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I was really pleased to stumble across this article from The Times on Terry Venables. I'd not heard anything about him for so long I was starting to worry about his health - totally unnecessarily thankfully. As for the question in the title as to whether he is England's best living coach - yes, by a country mile. Venables, the footballer, is the reason I support QPR.
They call it La Escondida, the hideaway. It is hidden away from the Costa Blanca, up in the mountains, amid the olive groves. It is here, in the tranquillity of the Spanish countryside, that Terry Venables has found his oasis – the furthest thing he can imagine from the stresses and strains of managing England.
A retirement home? Hardly. Venables and his wife, Yvette, run a boutique hotel – Michelin-trained head chef and all. “We’re non-stop out here,” she says. “It’s morning to night, non-stop, no let-up. It’s not easy.”
So who does what? “She’s the Basil Fawlty role,” he says with a guffaw. “I’m front of house. I walk around, have a chat to people. I like it. It keeps me busy, keeps me engaged. If you want to keep going on, you’ve got to keep fit, stay busy.”
Yvette laughs at the mention of fitness. “Hang on,” she says. “We’ve got two swimming pools and you’ve never been in either of them.”
“Well, no,” he smiles. “But my health is good. You never like to say that, because I could fall off the mountain tomorrow, but I’m fit, I’m well. I feel like this is my third life. First life playing, second life managing. What do you do about the third? This is a nice existence. Busy, but nice.”
Venables turned 74 in January. Almost a decade has passed since his final job in football, as England assistant manager under Steve McClaren, but even here, in this idyllic setting, he admits he gets pangs from time to time. He says he was unexpectedly approached about a job recently – a good one, coach of one of the leading African nations, though he would prefer not to say which – and that, while his initial response was that it would be incompatible with his responsibilities, they have remained quite persistent.
Was he tempted? “I was, actually,” he says. “I believe I could still do it. Really, I do. Football has always been what I do. I watch matches now and I think, ‘If they only they would do this . . . Wouldn’t it be good to try that?’ There are so many possibilities in football.”
“That was always the challenge for me as a manager, wherever I went in the world. I always had to work out the way to get the best out of that group of players. Sometimes I would be thinking, ‘Crikey, I still don’t know what the team is like yet’, and I would be going through the videos and then suddenly I would shout ‘Yippee!’ and say to Yvette, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I know where we need to go to and what need to do to get there.’ ”
A classic example would be his experience at Euro ’96, where he urged his England team to cast off its tactical straitjacket and to embrace different systems; he had started, two years earlier, with an unfamiliar “Christmas tree” formation and ended up progressing, via 4-3-3, to the least conventional type of 4-4-2 and of course 3-5-2, deploying three central defenders, as indeed Gareth Southgate, one of his players at that tournament, now the England manager, did against Germany on Wednesday night.
“Great lad, Gareth,” Venables says. “He’s sensible, intelligent. I used to pick him out for things in training. I wanted him to add to what he was able to do. He liked to carry the ball out of defence, but when he first came into the squad, he would do it too quickly. I said to him, ‘You’re going so quickly, in a straight line, that you look like you’re running down a hill after the ball. You’re going so quick, you’re actually helping the opposition.’
“We worked out that if he did it another way, slowing it down, drawing the opposition towards him, making a half-turn, he could make a real difference to our attacking play.”
A wistful look comes over Venables as he casts his mind back to Euro ’96. “It was the most beautiful summer,” he says. “The football that we played, against Holland, against Germany, it was amazing. The feeling we had at Wembley, it was beautiful. We beat Holland 4-1, but we were just as good against Germany in the semi-final. We did everything but score the winner. Extra-time, I can still see it now . . . ”
Paul Gascoigne sliding in, a stud’s length from scoring the “golden goal” that would have taken England to the final? “That’s the one,” he said. “Gazza, my lovely boy. He deserved to score, but it wasn’t to be. And then penalties and . . . Gareth missed one, the bugger. No, I’m joking. It was hard on him. Anyone could miss a penalty. It speaks volumes for him that he was willing to take it when others were too nervous to take one. But . . . penalties again. Same as the European Cup final [in 1986 when his Barcelona team lost to Steaua Bucharest].” He puts on his Marlon Brando voice. “I coulda been a contender, Charlie.”
