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Being black is not why Cole and Co have been held back
Last updated at 9:02 AM on 12th September 2011
The worst team in the history of the NFL were the 2008 Detroit Lions. They lost all 16 games and conceded 517 points with a differential of minus 249.
This eclipsed a previous record, held by the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who lost every match in a 14-game season, with an aggregate losing margin of 20 points. The Buccaneers averaged nine points per game and failed to score on five occasions.
‘What do you think of the execution of the offense?’ coach John McKay was asked after a particularly abysmal showing. ‘I’m in favour of it,’ he replied.
And do you know what then happened to the 2009 Detroit Lions and the 1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a result? Nothing. The Lions began that season in the same group, the NFC North, playing the same teams, while the Buccaneers simply moved from AFC West to NFC Central, which was not a demotion merely geographical reorganisation.
Losing streak: Ramzee Robinson and Kalvin Pearson ponder the final defeat of the 2008 season at the hands of the Green Bay Packers
That is the difference between sport in America and sport in Britain: relegation. If a franchise is not pulling its weight economically, it may fold; but if the team is useless all that happens is it receives first pick in the college drafts for next season in the hope of levelling the competition.
American sport can engage in social engineering exercises such as the Rooney Rule, therefore, because the whole contest is subject to engineering.
More from Martin Samuel...
Over here, the consequences of failure are rather more drastic, like £30million down the chute or the threatened existence of a club. Faced with such serious consequences, chairmen do not always have time to draw up a socially progressive list of candidates in the midst of a mid-season crisis; do that and, with a schedule so crowded, another six points could have slipped by in the time it takes to conduct the interviews.
‘Instead of taking two days to do the search it might take two weeks,’ insists Cyrus Mehri, an employmentdiscrimination lawyer from Washington DC and a Rooney Rule champion.
What he fails to recognise is that, in England, those two weeks could equate to 12 points, which last season was the difference, in Birmingham City’s case, between relegation and ruin and eighth place in the Barclays Premier League.
The Rooney Rule has been in operation in the NFL since 2003, a beacon of affirmative action.
Steered through by Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the rule decrees that a minority candidate must be interviewed for all vacant head coaching and senior football operation posts.
When the rule was introduced there was just one minority coach in the NFL; now there are eight. Practising what he preached, Rooney gave the Pittsburgh job to Mike Tomlin who, in 2009, became the youngest coach to win the Super Bowl.
The man who gave the rule its name: Dan Rooney holds the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft following the Steelers' win in Super Bowl XL
As just two of 92 coaches in England’s professional football leagues are black, there is increasing pressure to introduce an equivalent law.
Mehri is working with Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and Richard Bevan of the League Managers Association, to push it through.
And two in 92 is a desperately poor percentage, clearly. Those campaigning for change have their hearts in the right place. Yet for the statistic to be a result of prejudice we first have to believe one thing: that the chairmen of football clubs would deliberately undermine their chances of success rather than employ a black man.
This goes against the circumstantial evidence which suggests that if Colonel Gaddafi knew how to spring a decent offside trap, there would be club owners attempting to smuggle him out of Libya ahead of the rebel forces in time for next Saturday’s home game.
Lee Hughes went to prison for causing death by dangerous driving and is currently the striker for Notts County, and in case anyone is figuring it is just white guys that catch the breaks, Marlon King has been convicted of 14 offences since 1997 including sexual assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and signed a three-year contract with Birmingham this summer.
Football clubs become a broad church when weighing pragmatic issues against moral ones. So why would an owner close executive positions off to 15 per cent of the population? It makes no sense. There has to be more to it than institutionalised racism, just as there is a reason educational statistics differ wildly between Asian and African Caribbean communities.
The percentage of male Asian pupils obtaining five or more A* to C GCSE passes in 2009-10 was 75.3 per cent compared with 68.5 per cent of male pupils classed as black.
Male Indian pupils in that bracket numbered 85 per cent compared with 64.2 per cent male Afro Caribbean, the lowest success rate of any ethnic group. Educational failings cannot simply be down to discrimination, as male pupils from Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi communities are also out-performing male white children. So, just as there is concern that young Afro Caribbean men are not engaging with education, similar fears remain in football.
