Huddersfield Town have announced Lee Grant as their new manager. He’s a former goalkeeper who has been the attacking coach at Ipswich during their rise from League One to the Premier League with back-to-back promotions (and then relegation from the Premier League but I don’t think that was his fault).
He has no management experience but is apparently highly rated and has been waiting for the right job before jumping from coaching to being in charge. His interview on the club’s social media was impressive and he handled himself well in his first press conference. He seems intelligent and articulate, which are not attributes you find a lot of in football. Though how his team performs on the pitch matters a lot more than how he handles himself in front of a camera.
Here are some of my initial thoughts on our new manager….
A calculated gamble
Going for a completely inexperienced manager has gone well for Town in the recent past, with Corberan and Wagner both pulling together teams capable of more than anyone expected. However, in the same time period we’ve have Siewert, Schofield and Fotheringham all try and fail hard when starting their managerial career in Huddersfield (I have a suspicion that Mark Fotheringham will only recently have dropped off the payroll, given the long contract we gave him and his failure to get another managerial role).
So using our club as a crèche for ambitious coaches to take their first step into management has potential for brilliant or awful results but rarely mediocrity. The benefit and risk of this approach are that nobody, including Grant himself, knows what he’s capable of. I expect it’ll either be brilliant or awful but not anywhere in between.
Given the choice between exciting and boring, I suppose it’s right to go for a gamble rather than a dull, steady-away choice. Though now may be an odd time to throw the dice on a young, inexperienced coach. It’s basically what we did with Worthington for the final ten games of the season and that ended in complete free fall.
Manager not head coach
The distinction between head coach and manager may seem nerdy and technical but it’s significant in this case. When asked about his responsibilities as manager, Grant has emphasised that the signings that come through the door will be his responsibility.
Reading between the lines, I suspect this was something Grant has requested and most likely only accepted the job because he’s been given the final say on signings rather than a seat at a committee table. This makes me think he’s pretty smart and also that he believes previous managers have failed at Town because they had rubbish players foisted on them by directors of football that had their own agendas.
If I’ve understood it right and Grant has the final say in all our signings then it feels like we’re handing a lot of power and responsibility to a complete novice. We’re also creating a situation that most decent directors of football would run a mile from. Apparently the club haven’t decided on the director of football role yet but I’m doubtful anyone will fill that role while Grant is here. Who would want to come to be in charge of the football side of things at Town when they’ve given the manager control of transfers and the rest of the exec picked a manager without a directors of football in place? Not anyone of the calibre we’d hope to give that job to.
I don’t love the model of head coaches and directors of football but we’re told it’s how football now works. Maybe Lee Grant knows exactly what he’s doing and can build a squad that’s capable of getting us out of League One but beyond talking a good game, there’s no hard facts to suggest he will. I want to be positive about this but given how badly most of your managerial appointments work, it worries me that we’re going to build a team to play his system and then sack him after a few months and be saddled with players that don’t suit our next manager’s style.
The backroom team are vital
I can’t think of a time when the coaches coming in to support a new manager have been more important. Maybe Lee Clark, another first time manager, who had Derek Fazackerley, Terry McDermott and Steve Black behind him. Those two experienced coaches and a top sports psychologist gave Clark the people he needed to do well, even if his project ultimately fell short.
I hope Grant is given a similarly qualified coaching team around him to give him the best chance of success. Mark Fotheringham had to make do with the coaches already at the club for most of the time he was in charge, which perhaps showed how much faith we had in him.
Given we’ve picked Grant to lead us, we should push the boat out to get the right team in place around him. Particularly as he’s likely to have a lot of responsibilities that previously fell on Makr Cartwright’s shoulders and will need the coaching team to be leading training when he’s away wheeling and dealing.
I wonder if we might see some old faces return in Grant’s coaching team. Mark Hudson coached at Ipswich this season alongside Grant and may want to link up with him again at a club he’s been at as a player before. Michael Hefele is also currently looking for work and obviously has a huge affinity for Huddersfield. Hefele has completed a masters in sporting directorship, so he may even be suited to a dual role of coaching and being a connection between the boardroom and the training pitch. Not to forget that he’s also someone we know can create a great atmosphere simply by walking into a room.