He is laughing. “But as everyone always says to me, ‘Behind that mask . . . ,’ ” he says. “I tell them, ‘Well just take the mask away and see what you’ve got.’ ”
Venables believes Southgate, whom he also coached at Middlesbrough, will do a “really, really good job” as England manager, but to make a real success of the job would be to buck a trend dating back to 1966 – or even further, as Venables sees it.
“We have had fantastic individual players in England,” he says. “Go back to 1950. Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney, all those great players went to Brazil for the World Cup and they got beaten [by the United States]. You go from the 1950s right the way through, all those fantastic players, and with the exception of one tournament, they couldn’t win for England.”
Why? “My feeling is that too often they wanted to be individual players, just like they were when they were kids with mum and dad watching,” he says. “When they went back to their clubs, they wanted to show, ‘Look, I’m a player. I’m a star.’ Well, as I see it, you don’t get ‘stars’ in football. You get people who win and who deserve it because they do it – above all else – with each other. I can’t stand when people want to be the individual. You do that and all you’re doing is letting everyone down.”
He is not naming names or even referring to one generation – for example the one that, under McClaren and himself, failed to reach Euro 2008 – rather than another. He believes it has been a common thread in English football history, which is damning. Rather than claim credit for finding a system in which individualism was curbed in 1996, he suggests the greatest strength of that squad was the personalities involved. He reels them off. “Seaman, Neville, Southgate, Adams, Pearce, Gascoigne, Ince, Anderton, Platt, McManaman, Shearer, Sheringham . . .” he says. “That team had leaders. Inner strength. Smart leaders, too. And they’re like gold dust.
“I watch football with people and they’ll say to me, ‘Cor, look at him. He’s a good player.’ ‘Who? Him? No he’s not.’ ‘Look at him, he’s dribbling around. He’s a really good player.’ ‘No he’s not going anywhere. He’s just enjoying himself.’ I’m not chiding anyone here, but the thing is that any player can look good on the ball when the pressure’s off. Anyone can play football over the park. You need to be able to do it under pressure. That’s where you need your strong personalities, your leaders, your players who can spot when one of their team-mates is struggling and who can paddle even harder to get that guy through.”
Recent England teams have invariably lacked that quality. When up that creek, they have often found themselves without a paddle. Venables was watching at his London home, aghast, as England disintegrated at the hands of Iceland at Euro 2016. “You could see it just slipping away,” he says. “No disrespect to Iceland, but they were what we used to call hammer-throwers, weren’t they? But they did it. They stopped our players. Credit to them. They did really well.”
Other England managers have talked about a culture of fear. “That has always been a problem,” he says. “Can you take the pressure? That’s where you need your leaders, your strong personalities. It’s not just about clenching your fist and giving people a bollocking, although you need your players who can do that. It’s about being strong enough to play under pressure and to get on the ball and pass it, pass it, pass it. Not everyone is. But if you get that right, if you’ve got the players who will do that, you won’t be too far away, my son. That’s what we had in Euro ’96. We didn’t have that fear.”
We keep coming back to the summer of 1996. It is a constant reference point for Venables – inevitably so. He wishes he had had more than one tournament as England manager, wishes he had been able to take that young squad to the ’98 World Cup, by which time David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Michael Owen were also on the scene. “I was pleased to get the chance to do what I did, but, yeah, it would have been nice, all those young players coming through,” he says.
Venables never saw eye to eye with the FA hierarchy. He felt that Noel White and Peter Swales, on the international committee, were always against him. He is unwilling to go over that old ground – or to revisit the subject of Alan Sugar, with whom he clashed so disastrously and so publicly during their time at Tottenham Hotspur. He rejects the suggestion that he had fingers in too many pies, that his interests in the business side of the game, even working in an executive role at QPR early in his managerial career, became a distraction from his true vocation. “Coaching was what I did,” he says.
