Managers are falling like flies, new lads are being appointed on a seemingly weekly basis and even Graham Potter is back in the Barclays now.
And with an FA Cup weekend coming up it felt like a compelling time to reconsider the all-important Football365 Manager Rankings, which are already approaching far more acceptable overall numbers after last year’s deeply disappointing effort from all concerned.
We last updated these in November, and it’s fair to say a great deal has happened since. Those now entirely ridiculous rankings are in brackets here, and you can read the whole sorry nonsense here if you have literally nothing better to do with your time.
We, though, would urge you to read these ones instead. Because these ones are correct, and what is more there is absolutely no chance they will also look ridiculous and wrong when we do the next update in March.
28) Erik Ten Hag, Man United August-October (22)
Should obviously have been sacked in the summer, could very easily have been sacked after either of the two grimmest thrashings – Liverpool and Spurs – and arguably most compellingly of all should have gone after trying to convince himself and the world that a 0-0 draw at Crystal Palace was evidence of anything much at all about his future prospects.
As we said last month:
As is very often the case for a flailing manager – especially at the biggest clubs – he is not really the biggest problem but nor does he show any hint of being in any way part of a possible solution.
The football is uninspiring and, much as we hate the phrase, increasingly small time. Ten Hag’s confidence has shrunk to the point that he no longer feels able to take his team to a place like Aston Villa and do anything more than cling grimly to the 0-0 he started with.
There are teams where you can justifiably point to hard-earned, backs-to-the-wall goalless draws at Crystal Palace and Aston Villa as evidence that you know what you are doing and are going to get the job done, but Manchester United surely cannot ever be one of those clubs.
The irony, of course, is that a man who spent a large part of the second half of his United managerial career desperately insisting that results be ignored finally did get the tin-tack after a result that on its own probably could have been ignored.
Given the chances United missed – Diogo Dalot’s in particular was one for the all-time list and probably not really Ten Hag’s fault if we’re being fair about it – and the genuine absurdity of the penalty that eventually settled it, there is a strong case to be made that West Ham 2-1 Man United is the most easily dismissed result in the Premier League since Tottenham 2-1 Liverpool.
It wasn’t quite as abysmal a bit of officiating as that one, but it was arguably worse because a) it came so late in the piece and b) represented VAR actively changing a perfectly fine decision rather than a failure – however ludicrous – to overturn an error that already existed.
But when you have somehow come out the other side of at least four clear sacking windows as Ten Hag so obviously had, the sympathy that exists for getting the boot during an altogether more opaque one can only be very limited indeed. He had to go, and even United’s struggles to adapt to life under Ruben Amorim don’t really offer much vindication for Ten Hag given that so much of that struggle is down to the squad rot – both in personnel and mindset – that was allowed to fester during his time.
27) Ivan Juric, Southampton December onwards (NE)
Fair to say Juric is no stranger to a brief managerial spell, so at least what appears to be around the corner shouldn’t present too much of a culture shock. This is, after all, a man who managed to have three separate spells as Genoa manager in the space of two-and-a-half years between June 2016 and December 2018.
The shortest of those lasted only eight winless games before he was sacked for losing to a third-tier side in the Coppa Italia. It is far from certain his Southampton adventure, currently consisting of three games and three defeats, outlasts that.
After three years and 122 games at Torino – easily the longest and only 100-game reign of his managerial career – Juric lasted less than two months at Roma. Again, matching that really does currently feel like a bit of a stretch target.
26) Russell Martin, Southampton (20)
You can’t blame a guy for trying, can you? Having sat and watched Vincent Kompany brazenly and above all successfully place his own career prospects several levels above Burnley’s survival prospects last season, you can forgive Russell Martin for wanting a slice of that pie having surprised many by steering Southampton back to the top flight.
The problem is that Southampton were even less suited to trying to Pepball their way around the Barclays than Burnley. Burnley had at least cruised through the Championship in dominant fashion; Southampton scraped up through the play-offs after an end to the season in which even a relegation-haunted Huddersfield had scared the living sh*t out of them.
And lo it came to pass that Southampton were not capable of passing Premier League sides to death. There is a wider point here about wanting to do this. It’s something that now-established teams like Brighton and Brentford didn’t do when they first came up. They showed the Barclays some damn respect. These days everyone wants everything instantly, and these teams and managers think they can just saunter on in here and started passing out from the back from day one.