Chris Powell, now manager of Charlton Athletic and a former chairman of the PFA, talks of black candidates needing to be qualified for the job. ‘If not, there is no point,’ he says. ‘I want to strike the right balance, qualified people, black and white.’
Striking a balance: Chris Powell
Between 2002 and 2008, the number of black male coaches obtaining the top qualification required for professional management, the UEFA Pro License, numbered less than 10. At the end of that period, special dispensation had to be sought for the most high-profile black English coach, Paul Ince, when he arrived at Blackburn Rovers.
Despite being a manager for two years, and working at two professional clubs, Macclesfield Town and Milton Keynes Dons, Ince had not obtained the necessary qualification.
The majority of black coaches who have the Pro Licence are in work, and out of it, just like any white man in what is a precarious profession.
Eddie Newton was Roberto Di Matteo’s coach at West Bromwich Albion last season, and left the club when Di Matteo did. Damien Matthew, his old Chelsea team-mate, is first-team coach at Charlton. Noel Blake is coach of England’s Under 19 team.
In 2008, Chris Ramsey was interviewed in the magazine When Saturday Comes bemoaning his lack of opportunities in England, despite holding a Pro License.
Subsequently, he became head of player development at Tottenham Hotspur’s academy. That is a good job. It may not be as good as managing Tottenham, but there are a lot of UEFA Pro License holders who are working as coaches and support staff. Ramsey’s role is no insult.
It is easy to use racism as an excuse for lack of opportunity. Andrew Cole, late of Manchester United, England and being called Andy, said there was a lost generation of black footballers who could have become coaches. No doubt he feels he is among them.
Drawing a blank: Andrew Cole has no coaching qualifications
Yet has Cole got his UEFA Pro Licence? No. He’s now working as an ambassador for Manchester United, so hardly in obscurity, Cole explained: ‘Sir Alex Ferguson has been absolutely brilliant with me. He keeps telling me to get my badges done, but is there going to be a job for me at the end of the tunnel? I’m honestly not sure.’
So instead of passing exams to find out, Cole complains at not getting an opportunity and his stunted career becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ian Wright made similar claims eight years ago. He said he had no chance of becoming England manager because of his colour. It transpired the Football Association were so keen to involve Wright in long-term strategy that they had made an offer to fast track him through their coaching courses. Naturally, he refused.
‘What’s the point?’ Wright asked. ‘I would never be allowed to get to the top as a coach. They didn’t give Brian Clough the job as England manager because he was too outspoken — I am outspoken and black.’ Not to mention unqualified, by choice.
Cole says he helped Lee Clark at Huddersfield Town last year, but was not given a job because the club could not afford him. ‘I didn’t ask for anything financially, so how could they know that they couldn’t afford me,’ he says.
Well, because experience suggests there is a going rate for former Manchester United and England players from the Premier League era, and Huddersfield presumed Cole was out of their league. It happens in every occupation. Do not bother approaching him, we cannot afford it. Cole could always have put them straight, or taken action that would tell the world he is serious about coaching: like getting his badges.
The absence of black advancement is hardly just football’s problem. Katharine Birbalsingh, the former head teacher now an outspoken critic of state education, said that when she searched for a state schooled black investment banker or corporate lawyer to come in and inspire her children, the visitor would invariably be American or African. ‘Black, state-educated professionals are rare in Britain,’ she concluded.
Broadcaster Lindsay Johns noted that when Barack Obama was elected in America, the black man chosen to put the event into perspective on BBC’s Newsnight was Dizzee Rascal. Mr Rascal, as Jeremy Paxman called him, is an intelligent man, but there was no ready equivalent of the Harvard-educated Obama, no instantly familiar black lawyer or intellectual. Bonnie Greer, deployed on Question Time against the British National Party leader Nick Griffin, is American. Birbalsingh grew up in Canada.
