Lennon Should Look To Redknapp and Clough.
His loveable cockney rogue image which is a sort of OTT Michael Caine in the Italian Job, his WII adverts, his availability for anyone with a microphone and love for Peter Crouch mean that the gut instinct is the want to see him floating face down in a Malaga pool tied to Terry Venables.
That view softened the other week – it was downgraded to Level 3 Method Of Death: Overdose of fake bake – when I read that he told Roman Pavlyuchenko to “f*cking run around a bit” when the Russian was preparing to come on as a sub and Rafael van der Vaart stating that “There is a clipboard in our dressing room but Harry doesn’t write anything on it“.
The nerdy Football Manager obsessive w*nk idol, Johnathan Wilson, wrote about Redknapp and Clough the other week. Clough, he says, was scathing of those ‘over complicating’ the game and spoke of tactics dismissively. It’s something I can hold dear.
I blame Strachan and Pendry for me now having a massive clipboard phobia. The sight of them taking ten minutes to bring on a sub as they went through pages and pages of diagrams was one of many frustrating things about them (10 mins to bring on Chris Killen at 1 nil down). Strachan coached the life out the players.
Last week I saw Roy Keane send on a 6 foot plus centre forward who then passed a bit of paper Ipswich right hand sided midfielder. I thought to myself what sort of idiots are you dealing with when they need a note that tells them: “hoof it in the fecking box.”?
Ok, 90% of footballers are slacked jawed imbeciles. Lennon admitted this himself pre-season when he said that you can spend 15 minutes talking to a footballer but they will only remember the last thing you say. He also spoke about asking players not to do things they can’t do. It rings of keeping it simple. That’s something Lennon maybe wants to revisit.
He seems to be forgetting his mantra. Keeping it simple means playing players in their best position, this means that some will be disappointed. That’s why he gets the big money to make those decisions. His subs seem to be trying to hard.
Instead of doing the simple thing, like against Hearts when instead of bringing on a centre midfielder and taking off the useless Samaras – a blind monkey could have seen that sub – he waited then brought off a wide player and right back and replaced them with a wide player and a right back leaving Maloney and Ki as our centre midfield.
Dundee Utd and Inverness saw our midfield get over-run, twice, and a flirtation with a 3-5-2. At no time did he tell an on-coming midfielder “just go and fecking hold onto the ball for a few minutes and stick your foot in“. He changed players up front and out wide to no great effect.
Like Clough and Redknapp, Lennons strength seems in motivation and building team spirit. He needs to stop trying to impress and send out his team to follow simple instructions and himself to follow simple game changing instructions.
No fancy tactical wankery. We’re not intelligent enough for it.