If nothing else, Gary Neville can take consolation from the fact that, ultimately, almost all football managers fail. Admittedly, most take longer than four months and don’t fail in quite such spectacular fashion, but at the age of 41 the former Valencia manager at least has plenty of time to seek solace in that cliched motivational saw unwittingly coined by one of life’s great pessimists. “Try again,” wrote Samuel Beckett. “Fail again. Fail better.” He can hardly fail worse.
Neville has bounced back from similar reverses. While his version of events explaining a thoroughly miserable time at the Mestalla Stadium has yet to emerge, it’s worth remembering Neville’s career as a player ended in similarly undignified circumstances. By his own account, he realised the jig was up while sitting on a toilet at The Hawthorns, staring disconsolately at the back of the door while pondering the sad reality he “was making Jerome Thomas look like Ronaldo”. Some 25 minutes later Neville was put out of his misery and substituted and after 602 appearances for Manchester United his largely excellent work as a footballer was done. “Off I went for the last time,” he would recall. “I knew it was over. Gary Neville, the former Manchester United defender.”
Now he has become Gary Neville, the former Valencia manager, and it is easy to imagine this perfectionist beating himself to a metaphorical pulp over the myriad failures that characterised a first stab at management which lasted less than four months. It was a ridiculously brief tenure but long enough for him to lead Valencia out of three cup competitions and to victory in only three of 16 La Liga fixtures. The contours of many toilet doors are likely to be scrutinised as he ruminates over where it all went wrong in a job he felt unable to turn down because it meant “I could have said goodbye to [my] credibility in football”.
Among those – and there are many – who appear genuinely delighted to have seen Neville come such a spectacular cropper in his first job in management, there seems to be a prevailing view that taking the Valencia job has in fact hastened this farewell to his credibility in football, on the grounds that while this largely respected pundit has proved he can talk a good game for Sky Sports, his inability to back up his insights from the dugout mean any football musings he may have to offer can no longer be taken seriously.
Quite how his inability to get a tune out of a disaffected and unfit squad of Valencia players renders his criticism of Arsenal’s lack of backbone or Simon Mignolet’s positioning in the face of long-range efforts any less valid is open to question. It could be argued his inability to get a tune out of a disaffected and unfit squad of Valencia players ought to give him another, priceless layer of perspective and humility from which to offer the nuggets of expertise that have made him so popular and influential as an analyst, should he choose to return to the comparatively stress-free sanctuary of the studio.
In his previous life as a TV pundit, Neville was often excoriating in his criticism of managers, many of whom will be only too pleased to point out, in the face of possible future criticism, that their records now stand up to far greater scrutiny than his own. We can only surmise what Neville the pundit would have made of Neville the manager: a former player-turned-TV-staple pitching up in a foreign country with no experience, no knowledge of the lingo and no apparent clue how to implement the ideas he must have had.
Having been lucky enough to spend time in his company chronicling a day in the life of one of his Monday Night Football broadcasts last season, I’d guess his assessment would have been meticulously researched, largely fair but ultimately withering to the point of extreme brutality. For all that, it is his long-held view that owners should exercise patience with their managers, even if it is not one that seems to tally with the decision, taken with his fellow Salford City co-owners, to dispense with the services of their club’s manager Phil Power in January last year.
In an interview with the Guardian, Neville’s former Sky Sports sparring partner Jamie Carragher affectionately bemoaned his former colleague’s recent absence from the studio. “Everyone knows what he’s like, running around at 100 miles per hour but you do miss laughing at him,” he said. “He’d be worrying about something not going right and always on edge … it was always highly entertaining.”
Despite having spent the past four months permanently on edge as Murphy’s Law dictated that pretty much anything that could go wrong did so in the most calamitous way imaginable, those in Neville’s immediate orbit have felt anything but highly entertained. Valencia fans certainly weren’t slow in making their displeasure known during his final match in charge, accompanying a 2-0 home defeat by Celta Vigo with loud chants for the rookie manager to get out of town.
Now he is gone, another failure on a football continent where a paltry three – three! – of the 98 managerial posts available across the traditional football powerhouses of England, Spain, Germany, Italy and France are occupied by Englishmen. Neville’s time in Spain may have ended in ignominy but he deserves credit for at least having a go.