The utter and total failure of Southampton and Martin, who we fear remains unlikely to be the next manager of Bayern Munich despite his impeccable credentials, should at least serve as a warning to others.
25) Julen Lopetegui, West Ham August-January (19)
Getting rid of David Moyes in the hope of finding something a bit more proactive and enjoyable and then replacing him with the Spanish Moyes was always an interesting choice from a club that deals almost exclusively in interesting choices, but it’s still been striking to watch just how badly it’s gone and in such Moyesian fashion.
The worst of Moyes’ West Ham were so, so similar to the worst of Lopetegui’s: unnecessarily painful to watch given the talent available, but also and more damningly utterly ineffectively painful to watch. The 4-1 defeat at Man City was the ninth league game out of 20 this season in which the Hammers had conceded at least three goals.
It could only ever end one way, and given how bad West Ham have been you do almost have to hand it to the way the people running that club managed to make Lopetegui look like a wounded victim by making such a complete bollocks of his very necessary departure. Sacking managers is part of the game, but you can still do it with some dignity and grace.
Making the poor sod take training on the morning of a day he knows is going to be his last was just deeply weird, deeply unpleasant behaviour. It makes no sense unless viewed as some kind of desperate ploy to enrage Lopetegui to the point that he might jump before they had to push him.
24) Ben Dawson, Leicester November-December (NE)
Left Newcastle in the summer after 15 years in various academy and age-group coaching roles for a job on Steve Cooper’s coaching team at Leicester. Might have been an error. Named caretaker following Cooper’s departure, he oversaw a 4-1 defeat at Brentford before handing the reins to Ruud van Nistelrooy.
23) Gary O’Neil, Wolves August-December (18)
An apparent recovery on the back of two straight wins and a four-game unbeaten run in October and November crashed and burned spectacularly as Wolves lost three straight games, one of which involved the genuinely weirdly impressive achievement of conceding four goals to Everton.
O’Neil’s job was very much on the line ahead of a home game with Ipswich, one that ended with a late winner for Wolves’ relegation rivals and star man Matheus Cunha getting fisty with stewards. So, on balance, a sub-optimal run of form and antics. It felt like the end. It was the end.
And now we don’t really know what happens next for O’Neil. He’s a man who has now completed two genuinely impressive firefighting jobs from hospital passes (need a police reference here really don’t we, but buggered if we can think of one) at first Bournemouth and then Wolves. But having been replaced to such great effect at Bournemouth by Andoni Iraola and now having made a right bollocks of things at Wolves after his first stab at an actual pre-season of proper preparation he might just be a bit stuck.
There are presumably two kinds of jobs that now exist for O’Neil’s next foray. One, another desperate Premier League club enlists his proven relegation-avoiding credentials and that could actually even be Everton this season now we think about it. Two and perhaps more likely, an upwardly-mobile ambitious Championship club tasks him with doing the ‘getting into the Premier League’ bit before his specialist subject of ‘staying in the Premier League’. What we do know for certain is that O’Neil will get the job on the back of some fine video screen analysis and Speaking Well, I Thought on Monday Night Football.
Chelsea v Wolves is scheduled for Monday January 20. Just saying.
22) Steve Cooper, Leicester August-November (10)
‘Nobody is currently talking about Steve Cooper’ we chirped in November. Turns out we just weren’t listening. He was gone within days, with nobody much happy with the sufferball on offer even though it was keeping Leicester very much afloat in a choppy and complicated relegation fight.
The timing of his dismissal was odd, coming as it did after a narrow defeat to Chelsea straight after the international break that rather indicated he was already done for and a new manager could have been given a bit more time during that break to get his feet under the desk.
All became clearer, mind, when Ruud van Nistelrooy – who only completed his interim duties at Manchester United at said international break – was the man anointed as the saviour of Leicester’s season just after inflicting a couple of sizeable blows upon it with the Foxes’ relegation rivals United.
