Changing coaches mid-season is a drastic move in the Isuzu UTE A-League, but how much difference can it make? Tom Smithies reports
Initially it can be as simple as insisting on a handshake and eye contact, and changing the dynamics of a dressing room. Conversations will be had, and quickly, to lay out expectations but also to judge the body language of those listening.
Very simple, direct instructions will follow for certain situations, with defenders in particular being told explicitly how and where they will be expected to move and run.
First impressions count in so many ways when a coach takes over a struggling team mid-season and has to plug leaks, change direction and reuse resources in an effort to have a galvanising effect. First impressions from the new leader, and first impressions from his new charges.
Day 11 of the Mark Rudan regime at Western Sydney Wanderers brought his third game; a challenging schedule, but which may in some ways speed up his efforts to overhaul a club that has largely limped along and churned through too many coaches since Tony Popovic quit in 2017.
Changing coaches mid-season is the dime-a-dozen, default response of club owners in Europe if results aren’t going to plan – former Melbourne Victory rightback Daniel Georgievski still laughs at the three years he had in Croatia where the club saw nine coaches come and go. But in the A-League it’s a far rarer thing.
Carl Robinson’s dismissal by Western Sydney made him just the 21st to be sacked mid-season for football reasons since 2005 (Perth Glory hold the dubious honour of accounting for five of those), and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so intriguing – just how quickly can a new coach make a measurable difference with somebody else’s squad? How much do players respond to the sudden change in the tracksuit figure giving out orders? And what exactly happens inside the inner sanctum when a club decides such a rupture is unavoidable?
Talk to players and in many ways it’s like a storm passing through; when change comes, it should come quickly. The pressure, the dark clouds and the intensity build up around a struggling, incumbent coach, until one loss or anaemic display too many sparks a club owner into action. Suddenly the air is fresher, and there is – or should be – renewed zeal in the step of every player, whether hoping for a clean slate from the new gaffer or worried about keeping their place.
Sometimes in the past it was a longer, messier exit for the man on the way out. In 2008, poor Branko Culina woke on a Monday morning to reports in two newspapers that his tenure at Sydney FC coach would end that week. (This reporter wrote one of those stories, and had to tell Culina of the fact the night before.) Summoned to the club’s offices that Monday afternoon, he arrived to find photographers waiting outside the lift to record his physical exit.
Even two years ago, the impending sacking of Markus Babbel broke online pretty much as Babbel was doing what turned out to be his post-match press conference. The next morning the players were summoned to the Wanderers Football Park to hear the formal news.
“You read the media, you read what people say (about a coach being on borrowed time), but you take it with a grain of salt, because you just don’t know until it actually happens,” says Georgievski who was in that Wanderers squad. “But you kind of feel guilty because you’re part of the reason why the coach gets sacked. I guess that’s football, it’s a fickle industry.” The idea that players might want a coach to leave is simplistic, Georgievski says, because you have no control over who will replace them.
“Is the new coach gonna like me? Am I going to be able to live up to his expectations? All those questions go through your mind.
“That’s what people don’t see, as a player maybe you’ve had battles with an opposition coach (who suddenly becomes your coach) – I had battles with Rudes when he was at West United and Wellington. He probably hated me! So if I was a player at the Wanderers, I’d be wondering if he’d bring that up?”
Very often there is a quick bounce associated with the new coach, but statistically it’s comparatively rare for a club to find immediate and sustained success by changing the coach mid-season (Gary van Egmond was a fine exception, taking Newcastle from near bottom to the finals in 2007).
In a landscape such as Australia’s the pool of available and experienced candidates is small. Sometimes, though, a club feels like it has to act, even if the change is designed to buy itself time and consider the long term. That can equally happen in Europe.
When Kenny Dalglish was asked to replace Roy Hodgson at Liverpool in 2011, it was an appointment that enthused the fans and lifted a club that had slipped into the bottom half of the table by mid-season of Hodgson’s first camapign.
