Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
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Scott Parker Suffers the Yo-yo Curse of British Manager at Next Stop Burnley

Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images
Scott Parker – on another promotion mission – takes over a Burnley side with one of the stronger squads in the Championship. Photograph: Visionhaus/Getty Images

The pattern is familiar. The promising young manager gets his chance with a Championship club. He leads them to promotion. He talks a good game of pressing and position, shape and transition, passing and control. And then the financial reality of the Premier League strikes. The manager is reluctant to adapt his philosophy, perhaps doesn’t know how to; that is his style, the way he will make it to the top.

They perhaps achieve a couple of notable results. Maybe, people think, this young manager is the real deal. But they play against an elite side and lose. The cumulative effect of playing against high-class opponents every week takes its toll. The players who swaggered through the Championship become error-prone and, in the Premier League, those mistakes are punished. Confidence dwindles. Form deteriorates. Results go against them. There is a cycle of decline.

The manager, realising his attempts to play out from the back, to dominate the ball, are leading to possession being squandered in dangerous areas, changes approach. He goes more direct. His squad isn’t really set up to play like that. Results don’t improve. Relegation follows. Perhaps the manager is sacked; his time in the Premier League is over. At some point he will be given the chance with another Championship club. Sisyphus goes again.

Into which role steps Scott Parker. His feels like almost the archetypal English managerial career. He is personable and articulate, albeit speaking almost entirely in soporific modern manager babble that pours from his mouth like a mountain stream, sweeping training cones, flip charts and columns of data down into the valley.

He looks like a manager, sounds like a manager. Even as a player he gave the impression of command, of knowing what was going on. It should work.

Parker replaced Claudio Ranieri at Craven Cottage at the end of February 2019 with Fulham second bottom of the table, 10 points from safety. Few managers get a job, especially not a first job, in auspicious circumstances. They did win three of those remaining games but lost the rest, and went down: the first relegation on his record.

Fulham were promoted the following season but didn’t win in the Premier League until November: his second relegation. The cycle turned again: he left the club that summer.

Appointed manager of Bournemouth, he led them to automatic promotion, two points behind Fulham.

They beat Aston Villa on the first day of the following season, 2022-23, but conceded 16 without reply in successive league games against Arsenal, Manchester City and Liverpool. Parker spoke of the squad being “unequipped” for the Premier League. Three days later, he left the club.

Scott Parker lasted 67 days at Club Brugge.

To an extent, he was done by the calendar, which served up a brutal start. But Parker was also the victim of experience; he knew how hard it is to keep going week after week against better-resourced, compromising principles to try to scrape a few points.

His fault was to acknowledge that in public: the job of a manager is to a large degree a confidence trick, to instil in the players a sense of their own greatness so they achieve heights in excess of their ability.

His appeal to realism was not helped when Gary O’Neil took over and hauled Bournemouth to 15th – not that that was enough for O’Neil to keep the job; he too had to find another struggling club and start again. But that’s how it tends to be.

It’s very hard to break into the top half of the Premier League, so few British managers have that experience and clubs with aspirations to be in the top half tend not to appoint them, preferring those who have shown promise in arguably less taxing leagues abroad.

There is an obvious solution for British managers: go abroad. Parker did that, joining the Belgian champions Club Brugge in December 2022.

He lasted 67 days, winning just two of 12 games. The Dutch winger Noa Lang, one of Brugge’s stars, did seem to enjoy how Parker worked, and a congested fixture list meant there was little time to instil his ideas, but equally Parker never seemed to have a grasp of the league, tweaked the team constantly, played players out of position and seemed to resent the chief executive’s well-known desire to be involved in tactics and team selection.
To an extent that period in Belgium can be ignored. It is relatively common for perfectly decent managers go to a new country and fail to fit in, but those 67 days may make other foreign clubs less likely to employ him. And so Parker is back pushing his boulder up the Championship again, this time with Burnley.

Like Fulham and Bournemouth, they are a mezzanine club, seemingly too good for the Championship but never comfortable in the Premier League.

Burnley themselves are perhaps slightly stung that, having remained loyal to Vincent Kompany as they slid to relegation, he became a target for Bayern Munich, an offer that couldn’t be refused. It is probably significant that Parker has been named as head coach rather than manager, as Kompany was, indicating both that his role will be less wide-ranging than the Belgian’s and that the club is keen to establish a framework based on principles rather than the identity of an individual manager.

The retention of Kompany’s first-team coach, Mike Jackson, and the appointment of the assistant coach Henrik Jensen, which was planned before Kompany’s departure, are part of the process of establishing a structure around the head coach.

Five players have left and more outgoings are probable, but Burnley should still have one of the stronger squads in the division, which is why they are second favourites behind Leeds for promotion.

Parker is used to that: every time he’s taken over a club in the Championship, it’s been one that has recently suffered relegation, still receiving parachute payments. Promotion has always been expected.

