The concept of romance in football can be easily dismissed in an age of pass completion percentages and Official Savoury Snack Partners (Manchester United's is Mister Potato, for those wondering) as an artificial narrative spun by clueless hacks and propagated by rose-tinted better-in-my-day nostalgics. Rarely is it conceived of in terms of strategy or motivation; those that suggest so would leave themselves exposed to accusations of tactical quackery, like André Villas Boas in reverse.
Tony Pulis and Alan Pardew are proving romance isn’t dead
Romance may play a more important role in football than you’d expect.
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But, either through happy coincidence or a manager's mastery of the mind, it could well be more important on the pitch than you'd expect. Just ask Alan Pardew and Tony Pulis, two of the Premier League's current romantics.
Before we go on, it's probably best that we work out quite what we mean by romance. After all, you may well be thinking that the closest Pulis has come to intimacy was headbutting James Beattie while nude in the showers after Stoke City's defeat to Arsenal in 2009, and that Pards hits his amorous heights in his local Yates's Wine Lodge (and on both counts you may very well be right). But, fortunately, we're not talking about that kind of romance. For clarification, let's consult the dictionary:
romantic
rə(ʊ)ˈmantɪk/
adj
1. conducive to or characterized by the expression of love.
It's the "conducive" part that we're initially concerning ourselves here. In short, their ability to make people care. It's not a characteristic that alone makes a great manager, but it is one that all great managers have. Obvious masters of the art include José Mourinho and Sir Alex Ferguson, though it's just as important for teams at the bottom of the table, when the monotony of defeats will often eventually lead to utter apathy and a glum acceptance of the inevitability of relegation.
This grim inevitability was suffocating Selhurst Park last November when Pulis took over from Ian Holloway with Crystal Palace rooted to the foot of the Premier League table. The Eagles looked totally flightless and were sat six points from safety. That Pulis took over only added insult to injury; at least under Holloway they had the chance of scoring a few goals on their way back down to the Championship. But, by the end of the season, they had beaten Chelsea and Everton (when Everton were good, folks!) and taken points off Liverpool, among others. It was a remarkable run, and they finished comfortably in mid-table.
It was a turnaround that couldn’t be explained away by a change in strategy alone. Pulis is clearly a very capable tactician, with the ability to drill robotic discipline into a rag-tag bunch of players that, if they weren’t already, looked destined to become Championship journeymen. But, fundamentally, his is a very simple blueprint that requires utter commitment to the cause. As he had done at Stoke City, he created a siege mentality. He gave the fans hope and the players reason to care. Anthony Richard Pulis, the most dour, joyless man in all of football, was showing himself to be a true romantic. British football loves an underdog, and Pulis was their king.
Former Stoke defender, Danny Higginbotham, illuminated his motivational methods in an interview with the Guardian last year:
[Pulis would] say: “Look at this lot, they don’t want us in the league.” I remember when we used to play against Arsenal, you could almost sense them thinking: ‘What the hell are you doing on the same pitch as me?’ That was the impression you got and, as a group, we loved that.”
It's early days, but he already seems to be working the same magic at West Bromwich Albion. They've gone unbeaten in three league games and find themselves in a comparatively salubrious 14th place; Aston Villa, Sunderland and Burnley all have more immediate concerns above the bottom three. They're a point behind Palace, where Pardew has overseen a rather more unexpected turnaround, masterminding back-to-back league victories for the first time since Pulis departed. The turnaround at Selhurst Park is also romantic, but a romance of a more serendipitous nature.
When he was at Palace, Pulis had the ability to make his players care, but that didn’t extend as far as personal loyalty -- as evidenced by his stunning departure a couple of days before the start of the new season. Pardew, in contrast, left his seemingly invulnerable position at mid-table Newcastle United to join a team that seemed destined for a season-long struggle, precisely because he cared. He played for Palace with great success from the late eighties, and has been strongly associated with them ever since. His decision was more romantic than anything else. Consulting our handy dictionary definition, we can explain Pardew’s move as “characterized by the expression of love.”
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The question now, is whether that is also “conducive” to it. Can Pardew make his players care as much has he does? It isn’t hard to imagine that there is at least some causal link, if only with many qualifications. But, the only definite -- if deeply unsatisfactory -- answer is that time alone will tell. So long has he been aboard the Newcastle rollercoaster that we’ve all lost track of how to evaluate his performance as a manager, making predictions all the more difficult. However, what we know for sure is that early results offer reason for optimism. Pardew is a walking, talking embodiment of Palace success; a man with the requisite tools to imbue his players with a passion for the club.
Sure, Pardew is arrogant; sure, Pardew loves himself more than he could love anything else in the entire universe; sure, Pardew is Alan Pardew. But if there’s one thing Pulis’ success has shown, it’s the fundamental importance of man management, perhaps beyond anything that can be achieved on tactics boards. That isn’t to belittle the significance of the latter -- there’s a reason Palace didn’t do a halftime raffle to choose Warnock’s replacement from the stands. But at the bottom of the table, where the margins are so fine and the emotions so fragile, the simple act of making people care can make all the difference. That, in a nutshell, is why romance matters, and why Palace may not be so stupid for shelling out to hire Pardew.
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