Terry Venables Times Article....

This was posted by Roller on LFW, I'm sure he doesn't mind it being re-posted over here.

It's a fine piece and shows that TV is in rude health.......brilliant manager and before that player, I'm sure we'd have gone on to better things if Barcelona hadn't come calling........just typing that seems so ludicrous these days, as if a team like Barcelona would want to pinch the manager from little old QPR....

Anyway enjoy.....


They call it La Escondida, the hideaway. It is hidden away from the Costa Blanca, up in the mountains, amid the olive groves. It is here, in the tranquillity of the Spanish countryside, that Terry Venables has found his oasis — the furthest thing he can imagine from the stresses and strains of managing England.

A retirement home? Hardly. Venables and his wife, Yvette, run a boutique hotel — Michelin-trained head chef and all. “We’re non-stop out here,” she says. “It’s morning to night, non-stop, no let-up. It’s not easy.”

So who does what? “She’s the Basil Fawlty role,” he says with a guffaw. “I’m front of house. I walk around, have a chat to people. I like it. It keeps me busy, keeps me engaged. If you want to keep going on, you’ve got to keep fit, stay busy.”

Yvette laughs at the mention of fitness. “Hang on,” she says. “We’ve got two swimming pools and you’ve never been in either of them.”

“Well, no,” he smiles. “But my health is good. You never like to say that, because I could fall off the mountain tomorrow, but I’m fit, I’m well. I feel like this is my third life. First life playing, second life managing. What do you do about the third? This is a nice existence. Busy, but nice.”
Venables turned 74 in January. Almost a decade has passed since his final job in football, as England assistant manager under Steve McClaren, but even here, in this idyllic setting, he admits he gets pangs from time to time. He says he was unexpectedly approached about a job recently — a good one, coach of one of the leading African nations, though he would prefer not to say which — and that, while his initial response was that it would be incompatible with his responsibilities, they have remained quite persistent.

Was he tempted? “I was, actually,” he says. “I believe I could still do it. Really, I do. Football has always been what I do. I watch matches now and I think, ‘If they only they would do this . . . Wouldn’t it be good to try that?’ There are so many possibilities in football.”

Venables was always a deep thinker about the game. His mind was opened during what felt like English football’s period of enlightenment in the 1960s, gathering at Cassettari’s, a greasy-spoon café around the corner from Upton Park. It was there, over egg and chips, that figures such as Malcolm Allison, Dave Sexton and John Bond would sit and discuss the latest tactical trends across Europe and how they might work in the English game. “That was exactly it,” Venables says, “moving the salt and pepper pots around the table with Malcolm Allison holding court.

“That was always the challenge for me as a manager, wherever I went in the world. I always had to work out the way to get the best out of that group of players. Sometimes I would be thinking, ‘Crikey, I still don’t know what the team is like yet’, and I would be going through the videos and then suddenly I would shout ‘Yippee!’ and say to Yvette, ‘I’ve got it. I’ve got it. I know where we need to go to and what need to do to get there.’ ”

A classic example would be his experience at Euro ’96, where he urged his England team to cast off its tactical straitjacket and to embrace different systems; he had started, two years earlier, with an unfamiliar “Christmas tree” formation and ended up progressing, via 4-3-3, to the least conventional type of 4-4-2 and of course 3-5-2, deploying three central defenders, as indeed Gareth Southgate, one of his players at that tournament, now the England manager, did against Germany on Wednesday night.

“Great lad, Gareth,” Venables says. “He’s sensible, intelligent. I used to pick him out for things in training. I wanted him to add to what he was able to do. He liked to carry the ball out of defence, but when he first came into the squad, he would do it too quickly. I said to him, ‘You’re going so quickly, in a straight line, that you look like you’re running down a hill after the ball. You’re going so quick, you’re actually helping the opposition.’

“We worked out that if he did it another way, slowing it down, drawing the opposition towards him, making a half-turn, he could make a real difference to our attacking play.”

A wistful look comes over Venables as he casts his mind back to Euro ’96. “It was the most beautiful summer,” he says. “The football that we played, against Holland, against Germany, it was amazing. The feeling we had at Wembley, it was beautiful. We beat Holland 4-1, but we were just as good against Germany in the semi-final. We did everything but score the winner. Extra-time, I can still see it now . . . ”

Paul Gascoigne sliding in, a stud’s length from scoring the “golden goal” that would have taken England to the final? “That’s the one,” he said. “Gazza, my lovely boy. He deserved to score, but it wasn’t to be. And then penalties and . . . Gareth missed one, the bugger. No, I’m joking. It was hard on him. Anyone could miss a penalty. It speaks volumes for him that he was willing to take it when others were too nervous to take one. But . . . penalties again. Same as the European Cup final [in 1986 when his Barcelona team lost to Steaua Bucharest].” He puts on his Marlon Brando voice. “I coulda been a contender, Charlie.”

He is laughing. “But as everyone always says to me, ‘Behind that mask . . . ,’ ” he says. “I tell them, ‘Well just take the mask away and see what you’ve got.’ ”

Venables believes Southgate, whom he also coached at Middlesbrough, will do a “really, really good job” as England manager, but to make a real success of the job would be to buck a trend dating back to 1966 — or even further, as Venables sees it.
“We have had fantastic individual players in England,” he says. “Go back to 1950. Stanley Matthews, Tom Finney, all those great players went to Brazil for the World Cup and they got beaten [by the United States]. You go from the 1950s right the way through, all those fantastic players, and with the exception of one tournament, they couldn’t win for England.”