Just as the tendency is to sympathise when a manager takes one of the mezzanine clubs down, so there must be a degree of scepticism when he takes one of them up. And that is the curse of the English manager.

What he achieved at Fulham and Bournemouth demonstrates Parker is not a bad manager. It’s far harder to say if he’s actually good or whether he’s just riding the yo-yo.

The Guardian Sport



Australia Beats US at Davis Cup to Reach Semifinals

Tennis - Davis Cup Finals - Quarter Final - United States v Australia - Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena Arena, Malaga, Spain - November 21, 2024   Australia's Jordan Thompson and Matthew Ebden celebrate winning their doubles match against Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul of the US REUTERS/Juan Medina
Tennis - Davis Cup Finals - Quarter Final - United States v Australia - Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena Arena, Malaga, Spain - November 21, 2024 Australia's Jordan Thompson and Matthew Ebden celebrate winning their doubles match against Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul of the US REUTERS/Juan Medina
TT

Australia Beats US at Davis Cup to Reach Semifinals

Tennis - Davis Cup Finals - Quarter Final - United States v Australia - Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena Arena, Malaga, Spain - November 21, 2024   Australia's Jordan Thompson and Matthew Ebden celebrate winning their doubles match against Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul of the US REUTERS/Juan Medina
Tennis - Davis Cup Finals - Quarter Final - United States v Australia - Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martin Carpena Arena, Malaga, Spain - November 21, 2024 Australia's Jordan Thompson and Matthew Ebden celebrate winning their doubles match against Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul of the US REUTERS/Juan Medina

Australia reached the Davis Cup semifinals for the third consecutive year, eliminating the United States 2-1 when Matt Ebden and Jordan Thompson beat the surprise, last-minute pairing of Ben Shelton and Tommy Paul 6-4, 6-4 in the deciding doubles match on Thursday.
The victory on an indoor hard court at the Palacio de Deportes Jose Maria Martina Carpena in southern Spain means 28-time Davis Cup champion Australia will face defending champion Italy or Argentina on Saturday for a spot in the final of the annual team competition, The Associated Press reported.
The other semifinal, to be contested Friday, is the Netherlands against Germany. The Dutch got past Rafael Nadal and Spain in the quarterfinals earlier in the week, sending the 22-time Grand Slam champion into retirement.
The Australians were the runners-up the past two years, including in 2023 against Italy, which is led by No. 1-ranked Jannik Sinner.
The Americans own a record 32 Davis Cup titles but haven’t been to the semifinals since 2018 and haven’t claimed the title since 2007, their longest drought in the event.
The Shelton-Paul substitution for Paris Olympics silver medalists Austin Krajicek and Rajeev Ram was announced about 15 minutes before the doubles match began. Ebden and John Peers beat Krajicek and Ram in the Summer Games final in August.
The Australians broke once in each set of the doubles. In the second, they stole one of Shelton's service games on the fourth break opportunity when Ebden's overhead smash made it 5-4. Thompson then served out the victory, closing it with a service winner before chest-bumping Ebden.
The 21st-ranked Shelton made his Davis Cup debut earlier Thursday in singles against 77th-ranked Thanasi Kokkinakis, who emerged from a tight-as-can-be tiebreaker by saving four match points and eventually converting his seventh to win 6-1, 4-6, 7-6 (14).
No. 4 Taylor Fritz, the US Open runner-up, then pulled the Americans even with a far more straightforward victory over No. 9 Alex de Minaur, 6-3, 6-4.
Kokkinakis withstood 21 aces from Shelton, a big-serving left-hander who reached the US Open semifinals in 2023.
When their match finally ended, on a backhand by Shelton that landed long, Kokkinakis dropped onto his back and pounded his chest. After he rose, he threw a ball into the stands, then walked over to Australia's sideline, spiked his racket and yelled, before hugging captain Lleyton Hewitt.
“I don’t know if I've been that pumped up in my life. I wanted that for my team,” said Kokkinakis, who won the 2022 Australian Open men's doubles title with Nick Kyrgios. “It could have gone either way, but I kept my nerve.”
One key stat: Shelton finished with 29 unforced errors in his Davis Cup debut, nearly twice as many as the 15 by Kokkinakis.
After a strong hold at love in an opening game that included a 139 mph (224 kph) ace and a trio of service winners, Shelton lost his way completely, losing 12 of his next 16 service points and six games in a row overall. That set ended with Shelton double-faulting when he was cited for a foot fault.
But he broke to open the second set and soon the match was far more competitive.
“Once I got going, I thought I found a really good groove," Shelton said. "I didn’t exactly like how I finished the match at the end. I thought I left a little bit on the table.”
Fritz won nine of his 10 service games against de Minaur and dealt just fine with a quick turnaround after reaching the title match at the ATP Finals on Sunday in Turin, Italy, before losing to Sinner.
Fritz flew to Spain the next day, then practiced Tuesday and Wednesday.
“I’m just really happy,” Fritz said, “with how I held it together.”