It is a rainy Sunday afternoon in Breda, FC Twente have just won the Dutch title and Steve McClaren cannot stop smiling. Only one thing disappoints him. “I wish Sir Bobby Robson could have been here,” he says. “He told me to take this job and his advice was right.”
Robson, who died in 2009, became a mentor to McClaren following the latter’s England debacle and he would surely have been delighted to see a man with whom he shared so many footballing principles take charge at his beloved St James’ Park.
Newcastle United remain a club surrounded by far too much sentimentality but it somehow feels right that the 54-year-old is now sitting beneath the picture of Robson which stares down from the walls of the manager’s training ground office. Five years on from that redemptive day in Breda, McClaren is back in the Premier League and contemplating a post offering boundless possibilities but which has proved a poisoned chalice for so many predecessors.
Much depends on whether Mike Ashley, Newcastle’s owner, really has learnt his lesson and is prepared to provide the investment an alarmingly slender squad craves. If so, McClaren could be provided with the perfect canvas on which to showcase the coaching ability which has won him widespread respect within the game.
He may have a mixed managerial record – the Eredivisie title and the League Cup triumph and journey to the Uefa Cup final with Middlesbrough are offset by his England and Wolfsburg experiences – but his work on the practice pitches commands consistent acclaim.
Roy Keane, Teddy Sheringham and Jermain Defoe (who canvassed for Sunderland to appoint him before Dick Advocaat’s U-turn) are among a fan club that also includes George Boateng and Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink. “He’s the best English coach,” said Burton Albion’s manager. “He makes players better and he’s evolved since Middlesbrough.”
Boateng, another of McClaren’s Boro brigade, agrees. “Steve’s the best coach I ever had,” said the former midfielder. “His coaching’s amazing, he engages your brain, makes you think twice.”
No Newcastle fan would disagree that an often worryingly one-, at best two–dimensional team are overdue an infusion of footballing intelligence. John Carver’s former charges could certainly do with being reacquainted with concepts such as playing between the lines and, more prosaically, defending the most rudimentary set pieces.
McClaren has always liked good passing and displayed increasing attacking inclinations at FC Twente and Derby County but he also knows how to set up teams for specific games. A majority of fans may be underwhelmed by McClaren’s appointment and certain rival club owners scornful about the notion of employing “the wally with the brolly” but it was no fluke that, at Boro, he enjoyed an impressive record against José Mourinho’s Chelsea.
McClaren has a good relationship with Graham Carr, Newcastle’s powerful chief scout who is effectively the director of football. Indeed Carr, whose habit of instructing the club to sign players Alan Pardew did not particularly want was partly responsible for the latter’s defection to Crystal Palace, proved a driving force behind the decision to hire the former Derby manager. It is hoped they will remain sufficiently close to make Newcastle’s continental-style administrative structure work.
Ashley’s apparent willingness to relax a previous reluctance to permit the signings of players aged over 25 and generally more expensive British recruits should help. Plans are underway to sign, among others, Charlie Austin from Queens Park Rangers and Micah Richards, a free agent.
Newcastle desperately need strengthening in attack and defence with as many as six high-calibre faces (preferably including a midfield playmaker) required but there is also a need to rebalance a disproportionately Francophone dressing room. Perhaps McClaren’s relationship with the Ivorian Cheik Tioté, one of his former FC Twente charges, may assist his attempt to win the hearts and minds of that French-speaking contingent.
It will be fascinating to see whether he can coax the creative best out of Rémy Cabella, hitherto a £12m flop never properly trusted by either Pardew or Carver, while persuading Moussa Sissoko to perform on a more consistent basis. Similar intrigue should surround his decisions on who to offload, with the erstwhile captain Fabricio Coloccini the most high-profile potential departure.
The north-east media are unlikely to faze a manager, battle-hardened by his time with England, who already knows most of them but McClaren may face a harder job winning over the 52,000 who regularly fill St James’ Park to capacity.
It should help that, since leaving the Riverside, he has kept his family home near the Georgian market town of Yarm (where Teesside meets North Yorkshire) and understands the north-east psyche.
Having rejected the cringe-inducing presentational spin, image consultants and jargon-heavy psychobabble he surrounded himself with during the England days (although he retains a strong belief in sports psychology and could yet make Steve Black Newcastle’s “mind doctor”), he cuts a much more open, relaxed figure these days.
This laid-back demeanour is about to be sorely tested by one of English football’s most challenging jobs. Lennie Lawrence, a Boro predecessor, used to say football managers needed skills in five spheres: coaching, man-management, tactics, media management and boardroom politics.
McClaren possesses the first four but the way in which he copes with Ashley appears set to define both his and Newcastle United’s futures.
