Promoting your No2 is always a big mistake

Ask most people what comes to mind at the mention of The Godfather trilogy and nine times out of 10 they will make reference to the decapitated horse’s head placed in the bed of the stubborn moviemaker Jack Woltz. For me, though, the star has always been the Corleone family’s loyal right-hand man and consigliere, Tom Hagen.

The role of the No2 is certainly under‑appreciated, which is why some have a desire to try their hand as the main man. On Saturday afternoon two managers who have made their mark as the second in command will go head to head in a crucial Premier League relegation battle, as Terry Connor’s Wolverhampton Wanderers take on Steve Kean’s Blackburn Rovers at Molineux. Although Connor has been in the job two minutes and is in temporary charge as things stand, it feels like both men are destined to add their names to a long list of former assistants – Ricky Sbragia, John Gorman, Chris Hutchings, Steve Wigley, Sammy Lee and Les Reed immediately spring to mind – who have made a pig’s ear of things in the Premier League after accepting the chance to run the show.

Their previous role, as a No2, has nothing like the same limelight as the manager’s position, although their work can certainly be crucial to a club’s success. From the players’ point of view, the assistant acts as the “good cop” in a changing room shortly after the manager has torn a strip off the team, and for a manager they are the savvy and shrewd tacticians who breathe football day and night.

They work at close quarters with the players on the training pitch, communicating the manager’s ideas without all the F-words. They also act as a link between the player and the manager, in particular for those players who never like to deal with the manager directly (that group, incidentally, includes me). Yet it amazes me that so many chairmen seem to think an assistant manager’s skills are easily transferable to the No1 position.

Those owners who take a different view and recruit from outside are often, although not always, rewarded with an immediate improvement in performances and an instant upturn in results. Just look at Sunderland under Martin O’Neill. The simple fact is that everyone has something to prove under a new boss who has never worked with them before.

I won’t say tactics have nothing to do with it, but when I hear a pundit say something like “he’s got them organised” in reference to a team’s improved form, I cringe. Often it has little, if anything, to do with hours spent on the training pitch, and it is more down to the players trying that much harder and reverting to what they should have been doing anyway.

The indifferent form a team have shown previously can sometimes be put down to the players becoming so comfortable with the manager that they ease off mentally and physically. You’ll know this has happened when you hear a manager say: “I have taken this team as far as it can go,” which roughly translates as: “This group of players is no longer motivated by me.”

In my experience, a club that promotes a coach or assistant manager from within never seems to get much of a reaction in terms of results, and the reason is largely because the players are already too familiar with him. Rather than being in awe or in fear of a new manager (two traits that you may attribute to a successful No1), the squad is relaxed to the point where almost nothing has altered.

The dynamics of the new relationship must be even more awkward for the assistant-turned-manager as he tries to redraw the boundaries with players more accustomed to his arm around their shoulder. But the brutal truth is that many assistants struggle with the step up because they do not have the characteristics that are required in order to lead a group of people. A coach can have all the badges he could ask for and he may know his football inside out, but if he is uncomfortable at occasionally having to be a ruthless bastard by handing out fines or leaving people out of a match-day squad, then, I’m sorry, he shouldn’t bother applying.

Although a manager must be able to trust his assistant, he also needs his right-hand man to challenge his methods and pull him up when something isn’t working. In other words, behave nothing like Phil Neal did in that cringeworthy fly-on-the-wall England documentary made during Graham Taylor’s reign at the start of the 1990s, when the assistant’s tactical insight at a time when the team were up against it was limited to repeating everything that the manager had just said.

I played under a carbon copy of Neal at my last club, a man so useless he used to put on a training session for 30 professionals on a full-size pitch, and make them play one touch for an hour, which, take my word for it, is completely unheard of. A more pointless individual you will never meet. Where he has been clever, though (and I type this through gritted teeth), is the way he massaged our manager’s ego by telling him exactly what he wanted to hear. Thankfully, during the time I played for the club he never made any noises about one day taking over.

It is easy for me to look at things in the cold light of day when I’m not the one primed to emerge from the shadows of someone like Sam Allardyce or Mick McCarthy. But a person’s ego is a funny thing and anyone who has ever been involved with professional football will know that a certain part of your brain is forever asking: “What if?” The trick is to realise what you have before getting in to something you don’t need.

Shortly before filming the last Godfather movie, Robert Duvall, who played Hagen, pulled out after refusing to take a penny less than Al Pacino. After a complete overhaul of the script that saw Duvall written out, The Godfather Part III was released to a string of terrible reviews. Now there was a No2 who really knew his value.

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