These days, despite certain pangs for the touchline, La Escondida is what he does. He loves it. Alan Shearer came out to stay while filming a BBC documentary last year. “When I came here, I tried to see if I could get Gazza to come and stay for a few days,” Venables says. “We’ve spoken on the phone from time to time. He was a wonderful player, the most fantastic player – with all the problems that he had – that I’ve ever seen. I still love him. I could just see him out here, you know, kicking stones down the road . . .”
Venables smiles once more. Whatever those slight regrets, life is great. He “coulda been a contender”, he feels, but he took England an awful lot closer to glory than any man alive.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 21:47 - Apr 2 with 9477 views
His autobiography was a brilliant read, the way he planned for Euro 96 was incredible but yet again the British Press decided they didn't like him so forced him out and when they realised they were wrong it was too late
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 23:03 - Apr 2 with 9404 views
From a journalism point of view it's quite a talent to make you feel like you're there next to the pool, and Venables is talking in his voice, and that's how that article reads. It's such a skill.
Too much football journalism these days is two pages of Ashley Young saying "yeh the new gaffer's been really good, we're all buying into that, but we're that sort of group anyway, we're all working really hard, nothing comes easy so you've got to work hard, I've just had a baby so I've got a perspective on life - Ashley Young was talking on behalf of EA Sports FIFA WnkBot 2017" and there's no question about his diving, his complete absence from England squads or his (ongoing) fondness for using his time in hotel rooms on away trips to masturbate into his webcam on internet chatrooms, because the EA Sports FIFA WnkBot 2017 press officer will be sitting there during the interview ready to pounce on the journalist and withdraw access if they dare move away from the pre-agreed "talking points".
For instance, point me in the direction of one single interview with a Chelsea player in the last 12 months where Mourinho's departure gets more than a paragraph. And that's the story right? Nobody gives a fcking stupid fck that Conte is really intense, Conte buys all the tea ladies a Christmas present, Conte is great in the dressing room. Everybody wants to know how a billion pound squad went from title winners to relegation candidates, everybody wants to know why Eden Hazard went from the world's best player to some chump with a fat bum, and everybody knows it's because he was shagging the doctor and several of them had been there before and Mourinho used her in his big theatrical scapegoat routine so they all put their cues on the rack and stopped playing - but that's not in the 'talking points' so you don't get it.
Anyway, ahem, sorry, great interview, loved it, read it twice.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 01:31 - Apr 3 with 9346 views
Equally, we weren't above going to some northern provincial town and, much to the vexation of the locals, playing the offside trap thirty times in a game before returning south with all the points either!
Looking back, while he had a past murkier than most, the way he was handled by the FA showed how and why the game has been lost here. A truly gifted coach and a footballing man, hindered by small minded oafs to ignorant to know just how dense they were!
'Always In Motion' by John Honney available on amazon.co.uk
If EL Tel had never left for Barca I truly believe we would have been title contenders , had a good run in Europe or won a cup we had a very good squad Fenwick, Allen, Stainrod, Dawes, Fereday , Wicks , we was so well drilled we were doing the offside hands in the air thing well before Graham did it at Arsenal (actually he nicked that from venables) we also had the plastic pitch to our advantage as well , what venables was good at was set pieces watch those England games and the Anderton /sheringham sort corner routine , brilliant Euro 96 we had the players & system and really should have won it, imagine him having Beckham, Scholes , Owen, Rooney to work with but thanks to the FA (they couldn't have a cockney wideboy) we will never know
And Bowles is onside, Swinburne has come rushing out of his goal , what can Bowles do here , onto the left foot no, on to the right foot
That’s there that’s two, and that’s Bowles
Brian Moore
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 10:23 - Apr 3 with 9129 views
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 09:37 - Apr 3 by paulparker
If EL Tel had never left for Barca I truly believe we would have been title contenders , had a good run in Europe or won a cup we had a very good squad Fenwick, Allen, Stainrod, Dawes, Fereday , Wicks , we was so well drilled we were doing the offside hands in the air thing well before Graham did it at Arsenal (actually he nicked that from venables) we also had the plastic pitch to our advantage as well , what venables was good at was set pieces watch those England games and the Anderton /sheringham sort corner routine , brilliant Euro 96 we had the players & system and really should have won it, imagine him having Beckham, Scholes , Owen, Rooney to work with but thanks to the FA (they couldn't have a cockney wideboy) we will never know
Venables leaving was the reality check we've never quite got over, since always the feeling we were hanging on by our fingertips to any success, even when Francis got us top 5.