21) Ruud van Nistelrooy, Leicester December onwards (NE)
The 3-1 win over West Ham and 2-2 draw with Brighton represented a decent new-manager bounce for Leicester under a manager who’d just dealt them a pair of paddlings as interim Man United boss, but the underlying numbers from those games didn’t really point to Van Nistelrooy having cracked any code or stumbled on something sustainable.
Sure enough, five straight defeats of assorting degrees of alarm have followed and the next few weeks will tell us plenty about whether Van Nistelrooy can even steer Leicester into a relegation fight before he can think about trying to get them back out of it. With others down there looking currently far more upwardly mobile, the concern is that Leicester simply sink without trace along with Southampton and leave everyone else scrambling to avoid a single spot. Certainly Leicester appear the only club for whom such a fate is possible.
RVN’s Foxes face Palace, Fulham, Tottenham and Everton by February 1. It should give us a pretty clear indication of where things are heading, if five straight defeats isn’t already enough.
20) Sean Dyche, Everton (16)
Current Sack Race favourite and you have to say that’s fair enough. There really isn’t any compelling excuse for Everton to be slumming it like this in a grimly miserable relegation scrap again, and if Dyche cannot build a coherent case that he’s the best man to keep them above the relegation waterline, then really what is the point?
The belligerent run of spoiling draws against City, Arsenal and Chelsea is starting to look more and more like a defiant but futile last hurrah for Dyche’s particular brand of misery with Everton increasingly inclined to look elsewhere for a manager who might do more than drag them a point above the relegation zone with such misery-inducing football. Feels like for a club of Everton’s history and stature you might be able to get away with flirting with relegation and you might be able to get away with football that makes the ears bleed, but you can only do both for so long before it just becomes demeaning for all concerned.
Everton finally losing their long and proudly-held top-tier record the precise moment they move into a shiny new stadium is just far too Everton a piece of behaviour to be ruled out, and it does look more and more like it might need a change of direction, a change of mood, and a change of manager to prevent that nightmare scenario becoming horrifyingly real.
Everton have a bleakly hilarious record of making managerial changes just at the precise moment it’s too late to do anything much with the playing squad and long after what needs to be done has become entirely apparent, so we’re already earmarking a 1-0 defeat to Leicester on February 1 as Dyche’s final game.
19) Ange Postecoglou, Tottenham (17)
We’ve been over this several times now. We’re bored of it, and we know from feedback that you’re bored of us being bored of it. But we keep coming back to the very idea of what Spurs want to be, and we’re not sure the fans and the club are quite on the same page here any more, and that’s creating a big disconnect. The fans, in general, are broadly Ange In, Levy Out.
It’s a telling shift, because when Spurs have reached this point of their ruinous 18-month cycle before, the managers have borne the brunt of it. Really does feel like Levy might have genuinely made a strategic error in appointing a likable sort who the fans respond to in a way they haven’t since Mauricio Pochettino and his actually good teams of the mid-to-late 2010s.
Fundamentally, we don’t believe Postecoglou can achieve success as Daniel Levy and the Spurs board define it, which is consistent Champions League finishing positions. But there is a reasonable body of evidence that Postecoglou can (not necessarily will, mind) deliver success as a plurality of Spurs fans might define it, which is playing good and fun attacking football and for the love of f*** just winning something, anything, to shut everyone else the f*** up for a bit.
The hugely impressive nature of almost every Spurs win and the hugely cruddy nature of almost every Spurs defeat is everything here. They can absolutely win a trophy because they can absolutely beat anybody. They absolutely can’t finish in the top four because they absolutely cannot beat anyone reliably and consistently.
There are all manner of great little stats and quirks about this oddest of seasons, one that took its latest whiplash-inducing change of direction on Wednesday night against Liverpool. The fact they are the second top scorers in the Premier League yet nearer a relegation battle than a European fight, for one.
Or the fact they are currently joint holders of the record for both biggest home win and biggest away win of the Premier League season so far, and the added quirk that the away win is bigger.
Or just the absurdity of a team that hasn’t managed a single one-goal win in 20 Premier League attempts has now ticked off six of the things in Carabao and Europa action.
But right now we think our very favourite and straightforward indicator of where Spurs and Postecoglou actually sit is the fact they have won only six of their last 17 games in all competitions going back to October, yet those wins have come against Manchester City, Aston Villa, Manchester City, Southampton, Manchester United and Liverpool, and that those wins include a 4-1, a 4-0, a 5-0, and a 4-3 in which they led 3-0.
