Sean Dyche and Chris Wilder
Posted: Sun Nov 03, 2019 10:12 am
Wasn't sure where to post. Article in Saturday's Times re these two Premier League managers.
It didn't seem to fit with the "Sam Alardyce" thread.
It's lengthy, so bear with it.
Byline: James Gheerbrant
Why is it so hard to imagine Chris Wilder or Sean Dyche thriving at one of the elite clubs?
This Saturday, there are eight fixtures in the Premier League, that shiny altar to sporting internationalism. But, to paraphrase the Sesame Street song, one of these games is not like the others.
Sheffield United v Burnley will be contested by teams who have given, respectively, 97.9 per cent and 72.8 per cent of their minutes this season to British and Irish players (in a league where the other 18 teams average 38.9 per cent) and whose captains were born a combined distance of about 30 miles from their home grounds. It will be played at a stadium that bears no sponsor name and has been in use since 1889, and it will be played, at least in part, in the airspace above the Bramall Lane pitch — these are the only teams to have hit more than 19 per cent of their passes long this season.
What makes Sheffield United v Burnley so fascinating is precisely the fact that it goes against so much of what we think the modern Premier League is about: globalisation; cosmopolitanism; the inescapable tide of market forces; a two-dimensional, televisual style of football played on perfectly manicured green carpets. It is, in some ways, a throwback. But the men in the dugout are not regressive relics; instead, they are in the vanguard of English coaches.
You could be forgiven for mentally lumping Sean Dyche and Chris Wilder together; there are a lot of similarities. A husky baritone, a long but undistinguished playing career, an unapologetically old-school pastoral approach and a cultural emphasis on graft, honesty and standards. Dyche’s views on diving are common knowledge, as is his Burnley training-ground ban on gloves, hats and snoods; Wilder forbade his Sheffield United players from swapping shirts against Liverpool, and at Oxford United required his young players to type up a dossier on their opponents, which he would send back if it contained grammatical mistakes. Underlying the methods of both men is a layer of steely machismo: Dyche’s regime of forfeits includes a dip in the River Calder; during his half-time team-talk against Leicester City, Wilder ripped off his shirt.
It would be easy to ridicule this approach, even to demonise it. So the first thing that bears saying about Dyche and Wilder is that they are both, without caveat, doing an excellent job. This season, Sheffield United rank a highly respectable 14th in the Premier League for non-penalty expected goal difference (xG), which measures the quality of chances a side creates minus the quality of chances they concede, and thus accurately quantifies a team’s underlying performance level. Burnley are fifth, above Manchester United and Arsenal, and would probably be fourth if Leicester hadn’t played 125 minutes against ten men this season.
There are some important stylistic differences between Burnley and Sheffield United, but broadly it is fair to say that Dyche and Wilder have thrived by taking some of the more overlooked, unfashionable, perhaps even traditionally English elements of the game and subjecting them to the same sort of innovative rigour that elite clubs might devote to counterpressing or co-ordinated passing movements.
A large part of Burnley’s success, for example, is that they consistently have the lowest xG per shot in the league: in other words, they ensure that the chances they concede are low-quality by forcing their opponents to head the ball, shoot from distance or through a crowd of bodies. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but to pull it off to that degree of excellence requires immense positional sophistication.
With Sheffield United, much attention has been lavished on their overlapping centre backs, a genuinely novel tactical ploy. But it is also true that Wilder, since his Northampton Town days, has been arguably the most imaginative war-gamer of set-piece situations in English football, devising intricate routines with blockers and decoy runners to turn low-percentage scoring opportunities into high-percentage ones.
The other thing with Dyche and Wilder is that they are excellent communicators, who are brilliant at conveying to players, and supporters, precisely what their team stand for. Speaking last month, Aidy Boothroyd, the England Under-21 manager, nutshelled the magic of Dyche’s Burnley in six words: “You know exactly what they are.” At a time when so many of the Premier League’s better-resourced teams — Arsenal, Everton, West Ham United — are indistinct ghost ships with no compelling USP and only a tenuous grip on their fans’ imaginations, the value of being able to construct a pin-sharp identity has never been clearer.
