield, he failed at Bradford City and then Grimsby. Despite scores of other managers also failing at Bradford and Grimsby – suggesting rather more deep rooted problems than simply bad first team management – Law has only made it back as far as Alfreton Town where he currently has a part time group of players holding its own in the Conference in a stadium barely fit for the Unibond League and a playing budget worthy of an even lower level than that, regularly beating the likes of Luton, Wrexham and Lincoln City.
Certainly the UK is more reticent with its second chances than, say, Italy where managers can survive four or five poor jobs and still get another somewhere. Luigi De Canio, a very popular and successful manager of QPR, had 11 Italian clubs before arriving in W12 and has had another two since. The alternative eyed by Flavio Briatore when De Canio arrived was Francesco Guidolin who, even allowing for the nonsense of his four separate spells with Palermo, had 12 clubs before Briatore spoke to him and has had three more since. This raised suspicions among QPR fans more used to the English way of doing things.
But once you are on the managerial roundabout (copyright Paul Finney) in the UK, you can pretty much stay on it for as long as you want. Bryan Robson, for instance, spent Steve Gibson’s millions with gay abandon at Middlesbrough, buying the likes of Juninho, Ravenelli and Nick Barmby and still contrived to get the team relegated. To his credit – and mainly because he was allowed to keep hold of the likes of Paul Merson in the division below – he promoted them back but only a humbling intervention by Terry Venables prevented him taking them straight back down again. He was subsequently given managerial jobs by Bradford City (who he relegated), West Bromwich Albion (who he relegated) and Sheffield United (who he looked all set to relegate until they ditched him seven months into the job). It does seem to help if you’ve played for Manchester United, as if suckling at Sir Alex’s withered teet provides any kind of sixth sense in getting much smaller clubs with much bigger problems heading in the right direction.
Alex McLeish relegated a half decent Birmingham City side not once but twice, and was rewarded with a job across the city at Aston Villa. When that went tits up he was quickly employed once again by Nottingham Forest – a union that lasted barely a month. He and Peter ‘Reidy’ Reid still maintain a straight face when they sit on the Goals on Sunday sofa and say they’re “looking to get back in should the right opportunity come up.” People still seem to fancy Alan ‘Curbs’ Curbishley as well, despite him not working at all for the last five years since he burdened West Ham with the likes of Freddie Ljungberg and Kieron Dyer on colossal contracts that ran into hundreds of thousands of pounds per appearance.
Mark Hughes took a team capable of narrowly avoiding relegation from the Premier League and turned it into a team lucky to win four matches and take as many as 25 points from 38 games the following season, saddling it with a squad of 42 high earning players that has enough midfielders and goalkeepers to stock three sides but no fit centre forward and no centre backs of any sort. It should really come as a surprise that another team capable of narrowly avoiding relegation from the Premier League has decided his expertise is what is required for them – but it really doesn’t.
Step right this way Dr Shipman, I’ll show you to your new office.
Stoke chairman Peter Coates is not a man easily swayed by popular opinion. His decision to re-appoint Tony Pulis as manager in 2006, 18 months after he’d left his first spell to the relief of many Stoke fans and immediately following a spell as Plymouth manager where he accomplished very little, didn’t exactly thrill the Boothen End. Pulis was unashamed in his methods – promoting Stoke with a basic, unattractive long ball game and a plethora of loans from the Premier League, and then bullying his way to consolidation in the top flight. Coates will look at the club’s bank balance, the full houses that have replaced 11,000 Tuesday night gates for league fixtures against the likes of Watford and Blackpool, the players he’s now able to attract and the shirts he’s able to sell and think that’s all been very worthwhile.
QPR has, rightly, been held up as the text book example of how not to run one of the smaller Premier League football clubs and Hughes had a big hand in that. But Coates will look at the same things Rangers looked at when they turned to the former Manchester United striker in the first place. Top ten – and one top six – finishes with Blackburn Rovers who he also took to three cup semi finals; a highest ever Premier League finish (eighth) for Fulham; an eye for a player that has brought Chris Samba, Moussa Dembele and Vincent Kompany to these shores resulting, in two cases, in massive sell on profits for his clubs. Given the way Stoke have thrown money at players (£70m since 2009 with just £10m recouped in sales) without any discernible improvement whatsoever it starts to become a little easier to see why Hughes is his man.
