Megson slams sack epidemic
GARY Megson is struggling to make sense of the Premier League sack race.
The Wanderers boss has seen seven of his contemporaries lose their jobs this season, most recently Luis Felipe Scolari at Chelsea and Portsmouth’s Tony Adams.
Between them, the pair had racked up less than a year in charge of their respective clubs, and their departure reduced the average job expectancy of a top flight boss to just 15 months.
That means Megson is now a statistical anomaly. It has been 18 months since he walked through the doors to launch his rescue job at the Reebok.
And although the Whites boss says he is concrete proof that having several clubs on your CV no longer puts you at the back of the queue when opportunities come along, he claims an ever-decreasing shelf life is something managers have grown to accept.
“It has always been volatile,” he said. “After a kamikaze pilot, football managers have probably got the next best job security.
“Everyone accepts it, but moving on from a football club does not now have same stigma as it used to 25 years ago. I remember Harry Bassett saying that.
“You can lose your job if the chairman doesn’t like something, it doesn’t just have to be about results.”
The landscape has changed somewhat since Ian Porterfield became the first manager to be sacked in the Premier League, ironically at Stamford Bridge, 17 years ago.
In that time, the 20 current top flight clubs have got through an average of nine managers each. In employing just five – Roy MacFarland, Colin Todd, Sam Allardyce, Sammy Lee and Gary Megson, the seat at Wanderers is among the safest in town.
This week, managers have queued up to condemn trigger happy chairmen – the cynics might say with the same venom turkeys campaign against Christmas.
But Megson, who has sampled his fair share of boardroom battles in the past, maintains the view that the only thing that can save a manager is his players and the right measure of success.
“It makes me laugh how people say so-and-so is a good manager, or such-and-such is a good coach,” he said. “It is purely and simply down to the players you have got.
“What makes you a great manager is great players.
“You can have a three or five-year plan for a club but whether you get to that point is open to debate. You have to be successful in getting to that stage.
“People won’t accept that you have to wait for success.”
Expectation levels are an obstacle for any manager, and coming off the back of the Sam Allardyce era, Megson perhaps feels them more acutely than most. And what exactly would constitute success for Wanderers this season divides opinion among the supporters.
For any club, the first hurdle to scale is achieving safety. A top-10 finish seems to be the aim for those in the dressing room.
Megson is reticent about revealing his own targets but says similar expectations make for more success on the pitch.
“There needs to be a realisation of what that expectation should be,” he said.
“Here, I have spent more than any Bolton manager ever. But I have also sold more.
“If you look at the millions that have come in, there are more than the millions that have gone out.
“The wage bill is way down, the cost of running the club is way down, so we have to do these things and yet still try to be as successful as we can.
“They were all done for a reason – the situation we found ourselves in 18 months ago. So our expectation levels had to change as a result.”
Wanderers head into today’s home game against West Ham knowing victory could put them level on points with Fulham – who currently occupy the dressing room goal of 10th place.
Home form could well be the key in reaching that target, but Megson is careful about taking his eye off the ball.
“This season, the club that is bottom of the table is still in with a really good shout, and I mean rock-bottom,” he said “There have been times in the last few seasons when the bottom team has been right out at this stage.
“There are about 13 or 14 teams that can’t say they’re safe yet, but as the weeks go by that’s going to get less and less and we want to be one of those sides that drops out and ensures we stay up as quickly as we can. Then we can talk about other targets.”