You can’t really talk about Burnley or Sheffield United’s identity without talking about their unusual degree of national homogeneity. Plainly, such a pronounced anglophone bias is unlikely to be coincidental, and that lack of diversity has uncomfortable connotations. In their squad construction, Dyche and Wilder are playing on clarity of communication — in a polyglot league, can you gain an edge by minimising the language barriers through which your message is refracted? — and also on historical precedent. Look up the Burnley or Sheffield United squads on Wikipedia, look down the column of flags by each name and you could almost be looking at one of the all-conquering Liverpool or Nottingham Forest teams of the 1970s or 80s.
In a lot of what these two managers do, there are echoes of another time and place in British life. Wilder was raised in Stocksbridge, ten miles from Sheffield, by working-class Liverpudlian parents; Dyche’s mother worked in a shoe factory in Kettering. “I have an affinity with shoes because I grew up where I did and even as a kid I always had hand-made leather shoes, so it’s an appreciation,” he told the Lancashire Telegraph in 2014. “Then a pair of shoes would last 20 years.” You can see the imprint of these values in the way that Dyche and Wilder coach, I think: an emphasis on craftsmanship and industry at a time when the drift in football coaching is towards automation and almost robotic synchrony.
Of course, the million-dollar question with Dyche and Wilder is whether they could succeed in a bigger job. Take them out of their environment, and put them in charge of a huge budget, a multinational squad, a global fanbase with certain stylistic expectations, and could they still excel? It is hard to imagine — for some reason, they just don’t feel like Arsenal or Manchester United managers, say.
But then again, all those same doubts applied in December 2017 when Ajax appointed Erik ten Hag, a coach with a journeyman playing background, an unfashionable regional accent and an aversion to soaring rhetoric, who might easily have seemed too small-town and too small-time for such an iconic post. Two years on, Ten Hag is established as one of the best coaches in European football. An elite coach does not always look or sound how we may expect. We wonder whether Dyche or Wilder can make the jump; but perhaps the leap is ours to make.
It didn't seem to fit with the "Sam Alardyce" thread.
It's lengthy, so bear with it.
Byline: James Gheerbrant
Why is it so hard to imagine Chris Wilder or Sean Dyche thriving at one of the elite clubs?
This Saturday, there are eight fixtures in the Premier League, that shiny altar to sporting internationalism. But, to paraphrase the Sesame Street song, one of these games is not like the others.
Sheffield United v Burnley will be contested by teams who have given, respectively, 97.9 per cent and 72.8 per cent of their minutes this season to British and Irish players (in a league where the other 18 teams average 38.9 per cent) and whose captains were born a combined distance of about 30 miles from their home grounds. It will be played at a stadium that bears no sponsor name and has been in use since 1889, and it will be played, at least in part, in the airspace above the Bramall Lane pitch — these are the only teams to have hit more than 19 per cent of their passes long this season.
What makes Sheffield United v Burnley so fascinating is precisely the fact that it goes against so much of what we think the modern Premier League is about: globalisation; cosmopolitanism; the inescapable tide of market forces; a two-dimensional, televisual style of football played on perfectly manicured green carpets. It is, in some ways, a throwback. But the men in the dugout are not regressive relics; instead, they are in the vanguard of English coaches.
You could be forgiven for mentally lumping Sean Dyche and Chris Wilder together; there are a lot of similarities. A husky baritone, a long but undistinguished playing career, an unapologetically old-school pastoral approach and a cultural emphasis on graft, honesty and standards. Dyche’s views on diving are common knowledge, as is his Burnley training-ground ban on gloves, hats and snoods; Wilder forbade his Sheffield United players from swapping shirts against Liverpool, and at Oxford United required his young players to type up a dossier on their opponents, which he would send back if it contained grammatical mistakes. Underlying the methods of both men is a layer of steely machismo: Dyche’s regime of forfeits includes a dip in the River Calder; during his half-time team-talk against Leicester City, Wilder ripped off his shirt.
