Managers left to carry the can

Football needs to remind itself of what managers are for. They cannot be there merely to carry the can for players who lose form, fans who lose faith and directors who lose their nerve.

How many managers have to pass through Manchester City before it occurs to someone that the faults may lie elsewhere? Joe Royle, like Frank Clark, Steve Coppell and even Alan Ball, has arrived at Maine Road with some record of success but unless the club is purged of bad influences he will surely go the way of the others.

Alan Hill, Clark's assistant who was fired along with him, has talked about a deep cancer within City which has to be removed. Clark himself has referred to a fifth column operating on the fringes which undermines the manager's job.

Manchester City are not sleeping giants. They are more like those whales who insist on beaching themselves despite all efforts to point the lost leviathans towards the open sea. Royle will attempt the task while keeping an eye out for sharks, but at least his role is clearly defined.

Gianluca Vialli, the shaven-headed successor to Ruud Gullit, has already set a shining example as player-manager of Chelsea. Just where playing stops and management begins will doubtless become clear in due course, but things used to be much simpler.

When, in the mid-1950s Chelsea won their only league championship to date Ted Drake managed the team under the benign chairmanship of Joe Mears, Dick Foss brought the youngsters along and Jimmy Thompson, the chief scout, discovered Jimmy Greaves. Wednesday's Chelsea programme listed a dozen people responsible for team management alone.

Of course Premier League clubs like Chelsea are major businesses with diverse interests and no longer capable of being run on the basis of one man picking the team while another runs around with a bucket and sponge. But at this level it takes an exceptional talent to combine the roles of player and manager, and if Vialli succeeds he will surely be the first to make sense of this peculiarly British custom.

While Graeme Souness certainly revived Rangers in a dual role his frenzied buying and selling of players became a joke. Kenny Dalglish brought additional honours to Anfield as player-manager but faltered when he had to turn the team around.

Gullit's prime value to Chelsea was his influence as a player and the charisma which drew other big foreign names to Stamford Bridge. Differences over a new contract may have been the principle reason for his departure but a reluctance to give up playing in order to concentrate on management was a contributing factor.

The best managers are still those who just manage. Bob Paisley somehow got by without promoting pizzas and when he retired no lady newspaper columnist regretted that she would not be seeing his legs again.

By a neat coincidence the latest managerial upheavals have been accompanied by a republishing of Stephen Studd's biography of Herbert Chapman, who not only won championship hat-tricks with Huddersfield and Arsenal in the 1920s and 1930s but established the manager as the fulcrum of the club.

Previously managers had been administrators with players deciding tactics while directors looked after transfers. Chapman was the role model for Frank Buckley, Matt Busby, Stan Cullis, Bill Nicholson, Bill Shankly and numerous others, but things can never again be as clearcut as he made them.

He operated under the retain-and-transfer system which effectively meant a club could hold on to players for as long as it wanted. From next season, pace Bosman, out-of-contract players in England who are over 24 will be free agents which may be natural justice but will do little for continuity in team-building.

This is the age of the paid director, the hands-on chairman, the plc and the share option. Next season may even see a foreign coach inheriting the legacy of Shankly and Paisley at Anfield. But the most successful manager in British football, Alex Ferguson, has revived Manchester United in much the same way that Chapman brought fame to Arsenal and for the same reason. He has been allowed to manage.

Herbert Chapman was also the first manager to be given football's equivalent of a state funeral. These days they end up at Manchester City.