An imaginary stadium's modelled and rendered.
I’ve never been a fan of the phrase ‘there’s no I in team.’ To me, that’s nonsense and as far as Sunderland are concerned there is a stand-out example in Jack Clarke.
Which is why it is worrying that his agent Ian Harte has suggested he hopes the winger leaves Sunderland in the summer. Everyone knows Clarke provides the team with individual brilliance.
Yes he does what he does inside a structure. But nobody is going to tell him not to stray off beam if he can conjure up the kind of goal he did against Plymouth Argyle, now a regular feature. He added his 15th goal against Birmingham last weekend. Hopefully he will do it again when the Black Cats play Swansea City, next.
A manager can have all the structure in place they want. They can have all the analytical data at their disposal. The sports science team can have their say. You can play in a shape with hardworking individuals and compete and everyone can ‘put a shift in.’ But individual flair can prove the difference between success or failure. For teams and managers.
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Managers are judged on results. They have to win games and to do that they need good players. A manager can be made to look a better one just because of one or two individuals in their team who do something outrageous. Just ask Pep Guardiola whether he could have done what he did at Barcelona without Messi, Javi, Iniesta and the like.
Let’s look at it another way. In Stoke City’s days under the pragmatic Tony Pulis, imagine if his chairman said to him, ‘we are going to give you Louis Suarez, David Villa and Cristiano Ronaldo.’ Dear old Tony would never have turned around and said, ‘sorry, but they won’t fit into my work ethic.’
He’d snap the bloke’s hand off and suddenly become a better manager, with a higher win percentage.
Without wanting to get too far into the realms of fantasy, if I, or anyone reading this, was manager of Barcelona at their peak, say 2010, they could have sat in the dressing room with a big fat cigar during games and said, ‘do what you did last week lads, and make sure you give the ball to Lionel.’ We could have heard the roars for each goal and just taken an extra puff as a reward. What difference did having someone on the bench make when talking about a team that no one could get the ball off?
Go to the other extreme, the dads who relive their youth through their sons/daughters and manage, say, an U10s team. There is one player running rings around everybody else and is obviously three levels above the rest. He/she scores six goals every game. The manager just stands there taking the plaudits when his input can be minimal.
A team without individual flair is like a Christmas tree without lights, a birthday cake without candles, or Sunderland without Jack Clarke.
The goal against Plymouth was special and had little to do with who was sitting in the dugout. Trai Hume’s fantastic cross-field pass would have rolled out of touch without Clarke’s intervention. From where he received the ball, near the left corner flag, he had no right to score. Yet he weaved his way to the edge of the penalty area, threw a little dummy, made himself room for a curling shot and found the net with unerring accuracy. Having a player in your team who can produce what was essentially a goal out of nothing is crucial if you want to be a successful club.