Anyone without a dog in the fight should be desperate to see Postecoglou’s Spurs make it to a Carabao final against Newcastle, as a social experiment if nothing else.
And that is still, despite everything, only one of three entirely plausible routes by which Postecoglou can deliver on his promise of second-season silverware. Spurs have already pulled enough weirdly inexplicable top-tier performances amid the more general dross to suggest they could absolutely do it.
What happens then? Is there a protocol in place for that? The last manager to actually win a trophy with Spurs finished 11th in the league and made it only eight infamous games into the next one. Postecoglou is potentially the next Juande Ramos, is the odd conclusion we have no choice but to draw here.
18) Ruben Amorim, Man United November onwards (9)
Okay fine, we put him too high. No, he isn’t currently doing a better job than Mikel Arteta. We maybe did place too much stock in his restraint when somehow not calling Ed Sheeran a c*** on live TV during his first post-match interview.
I think we all thought two things about Amorim when he arrived. One, he had the necessary charisma to have a chance of success in a role that demands it and in which recent occupants have been conspicuously lacking but also two, it was going to take a good long time for him to really make Manchester United any better given the depth and breadth of the problems both on-pitch and off.
What we will hold our hands up and admit we hadn’t truly budgeted for was Amorim making them conspicuously worse in the short term. We didn’t think Erik Ten Hag should remain Manchester United manager, sure, but we never looked at them and thought for even a daydreaming second he might take them down.
We still think long-term Amorim has a better chance than anyone else of lifting United from their ever-deepening, ever-lengthening post-Ferg gloom, but we’d be lying if we said confidence remained as high now as it did a couple of months ago.
It’s not his fault that United’s squad is on the whole too stupid, feckless or both to understand concepts as complex as ‘wing-back’ or the number three, but like a certain other manager at a certain other struggling Big Sixer, the line between the ‘commendable adherence to stated principles’ and ‘mule-headed stubborn clusterf*ck’ may have been crossed already. And even faster.
Still cuts a relentlessly impressive figure off the pitch, and we earnestly hope that the twin challenges presented by Manchester United and the UK media don’t beat the refreshingly honest and detailed press conference answers, but things have got to improve on the pitch really quite soon. Man cannot live on one 2-2 draw at Liverpool alone.
17) Simon Rusk, Southampton December (NE)
A narrow Carabao defeat to Liverpool and a goalless draw with Fulham that represents 16.67 per cent of Southampton’s entire points tally for the season and 50 per cent of their clean sheets makes Rusk, stopgap between Russell Martin’s egocentric Kompany-lite stylings and whatever it is Ivan Juric is attempting to achieve, comfortably Southampton’s most impressive manager of the season.
16) Pep Guardiola, Man City (14)
Let’s just say that fixtures against Leicester and a West Ham in the final throes of the failed Julen Lopetegui experiment were agreeably timed for a manager and team in desperate need of some respite after a genuinely mind-melting run of one win in 13 games.
Such was the extent of that run and the paucity of the recently vanquished opposition, and, in the Leicester game especially, the still unconvincing nature of the City performances that no dramatic ‘We’re so back’ conclusions can yet be remotely drawn.
But the unnerving and for a little while all too real prospect of Guardiola actually leaving City has at least retreated into the background for now.
Only for now, though. There is still a monumental overhaul and rebuild required of this suddenly ancient-looking squad before City can go again. There’s no doubt they can achieve it, but great doubt over whether Guardiola retains the energy or desire to oversee it.
We and he will perhaps have a clearer idea by summer, but it’s going to be a time for some potentially awkward but necessarily honest conversations with himself and others. If he’s not going to see through the renewal of this champion team, better surely to walk away and let someone else who does have the will to start the process from scratch rather than having to finish someone else’s half-hearted attempt.
15) Graham Potter, West Ham January onwards (NE)
As manager rankings custom dictates, a new manager slots in right in the middle until such time as a definitive judgement can be made, i.e. after he has taken charge of one actual game. You always know for sure then. It’s why for instance none of these other rankings ever change month to month.
