Take a risk like Maresca: why Leicester City should go for a fresh face
The wait goes on for Leicester City to make a permanent managerial appointment – and David Bevan has some thoughts on the type of person it should be…
When scouring the seemingly endless lists of names linked with Leicester City’s vacant managerial position, I’ve realised there’s a voice in my head quickly delivering a yes or no to each one.
At first I thought it was to do with their preferred style of play, but there’s been a yes for multiple potential candidates whose tactical approach couldn’t be more different from one another.
Then I thought it must be to do with their management experience, but again there have been positive vibes about people with almost none of that.
Eventually I’ve got to the bottom of what it is I value most: the chance for our new manager to make their time at Leicester City the defining period of their career.
Opportunity knocks
We may seem like a basket case in many ways but a lot of that is tied up with losing on a regular basis last season.
In fact, this summer offers a genuine opportunity for one lucky person. This is the time to dream of possibilities, of appointing someone who has shown promise, who hasn’t failed yet, who can energise the fanbase.
Bring in the players you want. Shape the team in your image. Move the club forward.
Almost everything at all levels of the club has been so badly managed for so long that the quickest route to putting everything back in place - particularly in the absence of any concept of executives taking responsibility for our decline - would be to pick the right manager.
While it’s not as simple as that, this current interminable wait will be long forgotten if they do get it right. You could even argue that the club’s recent track record of managerial appointments has largely been good and the issues have been caused more by a terrible track record of knowing when to get rid.
We’ve seen what the right choice looks like before with Martin O’Neill and Nigel Pearson, who both took the reins during varying degrees of turmoil and stamped their authority all over the club. Indeed, they both had such strength of character that I’d argue some part of what we see now as the club’s identity was forged by their personalities.
With O’Neill, it was his ability to create an us-against-the-world mentality that fostered results against the odds. With Pearson, the implementation of scouting and sports science that put the foundations in place to achieve the unthinkable.
That’s not to say either of them should come back by any stretch of the imagination, or that we need someone identical. But we need someone with the same determination to build us back to what we know we can be and a large part of that involves exciting the fans again after a long period of declining enthusiasm.
The sorting hat
If this fortunate person is going to make their time with us the defining period of their career, it means they can’t already have an overarching affinity for another club - particularly through having managed them already.
This stipulation would, for example, sort the following alleged candidates into two categories:
Yes: Maresca, McKenna, Tomasson
No: Smith, Solskjaer, Gerrard
Enzo Maresca and Kieran McKenna have always been the most intriguing names in circulation, while Jon Dahl Tomasson aced his audition in the lashing rain on Filbert Way a few months back.
If, as seems probable at the time of writing, Maresca is the man then of course it will represent a huge leap of faith - but after months and months of inaction from the board, this would be a bold move that should be welcomed.
It is a potentially thrilling appointment that could be the start of something special - and although it could all go wrong, that’s the same for practically anyone feasible. The arrival of a new manager is not a time for cynicism. It’s a time for hope, whether that later turns out to be prescient or naive. At least there’s the excitement of possibility with a new name, a fresh face.
And while a lot will be made of Maresca’s relatively brief grounding with Manchester City, that’s very different from a lifetime of love for one club.
We won’t put all our eggs in one basket until anything’s confirmed though.
Because you’ll also notice there’s a name missing from the sort. Where does Scott Parker, one of the recent hot favourites, sit?
Parker is definitely the most contentious case here. Is he a fresh face? He doesn’t seem tainted by association with either of the clubs he got promoted from the Championship, because their fans appear to despise him.
So is he a success for gaining those promotions or a failure for not kicking on? Has he learned from his experiences at Fulham and Bournemouth? Or is he doomed to repeat exactly the same chain of events with his next club and, if so, would that be such a terrible thing if we fast forward 15 months and we’re looking for a new manager again in the Premier League?
Either way, this is not a perfect method and this is not a definitive list.
It’s more an attempt to understand why some names feel like a yes and some feel like a no when we have little more to go on than gut instinct.
Pride and pettiness
I’m also fully aware it’s irrational. I remember thinking when Neil Warnock left Sheffield United that you wouldn’t want him to manage your club in the future because his heart was so clearly with the Blades.
But that was 16 years ago. He’s gone on to become broadly well-liked by fans of clubs he’s subsequently managed - the likes of Crystal Palace, QPR, Cardiff City and, at present, Huddersfield Town.
Even just looking at current Premier League managers, using this theory you’d probably have ruled out David Moyes at West Ham given his strong association with Everton, Eddie Howe at Newcastle after his time at Bournemouth and Pep Guardiola, whose heart clearly belongs to Barcelona. That’s before you even get to Chelsea bringing in Mauricio Pochettino this summer, given his spell at Tottenham.
So is it just a pride thing? Not really.
It may in fact sound petty, and that’s an even more fitting word than you might realise. Because some of it has to do with our weird recent association with Aston Villa.
We’ve seen Dean Smith brought in as interim manager, their former manager Steven Gerrard linked with the permanent post and, in the longer term, Academy manager Ben Petty recruit a whole host of discarded Villa youngsters to pad out our youth team.
That might not seem like much of a link until you consider there’s more than one Villa fan in our boardroom, and the thought when we first saw Seagrave was that we’d attract talent from all over the Midlands and beyond, not from Bodymoor Heath.
It makes it all the more galling that our £32million FA Cup hero ended up there on a free, and there’s a strong possibility he’ll soon be joined by arguably the best player to come through our youth academy since Emile Heskey.
If we’re going to source a crop of young players from another club, let’s aim higher than Aston Villa rejects - for which one man on the shortlist could come in very handy…
Living legends
There’s also a clear link between the managers who have come in and done an extraordinary job for Leicester City. They weren’t overly associated with any club before us, particularly in a managerial sense.
We can, of course, include both O’Neill and Pearson in that category. It possibly even applies to Claudio Ranieri, despite his strong bond with Chelsea fans, given the number of clubs he gets through and the number of managers Chelsea get through.
So is it just an age thing? Again, not really.
O’Neill and Pearson had the benefit of still starting out in their managerial careers when they arrived at Leicester. You couldn’t say the same of Ranieri, but then what he achieved is so far removed from the normal reality of supporting a club like Leicester City that maybe you can’t use it in any wider context. The success of his appointment was the same as the title win itself - a one-off of extraordinary proportions.
Besides, the current decision-makers don’t appear to be looking at an ageing journeyman. It all points to relative youth and one man’s inexperience is another man’s promising career trajectory.
When it comes down to it, there are no guarantees with any candidate. But the time is right for a fresh start and giving someone untainted by previous association the chance to make themselves, in time, a Leicester City legend.
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