Clubs rarely take a chance on managers who are proving themselves at a much lower level, yet they will chance their arm on a Gerrard or a Rooney, because they were very good players. Equally Championship sides with a limited budget tend to make a desperate grab for a manager who has a Div 1 or 2 promotion on his CV and is still quite young. In 18 months time, when he is just getting to grips with the new level and finally has a team beginning to do what he wants, he finds himself sacked, because he's mid-table or below. He wasn't fulfilling the secret Premier League dream. I'm afraid my bet would be, one year from now PNE will be about sixth from the bottom of the Championship.
Luckily for my own club, very few clubs secretly harbouring Premiership ambitions and lacking the money to spend their way there, have the creativity to imagine whether and how their managerial choice would fare if faced with the many demands of the Premiership. Would you throw Ryan Lowe in against a Guardiola or a Rangnick or a Bielsa? Bizarrely I can imagine at least two managers at National League level, who might not look as though they had arrived on the wrong planet at that level. Certainly given charge of a Championship club they'd be looking at the promotion race and re-modelling their new club so that it became involved. They might do an Icarus and fly too close to the sun, but they wouldn't be looking at their budget as a determinant of their future league position.
If you wanted a lower-league manager with promotions on his CV, if you'd waited a day you could have got Paul Cook. Ipswich used to give their managers years. They let him sign 19 new players, they didn't gel and were bottom, now that they are trying to join the promotion race, they sack the manager. Perhaps he had one drink too many ....? Anyway I hope I'm wrong, and you get the good football and begin to challenge for promotion. Football fans don't actually need success. They need hope - just a genuine reason to turn up each Saturday feeling hopeful. You deserve that. Preston deserves that much at least.
Luckily for my own club, very few clubs secretly harbouring Premiership ambitions and lacking the money to spend their way there, have the creativity to imagine whether and how their managerial choice would fare if faced with the many demands of the Premiership. Would you throw Ryan Lowe in against a Guardiola or a Rangnick or a Bielsa? Bizarrely I can imagine at least two managers at National League level, who might not look as though they had arrived on the wrong planet at that level. Certainly given charge of a Championship club they'd be looking at the promotion race and re-modelling their new club so that it became involved. They might do an Icarus and fly too close to the sun, but they wouldn't be looking at their budget as a determinant of their future league position.
If you wanted a lower-league manager with promotions on his CV, if you'd waited a day you could have got Paul Cook. Ipswich used to give their managers years. They let him sign 19 new players, they didn't gel and were bottom, now that they are trying to join the promotion race, they sack the manager. Perhaps he had one drink too many ....? Anyway I hope I'm wrong, and you get the good football and begin to challenge for promotion. Football fans don't actually need success. They need hope - just a genuine reason to turn up each Saturday feeling hopeful. You deserve that. Preston deserves that much at least.