Why? “My feeling is that too often they wanted to be individual players, just like they were when they were kids with mum and dad watching,” he says. “When they went back to their clubs, they wanted to show, ‘Look, I’m a player. I’m a star.’ Well, as I see it, you don’t get ‘stars’ in football. You get people who win and who deserve it because they do it — above all else — with each other. I can’t stand when people want to be the individual. You do that and all you’re doing is letting everyone down.”

He is not naming names or even referring to one generation — for example the one that, under McClaren and himself, failed to reach Euro 2008 — rather than another. He believes it has been a common thread in English football history, which is damning. Rather than claim credit for finding a system in which individualism was curbed in 1996, he suggests the greatest strength of that squad was the personalities involved. He reels them off. “Seaman, Neville, Southgate, Adams, Pearce, Gascoigne, Ince, Anderton, Platt, McManaman, Shearer, Sheringham . . .” he says. “That team had leaders. Inner strength. Smart leaders, too. And they’re like gold dust.

“I watch football with people and they’ll say to me, ‘Cor, look at him. He’s a good player.’ ‘Who? Him? No he’s not.’ ‘Look at him, he’s dribbling around. He’s a really good player.’ ‘No he’s not going anywhere. He’s just enjoying himself.’ I’m not chiding anyone here, but the thing is that any player can look good on the ball when the pressure’s off. Anyone can play football over the park. You need to be able to do it under pressure. That’s where you need your strong personalities, your leaders, your players who can spot when one of their team-mates is struggling and who can paddle even harder to get that guy through.”

Recent England teams have invariably lacked that quality. When up that creek, they have often found themselves without a paddle. Venables was watching at his London home, aghast, as England disintegrated at the hands of Iceland at Euro 2016. “You could see it just slipping away,” he says. “No disrespect to Iceland, but they were what we used to call hammer-throwers, weren’t they? But they did it. They stopped our players. Credit to them. They did really well.”

Other England managers have talked about a culture of fear. “That has always been a problem,” he says. “Can you take the pressure? That’s where you need your leaders, your strong personalities. It’s not just about clenching your fist and giving people a bollocking, although you need your players who can do that. It’s about being strong enough to play under pressure and to get on the ball and pass it, pass it, pass it. Not everyone is. But if you get that right, if you’ve got the players who will do that, you won’t be too far away, my son. That’s what we had in Euro ’96. We didn’t have that fear.”
We keep coming back to the summer of 1996. It is a constant reference point for Venables — inevitably so. He wishes he had had more than one tournament as England manager, wishes he had been able to take that young squad to the ’98 World Cup, by which time David Beckham, Paul Scholes and Michael Owen were also on the scene. “I was pleased to get the chance to do what I did, but, yeah, it would have been nice, all those young players coming through,” he says.
Venables never saw eye to eye with the FA hierarchy. He felt that Noel White and Peter Swales, on the international committee, were always against him. He is unwilling to go over that old ground — or to revisit the subject of Alan Sugar, with whom he clashed so disastrously and so publicly during their time at Tottenham Hotspur. He rejects the suggestion that he had fingers in too many pies, that his interests in the business side of the game, even working in an executive role at QPR early in his managerial career, became a distraction from his true vocation. “Coaching was what I did,” he says.
These days, despite certain pangs for the touchline, La Escondida is what he does. He loves it. Alan Shearer came out to stay while filming a BBC documentary last year. “When I came here, I tried to see if I could get Gazza to come and stay for a few days,” Venables says. “We’ve spoken on the phone from time to time. He was a wonderful player, the most fantastic player — with all the problems that he had — that I’ve ever seen. I still love him. I could just see him out here, you know, kicking stones down the road . . .”

Venables smiles once more. Whatever those slight regrets, life is great. He “coulda been a contender”, he feels, but he took England an awful lot closer to glory than any man alive.

 

Thanks for posting Tramore, a good read.

 

Ditto. I struggle to think of a better Manager, of either QPR or England anyway.

 

England no
Qpr stock, jago, sexton.

 

“Seaman, Neville, Southgate, Adams, Pearce, Gascoigne, Ince, Anderton, Platt, McManaman, Shearer, Sheringham . . .”

what a team that was

 

What isn't widely reported is the role Venables played at QPR as a player, he was doing quite a bit of coaching behind the scenes with Jago and put the foundations of our style of play in place from our promotion season until he left us in 1974. You just wonder how far he might have taken us if Barcelona hadn't poached him...

 

Horses for courses I'm afraid. Alec Stock untested If he were available today most on here would sniff and tell him that we'd call him. There are more than enough on here who would reject him on the basis of lack of experience of managing a Premier league team in the same way they don't accept either Warnock or Holloway. Sexton great provided he doesn't have to build the team himself and can work with what's been handed down to him. Jago, if I recall had the meanest of mean defences in his first season and then went all out to create an attacking force on the basis that entertainment was the be all and end all. Deserves credit for creating a team when we had been a one man band. IMHO all three would have struggled in the modern game. For sentimental reasons however all three together with Venables, and Gerry Francis would always be my favourite managers because of what they have meant to this club and what each has given us in their brief time at the helm. You can stick your Redknapps and Hugheses where the sun don't shine

 

My comment was that I can't think of a better Manager of us or England than El Tel. We've had some great ones in Colin, Sexton, Jago, Stock and Venables. I don't know who was best for the reasons you give, they were all brilliant for us and it's hard to say anyone was the one best. Coin and Venables had huge success as well other places. Sexton achievements with us were the best.