THE ENGLISH GUARDIOLA
Chris Wilder stops midway through his sentence as we walk through the training ground car park. The Sheffield sky is leaden and it’s starting to drizzle. A green Lamborghini, a dazzling flick of a brush on a canvas of gloom, has caught his eye. “Aye, aye,” he chirps, “someone’s gone big early.” It’s only a few days since Wilder’s Sheffield United pipped Leeds United to the Championship’s second promotion slot, to a land where supercars owned by superhuman athletes are de rigeur.
He zips up his tracksuit top to his chin and narrows his gaze at the car. I wonder whether he’s taking a moment to realise just how far he has come. It’s a long way since the days of Halifax Town, when he got the pints in down the local pub to tell his players that the club had been liquidated. Or perhaps he actually wants to work out who has gone big. Early. Too early? That Wilder might take exception to such largesse is the sort of trait that would suit the stereotype. He is an English manager, after all.
You know the stereotype. A successful English manager is a bawler, a motivator and a disciplinarian. One who demands ‘110 per cent from his players’ and asks them to play with an injury for the good of the team. The sort that might go and deliver a rollicking to the player who has blown his promotion bonus on a car which, above all else, just doesn’t have the suspension give for the Sheffield inclines. No doubt the phrase ‘Billy big bollocks’ would be used.
The successful English manager is not The Thinker; a Pep Guardiola with furrowed brow and forefinger delicately, pensively, poised to his lips pondering tactical machinations. Nor is he a dynamo; a Jurgen Klopp with cartoon mania, a brilliant white smile and flashing eyes hypnotising his players to extraordinary feats. Yet Guardiola or Klopp