The stories penned in support of the Rooney Rule are almost all written by white journalists. If the diversity we witness on the pitch is not reflected in the club executive, it is not seen in the press box, either. And while the signs are that minorities will be better represented in the next generation of football writers, the by-lines suggest that, once again, it is the Asian not Afro Caribbean communities that are making inroads.
Poster boy: Mike Tomlin
This is a deep problem, not solved by tokenism. Tomlin is the Rooney Rule poster boy but equally common in the NFL are cases such as that of Leslie Frazier, who was persuaded to take an interview with the Seattle Seahawks when he was defensive co-ordinator of Minnesota Vikings. The job then went to Pete Carroll as all knew it would.
Frazier, now deservedly Vikings head coach, was used to fulfil an obligation. What would be the point in luring Ramsey from his post at Tottenham, distracting him and building false hope, if there was already a name that was top of the list, the deal as good as done? Has the Rooney Rule even made significant difference?
Right now, approximately 20 per cent of professional footballers in the English league are black. So there should be roughly 18 black coaches in 92, and there are two, a shortfall of 16. But 75 per cent of NFL players are black, meaning proportionally there should be 24 out of 32 black coaches, and there are eight, giving a shortfall of — guess what — 16.
Interesting, too, that the LMA should be so staunchly behind this plan, when Arsene Wenger is the only foreign manager to be voted Manager of the Year. Jose Mourinho did not get it for back-to-back league titles, nor did Carlo Ancelotti for doing the Double in his first season in England. Maybe Labour MP George Wigg was right in 1949 when he argued that to some Conservatives ‘the wogs begin at Calais’.
The Rooney Rule has played some part, but the key to minority advancement in America began far earlier with a black middle class emphasis on education. Yes change is needed, but beyond the boardroom, too.
Alternately, we can continue pretending that chairmen have little desire for success, and the reason Andrew Cole is not a coach is his black skin, not the blank space on his wall where his certificate should be.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/foo...#ixzz1XlUwbdKd
Last updated at 9:02 AM on 12th September 2011
The worst team in the history of the NFL were the 2008 Detroit Lions. They lost all 16 games and conceded 517 points with a differential of minus 249.
This eclipsed a previous record, held by the 1976 Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who lost every match in a 14-game season, with an aggregate losing margin of 20 points. The Buccaneers averaged nine points per game and failed to score on five occasions.
‘What do you think of the execution of the offense?’ coach John McKay was asked after a particularly abysmal showing. ‘I’m in favour of it,’ he replied.
And do you know what then happened to the 2009 Detroit Lions and the 1977 Tampa Bay Buccaneers as a result? Nothing. The Lions began that season in the same group, the NFC North, playing the same teams, while the Buccaneers simply moved from AFC West to NFC Central, which was not a demotion merely geographical reorganisation.
Losing streak: Ramzee Robinson and Kalvin Pearson ponder the final defeat of the 2008 season at the hands of the Green Bay PackersThat is the difference between sport in America and sport in Britain: relegation. If a franchise is not pulling its weight economically, it may fold; but if the team is useless all that happens is it receives first pick in the college drafts for next season in the hope of levelling the competition.
American sport can engage in social engineering exercises such as the Rooney Rule, therefore, because the whole contest is subject to engineering.
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Over here, the consequences of failure are rather more drastic, like £30million down the chute or the threatened existence of a club. Faced with such serious consequences, chairmen do not always have time to draw up a socially progressive list of candidates in the midst of a mid-season crisis; do that and, with a schedule so crowded, another six points could have slipped by in the time it takes to conduct the interviews.
‘Instead of taking two days to do the search it might take two weeks,’ insists Cyrus Mehri, an employmentdiscrimination lawyer from Washington DC and a Rooney Rule champion.
What he fails to recognise is that, in England, those two weeks could equate to 12 points, which last season was the difference, in Birmingham City’s case, between relegation and ruin and eighth place in the Barclays Premier League.
The Rooney Rule has been in operation in the NFL since 2003, a beacon of affirmative action.
