There has hardly been time for Alex Neil to pause for breath during his brief and barely believable journey from relative obscurity to the glitz and glamour of the Premier League. The way his star has rocketed has made it inevitable that Norwich City’s manager would be asked whether he has thought about managing Scotland after their failure to qualify for Euro 2016. The breakneck speed of Neil’s rise in the past two years does not make the idea of his country turning to him unthinkable.
Neil is not the type of person who is carried away very easily and when the question came, he let out an embarrassed laugh, said that he is a Scotland fan who wants Gordon Strachan to stay as manager and joked that he would think about it when his thinning hair is completely gone. He is not quite there yet. Give it a few years.
Even so, Neil has done little to stave off the impression that he is a man in a hurry ever since he became Hamilton Academicals’player-manager at the age of 31, in 2013, and everything he has achieved in his short career suggests that he is going places. Hamilton won promotion to the Scottish Premier League during Neil’s first full season in charge and the youngest manager in the Premier League had a similarly swift impact after replacing Neil Adams at Norwich in January, leading them back into the top flight thanks to their unfussy victory over Middlesbrough in the play-off final in May.
Norwich were seventh in the Championship when he arrived. Some managers say they need time when joining a new club but Neil has twice demonstrated that patience is not always a virtue. “You know what you want to set out and do,” he said. “You hope the players buy into it quickly and they can adapt their game.”
Norwich visit winless Newcastle United on Sunday and their solid away form will give them a strong chance of earning a third league victory of the season. Neil has turned them into an attractive side whose smart football has taken opponents by surprise. “It takes a lot of hard work,” he said. “It takes a lot of communicating with the players and getting their input. It’s about making sure your team is balanced in terms of what their strengths are and what their weaknesses are.
“You’ve got to try and make them gel together and try to play to their strengths and try to nullify their weaknesses as much as you can by complementing them with combinations in terms of personnel, or even just the way you play.
“We believe we’re a good team. We’re organised. We keep the ball really well and our style of play has improved considerably. But it’s making sure you get that, but also get the results to back that up. That’s the next 10 or 15% that we can add. If we do get there, we’ll have had a great season.”
Neil has experienced only success so far and he knows at some point he will need understanding from his bosses. “If things aren’t going well, if you don’t win five or six games, it doesn’t mean you all of a sudden become rubbish over that period,” he said.
“It’s more about the long-term. We might not have seen some of the best managers that ever lived, really, because if they get judged on today’s efforts then they might not have got the time they required.”
There is an unmistakable edge to Neil, a steeliness that will serve him well in the cut-throat world of the Premier League, and his youth has not prevented him from earning the respect of his players. “The bottom line is people will respect you if they think you know what you’re talking about,” he said.
The evidence suggests that Alex Neil knows a lot.
