Brian Viner: Good managers find route to greatness via game of risk

When Houllier attracts players with flair, he doesn't make the most of them

Until about 45 minutes ago I was going to fill this column with some musings about my friend Chris, or at least about his opinions on football, which are, let's say, robust.

Chris is a teacher, a lanky chap who, in his younger days, was an effective centre-forward, 60 per cent Niall Quinn to 40 per cent Basil Fawlty. These days he runs his school's first XI, and while acknowledging that the standard of football does not exactly evoke the Premiership, or even Division Two (South) of the Ryman League, Chris believes that football management, at whatever level, ought to be predominantly about one thing: coaching players to play better football.

When he looks at top-level managers with big reputations and matching bank balances, yet who do scarcely any coaching, Chris feels like the little boy who sussed out the emperor's clothes. How on earth, he wonders, do they get away with it?

Skilful management, Chris maintains, is much more about putting on a tracksuit and making average players good and good players better, than about choosing established stars on whom to shell out £10m, or £20m or, heaven help us, £30m.

Like me, Chris is an Evertonian, and therefore biased as hell, but even if he had been born less fortunate, he says, he would still look at the Premiership and identify David Moyes and Alan Curbishley as the two managers most worth their salaries, on the basis that neither considers – or has the luxury of being able to consider – the chequebook to be the most important tool of his trade.

Of course, this theory has its flaws. Arsène Wenger doesn't wear holes in his tracksuit bottoms, if he even has a pair, but "le genius" deserves his nickname if only for plucking Patrick Vieira from the Milan reserves. Then there's Martin O'Neill, who, a former Celtic player once told me only half-jokingly, is not entirely sure of the way to Celtic's training ground.

But you'd be hard pushed to label O'Neill overrated goods. Like his mentor, Brian Clough, his excellence lies in his motivational skills.

Chris is not sure that the same can be said, just to pluck an example out of the blue, of Gérard Houllier. The Liverpool manager leaves the coaching to others, can't seem to get his players consistently motivated, and doesn't even deploy his fat chequebook very effectively. It was manifest naïvety to buy the Senegalese Salif Diao, an under-performing player in one of the World Cup's over-performing teams (and infinitely cannier of Moyes to buy the Nigerian Joseph Yobo, an over-performing player in an under-performing team).

Moreover, when Houllier does attract players with scintillating flair, such as Jari Litmanen, he doesn't make the most of them. Houllier – like Chris, coincidentally – was trained as a schoolmaster, and there was a time when his schoolmasterly demeanour was just what Liverpool needed. But what has he done to make average players good and good players better? Precious little (thinks Chris). Maybe even the opposite. Michael Owen, notwithstanding his sparkling contribution to Liverpool's goal against Middlesbrough on Saturday (how are the mighty fallen, one thinks, when the Kop's biggest cheers of the season are for late equalisers), is plainly being starved of the nourishment he needs.

Anyway, as I say, that was what I was going to write about until 45 minutes ago. But then a package arrived, containing a book bizarrely titled Steak... Diana Ross: Diary of a Football Nobody. It records the thoughts of David McVay, a journeyman footballer with Notts County, from February 1974 to October 1975.

For those of us who come from the Seventies, it should be obligatory reading. But younger folk should take a look too, for it beautifully captures a bygone era, an era when not all footballers drove flash cars, least of all Second Division ones. Take the entry for 6 May 1974. County had been beaten 3-2 by Forest in the Nottingham derby, and McVay thought he'd had a decent game at the back, marshalling Duncan McKenzie, but passengers on the South Notts 68 bus disagreed.

"First thing he's stopped all afternoon," came a voice from the back of the queue when I stuck my hand out on Arkwright Street to catch the bus." And three days later on 9 May: "Brown envelope day. £19.83 which is slightly different from the 76 quid you can draw with a couple of bonuses. Strapped for cash so borrowed £2 from the club's kitty."

And on 3 January 1975 came this insight into one of the perennial requirements of good football management. McVay's team-mates Nixo and Neddy had a clever arrangement whereby, in training, they ran laps at exactly the same pace, thereby appearing to be pushing themselves harder than they were.

"The understanding was as telepathic as Keegan and Toshack of Liverpool," McVay records, adding that "Keegan, as Jimmy [Sirrel, the County manager] keeps reminding us, could have been a Notts player. 'Aye, £35,000 for Keegan at Scunthorpe,' he recalls. But it was Bill Shankly who took the risk."

That's it, the risk. Pace, my friend Chris, there is more to management than coaching. Good managers take risks. And for the great ones, they pay off.

b.viner@independent.co.uk