The meltdown at QPR has been described by Coates as “a blip” for Hughes and again, you can present a strong case for that. As with Bradford and Grimsby, if you’re working your way through the amount of managers QPR have done in such a short space of time the natural conclusion to draw is that the manager perhaps isn’t the problem.
QPR have no training ground, no youth academy, and no scouting network. They have no apparent ethos or ideal of what sort of club they want to be – a feeder club that buys low and sells high, a big hitter that throws money around, a long ball outfit, a club that develops its own talent. It’s a club that aims to cover up its problems by appointing a new manager and allowing him to buy six new players in every transfer window resulting in layers and layers of players in an enormously over-inflated squad, all bought by different people with different ideas in mind. There’s no continuity, no feeling for the club, no spirit among the team. It’s not a set up conducive to success and it’s not a situation that can be sorted out in the short term. Hughes could reasonably say that he was brought in with a short term aim of keeping the club in the Premier League in 2011/12 before starting to address long term issues with youth, scouting and training ground – work he wasn’t able to follow through because he was sacked 12 games into the new season which was another short term measure from a club that specialises in near sighted thinking.
Stoke could even argue that Hughes will have learnt from the experience. He admitted in his press conference on Thursday that he’d made mistakes at QPR, and regretted the manner of his departure from Fulham. Certainly a far cry from the brashness and childish talk of QPR’s “ambition” compared to the Cottagers when he first arrived at Loftus Road. He’ll also be older and wiser to “too good to be true” deals for the likes of Jose Bosingwa and Ji-Sung Park in future after his fingers weren’t so much burnt as chopped off at the knuckle in W12.
Tony Fernandes himself now says that QPR perhaps needed to go down a level and get the infrastructure right to avoid this ‘castles built on sand’ situation they’ve been trying to manage for the past two seasons – spin certainly, but with a degree of truth. Hughes can say that no manager is capable of keeping QPR in the Premier League in their current situation – as Harry Redknapp has since shown – and that his was a losing battle from the very beginning. Stoke have the stadium, the training ground, the youth set up, the scouting system, the ethos and everything else already in place. The last time he had that – at Fulham – he finished eighth in the league and Coates would snap your hand off for eighth place next season you can be sure of that.
There was a feeling, despite three wins late in the season catapulting them through a compressed Premier League to a highly flattering final position of thirteenth, that Tony Pulis had come to the end of his useful life in the Potteries.
Northampton Town manager Aidy Boothroyd told Sky Sports before the recent League Two play-off final that “the current trend is for tippy tappy football, but I don’t see it…” and promptly saw his side go three nil down in half an hour to Bradford City. Like it or not, the days where you could achieve things in football at any serious level through pub team bully boy tactics are fast running out. Stoke, while maintaining a consistent league position, have been less and less effective with each passing Premier League season.
There’s talk of a change in direction. Coates denies that this will be wholesale but one of the conditions imposed by the club that delayed the Hughes appointment was the insistence that he work with their new director of football. Having blown £70m on players in the last four years Coates wants to see some tangible returns. Buying young for low prices, developing them as players and selling on to the big hitters is the new trend in a sport where cup competitions are to be exited as soon as possible, the chance of league honours is non-existent, and survival is now the sole aim of every season.
Which, again, rather begs the question of why they have turned to Mark Hughes. Samba, Kompany and Dembele will no doubt have featured prominently in the interview – presumably Stoke interviewed Hughes rather than the other way around as QPR so memorably admitted after appointing him – but in two of his last three jobs (Man City and QPR) Hughes has done nothing but throw money around in exactly the same amounts and at exactly the sort of players that Stoke are now trying to move away from. When Fulham told him he couldn’t do that at Craven Cottage, and attempted to impose similar ideals to the ones Stoke now have in mind, he walked out in a huff and lamented the club’s lack of ambition.
