Not Ince-Ing His Words

“Very few black managers can lose their job and get another job. What I can judge it from is by looking at society. How many black people are there in the higher echelons of any industry? We can talk about journalism, we can talk about politics. So why should football be any different?”

That was Liverpool and England legend John Barnes last week bemoaning the fact that since having had his services dispensed with in 2009 by Tranmere, nobody’s been prepared to let him back into the dugout. It’s a sentiment that Paul Ince, still jobless after losing his Blackpool gig last season, echoes.
“Steve Bruce and Mark Hughes, who achieved more or less the same as me at Manchester United, started their respective managerial careers at Sheffield United in the old First Division and in charge of Wales,” he tells Hot Press. “To get a job, I had to go to Macclesfield who were 92nd in the league, fourteen points from safety. I kept them up, then went to MK Dons when they couldn’t get out of League Two and got them promoted the first year. I went to Blackpool when they were going down and kept them up. Next season we were third in the table, with the lowest budget in the Championship. If the chairman had spent some money they’d have been promoted. Blackburn, where they didn’t back me financially was a disappointment, but overall my win ratio is as good as 75% of the managers out there who do have jobs.”
Ince, who’s in Dublin for the launch of Carlsberg‘s 2015 #JOINTHEGREATS campaign, was good friends with the Football League’s first professional black manager, Keith Alexander, who died in 2010 whilst also in charge at Macclesfield.
“Keith was a role model for black managers coming through, did really well at all his clubs but never got offered the big job he deserved,” Ince resumes. “It’s not fair to stick the label on all the chairmen running football clubs, but some have very outdated attitudes.”
A depressing case being Dave Whelan, up until last season the Wigan chairman, who was censured by the FA for saying it was “nothing” to call a Chinese person “a chink” and that “Jewish people chase money more than everybody else.”
“It annoys me because I’m only 47 and feel I’ve got so much more to give as a manager,” proffers Ince who currently spends his weekends watching son Tom playing for Derby County. “They’re third at the moment in the Championship, which I really think is the most exciting league in Europe and full of gifted youngsters.”
He’s less enamoured of much of what he’s seen this season in the top-flight.
“It’s the most rewarding league in the world financially, but in terms of technical ability and the best players we haven’t got ‘em,” Ince ventures. “There wasn’t one Premier League player in the last FIFA World XI and justifiably so. There’s no English team in either the Champions League quarter-finals or the last sixteen of the Europa League. The reason in my opinion being that we’re bringing in too many foreign players at the expense of lads coming up through the youth system who’ve been schooled in how their club plays.”
Ince points to Manchester City, who were given a real footballing lesson in the Nou Camp recently by Barcelona, as one of the main offenders.
“The majority of that Barca team are Spanish and started in their B and C teams,” Ince points out. “City are a football club that happens to be based in Manchester rather than a Manchester football club. I’m not saying we should go back to the days of players going out and having ten pints after a game, but the camaraderie we worked hard to build at United seems to have disappeared.
“I went into the changing-room at the Liverpool training ground when Roy Hodgson was in charge to see Jamie Carragher, and the first thing the players did was go to their lockers and get their iPads and headphones out. No one spoke to each other, which was in complete contrast to the banter and mickey-taking at Liverpool when I was there. Football’s big business, but it’s also a sport that relies on team spirit and players desperate to go that extra yard for their mates. Don’t get me wrong; lots of foreign players have that pride in the shirt. We just need to get the mix right.”
Paul was at Man U for six years, which gave him plenty of time to study that footballing riddle wrapped in a mystery inside an enigma, Roy Keane.
“Roy’s very private and hard to work out, but I love him. It was a privilege to play alongside him; we had a great partnership together. Roy’s like me in that we both have high standards, which can be a problem when a player says, ‘Oh, I did well today’, and we’ll go, ‘Not from where I was standing, you didn’t!’ You either take that and move forwards or go, ‘Oh, he scares me!’ and move backwards.
“When Roy went to Villa they did okay, when he left they started to struggle and Paul Lambert lost his job. He loves his football and Martin O’Neill and Ireland are lucky to have him as part of the set-up.”
Asked as a parting shot what his favourite game in a Man U shirt was, Ince quick as a flash says: “Beating a Barcelona side that included Koeman, Salinas and Michael Laudrup 2-1 in the 1991 European Cup Winners’ Cup Final. Everything about that night was unbelievable. I’ve had a great career in football, which hopefully I’ll be able to resume sooner rather than later.”

See facebook.com/carlsberg for details of how you and a mate can tread the hallowed Anfield turf