Sadly a mindset that has, perhaps understandably, become ingrained in club, players and supporters.
A very good documentary made before he got the England job. 28:24 QPR as a player 39:28 QPR as a manager
'I'm 18 with a bullet.Got my finger on the trigger,I'm gonna pull it.."
Love,Peace and Fook Chelski!
More like 20StoneOfHoop now.
Let's face it I'm not getting any thinner.
Pass the cake and pies please.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 11:46 - Apr 3 with 9050 views
When he's denouncing individualistic players he could be talking about Taarabt.
Terry Fenwick's comments about Venables on the Open All R's podcast:
'I think he was the best manager in British football, if not the world, for over a decade. He was a great man manager and a great coach, and of course that doesn't often come hand in hand - you've got some great man managers out there that are not particularly good coaches, and vice versa - some good coaches that are not good at managing people, but Terry had it all.'
Air hostess clique
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 12:25 - Apr 3 with 8958 views
Met him once, spent fair bit of an evening with him actually. Total gent and didn't mind me chewing his ear off about QPR all night. Just told me the stories - lovely man. And a fantastic coach.
Bare bones.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 13:56 - Apr 3 with 8845 views
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 15:59 - Apr 3 by kensalriser
Only decent England manager since Sir Alf. Robson #3, the rest a long way behind.
Reckon Robson was a bit over rated as England manager TBH. Italia 90 saved his reputation quite a bit and I reckon he had a fair bit of luck in the tournament. Euro 88 was a disaster and Mexico 86 started like one.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 16:37 - Apr 3 with 8706 views
Yeah that's a great piece of writing. It was a funny time in our history. We had some great young players coming through and some expensive blokes whom he inherited and he got rid of a lot of those and got some more hungry types in Gregory and Stainrod plus half of the old Palace team that he used to manage. And then there was the plastic pitch - we used that to our advantage and somehow Venables didn't always seem to get all of the credit that he deserved at the time. You could see how good he was when Mullery took over.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 18:53 - Apr 3 with 8635 views
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 16:29 - Apr 3 by Toast_R
Reckon Robson was a bit over rated as England manager TBH. Italia 90 saved his reputation quite a bit and I reckon he had a fair bit of luck in the tournament. Euro 88 was a disaster and Mexico 86 started like one.
Not forgetting failing to qualify for Euro '84 in his first qualification tournament.
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 16:29 - Apr 3 by Toast_R
Reckon Robson was a bit over rated as England manager TBH. Italia 90 saved his reputation quite a bit and I reckon he had a fair bit of luck in the tournament. Euro 88 was a disaster and Mexico 86 started like one.
Don't disagree, but who would you place above him other than Alf and Tel?
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 19:15 - Apr 3 by kensalriser
Don't disagree, but who would you place above him other than Alf and Tel?
Mercer for sure. Having said that, if Mercer had got the job, Gordon Milne would have been his assistant and that might have meant that he didn't manage Besiktas which meant that Sir Les didn't go to Besiktas, which might have changed the history of the world somewhat.
[Post edited 3 Apr 2017 20:06]
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 22:03 - Apr 3 with 8507 views
Venables was the man in charge when I first went to games as a kid, and my God, was I spoiled. I thought every Rangers manager would be like him. Looking back, the cockney flash and forward thinking (both of which I loved him for) always slightly masked the degree to which he was also a very canny, pragmatic, results-orientated customer. (Which I mean as a total compliment).
I remember there was talk about him coming back in 2008 to replace Dowie, and I'm glad he didn't, as it would have ended badly amid the Bernie Flaviodini circus.
