• You may have to login or register before you can post and view our exclusive members only forums.
    To start viewing messages, select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Jan Molby gives his vote to

Status
Not open for further replies.

King Binny

Part of the Furniture
Honorary Member
... Paul Lambert

FORMER Swansea City boss Jan Molby believes only one young manager fits the bill for Liverpool... Norwich boss Paul Lambert.

The great Dane, manager at The Vetch during the 1990s, is of the opinion that neither of the men who followed him into the Swansea hot-seat are up to managing such a big club as Liverpool just yet.

However, he does believe Lambert is destined for the very top after the work he has done with Norwich in the Premier League.

Molby said of the club’s owners: “They seem to have a profile of the kind of manager they are after; someone young, progressive, whose skills are on the training ground and who has a point to prove.

“Scores of names have already been mentioned, and I’m sure more will crop up over the next few days.

“The new bosses on the block in the Premier League – Roberto Martinez, Paul Lambert and Brendan Rodgers – have each been linked.

“They would, on the face of it, fit the criteria I listed above and Martinez and Rodgers appear high up on the list.

“But if you asked me to choose from those three, then Lambert would be the only one I would consider.

“Martinez seems to be being lauded for guiding Wigan to Premier League security, but Norwich and Swansea finished above them this season.

“Lambert, for me, is heading to the top. I’m not sure if he is right for Liverpool at this moment, but he is going to be a top, top manager.”

Molby continued: “Those three are the Premier League candidates, but there are many, many more across Europe.

“I don’t think Andre Villas-Boas will be far from the owners’ thoughts, for example. And I can understand why.

“For me, he is the unluckiest man in football. He arrived at Chelsea with a job to do, to try and restyle the club and to make some tough decisions in doing so.

“He tried that, but he wasn’t given the support or backing to do so, once results began to wobble.

“He made some mistakes, no doubt about it, but his record – in terms of games won, goals scored and goals conceded – is superior to Roberto Di Matteo’s, and some of the players – think Romeu, Lukaku, Cahill, Mata, will be main men of Chelsea going forward.

“Others? Well I really like the work Jurgen Klopp has done at Borussia Dortmund, but I don’t see him as a realistic candidate.

“I view Dortmund as one of the top five club sides in Europe, and I think Klopp is a man whose career is destined to remain in Germany.

“Lucien Favre, of Borussia Moenchengladbach, is another who has impressed me. As has Diego Simeone of Atletico Madrid, who won the Europa League.

“They are gambles, but what manager isn’t, these days?”
 
On the opening day of the 2009-10 League One season, Bryan Gunn's Norwich City were on the wrong end of a 7-1 home thumping at the hands of Colchester United. The result cost Gunn, who had failed to keep Norwich in the Championship the year before, his job. His replacement was the mastermind of the Carrow Road massacre, his compatriot Paul Lambert.

Two seasons later, Norwich won promotion to the Premier League. It was a remarkable rise, but no one expected much this season from a young, inexperienced team full of Football League recruits. No one, that is, except Paul Lambert. With the mild-mannered Scot at the helm, the Norfolk side finished comfortably in mid-table, beating the likes of Newcastle and Spurs and taking points off Chelsea and Liverpool.

But then Lambert knows what it's like to be an underdog. As a player, he found himself out of contract after a disappointing season with Motherwell in 1995-96 - the club only avoided the newly introduced relegation play-off by one place, having finished second the season before.

With no British offers forthcoming, he managed to wangle himself a trial, and then a contract, at Ottmar Hitzfeld's Borussia Dortmund. Nine months later, he marked Juventus' Zinedine Zidane out of the Champions League final, set up the opening goal in the 3-1 win and became the first British player to lift the trophy at a non-British club.

He left the following year to join Celtic, where he enjoyed eight trophy-laden years, but his short time at Dortmund under der General - whom he describes as his greatest role model - had a phenomenal impact on Lambert. It was a large part of the reason he decided to take his coaching badges in Germany, where he was schooled not only in football but also medicine, psychology and sports science.

Lambert takes a very active role in his development as a manager He recently spent time at Barcelona's La Masia academy watching the senior side train, an experience he described (at least five times) on Goals on Sunday as "an eye-opener". Evidently, Lambert has a voracious appetite for football.

