Soccer: FA make best of a bad job by promoting McClaren

No doubt the English Football Association believed it was drawing a line under one of the most inept phases of its administration of the national game when it formally unveiled Steve McClaren yesterday as head coach.

It was a pretty thought, one which the FA might even have believed was worthy of wrapping up in ribbons. The reality, though, was rather different. The strong possibility was that the FA was not drawing a line but digging a hole.

There will be no question about this if England fail to meet the challenge of a third successive major tournament in which McClaren has been Sven Goran Eriksson's No 2.

A good World Cup for England, by which we have to mean at the very least an honourable exit at the semi-final stage (for this, even without Wayne Rooney and with heavy doubts about Michael Owen, is supposed to be a golden generation of English footballers) and the FA could claim that it was not necessarily replacing one lame-duck coach with another.

It might say that the new man had the potential to build on something more than guilt by association.

However, this isn't really the point. Two questions have to be asked. Is McClaren the right man, was he right in his bullish recent statement that his CV speaks for itself? And was the timing of yesterday's appointment anywhere close to wise? The second answer is easier in that it cannot be a hostage to events.

The FA didn't need to expose a flank so hopelessly, it didn't need to rush to the embarrassing breakdown of talks with Luiz Felipe Scolari. It could have carried on negotiations with some stealth. Instead, it gave itself an insane, unnecessary deadline once it had decided that its distaste for Eriksson's behaviour stopped short of sending him on his way immediately after "Sheikhgate" and another episode of his disloyalty, in the presence of undercover journalists.

The result, of course, was a circus of a selection process which had to put you in mind of the great Formula One man Sir Frank Williams' comment about many driving appointments on the Grand Prix circuit. "It's a bit like pinning the tail on the stage donkey," said Sir Frank.

No one would say that McClaren is a donkey. But then, who could seriously argue that he has not, in a particularly abject way, been elected flavour of the month? He is not so much a choice as a fallback position.

He was cast aside before the Scolari misadventure, and for some fairly compelling reasons. A few months ago he was on the thinnest of ice at Middlesbrough, and quite how thin it was could not have been made more savagely clear by his senior player, Gareth Southgate.

Once you burrowed an inch below the niceties, you could see that the much-capped former England player was saying that McClaren had lost the confidence of his chairman, Steve Gibson, and the dressing-room.

The reaction of the Middlesbrough fans was explicit enough, not least when one of them threw his ticket at the feet of the manager. Fans can be fickle, of course, but they had endured a vertiginous experience with a 7-0 thrashing by Arsenal and what looked like a collective nervous breakdown against Aston Villa, at home. Even if the disquiet of fans has been eased by Middlesbrough's arrival in the Uefa Cup final, the point of exasperation reached by Gibson, one of the game's most forgiving and generous chairmen, is surely more significant.

So why did McClaren rise from the dead in the race for the England job? Why did his odds sway crazily from 33-1 to this week's 1-4? Desperation, that's why; the desperation of a chief executive, Brian Barwick, and FA councillors who plainly could not stand another week of severe embarrassment. With due respect to such important figures, however, that mattered a lot less than signing up the best man in the field.

After the Dutchman Guus Hiddink, who never really made it to the starting grid, and the Brazilian Scolari, one CV stood out - and it wasn't McClaren's. It was Martin O'Neill's. The reason why he slipped back so quickly in the running - indeed he scarcely made it beyond the first furlong or so - was because he didn't sweet-talk the FA bigwigs on the airy-fairy subject of coaching pyramids and "continuity". Rather than that, he made clear his view that the job was about getting the best out of the likes of Rooney and Steven Gerrard and Frank Lampard.

The fact that cannot but create some bitterness now is that there were a number of certainties about O'Neill, not least a consistent track record as a manager before his wife's ill-health forced him to resign at Celtic. At Wycombe Wanderers, Leicester City and Celtic, the pattern was unbroken. He displayed the vital knack of getting the best out of available players.

Under O'Neill, Leicester, with modest funding, won two League Cups, appeared in another final and became a formidable unit, one in which signings such as Muzzy Izzet, Matt Elliott, Steve Guppy and Neil Lennon all graduated to international football, and a young Emile Heskey emerged as an eye-catching force. No one stepping into O'Neill's wake at Leicester has had anything like the same effect.

When he went to Parkhead, Rangers had just won the Scottish title by 15 points. O'Neill promptly delivered the championship to Celtic in his first season, something which conservative experts on the Scottish game thought would take at least three years.

In European football, he made a joke of the reckoning in England that neither of Scotland's Auld Firms could expect more than a battle for survival in the Premiership. O'Neill's team overwhelmed the expensive Liverpool and Blackburn sides of Gerard Houllier and Graeme Souness.

Another confident expectation by O'Neill supporters was that he would rip into the exclusive club culture built up by Eriksson over the past five years. No one - not David Beckham, Gerrard or even the prodigy Rooney - would have any privileges beyond acknowledgement when they delivered the best of their talent.

By their lights, the FA men did what they believed was necessary yesterday. They may have felt a degree of relief. However, pretty ribbons were distinctly out of place.

- INDEPENDENT