Find it hard to imagine a time when he won't be the best manager I've ever seen at the club. Gets me a bit misty, he does, our Venners.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 09:39 - Apr 4 with 8403 views
Venables often triggers the subject of ‘managerial bloodlines’ in my head, which admittedly doesn’t seem to engineer much interest from anyone else, anywhere, ever, as I’m such an old fart really. Anyhow, as a club I think that we have been quite heavily influenced by the Allison-Mercer line over the years, and that’s a good thing in my view. Allison in particular was a designer of quick attractive sophisticated teams with some flair players. Mercer I think gave Man City a bit more tenacity and he was a better man-manager than Allison. Allison was a big influence on John Bond and Dave Sexton for instance. Mercer took on Gordon Milne as his new Allison when he left City for Coventry and Milne obviously ended up playing a big part in the development of Sir Les at Besiktas and was a successful manager in his own right. Venables of course was another disciple of Allison — at Palace. This is quite a good clip: What I’m not sure is how much Gerry Francis was influenced by Allison, albeit indirectly. His contact with Venables at QPR was both before Venables worked with Allison and post-Allison when Gerry (and Terry) came back from Palace, so it’s difficult to say for sure, but I would think that Gerry does have a bit of Allison in his footballing genes. Holloway was of course a Gerry disciple but in his first stint at Loftus Road we hardly played the beautiful game, and we don’t really do so now either. If there’s any of that Mercer-Allison bloodline left at the club now then it’s probably more in the form of Sir Les. Another QPR manager influenced by Mercer-Allison was Redknapp. He spent a lot of time with John Bond who was an Allison man from their time at West Ham I think. Bond’s son Kevin ended up as his assistant and Jordan was signed by and played for Sexton at Man Utd, so there’s a fair bit of genetic material there. Other QPR managers who join the line via Venables would include Waddock and Gregory and to some extent Wilkins I suppose. At international level, Venables obviously represents the chain, as does Southgate and so would Eddie Howe if he ever got the job (linked via Redknapp and the Bonds I think). It’s quite probably a load of rubbish but it passes the time on a boring day.
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Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 10:11 - Apr 4 with 8373 views
Terry Venables, England’s best living coach? on 09:39 - Apr 4 by ElHoop
Venables often triggers the subject of ‘managerial bloodlines’ in my head, which admittedly doesn’t seem to engineer much interest from anyone else, anywhere, ever, as I’m such an old fart really. Anyhow, as a club I think that we have been quite heavily influenced by the Allison-Mercer line over the years, and that’s a good thing in my view. Allison in particular was a designer of quick attractive sophisticated teams with some flair players. Mercer I think gave Man City a bit more tenacity and he was a better man-manager than Allison. Allison was a big influence on John Bond and Dave Sexton for instance. Mercer took on Gordon Milne as his new Allison when he left City for Coventry and Milne obviously ended up playing a big part in the development of Sir Les at Besiktas and was a successful manager in his own right. Venables of course was another disciple of Allison — at Palace. This is quite a good clip: What I’m not sure is how much Gerry Francis was influenced by Allison, albeit indirectly. His contact with Venables at QPR was both before Venables worked with Allison and post-Allison when Gerry (and Terry) came back from Palace, so it’s difficult to say for sure, but I would think that Gerry does have a bit of Allison in his footballing genes. Holloway was of course a Gerry disciple but in his first stint at Loftus Road we hardly played the beautiful game, and we don’t really do so now either. If there’s any of that Mercer-Allison bloodline left at the club now then it’s probably more in the form of Sir Les. Another QPR manager influenced by Mercer-Allison was Redknapp. He spent a lot of time with John Bond who was an Allison man from their time at West Ham I think. Bond’s son Kevin ended up as his assistant and Jordan was signed by and played for Sexton at Man Utd, so there’s a fair bit of genetic material there. Other QPR managers who join the line via Venables would include Waddock and Gregory and to some extent Wilkins I suppose. At international level, Venables obviously represents the chain, as does Southgate and so would Eddie Howe if he ever got the job (linked via Redknapp and the Bonds I think). It’s quite probably a load of rubbish but it passes the time on a boring day.
I think that's fascinating. have never really considered our history in that way.
Will watch that clip later, thanks.
"The opposite of love, after all, is not hate, but indifference."
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