Chris Hughton at Newcastle was an interesting one, as is Pardew.

A big part of the problem at Newcastle was a long-standing one - that the club had too many players who wanted to be running the team. Hughton dealt with it by forming a kind of senior players' council with which he worked very closely, and it brought the dressing room much closer together and put the club back on the right path.

It seemed that Hughton was the perfect fit for such a chaotic organisation, until Mike Ashley inexplicably sacked him. Alan Pardew was much derided as a replacement but he's kept up the decent results. I still wouldn't rate Pardew too highly though, even though he put an effective unit together at West Ham until the Tevez and Mascherano signings destablished things.

Admittedly I have no idea of what point I'm trying to make, except that football management isn't an exact science, very few managers have methods that would work everywhere and that sometimes counter-intuitive things work. I think.

Posted By: Ottosson Foxtrot, May 17, 14:31:17