Though Dalglish himself was removed just 16 months later, he had already done the job needed of him by the Liverpool hierarchy, says Brad Jones, who was part of the Liverpool squad that season.
“Dalglish was brought in not necessarily for his coaching, but for his personality – he’s very much a people person,” says Jones. “That worked to get the club out of that situation purely on Kenny being Kenny: keeping the fans happy, getting the fans back on board.
“Because he’s such a club legend, that gave the fans the energy to get behind the team and also gave the players energy. He’s a player’s manager, he wants to look out for players, he wants players to be happy. And you know, that kind of worked at the time. He was a good appointment for that period, just to calm everything down and get the players enjoying their football.”
Not that Jones is critical of Hodgson, who signed him and who he believes was simply the wrong coach at the wrong time for Liverpool.
“Roy is a very good coach, but possibly the style that he was trying to implement, didn’t suit what the club wanted,” says Jones. “Roy’s is a very structured, very disciplined style of football, and Liverpool expect free flowing, attacking football.
“That’s probably not where Roy focuses, it’s worked with other clubs with that style. We even saw it this week with Roy (coming out of retirement and) going to Watford. Suddenly they had the first clean sheet they’d had in over a year and a bit.
“That’s Roy Hodgson, that’s what he does. He would have been drilling them on the training ground, every session working on the shape, working on the formation to the point the players knew exactly what he wanted.
“It’s not rocket science to understand that that’s what Roy works on.”
Equally it’s not rocket science to see what Rudan would focus on at a club which conceded the second-highest number of goals last year and had let in a further 12 in seven games prior to his appointment. But even before that, Georgievski believes, there are immediate changes expected in more subtle ways.
“Rudes is massive on respect, so little things like looking each other in the eyes, shaking hands, whether that’s a habit of yours.
“When the new boss comes in, you want to leave a good impression. But at the same time, you don’t know what he knows about you already.
“You kind of think you know, but you don’t really know. So you have to show it on the pitch and that first training session, the players would have been just running rabid and doing everything right for the new boss to be impressed with them.”
It helps, of course, if a strong nucleus of players can be corralled by a smart incoming coach, to implement what he wants quickly. Ange Postecoglou’s exit from Brisbane in 2012, to take over at Melbourne Victory, sparked a series of convulsions which led to his No 2 Rado Vidosic’s appointment to be head coach in April that year followed by his sacking in December, to be replaced by Mike Mulvey.
“I was an advocate of Rado succeeding Ange because it offered us consistency in the playing philosophy,” says Matt Smith who was club captain at the time.
“But to be honest anyone succeeding Ange would have had a huge challenge because so many owed our individual success to the opportunities that Ange gave us.
“Rado was a very different coach and there’s no right or wrong to that, he was doing the job as he felt he should.”
With the champions near the bottom of the table, Mulvey was asked to take over by Roar’s owners. “When Mike came in we were to some extent looking for a leader and he was able to pick the group up,” says Smith.
“As captain I had senior players like Michael Theo, Thomas Broich, Besart Berisha and Shgane Steffanutto around me and we tried to drive those standards and stay strong.
“We all believed in what Ange had started so strongly, our ID and our values, we tried to protect it in a sense for a long time.”
Rudan, by contrast, has the opposite mission – to quickly try to implement a style and direction in a team demonstrably lacking in a collective purpose.
Those players who most want to impress – particularly those who felt unappreciated under Carl Robinson – should think hard about how they show it, says Georgievski with the amusement of a very experienced professional.
“To be fair, you can see straight away that he’s changed the mindset. Previously when Wanderers conceded a goal, you could see the structure would go all over the place, players not playing in position, leaving gaps in behind. But with his first two games they actually played well, defensively.
“Playing games so quickly actually reveals a lot for a new coach, because (if things work well) then the new coach might start to ask questions – you weren’t doing this for the old coach, why are you suddenly doing it for the new one?
“That could leave a sour taste… or it just means a player needed a kick up the bum!”