Hughes also isn’t exactly renowned for an attractive style of play. His Blackburn side drew plenty of criticism and finished bottom of the Fair Play League in all four of his seasons in charge. Fulham ended up qualifying for Europe through lack of cards but at QPR sendings off and discipline were again a problem and, while not quite as rudimentary as a Pulis side, his team set ups were in basic straight lines and the performances as uninspiring as the man himself.
At all his clubs except Fulham Hughes has worked with his own director of football Mike Rigg – ousted soon after Hughes at QPR to the distant crackle of party poppers and clinks from celebratory bottles of alcoholic beverages down at Harlington. And of course there’s the omnipresence of his minister without portfolio Kia Joorabchian whose ‘adviser’ title conveniently allows him to take as much or as little credit for Hughes’ success/failure as he likes.
None of this sounds like what Stoke are going for. And however valid the criticisms about infrastructure and everything else at QPR are, nobody can deny that Hughes did about the worst job he could possibly have done at Loftus Road. He had more backing – financial and emotional – than any other manager has had from a board in the club’s history. He could buy whoever he liked, including seemingly unrealistic targets like Julio Cesar, and do ridiculous things like taking a squad with three goalkeepers earning about £30k a week between them and turn it into a squad with four goalkeepers on £130k a week without making any improvement to the team at all without being questioned. He could appoint whoever he liked to his backroom staff and certainly took full advantage of that with plenty of jobs for his Taffia. And for it all he created a team that finished dead last in a league chock full of mediocre teams.
Hughes has dared to venture this week that his “achievement” of keeping QPR up in his first season in charge has been “airbrushed from history”. No offence Mark, but taking a team that was seventeenth in the league and had been playing very well just six weeks previously, spending £12m on it and only finishing seventeenth because Chris Foy screwed Bolton Wanderers over on the last day of the season isn’t exactly Queens Birthday Honours List stuff is it?
His predecessor Neil Warnock showed that QPR, while certainly difficult, is by no means the impossible job Hughes made it look and has no doubt been pitching it as in order to gain employment elsewhere. Warnock understood what QPR was and what it needed, Hughes never once seemed to get to grips with that and instead treated it as a vehicle from which he and his mates could toss somebody else’s money around.
Presumably his intention was to, Bullseye style, show Fulham what they could have won had they bowed to his demands. In the end he did exactly that.
Most QPR fans will be desperate for his new appointment to end in tears.
Hughes came across as a mixture of arrogant and boring at QPR – neither of which made him likeable to supporters even when the team did succeed in staying in the league in 2011/12. His talk of ambition, that awful line about interviewing the club rather than the other way around, and his “we will never be in this position again as long as I’m here” boast after the club had stayed up courtesy of other results on the final day seemed crass. The Friday press conferences, a pointless dirge brought in at the behest of Sky Sports so their old men and models rolling news channel has enough molehills to hand to its mountain builders, were as dull under Hughes as televised rugby union matches. The press would have been better off spending an hour watching the grass grow on the Loftus Road pitch than sit listening to the same phrases week after week. It almost seemed at times as if Hughes had recorded a dozen or so stock lines to play on a loop – “lot of quality in the building” was a favourite, “the business of winning Premier League football matches” another.
When his assistant manager Mark Bowen appeared on the Open All R’s Podcast at the height of the club’s struggles this season the answers he gave to some proper questions strongly suggested that the brashness and straight bat actually hid cluelessness. They had no idea why it had gone wrong, or what they were going to do about it.
Given all that, plus the failure of his team on the pitch and the sheer number of high earning, under committed, despicable individuals he has saddled the club with on long contracts, most in West London would love nothing better than to see him crash and burn. Throw in a spate of nasty incidents that have bred contempt between the R’s and Stoke in the last decade, and Hughes’ allegiances with Chelsea and Manchester United, and that desire burns brighter still.
But QPR have a much more important, and substantially less petty, reason for hoping Hughes fails. If he succeeds with Stoke – the most basic and least talented team outside of the newly promoted sides in the Premier League – it will force the faithful in W12 to face up to the idea that the problems at Loftus Road lie with the club and the board rather than the man in the dugout. Given that Hughes is long gone, but the club and board remain the same, that wouldn’t bode well for the future.
Tweet @loftforwords
Pictures – Action Images