With Premier League teams approaching double figures in matches played, and Football League combatants having passed that mark, chairmen the land over are becoming decidedly twitchy. As the prospect looms of another year passing with their club’s ambitions unfulfilled, or if even worse, a fight is developing to merely maintain status quo, change is sought. The inevitable conclusion is the removal of the incumbent manager.
No sooner has the man in situ been shown the door, than the focus turns onto who comes in next. Ian Holloway’s departure from Crystal Palace created the highest profile current vacancy. In the same week as the Eagles began their search for a new boss, Middlesbrough terminated Tony Mowbray’s Riverside tenure, and Chris Kiwomya’s eight months in charge at Notts County came to an end.
A glance at various bookmakers’ odds on contenders for these roles is as reliable a gauge as any, towards who might imminently be newly employed.
Tony Pulis is the runaway favourite for the Palace job. Pulis’ time at Stoke City finished unsatisfactorily, but the Welshman’s formidable body of work across seven years at the Britannia Stadium will appeal to the owners of a club that hasn’t survived more than a single season on any of the four previous occasions that they have earned a shot at Premier League football.
A look further down the list of the hopefuls vying to replace Holloway reveals an array of the game’s good, and not so good, including; Avram Grant, Neil Warnock, Stuart Pearce, and former Selhurst Park defender and assistant boss, Tony Popovic.
You could even achieve a return sixty-six times your stake if you happen to have a fortunate punt on Aidy Boothroyd (presently managing Northampton Town in League Two’s relegation zone) or Henning Berg, whose lone taste of management in this country spanned 57 days. During that period, Berg led Blackburn Rovers to a single Championship victory – and that over a Peterborough United side relegated at the end of the term.
There is one glaring omission from the men listed as bidders to instigate a desperately needed rejuvenation at Crystal Palace, and indeed, from any similar compilation of names whenever a football club is searching for a new manager.
Where is John Gregory?
The former Aston Villa boss possesses the breadth of experience, and depth of knowledge, to prove a considerable asset for any chairman looking to revitalise his club’s fortunes. Since he parted company with Queens Park Rangers in October 2007, Gregory has been restricted to two stints in Israel and then, in his most recent post, one in Kazakhstan.
His stewardship with FC Kairat ended in December 2011, since when the 59 year-old has been on the game’s fringes. Gregory’s readiness to travel to far-flung football hinterlands, to pursue his career, hints at an individual who is surely thirsting to be immersed back into the thrust of the English game.
It is Gregory’s time at Aston Villa that leaps from the page of an itinerant CV. Appointed on the back of his leadership of an imaginative and forward thinking Wycombe Wanderers team, the man who spent two years of his 18 year playing career at Villa Park steered the Midlands outfit to transient highs that they have since been unable to re-visit.
When he took the Wycombe reigns from Alan Smith in September 1996, Gregory had been further learning his trade as a coach under Brian Little at Leicester City, and then Villa. It was, perhaps, this grounding which enabled the Scunthorpe born boss to recover from his exacting first forays into management with Portsmouth and, on a temporary basis, at Plymouth Argyle.
Smith’s Wycombe team were rooted at the foot of the old Second Division (now League One) when Gregory assumed control. By the end of the season they sat 18th, a full eight points clear of the drop zone. Moreover, it wasn’t a recovery built on a stereotypical harum-scarum approach to accumulate lower-league points. The Chairboys deployed a three at the back system, placing an onus on the men who filled those berths to play through midfield.
It was the system that Glenn Hoddle’s England side of the time favoured, and is now back in vogue – most profitably being used by Brendan Rodgers at a soaring Liverpool. Gregory’s bravery brushed with a tinge of healthy arrogance – traits that were required to innovate, and implement new methods in the most testing of circumstances; personally and for his Wanderers team – persuaded Villa chairman Doug Ellis, that he was the man to overturn a slump the club were enduring under Little towards the end of the 1997/1998 campaign.
