Some thoughts on Alex Neil

I'm as stunned by this as anyone else. Shouldn't be - Hamilton's position speaks for itself, it's remarkable - but I am.

To give a bit of background on the Accies: this is a club which, until 2008/9, had never previously survived in the modern day top division at all. Its few previous campaigns in the Premier had been embarrassing: 21 points in 1987. 14 points in 1989. Comedy fodder for Saint and Greavsie on a Saturday lunchtime.

Billy Reid was the man who changed all that, and did stunningly well to do so - but their football under him was frequently awful and very negative. This made sense: how could such a tiny club survive at that level without going safety first? Which is what makes Neil so remarkable: because he's taken them to undreamt of heights playing exciting, positive football.

True, they actually choked automatic promotion away in the penultimate week of last season - then, in the play-offs, were seconds away from losing to Hibs, and ultimately went up on pens. That shows you the incredibly fine margins involved here. Lose that shoot-out, and there's no way we'd be in for him, it seems to me. But they won it, and have truly surfed the wave this season: little Hamilton Accies were top of the league back in October, are an incredible 3rd even now (3 points behind a club with about 30 plus times the size of its budget), and have had a whole bunch of extraordinary results. Winning at Celtic, thrashing Aberdeen 3-0, putting nine goals in two games past Motherwell - who'd finished best of the rest 3 seasons on the bounce prior to this season.

The caveat should be added, though, that in the absense of Rangers, Hearts and Hibs, the whole top division's gone kind of bonkers this season. It's a freak period in the Scottish game I think. If you imagine the EPL without Liverpool, Arsenal and, say, Everton, you get a bit of a sense of how much it's opened up the opportunities for everyone else - but that can't take anything away from what Neil's done. It's been amazing.

My doubts concern the following. (1) It's awfully difficult to form a confident assessment of a manager based on only 18 months or so of experience. (2) Much more fundamentally: Alex Neil is 33, and has been managing very young players with no background of previous success at a small club. How will our players - especially the bigger egos among them - react to being managed by a 33-year-old they'd never previously heard of?

That's my really big worry. Neither Chelsea nor even Spurs reacted well when young Andre Villas-Boas, never a top player in his time, tried to tell senior players what to do. Might the same phenomenon apply with us too? I fear it may well do - especially as I think the attitudes of a number of our players are seriously questionable.

Overall: do I think it'll work? No. But do I think it *could*? Yes. So credit to the board for thinking outside the box in that sense, even if I suspect the real key here lies in how an option he is in comparison with other more celebrated candidates. And would I take him over Sherwood or Phelan? Yes, I would - but not with any confidence.

Posted By: thebigfeller on January 7th 2015 at 16:46:01

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