While the Lopetegui-Potter transition may have been handled with all West Ham’s owners’ standard grace and class there’s little doubt they’ve had a bit of a result overall. Potter was still favourite for a very-possibly-very-quickly available Spurs job at the time the Hammers landed him, and he has turned down plenty of chances to get back into work elsewhere after his Chelsea humiliation.
Does feel like this could – could – be ideal for all parties. Potter was always likely to have to eat some sh*t and step down a level or two wherever he did get back into management, but in West Ham he can still point to career progression from Brighton at least and a squad that really need produce neither football so drab nor results so bad as they have this seasons.
There remains plenty to work with here – albeit Jarrod Bowen’s injury is a significant and badly-timed pisser – and at a club where expectations and measures of success run slightly lower than those at some of the other potential landing spots that remained open to Potter.
READ: Eight West Ham moves for Graham Potter’s perfect January transfer window
14) Oliver Glasner, Crystal Palace (21)
Things have improved but they also pretty much had to for a manager and team we described in November as the season’s biggest disappointments.
Since then, Palace have lost only twice and both times to Arsenal. Which, you know, is kind of okay. If you’re going to lose a couple of games it might as well be to someone good at least. Given that earlier in the season they were losing to your West Hams and Evertons.
It’s now 14 points from nine league games since the November international break which is much more the sort of thing one expects from Palace and the least we expect of Glasner, who remains a genuinely impressive coach.
Having dragged Palace out of the stickiest part of the relegation fight, there does appear now a very presentable chance to join the ranks of the mid-table morass which is of course the Eagles’ rightful home. Especially with some pretty gentle fixtures to come over the coming weeks for a team in far better spirits now.
13) Mikel Arteta, Arsenal (13)
Under more pressure now than perhaps any other time in the last two-and-a-half years. He’s not doing anything dramatically wrong, and the likeliest finishing position for Arsenal remains second which despite what banter merchants will tell you does still actually require you and your team to be quite good.
But there are nagging doubts now about the quality of the football and the lack of something at the pointy end of Arsenal’s attacking play. Doesn’t help when another trophy chance (probably) disappears under the weight of a world-class performance from exactly the kind of striker – indeed, exactly the specific striker – you so obviously and desperately need in Alexander Isak.
A tough FA Cup third-round draw against the defending champions Manchester United also raises the genuine spectre of another trophy chance turning to dust. That game as well as upcoming home Premier League tests against Spurs, Villa and Man City before the Carabao rescue mission at Newcastle do look like they have a season-defining vibe to them. And there’s a growing sense that season-defining for Arsenal and Arteta this time around might be era-defining.
12) Vitor Pereira, Wolves December onwards (NE)
To widespread shock that reverberated around football and rocked the game to its very foundations, Wolves opted to replace Gary O’Neil with a Portuguese manager. By the time everyone had recovered even a fraction of their composure, Pereira had only gone and taken seven Yuletide points from his first three games against Leicester, Manchester United and Spurs.
The new-manager bounce has now landed painfully with a 3-0 home defeat to Nottingham Forest, and just how much that initial run was due to Pereira improvements or just the good fortune of playing three of the sillier teams in Barclays history back to back will be shown in full old gold technicolour over a grisly looking upcoming run of league games against Newcastle, Chelsea, Arsenal, Aston Villa, Liverpool and Bournemouth.
11) Fabian Hurzeler, Brighton (4)
It all seems to have just slightly fizzled out a bit after such a promising start, which is sadly also rather Brighton. Hurzeler has certainly been an interesting new arrival in Our League but does already have the look of one destined to follow the now-established Brighton path of initial promise vaguely giving way to something still perfectly adequate and presentable but just not quite what it initially promised to be.
There is a kind of depressing grim inevitability to the fact that Hurzeler will, 18 months from now, be managing in France or Portugal or Turkey and again doing a perfectly adequate job there while Brighton and the Premier League at large move on perfectly well in their absence and so soon they are forgotten. Remember when Roberto De Zerbi was in the top three of the next manager betting for just about every Big Six job? Genuinely only about eight months ago, that. Makes you think.