His education in the ways of the 'trainer' is reflected in his tactical astuteness. At the Liberty Stadium in February, Lambert outmanoeuvred Brendan Rodgers' Swansea by pressing high up the pitch and utilising his wingers - League One finds Anthony Pilkington and Elliott Bennett - in more central positions. The tight midfield strangled Gylfi Sigurdsson, the creative fulcrum in Swansea's 4-2-3-1, and allowed Bennett to link with the tireless strike duo of Grant Holt and Simeon Jackson. It worked, with Bennett providing an assist in the 3-2 win. Rodgers' stylish tiki-taka was shut down with great effect by Lambert's pragmatic, direct response.

His faith in untested players like Pilkington and Bennett also comes from his time at Dortmund, where he rubbed shoulders with Germany's returning Euro '96 heroes like Jürgen Kohler, Matthias Sammer and Andreas Möller. Lambert has faith in unfashionable, inexperienced players because he was one himself - and it worked out rather well.

The experience instilled a deep self-belief in Lambert. As such, he has shown no hesitation in overhauling his squad on several occasions. The Norwich team that won League One was quite different to the team that earned promotion to the Premier League, and Lambert was one of the busiest managers in the transfer market last summer, bringing in seven players, four of whom - Pilkington, Bennett, Spurs loanee Kyle Naughton and ex-Millwall striker Steve Morison - have been first-team regulars.

"You have to make decisions that you think are right for the club," he said in an interview last year with David Hytner for the Guardian. "I also think that, in the dressing room, there should only ever be one voice and its got to be the manager's. I played under Martin O'Neill at Celtic for five years and he was a fantastic manager to learn off, and Mr Hitzfeld was the same at Dortmund."

Of course, Lambert is not the first British manager to find success abroad. The late, great Bobby Robson, for one, picked up several trophies at PSV, Porto and Barcelona, and the new England boss, Roy Hodgson, has spent the vast majority of his eventful managerial career in foreign climes.

In fact, the hullabaloo that surrounded Hodgson's appointment - or rather, Harry Redknapp's 'snub' - highlights perfectly the blinkered attitude of the British media to international success. Whatever the tabloids think, Hodgson is far more qualified for the job than Redknapp, who has helped relegate most of the clubs he's managed and openly admits to knowing nothing about tactics. While football isn't just about chalkboards and false nines - and Redknapp is evidently a superb motivator - it does help to have a Plan B when shouting doesn't work.

Lambert, like Hodgson, has worked his way up the managerial ladder and proved his ability on every rung. Unsurprisingly, he's been linked with the vacancies at Liverpool and Aston Villa. Inevitably, questions will be asked about whether he can handle a 'big club'. That, of course, remains to be seen, but his experiences in Germany, and his approach to his discipline more generally, certainly stand him in good stead. Young players and managers in Britain could do a lot worse than follow his example.
 
Aug 2011 article:


Paul Lambert only does things the hard way and there is every chance that his disdain for ridiculous odds is rooted in his background. As the newest member of the Premier League's Glaswegian management cartel puts it, "You aren't born with a silver spoon in your mouth, you know what I mean? You aren't given things. You had to go out and earn them."

The Norwich City manager's playing career looked to have stalled as he approached his 27th birthday, when he was out of contract at Motherwell and he had no offers in the British Isles. So he pushed for a trial at Borussia Dortmund, won a contract and, at the end of the 1996-97 season, he had won the European Cup, becoming the first British player at a non-British club to triumph in the competition. He successfully man-marked the Juventus playmaker Zinedine Zidane in the final.

Spool forward to management. Having cut his teeth in England at Wycombe Wanderers and Colchester United, he took over at Norwich with the club at the foot of League One and close to going into administration. It was August 2009. On Saturday, he will send his team out at Wigan Athletic in the top flight, after back-to-back promotions and back‑to‑back manager of the year awards.

Lambert's story feels as though it could be repackaged by Hollywood. The boy from Glasgow's East End has certainly done good and his next trick promises further gripping plot-lines. Lambert has made seven summer signings at a cost of around £9m, and six of them are aged between 22 and 24. Steve Morison, the £2.8m striker from Millwall, is the veteran of the group at 27.

Apart from James Vaughan, from Everton, they have next to no Premier League experience and Lambert's existing players are not exactly steeped in it, either. The other new boys are the on-loan defenders Ritchie De Laet from Manchester United and Kyle Naughton from Tottenham Hotspur; the defensive midfielder Bradley Johnson from Leeds United; and the wingers Anthony Pilkington from Huddersfield Town and Elliott Bennett from Brighton & Hove Albion.

