Ryan Conway, who is The Athletic’s Derby County reporter, spent some time talking about potential replacements for Phillip Cocu on a recent YouTube video and he spent some time talking about the possibility of Aston Villa’s assistant manager John Terry taking the reins at Pride Park during the video.
Terry has been Dean Smith’s assistant manager at Aston Villa since October 2018 and it may be fair to say that the former centre-back has enjoyed some success in his first post-playing role, as he and Smith helped the Birmingham club to earn promotion to the top-flight back in the 2018/19 campaign – with the Villans beating Frank Lampard’s Derby County in the play-off final that season.
Following Cocu’s sacking this past weekend, Terry is one of the names that has been linked with filling the vacant managerial position at Derby County and here is what Conway had to say about the possibility of the 39-year-old taking charge of the Rams during this recent YouTube video:
“He’s had a couple of years now as Dean Smith’s assistant, it would feel weirdly like a sort of appointment that has followed this current trend that Mel [Morris] has been on of hiring Frank and then Phillip and then John after that.
“He’s got the requisite badges – you always need a starting point. I would have some reservations about giving a first-time manager the job of getting you out of what is now quite a muddy situation.
“It’s not like they’re underperforming and they’re sort of mid-table or just below mid-table – they’re bottom and there’s clearly a lot of reasons as to why they’re bottom. I’d have reservations about slinging him in and going, ‘there you go, please drag us up from the depths of relegation.’”
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TIF Thoughts on what Conway had to say about the possibility of John Terry becoming the next Derby manager…
While Terry enjoyed success in the second tier as Smith’s assistant, he still has no experience as a manager. With Derby currently sitting at the bottom of the Championship 11 games into the 2020/21 campaign, perhaps this potential appointment is too risky for both the Villa assistant and the Rams, as the club won’t know precisely what they’re getting with Terry, while the 39-year-old himself could do damage to his career if he fails to turn things around at Pride Park.
As a result, while Terry has allegedly shown interest in vacant Championship managerial positions in the not-so-distant past and while Derby are in need of a new manager, we feel that Terry and Derby may not be the best possible match for each other at present and Conway is probably right to have reservations about this potential appointment.