The problem for any coach when they step up to a big club is that, until they have been successful at that level, the suspicion will always linger that they cannot be successful at that level. It’s one of the difficulties of the modern game: managing an elite club, with the huge budgets, the vast expectations, the array of egos needing constant maintenance (which these days seems to apply to fans as much as players), is a very different job to managing on a shoestring down the leagues.
As one Premier League director once put it to me, saying his club should have immediately replaced the…
