Also on the topic of "disciplinarian" managers, it CAN work extremely well. But the manager has to be charismatic and good at building relationships with players as well as just a hard-ass. We all had that teacher in school who scared the **** out of you and nobody ****ed with him. You also had the one that was a prick and people enjoyed winding them up. It's a fine balance. Ask Saudi Sportswashing Machine what it was like having Graeme Souness or Joe Kinnear as managers. Even Mourinho went too far in his last year at Real Madrid, ****ing off more players than he could afford to do, that final season was a disaster as a result.
Ferguson's book makes quite interesting reading on how he relied on members of his squad to also whip people into shape. If all you ever do is scream and shout at somebody then they won't enjoy their football and they won't enjoy playing for you. So he was always keen to have big personalities in the squad, people like Roy Keane, Bryan Robson, Eric Cantona, Nemanja Vidic etc, so that if a player wasn't pulling his weight he knew they'd have to answer to their team mates. That kind of team spirit invoked a very high standard within the club. Sherwood's point this week has been about how our team are too nice. When things go wrong, they just drop their heads. Having your boss screaming at you can kick you up the backside and inspire you to great things, but if it happens every week eventually you'd get sick of his ****, the motivation sometimes needs to come from somewhere else.
I think Harry actually had the right idea. I remember him saying our squad was a very quiet bunch when he first joined. So he brought in players like Parker, Gallas, Van Der Vaart, Adebayor, Friedel and Gudjohnsen who would inspire drive and motivation to the rest of the squad, as well as bringing in Joe Jordan to shout at players so that he could play good cop more often himself. That gave us two key benefits. Firstly, our mental strength in a game was far stronger than it had ever been before (going 2-0 down at the Emirates usually means certain defeat, not coming back to win 3-2 in the second half). But more importantly, players were inspired to work harder, to train harder, to better themselves. Don't just look at the breakthroughs of Bale and Modric, players who had been at Spurs for years like Dawson, Lennon, Huddlestone, Defoe and Assou-Ekotto played the best football of their careers in that period. To me, that's the most key thing I want a manager to have when he comes in - the ability to get existing players to play better.
I can't remember which of our players it was (think it was Kaboul), who said that playing under Ramos was like being in the army and that the atmosphere was tense around the club. Perhaps the virtue of being a big name manager who's won it all before will work in Van Gaal's favour if he tries to play tough with the players. I'm sure Ferguson didn't get told he was doing it wrong by manager of his players in his latter years. Whereas when AVB went to Chelsea and tried to play tough with them, there was a revolt against him because they thought of him as some geeky scout who didn't know what he was talking about. It's a very fine line between showing the players who's boss and ****ing them off. Because like it or not, player power exists. They are the ones who will or won't get the results on the pitch. They need to be happy, in a good frame of mind. I do have a concern about Van Gaal in that regard, he's fallen out with a fair few players in the past including Ribery who was his best player at Bayern. Remains to be seen what our boys who "lack character" as Sherwood said, will think of him.