What they have in common is the burning desire to seize their opportunity and prove themselves at the highest level. Lambert intends to attack the Premier League with vim and vigour.

"We wanted to go for lads who want to go from here to here and not from there to there," Lambert says, plotting an upward curve with his hand followed by a downward one. "The problem you do get is that people are money orientated, but I wasn't and I'm certainly not going to bring people here who I think just want the money. I want people who are hungry and want to be successful."

The signings suggest that Lambert is primed to overhaul his starting line-up once again. The team that conjured what he described as the "absolute miracle" of automatic promotion from the Championship last season was virtually unrecognisable to the one that took the League One title in 2009-10. Lambert has had to be ruthless but necessity always outweighs the sentiment.

"You have to be single-minded … you have to be ruthless, but in a good way and not a nasty way," he says. "You have to make decisions that you think are right for the club. I also think that, in the dressing room, there should only ever be one voice and it's got to be the manager's. I played under Martin O'Neill at Celtic for five years, and he was a fantastic manager to learn off, and Mr [Ottmar] Hitzfeld was the same at Dortmund.

"I don't think you can allow players to cross the line. People have got to go with what you say and what you think. Whether it's the right or the wrong decision, people have to respect the decision. But I don't pay much attention to outside influences. People can say what they want. I always try to focus on my own environment."

Lambert was born in Duke Street, Glasgow, "a stone's throw from Parkhead," and his family moved, when he was a little boy, to Linwood, "a 20 minute drive" to the west of the city. Sport was in his genes. His father, a roof tiler, was on the Celtic groundstaff in his younger days while his mother was a netball player.

Lambert's competitive fires were stoked by the street football he played in Linwood and, at 12, he began to train with St Mirren; he would win the Scottish Cup with them as a 17-year-old. His transfer to Motherwell came six years later, in 1993, where he played under Alex McLeish, who is now one of the Premier League's seven Glaswegian managers. Lambert played under another of them, Kenny Dalglish, at Celtic in 2000. Sir Alex Ferguson, David Moyes, Owen Coyle and Steve Kean complete the number.

It is not difficult to discern shared character traits and one of them is self-belief, which, for Lambert, was forged during his unforgettable year in Dortmund. Although McLeish and Motherwell had not offered him fresh terms, they felt he would come back to them before the new season, tail between his legs, eager to sign any sort of deal. He never did. With the help of a Dutch agent, he had a trial at Dick Advocaat's PSV Eindhoven and then Dortmund, and it mattered not that the former did not work out. Despite feeling "unbelievable self-doubt" at the German club, he impressed sufficiently in pre-season matches to secure a contract.

"After those games, I was back at the training ground and all of the German internationals who had just won Euro 96 were returning after an extended summer break," Lambert says. "There was Jürgen Kohler, Steffen Freund, Andreas Möller, Stefan Reuter and Matthias Sammer. I remember thinking: 'No. You can't handle that company. You're coming on a free from Motherwell.' I was worth a bottle of Coke.

"But I signed on the Thursday before the season started, I played, I did well and it just snowballed. All of a sudden, the crowd took to me and I became a mainstay. It changed my whole career."

Lambert still marvels at the German mentality and the toughness of his own was reinforced by the eight years he spent at Celtic, where he cleaned up on domestic honours. He believes the period will prepare him well for his Premier League baptism. "Criticism comes with Celtic," Lambert says. "If you take it on board, it can make you ill, but if you think: 'No problem', it makes you really thick-skinned."

When Lambert arrived at Norwich, he found that a dark cloud covered more than just the club. "The whole city was very down," he says. "Because there's only one team in the county, it affects a lot of people."

But Lambert's fighting spirit, man-management and high-tempo football has underpinned the revival. In the absence of big-name players, he is usually credited as the talisman and the sense of anticipation is tangible. The 41-year-old has eyes only for the challenge ahead and he talks on several occasions of the need to ignore "outside influences", which seems to be his buzz phrase.

He knows that the team are widely tipped to make an immediate return to the Championship, yet it barely registers. He is more interested in how his signings will permit him greater tactical flexibility, allowing him to deviate from his trusted 4-4-2 diamond midfield shape.

Lambert says that survival would be "monumental" and guiding him towards it is a principle from Glasgow's streets. "You've got to be frightened to lose," he says. "That's what drives me on, being frightened to fail. The past is in the past. I never think I'm safe."
 
Status
Not open for further replies.
Back
Top Bottom