John Carver believes Alan Pardew possesses the perfect temperament to manage England after surviving assorted traumas at St James’ Park.
“Alan can definitely be an England manager because he has the temperament,” said Carver who will be reunited with Pardew at Selhurst Park on Wednesday. After four years spent alongside each other in various technical areas it will be strange for Newcastle United’s interim head coach to see his former ally urging on renascent Crystal Palace from the adjacent dugout.
Not that Carver is ruling out a working reunion a few years down the line. “Alan didn’t talk about England when he was here,” he said. “But me, Andy Woodman [Newcastle’s goalkeeping coach] and Steve Stone [the club’s first team coach] would have a laugh and a joke about it. We’d say ‘do you think he’ll take us to England with him’. We’d have a bit of craic in the golf club about it. We used to have a laugh and a joke about England but Alan always remained focused on managing Newcastle.”
If Carver was in light-hearted mode when he bantered about getting measured up for an England track-suit with Stone and Woodman, he is deadly serious about Pardew’s credentials for the national job. “The England manager gets criticised by everyone,” he said. “There would be big pressure on Alan but he could deal with it.”
Sceptics may suggest Pardew’s headbutt on David Meyler at Hull last spring, not to mention his verbal abuse of Manchester City’s Manuel Pellegrini during an expletive laden technical area tirade last winter could disqualify him but Carver regards those two incidents as isolated, entirely uncharacteristic, aberrations. “Working with him every day I never saw anything like that in Alan’s character,” he said. “He wasn’t like that.”
Should Pardew defy the odds and keep Palace in mid-table the Football Association’s head hunters seeking Roy Hodgson’s eventual replacement may prefer to remember his fifth-place Premier League finish on a tight budget at Newcastle and his 2012 manager of the year award.
Yet despite many objective observers believing Pardew did an excellent job in often difficult circumstances on Tyneside before leaving for Palace after Christmas, he became a hate figure for many Newcastle fans and withstood months of abuse during a torrid 2014.
“The criticism Alan took was tough but he dealt with it,” Carver said. “I’m not sure there are many people out there who could have dealt with it like he did. His personality helped him and he helped me become a little bit stronger and more thick-skinned.
“The way Alan coped with it all taught me some invaluable lessons. He taught me it’s important not to be around the training ground all the time – about the need to spend time with your friends and the need to make time for a round of golf. It’s about not believing what you read in the newspapers and not getting yourself tied up reading blogs and things like that which was something I did when I managed Toronto because it does affect you psychologically.
“I thought some of the treatment Alan received was harsh but he was honourable and he stood up to it. He was as strong as an ox. His strength helped me and Steve Stone. He was a leader.”