It would be easy to ridicule this approach, even to demonise it. So the first thing that bears saying about Dyche and Wilder is that they are both, without caveat, doing an excellent job. This season, Sheffield United rank a highly respectable 14th in the Premier League for non-penalty expected goal difference (xG), which measures the quality of chances a side creates minus the quality of chances they concede, and thus accurately quantifies a team’s underlying performance level. Burnley are fifth, above Manchester United and Arsenal, and would probably be fourth if Leicester hadn’t played 125 minutes against ten men this season.
There are some important stylistic differences between Burnley and Sheffield United, but broadly it is fair to say that Dyche and Wilder have thrived by taking some of the more overlooked, unfashionable, perhaps even traditionally English elements of the game and subjecting them to the same sort of innovative rigour that elite clubs might devote to counterpressing or co-ordinated passing movements.
A large part of Burnley’s success, for example, is that they consistently have the lowest xG per shot in the league: in other words, they ensure that the chances they concede are low-quality by forcing their opponents to head the ball, shoot from distance or through a crowd of bodies. It doesn’t sound like rocket science, but to pull it off to that degree of excellence requires immense positional sophistication.
With Sheffield United, much attention has been lavished on their overlapping centre backs, a genuinely novel tactical ploy. But it is also true that Wilder, since his Northampton Town days, has been arguably the most imaginative war-gamer of set-piece situations in English football, devising intricate routines with blockers and decoy runners to turn low-percentage scoring opportunities into high-percentage ones.
The other thing with Dyche and Wilder is that they are excellent communicators, who are brilliant at conveying to players, and supporters, precisely what their team stand for. Speaking last month, Aidy Boothroyd, the England Under-21 manager, nutshelled the magic of Dyche’s Burnley in six words: “You know exactly what they are.” At a time when so many of the Premier League’s better-resourced teams — Arsenal, Everton, West Ham United — are indistinct ghost ships with no compelling USP and only a tenuous grip on their fans’ imaginations, the value of being able to construct a pin-sharp identity has never been clearer.
You can’t really talk about Burnley or Sheffield United’s identity without talking about their unusual degree of national homogeneity. Plainly, such a pronounced anglophone bias is unlikely to be coincidental, and that lack of diversity has uncomfortable connotations. In their squad construction, Dyche and Wilder are playing on clarity of communication — in a polyglot league, can you gain an edge by minimising the language barriers through which your message is refracted? — and also on historical precedent. Look up the Burnley or Sheffield United squads on Wikipedia, look down the column of flags by each name and you could almost be looking at one of the all-conquering Liverpool or Nottingham Forest teams of the 1970s or 80s.
In a lot of what these two managers do, there are echoes of another time and place in British life. Wilder was raised in Stocksbridge, ten miles from Sheffield, by working-class Liverpudlian parents; Dyche’s mother worked in a shoe factory in Kettering. “I have an affinity with shoes because I grew up where I did and even as a kid I always had hand-made leather shoes, so it’s an appreciation,” he told the Lancashire Telegraph in 2014. “Then a pair of shoes would last 20 years.” You can see the imprint of these values in the way that Dyche and Wilder coach, I think: an emphasis on craftsmanship and industry at a time when the drift in football coaching is towards automation and almost robotic synchrony.
Of course, the million-dollar question with Dyche and Wilder is whether they could succeed in a bigger job. Take them out of their environment, and put them in charge of a huge budget, a multinational squad, a global fanbase with certain stylistic expectations, and could they still excel? It is hard to imagine — for some reason, they just don’t feel like Arsenal or Manchester United managers, say.
But then again, all those same doubts applied in December 2017 when Ajax appointed Erik ten Hag, a coach with a journeyman playing background, an unfashionable regional accent and an aversion to soaring rhetoric, who might easily have seemed too small-town and too small-time for such an iconic post. Two years on, Ten Hag is established as one of the best coaches in European football. An elite coach does not always look or sound how we may expect. We wonder whether Dyche or Wilder can make the jump; but perhaps the leap is ours to make.
