Search: ' coaching'

He was a brilliant winger in a team on the rise under a manager who loved a bit of flair. But, as Adam Powley reports, that's when it all started going wrong

You know that story about the brilliantly talented kid at school who was so good, he seemed born to be a footballer? Invariably, there’s no happy ending: the precociously gifted youngster fails to make the grade for a variety of frustrating reasons – poor coaching, a lack of application, or simply bad luck – and it all ends up as a case of what might have been.

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Stephen Wagg reflects on the achievements of the first man to manage England in a World Cup finals and how he cultured a generation of managers

Walter Winterbottom lived until he was nearly 90, so a lot of English football lovers below a certain age have probably never heard of him. Still fewer among the club’s global “fan base” will have known, until this month’s obituaries, that he played for a season in Manchester United’s first team. He coached England when the team was no more than a series of grainy and occasional black and white images on the nation’s TV screens and he was gone before the medium got seriously involved with Eng­lish football.

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In the first month of 2002 the turnover of managers has shown no sign of slowing down. Andy Lyons meets Bruce Rioch, whose former clubs Derby and Aston Villa have both contributed to the upheaval this year, and he explains his philosophy and reflects on the growing pressure for quick results

When you first go into a club as a manager, do you generally have an idea of how long it will take to do what you think needs to be done?
One of the first things you talk about at a job interview is the length of the contract. Usually it’s two or three years. It’s rarely a five-year deal. If someone offers you two years and it’s a club in the south and you live in the north you might think twice about having to uproot. I’d like to say to a chairman: “What’s your ambition? Let’s look at what you want to achieve.” It might just be staying in Division One or the Premiership. You don't often go in and get the chance to build a club the way you’d want to.

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India is a potential superpower of Asian football, but huge support has not been matched by dynamic leadership on the subcontinent. Dan Brennan reports

Last month Brazilian goal-machine Barreto scored the only goal in a fiercely fought local derby in front of 120,000 fans. Next month he will be lining up against Shevchenko. He plays not at the Maracana or the San Siro, but at the Saltlake Stadium in Calcutta, where his team McDowell Mohun Bagan were taking on East Bengal in the opening game of India’s sixth National League season. While cricket may hog the media limelight and the sponsors’ money, in many parts of India, such as Bengal, Goa and Kerala, football is the main sporting obsession. In one half of India’s second city, Barreto is a cult figure.

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Mathias Kowoll examines Berti Vogts' managerial history and questions the wisdom of putting him in charge of the Scottish national team

“We’re going to take off his kilt,” Hesse’s reg­ional governor Roland Koch said on hearing that Berti Vogts’s Scotland would be in Ger­many’s Euro 2004 qualifying group. So while the Scottish FA picked “the terrier”, back in Germany a pop­ulist politician feels he can get a few cheap laughs from picturing the former national team coach mooning from the Hamp­den dug­out. Such a difference in opinion needs explaining.

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