By Matt Ball, head of editorial MSN UK
Last updated May 5 2006
The Football Association announced on Thursday that Steve McClaren will take over as England head coach after the World Cup. Is this decision the right one?
McClaren emerged as the leading candidate for the role of England boss once "Big Phil" Scolari had turned it down. The move to appoint the Middlesbrough manager will not be without controversy: die-hard fans will love the fact that he is English but newspaper football journalists have been giving him a tough time recently.
Here we look at the key reasons for and against appointing him. You can give your views on McClaren by using our
World Cup message boards.
Reasons for McClaren1. He has been Sven-Goran Eriksson’s assistant for four years so he knows the ropes. By July McClaren will have been part of the England set-up for both a World Cup and a European Championship.
2. McClaren has experience of European football – in the Champions League with Manchester United and in the UEFA Cup with Middlesbrough.
3. His is a man who can make an impact. Within five months of his moving to Manchester United the club won the treble of the league championship, Champions League and FA Cup. It went on to win the Premiership title in each of the subsequent seasons with McClaren in charge of coaching.
4. He has worked with Sir Alex Ferguson, one of the most successful managers ever and one who knows how to get the most from superstar players.
5. McClaren has shown himself capable of making brave selection decisions. He has introduced a large number of youngsters into the Middlesbrough first team including Stewart Downing, Lee Cattermole, Stuart Parnaby and James Morrison. This suggests he will be brave enough to bring new players into the England set-up and give them a chance – something some previous England bosses have been unwilling to do.
6. He is English and his appointment would show English managerial talent can make it to the top job – something the Football Association should be committed to developing and promoting.
Reasons against McClaren1. The only thing he could have learned working for Sven-Goran Eriksson is how to qualify for major tournaments; he has not learned how to win them. The Swede has failed to lead his team beyond the quarter-finals stage and when the going got tough against Portugal and Brazil he and his coaching staff had no plan B to rescue the team – they simply ploughed on with the rudimentary plan A and hoped for the best.
2. McClaren has got too close to England’s top players. As assistant coach he will have, rightly, formed a close bond with the players - offering the good cop role to Eriksson’s (or the media’s) bad cop. If he were the boss, however, he would need to distance himself more which is a very difficult transition to make when dealing with superstars and senior players. Does he really have the stature to do this?
3. McClaren is nothing more than a Johnny-Come-Lately to the race for job. A few months ago his Middlesbrough side was pummelled 7-0 by Arsenal and his chances of even being considered for the role of England coach looked less than slim. But a couple of wins against mediocre teams in the UEFA Cup and suddenly the Football Association seems to believe he is a genius of a football coach.
4. Despite spending oodles of money on transfers and player salaries, his Middlesbrough team is still poor. Now, now ‘Boro fans, I do not want you jamming the MSN switchboards with vitriol on this one; the league table does not lie. Middlesbrough languish in the bottom half of the table for a reason: they are not very good.
McClaren has brought in players of international quality such as Jimmy Floyd Hasselbaink, Mark Viduka and Aiyegbeni Yakubu but has still not achieved the type of Premiership success a club chairman less benevolent than ‘Boro’s Steve Gibson would be expecting. And before those three, McClaren also spent more than £8 million on Massimo Maccarone and £3.5 million on Michael Ricketts. What does that say about his judgment?
Middlesbrough fans have voted with their feet – the Riverside stadium has a capacity of 35,000 but crowds of more than 30,000 have been registered just six times this season.
5. Can McClaren really handle the pressure of being England coach? Whenever Middlesbrough lose his interviews on Match of the Day give him the appearance of a man on the edge of a breakdown. Could he cope with one of football’s notoriously toughest jobs?
6. Forget his UEFA Cup adventure where he is forced to throw on three or four strikers because his team has already leaked goals, McClaren’s typical approach (the one he uses in league matches) is too defensive for modern international football. Taking a cautious approach may be fine if your primary ambition is to avoid relegation from the Premiership by a slender margin but it will not win many international matches these days against stronger nations nor will it please the fans.