10) Ruud van Nistelrooy, Man United October-November (7)
Yeah, that genuinely went brilliantly well. Credit to everyone here. If we were going to have a four-match reign as Manchester United manager, what we’d do is to make sure that all four of those matches were at home and, ideally, two of them against Leicester and another against PAOK in the Europa League. Get some lovely fat wins under the belt.
But let’s not pretend United would have won those three games as straightforwardly under Erik Ten Hag (or, it must now be conceded, Ruben Amorim) as they did under Ruud. It’s not really Ten Hag’s fault, but everything had become extremely stressful by that point. Absolutely nothing was coming easily, and maybe one of those three games might have been straightforward. But at least one would have been harrowing.
And perhaps the most impressive result of Van Nistelrooy’s reign was the one game he didn’t win, with a 1-1 draw against Chelsea giving us far more information than some easy wins over dreck.
Essentially, though, it was the perfect interim stint. It’s had all the positives of the initial Ole caretaker spell, with the instant mood-lifting morale boost of seeing a bona fide club legend in the hotseat, without any of the unpleasantness of mistakenly leaving him there for another two years after that initial buzz had entirely worn off.
9) Thomas Frank, Brentford (11)
Just a match made in heaven, this, isn’t it? A sensibly impressive manager of a sensibly impressive club, where even the current whimsy of spending half a season getting all your points at home and now apparently setting out on a bid to reverse that over the closing months of the season feels ordered and correct instead of very silly indeed.
There remains a fear that Frank will one day ruin everything by taking a more glitzy-looking but fundamentally impossible job, and you certainly wouldn’t begrudge him the chance because he’s earned it. But we do have a quite powerful need for him to just stay at Brentford forever because it is the right and proper way of things.
Also the first man ever to make us reconsider the hitherto unquestioned truth that you can never trust a man with two first names.
8) Marco Silva, Fulham (5)
Silva has turned Fulham into the Barclays’ most reliably mid-table team, and that’s no small feat given they had a distinct yo-yo look to them before the last couple of years.
But they are in danger of if anything for me Clive becoming too mid-table. Their current run of Premier League form can be considered in both glass half-full and half-empty fashion. It’s either eight games unbeaten or just two wins in the last nine depending on how you look at that glass.
But what Fulham and Silva’s glass absolutely undoubtedly is, is half something. It’s always half something.
They are currently ninth because of course they are.
7) Kieran McKenna, Ipswich (15)
Doing very well and it’s hard not to be pleased. Even when the wins didn’t come in the early part of the season, it was clear McKenna was no wally and had got an Ipswich squad with frankly no real justifiable hope of Premier League survival to be at the very, very least competitive and awkward to play against.
They are now far more than that and if relegation nevertheless remains the likeliest outcome, survival is a very real prospect too and at the very, very least any relegation if it does come is going to be one that leaves McKenna, Ipswich and a whole gaggle of his players with reputation enhanced.
There is very clearly a very big job in McKenna’s managerial future – he’s already worked as a coach at both Manchester United and Tottenham where even if you do miss one managerial opportunity you always know another one will be along in about 18 months – and we look forward to seeing what he makes of that chance when it comes.
For now, though, we’d quite happily see what he can do at Ipswich over the next couple of years, whether attempting to keep them in the Premier League again or get them back in again. Either challenge would appear to be one that could tell us a fair bit about what is clearly a coach worth watching.
6) Unai Emery, Aston Villa (6)
It says a great deal about Emery and Aston Villa that they’ve had a really quite difficult and testing season which hasn’t quite gone according to plan in many ways, and yet they’ve gone about both their good days and bad with such calmness while other noisier clubs and managers hog the attention that you barely even notice them.
And as we meander into the second half of the season, there they sit just three points off a probable Champions League spot and ideally placed for a top-eight finish in this year’s Big Cup league phase.
Given where Villa were when Emery found them – and his own Barclays reputation at the time – you’d settle for this current scenario as evidence of a ‘difficult’ season, wouldn’t you?
5) Enzo Maresca, Chelsea (3)
Just starting to go a little bit wrong for Maresca and Chelsea, with the very distinct sense that Maresca has kind of been expecting this and waiting for the inevitable bum’s rush. A fight for the title has turned into a fight for a European spot in really quite alarmingly swift fashion, with the undoubtedly-still-overachieving Maresca coming in for some tough questions about his pre-game and in-game team selections. There have certainly been some curious ones.