Steered through by Dan Rooney, owner of the Pittsburgh Steelers, the rule decrees that a minority candidate must be interviewed for all vacant head coaching and senior football operation posts.
When the rule was introduced there was just one minority coach in the NFL; now there are eight. Practising what he preached, Rooney gave the Pittsburgh job to Mike Tomlin who, in 2009, became the youngest coach to win the Super Bowl.
The man who gave the rule its name: Dan Rooney holds the Vince Lombardi Trophy aloft following the Steelers' win in Super Bowl XLAs just two of 92 coaches in England’s professional football leagues are black, there is increasing pressure to introduce an equivalent law.
Mehri is working with Gordon Taylor, head of the Professional Footballers’ Association, and Richard Bevan of the League Managers Association, to push it through.
And two in 92 is a desperately poor percentage, clearly. Those campaigning for change have their hearts in the right place. Yet for the statistic to be a result of prejudice we first have to believe one thing: that the chairmen of football clubs would deliberately undermine their chances of success rather than employ a black man.
This goes against the circumstantial evidence which suggests that if Colonel Gaddafi knew how to spring a decent offside trap, there would be club owners attempting to smuggle him out of Libya ahead of the rebel forces in time for next Saturday’s home game.
Lee Hughes went to prison for causing death by dangerous driving and is currently the striker for Notts County, and in case anyone is figuring it is just white guys that catch the breaks, Marlon King has been convicted of 14 offences since 1997 including sexual assault and assault occasioning actual bodily harm, and signed a three-year contract with Birmingham this summer.
Football clubs become a broad church when weighing pragmatic issues against moral ones. So why would an owner close executive positions off to 15 per cent of the population? It makes no sense. There has to be more to it than institutionalised racism, just as there is a reason educational statistics differ wildly between Asian and African Caribbean communities.
The percentage of male Asian pupils obtaining five or more A* to C GCSE passes in 2009-10 was 75.3 per cent compared with 68.5 per cent of male pupils classed as black.
Male Indian pupils in that bracket numbered 85 per cent compared with 64.2 per cent male Afro Caribbean, the lowest success rate of any ethnic group. Educational failings cannot simply be down to discrimination, as male pupils from Chinese, Indian and Bangladeshi communities are also out-performing male white children. So, just as there is concern that young Afro Caribbean men are not engaging with education, similar fears remain in football.
Chris Powell, now manager of Charlton Athletic and a former chairman of the PFA, talks of black candidates needing to be qualified for the job. ‘If not, there is no point,’ he says. ‘I want to strike the right balance, qualified people, black and white.’
Striking a balance: Chris PowellBetween 2002 and 2008, the number of black male coaches obtaining the top qualification required for professional management, the UEFA Pro License, numbered less than 10. At the end of that period, special dispensation had to be sought for the most high-profile black English coach, Paul Ince, when he arrived at Blackburn Rovers.
Despite being a manager for two years, and working at two professional clubs, Macclesfield Town and Milton Keynes Dons, Ince had not obtained the necessary qualification.
The majority of black coaches who have the Pro Licence are in work, and out of it, just like any white man in what is a precarious profession.
Eddie Newton was Roberto Di Matteo’s coach at West Bromwich Albion last season, and left the club when Di Matteo did. Damien Matthew, his old Chelsea team-mate, is first-team coach at Charlton. Noel Blake is coach of England’s Under 19 team.
In 2008, Chris Ramsey was interviewed in the magazine When Saturday Comes bemoaning his lack of opportunities in England, despite holding a Pro License.
Subsequently, he became head of player development at Tottenham Hotspur’s academy. That is a good job. It may not be as good as managing Tottenham, but there are a lot of UEFA Pro License holders who are working as coaches and support staff. Ramsey’s role is no insult.
It is easy to use racism as an excuse for lack of opportunity. Andrew Cole, late of Manchester United, England and being called Andy, said there was a lost generation of black footballers who could have become coaches. No doubt he feels he is among them.
