Source: Telegraph
Martin O'Neill uses homegrown to outwit Chelsea
Martin O'Neill thumbed the pack of Top Trumps featuring football managers. 'You are in there Martin. You've got the same number of points as Alf Ramsey.' It was meant as a joke, a bit of banter to kick off manager's questions. [LNB]Chaucer first linked truth and jest. Shakespeare followed suit. If it was good enough for them O'Neill can hardly complain if the broad brush analysis places him in the court of Ramsey and paints Aston Villa as resolutely English, kryptonite to continental mores. [LNB]In a casual aside delivered from the fringes of the Villa team, Chelsea exile Steve Sidwell allegedly let slip the observation that the training regime at Bodymoor Heath, sumptuously appointed though it is, was light years behind the complexities of Cobham. [LNB]It might have been the frustration of the out-of-favour footballer talking. It might also have been the case. Furtive fags stolen by Martin O'Neill's assistant John Robertson around the car park help colour the picture of a club pulsing with ancient footballing rhythms. [LNB]On to this very English landscape walks Guus Hiddink for his first Premiership engagement. This high priest of total football has been helicoptered in from Moscow to tease the beautiful game out of Chelsea's dysfunctional family. [LNB]Hiddink is foreign coach no.5 in the era of Roman Abramovich, an owner reluctant to invest in native British talent on or off the pitch. Phil Neville, Everton's redoubtable slab of Mancunian slate, wondered what a Premiership coach indigenous to theses isles had to do to bleep on Roman's radar. [LNB]He was, of course, speaking about his own manager David Moyes, whose work at Everton spits in the face of football convention, and O'Neill, who has dropped anchor in the Premiership top four. Using largely British players O'Neill has taken a baseball bat to the idea that the foreign coaching manual is by definition the superior football text. [LNB]It is true that convenience played its part in Chelsea's approach to Russia's national coach, who affirmed his commitment to the motherland yesterday. Even so, the Hiddink brand enjoys a high credit rating among owners apparently blind to his failures in Spain at Real Madrid and Betis, and in Turkey with Fenerbahce. [LNB]When Hiddink resumes his role with the Russian Federation in the summer Carlo Ancelotti or some other global luminary will receive the attentions of Abramovich. It was once that way in the West Midlands. No less a figure than Jozef Venglos ensured that Dr No enjoyed a life beyond the imagination of Ian Fleming. [LNB]He was a football coach of repute, good enough to assist in the management of Czechoslovakia's 1976 European Championship winning team. Good enough as head coach to lead the Czech team to the quarter-finals of the World Cup in Italy. [LNB]Good enough in fact to make Aston Villa chairman Doug Ellis an unlikely pioneer of the continental coaching cult with the introduction of Dr Jo as manager at Villa Park in 1990, the first club in the top flight of English football to look abroad for leadership. [LNB]Within a year Ron Atkinson was appointed in his stead tasked with undoing the damage wrought by the international man of mystery, dubbed Dr No by a Holte End citizenry baffled by his methods. Venglos left Villa two places above the relegation zone. He said the players did not get his continental drift. [LNB]The English infatuation with all things foreign is rooted in the decades of failure and disappointment perpetuated by the national team. The 43 years since Sir Alf picked a team to win the World Cup have yielded zilch. England's defeat to Spain in Seville ten days ago drew the familiar clichéd refrains about the poor technique and relative immobility of the English footballer. [LNB]O'Neill is proving that English apples are just as crisp as foreign fare when grown in the right environment. More importantly he does not accept the crude differentiation of European and English styles. There is for him only football. [LNB]Fabio Capello shares the view and offers the 4-1 win in Croatia to support his case. In Zagreb, England conformed to the Premiership model. They were, if you like, Villa in white shirts. [LNB]'Manchester United can play it wide or through the middle. They have a mixture of great, great English or British players and continental players in the side. So I don't accept the distinction,' O'Neill said. 'One of the outstanding players the other evening (against CSKA Moscow) was a midfield player for us called Stilian Petrov, who got it down and played through them, ran past them. So I don't accept [that we play in a one dimensional way]. It's a cop out. 'If getting it wide to someone beating four or five players (Ashley Young of England) exhilarates the crowd I don't see a great deal wrong with it.' [LNB]Jose Mourinho, the continental coach the bucks the Chelsea trend, bade farewell to English football at Villa Park after a 2-0 defeat 18 months ago. O'Neill cites that game as the turning point in the transformation of Villa into a team capable of mixing in the top-four. [LNB]Despite the anomaly of only five home victories in a season that has yielded ten on the road, O'Neill believes that Villa will make it six today, which in turn, he said, will leave Hiddink to concentrate on the Champions League. A proper setting for European man. [LNB]