We all know that the “Gah, of course we’re not in a title race, don’t be so absurd” line is a familiar expectation-managing bluff from managers, a ruse as old as time. But we do really rather feel that Maresca’s repeated insistence that his players weren’t yet ready for a title challenge might really have been more an in some ways admirably self-aware admission that he himself wasn’t ready for that.
Which is also fair enough, because it is worth remembering that this is still his first ever go at top-flight management. He’s still doing remarkably well, just not quite so remarkably as a few short weeks ago.
4) Andoni Iraola, Bournemouth (12)
It’s long been obvious that there was something compelling about Iraola and that his Bournemouth side could become something really quite special if their best days could be replicated over a sustained period.
In his first season, Iraola started really quite horribly, failing to win until their ninth game of the season and then promptly losing 6-1 to Man City, albeit Man City were still good then.
What happened next was thrilling, though, with six wins – including what is now apparently their customary 3-0 win at Manchester United – and a draw against Aston Villa in their next seven games. That was followed by another winless run – seven games, this time – before four wins and a draw from their next five. From that point, Iraola’s side kind of stumbled over the mid-table line and that was that. It was a perfectly decent season in the round, more than enough to kibosh the ‘careful what you wish for’ jibes that were being prepared after those early struggles and the brutal but correct way Iraola was brought in to replace Gary O’Neil.
O’Neil did everything and more that could reasonably have been expected of him having taken the job on at a horrible time and with no experience. But nothing that has happened since suggests Bournemouth got it wrong.
There was more to Bournemouth than overall improved adequacy, though. The football was slick and watchable, with that first seven-game run of success featuring 18 goals scored in all and at least two in every game. Bournemouth had aimed higher than mere survival with the appointment of the former Rayo Vallecano coach and while there were dark times it was also very clear there was something there. Something really exciting on which to build.
Then this season came along, and Bournemouth started frustratingly slowly once again. Although August draws against Nottingham Forest and Newcastle would now appear to have greater currency now than they did at the time, it’s hard not to wonder what might have happened had Bournemouth not managed to turn round a 2-0 deficit in such absurd fashion in the closing minutes of their third game of the season at Everton. They had been thoroughly outplayed up for 86 minutes.
Slowly but surely, Iraola and his team have got going once again. The loss of Dominic Solanke h.as been adroitly handled. Following a run of seven points from three games against Arsenal, Villa and Man City with no points from games against Brentford and Brighton sparked fears of a repeat of last season’s streakiness, but they haven’t lost a Premier League game in eight goes since.
Since late November it’s been three draws and five wins – including the latest 3-0 at Man United and a hugely impressive 1-0 win over Spurs in which Postecoglou’s ‘entertainers’ were held at arm’s length with the insouciant ease of Nelson Muntz dealing with smaller kids at Springfield Elementary.
But that analogy only half works. Because Iraola’s side are not playground bullies. They are a clever side, but a skilful one too. They know what they are trying to do and are capable of following those instructions. These sound like very basic bars to clear, but the Premier League is currently awash with managers and squads failing those basics.
Above all, Bournemouth have sharpened up at the back without losing their attacking qualities. A team that for all its promise and propensity for eye-catching purple patches shipped 67 goals last season is now past the halfway mark of this season with just 23 against. Only the top three and fifth-placed Newcastle can better that.
What we have then is an upwardly mobile team with an upwardly mobile manager showing clear signs of phase two development and improvement after an already-promising phase one.
It’s nice. And now, having understandably if reluctantly cashed in on Solanke when Spurs came calling in the summer, the key advice for Bournemouth is to simply not answer any calls from North London over the weeks ahead.
3) Eddie Howe, Newcastle (8)
In moves both shameful and shameless, we’ve repeatedly tried over the last year or two to will an Eddie Howe Sack crisis into existence. We must now accept for now that those attempts have failed.
Newcastle may not be the all-conquering behemoth some may have imagined would be the case two or three years into their Saudi era, but they have become an enormously impressive football team.
And over the last month or so, perhaps the single most impressive football team in the land. Alexander Isak is currently unmatched among Premier League strikers, while we’re coming up dry when trying to find a midfield currently working better than Newcastle’s Bruno Guimaraes-Joelinton-Sandro Tonali engine room. It’s one that has absolutely everything one could want from a midfield: energy, creativity, housery, tough-bastardry, goals, brawn and brain.
