For all of the managerial departures that are taking place at the moment in the Premier League, Alan Irvine’s West Brom termination remains the most bedazzling.
Which is saying something; Alan Pardew’s decision on a personal level to trade five more years of a secure contract at ninth place Newcastle for nineteenth placed Crystal Palace seems difficult to fully comprehend.
Either way, West Brom are now at a cross-roads in their structural future. They conform to a unique managerial setup – they don’t have a manager, a de facto head of all footballing operations and administrative duties like every other Premier League team. Since Steve Clarke, the Baggies have persisted in only partially empowering their ‘manager’- instead they’ve a head coach, responsible solely for player development, training and tactics.
While being in control of those three aspects of management indisputably makes Irvine the most influential man at the club, it’s still unfair to deem him wholly responsible for the club’s failings.
“The biggest difference here is that there is a great structure and support in place,” said Irvine upon his appointment in June. “We have a technical director in Terry (Burton) and he will deal with a lot of things that would take a manager off the training ground – dealing with players’ contracts and with agents. These are all things that take you away from the most important job, which is working with players.
“They take you away from being able to analyse your own performance and analyse the opposition as thoroughly as you’d like to. The title is head coach and the main part of the job is to coach, but you can’t coach the squad of players without being involved in their management.”
As Burton outlined in his statement regarding Irvine’s sacking on West Brom’s website, the Scot’s successes have been on the development on developing their pre-existing players (the statement specifically referred to Saido Berahino and Craig Dawson). As a coach, that was his fundamental job – integrating 11 new players was not.
And Burton’s signings have fundamentally failed. Irvine allegedly had the final say on all of these signings, but to allow 11 players to leave and 10 to join reflects a fractious and unstable squad setup.
The £10m Brown Ideye has scored just twice, while Jason Davidson, Giorgos Samaras, Sebastion Blanco, Chris Baird and Critian Gamboa don’t appear to have made any impression. Does Irvine deserve most of the criticism for their failed impact, even though they were a product of Burton? Probably not, the blame should be shared.
If Burton and the West Brom board are to prevail with the club’s current structure, they need to afford their coaches more time. Instability- which is so blatantly prevalent throughout the club at the moment can be extremely damaging. That instability will remain as long as their patience remains so temperamental, and to keep chopping and changing will eventually lead to the club’s downfall. Alternatively, they can persist with this seemingly more bureaucratic structure but will have to become more tolerant when things don’t go straight to plan.
Tony Pulis’ track record of saving teams from relegation makes him the ideal candidate to take over from Irvine. However, given the way in which he left Palace due to a lack of control, it seems vastly unlikely that he and Burton will reach any form of compromise. Thats unless, of course, they re-align their managerial structure where Pulis can take control. Why shun the seemingly best candidate for the job in order to uphold a contentious structure?
If West Brom want stability, its time for them to abandon their managerial strategy and get back to basis. Otherwise, they risk being in an identical situation next year – only they’ll be in the Championship.
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