NOTTINGHAM FOREST’S Steve Cooper is another phenomenon – a top football manager without any high-level playing experience. No doubt the Welshman, along with world-famous names such as Arsene Wenger, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Jose Mourinho, kicked the ball around for small clubs on pitches of mud or concrete – but not a lot more. They owed […]
NOTTINGHAM FOREST’S Steve Cooper is another phenomenon – a top football manager without any high-level playing experience.
No doubt the Welshman, along with world-famous names such as Arsene Wenger, Sven-Goran Eriksson and Jose Mourinho, kicked the ball around for small clubs on pitches of mud or concrete – but not a lot more.
They owed their success as managers in fiercely competitive leagues to an intricate study of the game, to tactical skills unallied to success on the field, to motivation and to understanding what makes players tick as much as to kick.
Cooper isn’t yet among the elite coaches named above.
His record with Swansea and now at the club on the banks of the River Trent is very sound.
Yet he still hasn’t escaped from the Championship, despite two play-offs with Swansea and a brief spell with Forest, who are keenly chasing a top-six place this season.
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To make tomorrow’s FA Cup quarter-final home tie with Liverpool even more fascinating, Cooper, 42, has been a fan of theirs since he was a boy in Pontypridd.
A town renowned for its production of international rugby players and still often retaining the view of football as a ‘soft’ sport.
This was always nonsense and the variety of serious injuries from collisions and tackles may not impress rugger men.
But I am all too aware of the distress they cause among our players.
And I know from our incredible performance on Thursday night that not one West Ham player could be considered ‘soft’.
The son of a former first-class referee, Cooper had little choice but to love football as a boy.
However, his playing career went no further than the stiffs at Wrexham and died away at Porthmadog – a very old and proud Welsh club.
Better at least than Avram Grant, who rose to the heights of football management on a song and a prayer, with an unrecorded playing career behind him.
Cooper clearly is a football academic, like Wenger and, more recently, Bruno Lage at Wolves. Addicted to theories and capable of making them understandable to players.
Young players’ willingness to learn has nothing to do with the promise of future riches, although it is naive to imagine that many parents and agents are not attracted by the millions at the beginning of the rainbow.
Later, it will often be different.
Later, too, disaffected or dropped players might well pose the question: “Who did you play for, then?”
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I’m sure Mourinho or Brendan Rodgers would silence them with a look that is worthy of being on The Apprentice!
Cooper’s climb through the ranks to become youth manager at Liverpool impressed the FA.
As England Under-17s coach he led his team to the final of the 2017 European Championships and then to World Cup glory later that same year.
With Jadon Sancho, Phil Foden and Callum Hudson-Odoi in the team, he had facilitated (his word) players at the start of their careers who have already brightened Gareth Southgate’s outstanding international team.
Imaginative teaching is a talent and to do it with dozens of ambitious players demands patience and leadership.
Tomorrow’s Cup game will be a marker in Cooper’s career and I’m sure Jurgen Klopp, profiting by his rival’s work at Anfield, will not underestimate Forest’s threat to unravel his four-trophy dream.
They have already lifted the League Cup and are now chasing the Premier League, Champions League and FA Cup.
In football’s love-hate world, Cooper would love to beat Liverpool and hate to be the man who shattered that Quadruple dream.
In a purely football context, though, how good it is that once-barred women and once-derided managers should be making waves.