Grant has said the full coaching team is nearly in place, so by the time this article reaches you, they may already have been announced. Hopefully, regardless of who it is, they’ll give Grant the support he will need and also add some experience to Grant’s youthful ambition.
A fragile sort of hope
This appointment has lit a candle of optimism in me but the kind that a strong breeze could blow out. There’s every reason to buy into Lee Grant’s vision and get fully behind him. But it’s hard to keep believing in the hype of every new manager when we rattle through them with such speed.
We’ve been here before and had our hopes dashed. But being a football fan requires the kind of cognitive dissonance that means we know we’re likely to get hurt again but we still pick ourselves up and believe again the next time around. And eventually, simple probability means eventually one of the managers we’ll pick will turn out well.
(I’m aware that talking about cognitive dissonance on a football blog is a bit pretentious. But it’s also a valid way to describe the contradictory beliefs that Town will mostly likely fail yet also expecting them to succeed. Some sort of mental trickery makes it possible to think both things at the same time despite them being opposites.)
Give him time
I’m so sick of the constant upheaval that comes with binning off managers two or three times a season. While results are ultimately what decides a manager’s fate, fan opinion matters too. Possibly too much in the Kevin Nagle era. So I hope that Grant is given time.
Whatever happens this summer at Town, it’s going to involve a great deal of change and those changes will most likely take time to bed in. We currently don’t have any fit central defenders or wingers, our striking options all have question marks over them, and none of our remaining squad exceeded expectations last season (with Kasumu the only potential exception). I’d expect five or six new players to start the first game of the season for Town, given the exodus we had a few weeks ago.
What I’m trying to say is that Grant’s start to life in League One may be a bumpy time. While we’re bedding in a new style do play, half a squad of new players and a manager who’s never managed before, it’s likely results may not come immediately. If the club are so certain that Lee Grant is their man then that decision can’t change if we have a poor run of results.
It’s possible that Grant will hit the ground running and guide us easily to promotion, but that isn’t reasonable to expect. I just hope he has the time to fully implement his ideas and we don’t have to appoint a second or third manager in the upcoming season. Our last six permanent managers haven’t lasted a whole season, we really need to break that cycle and have a manager that sticks around for a while.
A thoughtful piece as ever, TS. I particularly enjoyed’ ‘cognitive dissonance’ – you get a lot of that when HTAFC is discussed.
One wonders just how many approaches were made (and spurned) before arriving at the door of Lee Grant. He certainly wasn’t on anyone’s radar a few weeks ago.
My hope is that Grant is not one of those coaches who becomes slavish to one style of play. Duff’s 3-5-2 for example. First & foremost, get good footballers! Town has had far too many players who have shown themselves incapable of the most basic skills like controlling a football with one touch and playing a sidefoot pass of 10 metres (or even yards, often only feet!). If you can’t do that, then you can play whatever system you like and it will fail. Conversely, a decent full back should be capable of playing either in a back four or wide in a midfield five. The basic skills are transferable. A squad of players should be a squad, not just 11 who aren’t very good and another 11 who are even less good.
And paramount must be restoring pride in wearing the shirt. Once the play-offs had slipped away, there were far too many players not giving their all. Totally unacceptable. It is a team game and a team can achieve an awful lot just by all pulling together and being accountable to one another. I think the last time I saw it in a Town team where we didn’t have the best players but compensated with team effort was the first season in the Premier League under Wagner. We knew we were weak by comparison but we stayed up! We know from what happened both before and subsequently to other promoted sides, to stay up was astonishing.
This is Division 1, not the Premier League. But they are professional footballers. If Grant can engender that pride combined with physical fitness (definitely lacking in the 24/25 squad), that will be a step up from where we’ve just been.
If the manager carries the can for failure it’s only right and fair that he has the final say on player recruitment. Anyone who accepts less than that is not a manager but a yes man. Good luck Lee.
Great trip down “Memory Lane” TS, both bad (too much) and good (not enough). We have had good people here and some have gone on to great things recently: Chalobah and Colwill – European winners; Billing – Serie A champion & Corberan – rescuing Valencia from relegation to mid-table security.
I too, like Simon, welcome the manager having as much control as possible – look at the quality of our recent signings and especially the older ones such as Hogg, Lees and Pearson with their pedestrianism and lack of ability on the ball. At least he won’t be lumbered with that.