The Emperor has no clothes: When Alan Pardew becomes unstuck.
Football management is a pressure cooker of, highs and lows, hero worship and inevitable dejection. Rarely does a manager leave the club with more adulation from supporters than when he walked in the door and if they do, they become eternal club legends, statues are built, stands are named and songs are sung forever more.
Most managers therefore, understand the adulation is short and the backlash can begin as quickly, however, has any manager in English football had the ability to take the fans of the club’s he manages through every spectre of emotional response to him in such a short space of time, as Alan Pardew?
Pardew, or ‘Pards’ is he is lovingly and more often not so, lovingly referred to, is one of the seemingly dying breed, a British manager in the top flight of English football. This places him in situations where with a good run of form, like he achieved after leaving the hellish pressure cooker of Newcastle for Crystal Palace, his name becomes linked to the England job, by a largely jingoistic press desperate to find someone born here who can succeed with the national team.
This is nothing new for Pardew, as a good run of form, seems to always coincide with his arrival at any new club.The ‘Pardew effect’ always begins with taking what is usually a fairly rudimentary squad, assessing what that team can do and coming up with a fairly simplistic system that plays to the squads strengths. The ‘Pardew effect’ has a motivational side too. It can never be said that ‘Pards’ is in any way lacking of self confidence, and being able to instil that sense of belief and confidence into the team, is something that seems to be a massive short term success of the man management aspects of what Alan Pardew can achieve.
This short term burst seems to always begin to fall apart however, as soon as one of two things happen, 1. Pardew’s feet get under the table or 2. Teams work out how Pardew teams will set up, and when both of these things happen, you get 2 league wins out of 23 games, like has just occurred at Palace.
Alan Pardew is the embodiment of the ‘British Manager’ and there is a very marked reason that there is a lack of British managers in the top flight.That is because, the British style of management at the top level of club football has become obsolete. In these modern days when the player is king, the swaggering ego in charge of every element, the biggest ‘I am’ in the dressing room, it simply doesn’t work without causing friction that manifests its self very evidently on a bad run. In the case of Pardew this creates very specific issues.
As with every manager essentially once ‘Pards’ get’s his feet under the table, his desire to reshape every element of the club into his own image, becomes more and more apparent. The specific issue here is that, despite being a fairly rudimentary (to put it kindly) technical footballer in his own playing career, Alan Pardew the manager is obsessed with this dominant, technically fluent, ‘possession football’ that very few players at the level of the clubs he manages, are technically capable of pulling off.
To play the football Pardew talks of would require the likes of Palace or Newcastle to go out and spend a fortune buying a whole new squad. Newcastle would not give him the leeway to do this, operating on their profit driven business model and Palace,despite investment, simply cannot sustain that level of spending without outgoings which leaves you with a paper thin squad.
This leaves Pardew having to bring in what he can and work with what he’s got. Time and time again, however,he has proven that whilst his ego acts as a bolstering component in the short term, it destroys the team spirit and forces players out in the medium to long run.
Whilst it is clear at clubs like Palace, that if they wish to progress up the league, they will have to develop and sign better players than the likes of the recently departed Mile Jedinak or Damien Delaney, who had a very public spat with his management team on the touchline at Tottenham, these figures are leaders within the dressing room and how you handle that process is essential to maintaining morale.
Pardew has constantly bundled his way arrogantly through these situations, forcing hands and rustling feathers, seemingly for the sake of it. Good long term man management relies on doing the nitty gritty unpopular things in the right way.
Pardew has a track record of failing at this on a noted number of occasions. For a manager to state in public that none of his players are as good as new signing Yohan Cabaye and that’s why they earn less money, may be true, but it’s an incredible thing for someone in such a senior position to voice publicly in a newspaper interview.
Another example is Jason Puncheon, who’d just scored the biggest goal of his career, had the instinctive reaction during his celebration to allegedly call his manager a ‘w***er’. Couple this with Lee Chung-Yong openly stating very marked dissatisfaction with Pardew in an interview and a pattern begins to emerge. This all before Pardew’s actions to force Club Legend Mile Jedinak out the door, by stripping him of his captaincy with no more than a few words. This insidious “I’m right ,you’re wrong” attitude has been the beginning of Pardew’s downfall, way back to Southampton, Charlton and West Ham.
It’s also important to note that it’s the ‘possession football’ Pardew *Talks* about that is in question here. Despite it being a system he has complete faith in, it has been yet to yield any positive results or semblance of established identity at any club he has managed.
Pardew sets his teams up with the intention of attacking flair and ball retention but they’re distinct lack of creativity is often easily found out by any half decent tactician. Allow Pardew teams to retain possession and construct one bank of 4 and one bank of 5 and let them try to break you down, which they never manage to do.
There’s lots of sidewards and backwards passes but nobody with the cutting edge to play the through ball or see something that is going to break down the West Brom’s of this world who play with four 6ft plus CB’s instead of fullbacks.
Pardew seemingly has two ways of trying to solve this quandary, pack the midfield with ball players, which sees his teams often caught over committing out of frustration, in search of a breakthrough, or long diagonal balls from the centre half up to the lone big striker, by passing the expensive technically talented midfielders, you’ve rinsed your club’s finances for, should you get relegated by signing.
In short, Pardew has yet to show any of the technical and tactical coaching ability required in order to play ‘sexy football’ even when signing world class talent and the lack of the man management and interpersonal skills to improve existing players when he can’t.
The Emperor has no clothes and now those at the top level of the game, including the players in his dressing rooms are starting to see it. Unless there is a drastic change in form at Palace or discovery of humility, not only will Pardew be facing the sack from the South London club, but will be likely cast to the ‘Zone of Irrelevance’ for high profile jobs at the top level of English football forever.