Drawing a blank: Andrew Cole has no coaching qualificationsYet has Cole got his UEFA Pro Licence? No. He’s now working as an ambassador for Manchester United, so hardly in obscurity, Cole explained: ‘Sir Alex Ferguson has been absolutely brilliant with me. He keeps telling me to get my badges done, but is there going to be a job for me at the end of the tunnel? I’m honestly not sure.’
So instead of passing exams to find out, Cole complains at not getting an opportunity and his stunted career becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ian Wright made similar claims eight years ago. He said he had no chance of becoming England manager because of his colour. It transpired the Football Association were so keen to involve Wright in long-term strategy that they had made an offer to fast track him through their coaching courses. Naturally, he refused.
‘What’s the point?’ Wright asked. ‘I would never be allowed to get to the top as a coach. They didn’t give Brian Clough the job as England manager because he was too outspoken — I am outspoken and black.’ Not to mention unqualified, by choice.
Cole says he helped Lee Clark at Huddersfield Town last year, but was not given a job because the club could not afford him. ‘I didn’t ask for anything financially, so how could they know that they couldn’t afford me,’ he says.
Well, because experience suggests there is a going rate for former Manchester United and England players from the Premier League era, and Huddersfield presumed Cole was out of their league. It happens in every occupation. Do not bother approaching him, we cannot afford it. Cole could always have put them straight, or taken action that would tell the world he is serious about coaching: like getting his badges.
The absence of black advancement is hardly just football’s problem. Katharine Birbalsingh, the former head teacher now an outspoken critic of state education, said that when she searched for a state schooled black investment banker or corporate lawyer to come in and inspire her children, the visitor would invariably be American or African. ‘Black, state-educated professionals are rare in Britain,’ she concluded.
Broadcaster Lindsay Johns noted that when Barack Obama was elected in America, the black man chosen to put the event into perspective on BBC’s Newsnight was Dizzee Rascal. Mr Rascal, as Jeremy Paxman called him, is an intelligent man, but there was no ready equivalent of the Harvard-educated Obama, no instantly familiar black lawyer or intellectual. Bonnie Greer, deployed on Question Time against the British National Party leader Nick Griffin, is American. Birbalsingh grew up in Canada.
The stories penned in support of the Rooney Rule are almost all written by white journalists. If the diversity we witness on the pitch is not reflected in the club executive, it is not seen in the press box, either. And while the signs are that minorities will be better represented in the next generation of football writers, the by-lines suggest that, once again, it is the Asian not Afro Caribbean communities that are making inroads.
Poster boy: Mike TomlinThis is a deep problem, not solved by tokenism. Tomlin is the Rooney Rule poster boy but equally common in the NFL are cases such as that of Leslie Frazier, who was persuaded to take an interview with the Seattle Seahawks when he was defensive co-ordinator of Minnesota Vikings. The job then went to Pete Carroll as all knew it would.
Frazier, now deservedly Vikings head coach, was used to fulfil an obligation. What would be the point in luring Ramsey from his post at Tottenham, distracting him and building false hope, if there was already a name that was top of the list, the deal as good as done? Has the Rooney Rule even made significant difference?
Right now, approximately 20 per cent of professional footballers in the English league are black. So there should be roughly 18 black coaches in 92, and there are two, a shortfall of 16. But 75 per cent of NFL players are black, meaning proportionally there should be 24 out of 32 black coaches, and there are eight, giving a shortfall of — guess what — 16.
Interesting, too, that the LMA should be so staunchly behind this plan, when Arsene Wenger is the only foreign manager to be voted Manager of the Year. Jose Mourinho did not get it for back-to-back league titles, nor did Carlo Ancelotti for doing the Double in his first season in England. Maybe Labour MP George Wigg was right in 1949 when he argued that to some Conservatives ‘the wogs begin at Calais’.
The Rooney Rule has played some part, but the key to minority advancement in America began far earlier with a black middle class emphasis on education. Yes change is needed, but beyond the boardroom, too.
Alternately, we can continue pretending that chairmen have little desire for success, and the reason Andrew Cole is not a coach is his black skin, not the blank space on his wall where his certificate should be.
Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/sport/foo...#ixzz1XlUwbdKd
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