Just as Cardiff City fans were becoming resigned to adding Monday 16 June to their long, long list of dates where we’d not appointed the successor to Omer Riza, there emerged this message on the club website around tea time with the promised interview following a couple of hours later.
The appointment of Brian Barry-Murphy was hardly a shock given that the Daily Mail story about him being in advanced talks with City about the job appeared last Wednesday, but there were a couple of surprising elements to it.
The first of them was the three year contract. No new City boss has been given such a long deal since Malky Mackay fourteen years ago and by giving Barry-Murphy such a long deal following a successoin of managers who sometimes got no more than a few months when appointed, it feels like a new beginning for the club
The first thing that strikes me about this appointment is that it’s different and while I, acknowledge that it’s so easy to be optimisitc when an appointment is made in the summer with weeks to go before competitive footbsll restarts, I feel good about it and my instinct is to say that, even if it all goes wrong and we’re looking for a new man in charge come October or November, I would not blame the three Amigos at the top of the club this time for the appointment itself as I find it exciting, pretty bold and out of character for them.
The other thing which I had not expected is that the title I’ve given this piece is, strictly speaking, wrong, because we’ve not appointed a manager, we’ve appointed a “first team Head Coach”.
Now, it’s been pointed out that the very short lived reign of Paul Trollope was the only other time in the Tan era where we’ve departed from the traditional manager job title and look what happened then!, I hope and assume that’s a point being made as a joke though, because, having seen how the land was lying at the start of the 15/16 campaign, Paul Trollope would have been a short term appointment whatever his job was called.
The relevant point here surely is that, far from leading to the closer ties and line of thinking between the football side and the adminsistration side that almost everybody has been crying out for, the job title first team Head Coach rather rep0resents a widenining of the gap between football pitch and Boardroom.
Yes, I know a job title in football shouldn’t be taken too literally, but, for me, it rather sends out a signal that Brian Barry-Murphy’s brief will be very much about getting things right on the pitch, so there needa to be someone there in some form to handle the bits which make the difference between a manager and a first team Head Coach.
It seems to me that there is more to come as far as off field new arrivals are concerned. Clearly, we need more coaching staff (assuming none of the people recruited for the very short lived Aaron Ramsey interim manager tenure remain with us), but there does seem to be a Director of Football sized space between Mr Barry-Murphy and the Board at the moment!
Given Vincent Tan’s aversion to the term “Director of Football’, I would expect any appointment to fill said gap to be given a different title and it may be that the job description may not tally precisely with youe typical Director of Football type role. However, for me, the message from the bosses to Brian Barry-Murphy would appear to be “you get on with sorting the team out and we’ll get someone else in (or maybe they’re at the club already) to look after the other stuff”.
Once again, I find myself asking the question ‘do I think this is good because it is good or is it because I agree with it?” when it comes to this reaction video to Brian Barry-Murphy’s appointment.
I said earlier that I wouldn’t blame Tan and co if Brian Barry-Murphy didn’t work out as City head coach because it’s an innovative appointment, but that would change if the hierarchy now left things as they are with only about thirty/forty per cent of the required work to sort the club out done.
You can look at Barry-Murphy’s relegation at Rochdale and rven make him responsible for Leicester going down as well if you want to, but I’d rather focus on how Manchester City selected him for an important job at what many were calling the best club side in the world a year ago. Indeed, if people are seriously going to hold Leicester’s relegation against him, then isn’t it fair to claim that Man City’s demise, such as it was, last season, coincided with Barry-Murphy leaving the club!
Seriously, Barry-Murphy’s time at Manchester City has to be deemed to be a success given they won titles while he was there and there has been a fairly steady flow of players he worked with at under 23 level into the first team.
Providing Barry-Murphy is not left to, effectively, fend for himself, the length of contract given him strongly suggests that , this time at least, the club without a plan do have one. For me, it seems to be the best way to go as well because, in terms of recognition by Wales age group teams (for example, the domination of the two Welsh under 17 squads that qualified for their version of the Euros in recent years by City players), we have the best group of players coming through at 18 to 20 years old in the history of our Academy.
Obviously, not all of those currently being seen as a potential first team player will make the transition, but it’s reasonable to think that the yield from this group will be a fair bit higher than normal and, despite the miserable evidence of last season, there are current first team squad members under the age of twenty five that you think should be able to prosper in League One.
After so much pessimism and struggle in recent years, this is a time to be optimistic about City’s future as long as the hierarchy are prepared to finish off the transformation that they’ve started.