Howe has got Newcastle absolutely purring in their current wildly impressive seven-game all-comps winning run, and if the Magpies are ever going to end a major trophy drought that extends beyond even England’s own then the next five months really do currently seem to be as good a time as any.
Of course, if Howe cannot deliver that long-awaited silverware for the nation’s most passionate and shirtless fans, we will sadly have no choice but to climb shamelessly right back on to our increasingly threadbare and worn Howe Sack hobbyhorse.
2) Arne Slot, Liverpool (1)
Jolly bad luck for Slot that the manager rankings come along after comfortably his trickiest week of the season. Back-to-back unconvincing performances against Manchester United and Spurs against the backdrop of negotiations and chatter around the Contract Three have reminded everyone that Slot had previously been doing a frankly miraculous job in holding the whole thing together.
Recency bias means we’re inevitably going to focus on the errors in judgement he’s made in the last two games, but it has to note that they stand out purely because before then everything Slot has done has been so serenely, quietly excellent.
But his in-game management of the United game was poor – TAA had to come off earlier, and at 2-1 the midfield cried out for the calming influence of a Wataru Endo, at the very least – while the whole approach to the Spurs game was odd.
Sure, it was the away leg and that changes things a bit, but it was an away leg at a ground where Liverpool had scored six goals less than three weeks earlier. Everything, from the schedule to the state of their opponents, suggested this was a leg worth targeting in all-out fashion to attempt to kill the tie dead and render the second leg a formality. For multiple reasons, it just seemed the obvious strategy. An FA Cup clash against Accrington at the weekend offers an obvious chance for resting key players, and who knows what the Premier League title race might look like or how many actual centre-backs Spurs might have available a month from now when the second leg rolls around.
We are, clearly, nit-picking, though. When the biggest gripes with a manager are some iffy decisions in a 2-2 draw and an entirely-salvageable 1-0 defeat in the first game of a two-legged semi-final you know things are going really rather splendidly overall.
1) Nuno Espirito Santo, Nottingham Forest (2)
Just a superbly brilliant thing, isn’t it? Nottingham Forest were already having a wildly impressive season even before a current six-game winning run that has propelled them and their manager into Leicester 2015/16 areas.
It’s certainly at this stage the most impressive outlier season we’ve seen since that one, and like Leicester that year once the initial WTF shock of it all wears off and you just watch them play you realise what’s actually happened here – and nobody is really quite sure how – is that quietly a very good football team has somehow been assembled that has found the right manager with the right plan to maximise every single strength while minimising every single weakness.
Only once have Forest been guilty of getting ahead of themselves: when 1-0 up at half-time against Newcastle. They lost their way in the second half of that game, forgot who they were, tried to be Man City for a bit and got smashed.
But even that negative has been turned into an overwhelming positive because Nuno and the lads have learned the lesson of that day spectacularly and entirely. They have suffered heavy defeat at Arsenal and City since that day, which is fair enough, but have won the other seven – including at Man United and at home to Spurs – while conceding only three goals and scoring 14.
The highest praise you can give Nuno and Forest this season is that the freakish unexpectedness of the season as a whole just doesn’t exist within the individual games themselves. Forest consistently win games by playing better football more intelligently than their opponents. There has been precious little smashing or grabbing, no real sense of a team giddily riding a wave they don’t understand. When you watch Forest win another game what generally strikes you most is that they simply deserved it because they played well and are good.
It kind of sounds like taking the piss a bit when you write it down like that, but it really isn’t. It’s what makes them so compelling, because there really isn’t now any sense that this is all going to implode dramatically. Like Leicester nine years ago (weep) it all looks entirely sustainable, and only the name of the team producing these performances makes anything they do week to week surprising.
We’re not saying they’re going to win the title (we are and they are) but there really is a very strong chance they can hold on to a top-five spot and with it the potential of a return to Europe’s top table for the two-time champions.
We are also absolutely here for the fact that Liverpool could sweep to the title in brilliant, dominant fashion under a new manager and that manager be nowhere near manager of the year.