The infectious enthusiasm and nous that Gregory brought to Villa inspired a ‘new manager bounce’ that went well beyond the norm. Nine of the season’s final eleven matches were won as the Villains completed a surge from 15th spot into 7th, and consequently achieved UEFA Cup qualification – the same competition in which they were beaten quarter-finalists only by virtue of away goals against Atletico Madrid, under Gregory’s embryonic tutelage
Dwight Yorke had been central to Villa’s wonderful form throughout Gregory’s early tenure. When the dawn of the club’s next season was overshadowed by the sale of the want-away Trinidadian to Manchester United, therefore, it was widely predicted that the excited anticipation about what lay ahead at Villa Park had disappeared up the M6 with their star attacker. Indeed, Gregory made little secret of his own exasperation, admitting that when Yorke confessed his desire to move;
‘If I had a gun, I would have shot him’.
The manager’s plans were additionally scuppered by new recruit David Unsworth’s decision to halt his Villa career before it had begun – the defender indicating a wish to be closer to home when he returned for a second spell at Everton.
Unsworth’s about-turn arguably opened the door for a 17 year-old Gareth Barry to take his place in Villa’s three-man back-line. With the precocious youngster thriving on his responsibility, and the accomplished pair of Ugo Ehiogu and Gareth Southgate completing the defensive trio, Gregory’s side confounded all expectations – and how.
On December 13th 1998 Villa Park rocked to the beat of its side overturning a two goal deficit against the Arsenal of Bergkamp, Overmars, Ljungberg, Vieira, et al, and a team containing double-scoring recent acquisition Dion Dublin, as well as the mix of energy and pace provided by Ian Taylor, Lee Hendrie, and Julian Joachim, cemented their place at the head of the Premier League.
The camapign would peter out, although the good burghers of Villa Park would gladly accept the eventual sixth placed finish from their current class. In that captivating and expressive Aston Villa team, and his purchase of enterprising, grafting, and inventive forces; Paul Merson, and later Steve Stone and Juan Pablo Angel, Gregory laid down his footballing ethos.
With the bar set high, Villa replicated their 1999 6th spot a year later, while the addition of the mercurial Benito Carbone afforded an extra sprinkling of verve to a side that bettered its point tally of 12 months previous, and embarked on runs to the F.A. Cup final, and last-four of the League Cup.
During the latter stages of Gregory’s Villa reign his team became more notable for being devilishly difficult to beat than for any cutting edge. They were hindered in mid-season of 2000/2001 by a string of narrow defeats against the league’s front-runners, and an inability to convert enough single point returns into maximum hauls.
When Gregory opted to leave Villa in January 2002 his decision was taken only three months on from the club once more topping the Premier League, after just one defeat in their opening ten games. Indeed, when the then 47 year-old tendered his resignation – offering up the explanation that he was in need of a break; although the overriding suspicion was that the parsimonious administration of Chairman Ellis was instrumental in his manager’s exit – the Midlanders had lost six of 23 league matches. That statistic is brought into starker light by virtue of the fact that Villa were defeated the same number of times across their final fifteen games.
His period at Aston Villa alone should ensure Gregory a place at the forefront of the minds of any chairman hankering for a boss, who defers to nobody in his drive to produce teams capable of going on the front-foot and competing with whatever they come up against.
Particularly pertinent, at a time when the downward trend of English players operating at the highest level is of enough concern to the chairman of the FA for him to convene a commission whose intention is to resolve that problem, Gregory is an arch-advocate for developing young home-grown footballers.
Barry, Hendrie, and Darius Vassell were all schooled under the six-time England international, while Joachim, Riccardo Scimeca, and Michael Oakes were all afforded extended first-team opportunities.
Gregory’s predilection for backing youth to flourish, – further exhibited when, as boss at Derby County, he handed the enduringly classy Tom Huddlestone a reserve debut at 15 years of age – and his certain understanding of English football, render it is especially curious that Aitor Karanka, a former player and coach at Real Madrid, is a hot-tip to be the man charged with resuscitating Middlesbrough. Other names linked with the Riverside post include Mike Phelan, Alex McLeish, and Gary Megson. It doesn’t make pretty reading for the battle weary ‘Boro faithful.
