Eredivisie Betting: McClaren winning his fight to lay the England ghost to rest.

Jonathan Wilson / Jonathan Wilson / 27 November 2008 / Leave a Comment

Steve McClaren's short time in charge of FC Twente has already seen both highs and lows yet as Jonathan Wilson explains, the former England Manager is making steady progress in his task of rebuilding a reputation which was ruthlessly dismantled during his time at Soho Square

Sentences you never thought you'd find yourself writing: I wonder if we might have been a little harsh on Steve McClaren? I'm not saying he wasn't a disastrously bad appointment for England, but maybe that was less because of his abilities as a coach than because he had been part of the old regime. Continuity is often held up as a universal virtue, but it can lead to inertia if it is perceived as maintaining a fading ethos.

McClaren's Middlesbrough were inconsistent, and he must bear responsibility for that, but it is also true that he took the club to the League Cup, the only trophy in their history, and then to the final of the Uefa Cup. Those are things that do not happen by chance, and neither does a coach win three Premier League titles in his three years as a number two at Manchester United without having some ability. This season, he's proving it again.

Taking over from Fred Rutten in the summer seemed a no-win situation.
McClaren's predecessor had performed miracles on a shoestring in taking a tiny club into the Champions League qualifiers, and in those circumstances it is the chemistry of the squad as much as anything else that inspires them. Remove the coach and that chemistry changes, usually to ill effect. To make it worse, they also lost the midfielders Orlando Engelar and Karim El-Ahmadi over the summer.

Yet slowly McClaren is beginning to take hold of the side. Cynics might point out that they are threatening to be every bit as up and down as his Middlesbrough, but given the changes at the club, it is probably unfair to blame him for inconsistency just yet. And after taking only one point from games against Ajaz, AZ Alkmaar and Feyenoord, they hit back in style at the weekend, dismantling the hitherto fairly solid Heerenveen and beating them 6-0.

The Switzerland striker Blaise Kufo got a hat-trick, suggesting he is returning to the sort of form that has made him Twente's top scorer in each of the past five seasons, but it was the scheming of Kenneth Perez, who helped himself to two, that really made the difference.
Some 6-0 scorelines can be flattering - not this one though, unless you mean to Heerenveen. The newspaper Algemeen Dagblad was moved to describe the result as "slanderous".

McClaren's apparent success, in the end, probably comes back to that issue of continuity. With England, he was perceived as a continuance of the Sven-Goran Eriksson regime, and yet his biggest error was arguably the decision to drop David Beckham. Whatever the reality, it was seen as change for change's sake, and confirmed the impression that he was overly concerned with how he was perceived.

There have been similar rickets with the press, most notably the notorious interview he gave in a Dutch accent, but McClaren seems to have learned from earlier errors. There has been no change for change's sake; indeed, not much change at all. Robbie Wielaert, the Twente central-back, has said the only difference to the training schedule this season has been the introduction of an exercise designed to teach players to head the ball further. Condemn him then, for living off the success of another, or praise his wisdom in recognising that if it ain't broke, there's no need to fix it?

Twelve games into the season, Twente are five points off the top of the table; in other words, they are doing much the same as they did last season under Rutten.

The suspicion in the opening weeks was that Twente were getting results almost despite themselves, but the victory over Heerenveen was perhaps a true sign of their potential. If that is a truer indicator of their form, and if they can find some sort of consistency, a title challenge is not utterly impossible in a league without great teams (they are [34.0] to do so). Perhaps, though, it is best for now to look at the short term, and Saturday's game away to a struggling Den Haag side who have lost their last five matches, perhaps offers some value (they are [1.95]).

Whatever happens though, McClaren has made an impressive start to the long process of rebuilding his reputation.