Danny Wilson, whose most recent of his seven managerial assignments concluded with him unable to lift Sheffield United out of their League One purgatory, heads the line-up hoping to replace Kiwomya at Notts County. Lee Bradbury’s Havant & Waterlooville sit slap-bang in the middle of today’s Conference South table, yet the 38 year-old is another to be considered a viable choice at Meadow Lane. Bradbury is a boss of promise, but is in the midst of his education.
It is possible that Gregory’s failure to rescue, from the Premier League drop, a flailing Derby County outfit he took command of under a week after the start of his post-Villa ‘break’, has dampened his cache among prospective employers. If so, he is paying a harsh price for his fourteen months at Pride Park.
When he returned to the club for whom he was integral to successive promotions in his playing dotage, Gregory was greeted by a disparate group that had seen off his predecessor Colin Todd in the space of three months.
Even the incipient spring under their new manager, which saw the Rams beat Tottenham Hotspur and Leicester City, and take a point from Manchester United, was not sufficient to rouse a team that had won four of 24 contests and scored a meagre 17 goals before Gregory arrived. Fellow strugglers Everton, with a 4-3 victory at Pride Park, knocked the stuffing out of Derby’s initially reinvigorated playing staff.
Left with responsibility to shorn a bloated squad, and with inward trading restricted to the loan market, Gregory ultimately took the fall for an inconsistent first Championship season and left Pride Park under a considerable cloud.
Remarkably, barely over a year after vacating Villa Park with his stock at an all-time high, Gregory was destined to remain out of a managerial job for three-and-a-half years. When, in September 2006, he accepted the task of working for the eccentric Gianni Paladini at Queens Park Rangers – another club at which Gregory prospered during his playing incarnation –the remit was to keep the club in the Championship, of which, upon his appointment, they were rooted to the bottom.
Having fulfilled his primary objective, Gregory was sacked after the subsequent campaign began poorly. There is no escaping that his final months at Loftus Road were among Gregory’s most difficult. Notwithstanding the poor series of results that sealed his fate, hindsight provides any manager that worked under the turbulent rule of Paladini with a deal of clemency. That caveat, though, didn’t spare the deposed QPR boss from being damned by his time in Shepherd’s Bush and, continental ventures aside, he hasn’t surfaced since.
If there is a prevalent feeling among various football club powerbrokers that Gregory’s outspoken, and sometimes confrontational public demeanour might be a recipe for future trouble, it is a concern that should be disregarded.
The man who so caustically condemned Yorke, was unable to supress his irritation with Unsworth, and chiefly, dealt extremely clumsily with Stan Collymore’s confession that he was suffering with depression, was entirely consumed by a determination to make good on his priceless Villa chance.
Gregory couldn’t comprehend anybody that didn’t share and prioritise his vision – namely that Aston Villa would force their way into the English footballing elite.
Now, he is imbued with the wisdom borne of advancing years, and a perspective granted by his being diagnosed five years ago with prostate cancer, an illness from which he is now happily recovered, any club that places their faith in Gregory will be hiring a rounded individual – in matters of both football and life.
Whatever lies behind the circumstance of John Gregory’s absence from our national game’s landscape, his is a presence that would add a dash more charisma to the scene and, at once, inject any team under his charge with fresh vigour and a dusting of brio.
Any tentative chairmen, curious as to whether the man that briefly took Aston Villa to the Premier League’s summit has designs on returning to the dugout, need only pick up the telephone and they will be guaranteed a definitive answer. If it comes in the affirmative, they could do far, far worse – as a peek at those bookies’ short-lists will confirm.
Follow me on Twitter @mcnamara_sport
ThisisFutbol.com are seeking new writers to join the team! If you’re passionate about football, drop us a line at “thisisfutbol.com@snack-media.com” to learn more.