Cod Almighty | Diary

Pretty much every Bignot in the country has now been employed by Town

11 November 2016

Retro Diary writes: The appointment of Marcus Bignot as manager this week seems to sail through all the tests of common sense with flying colours. If it turns out to be a disaster - and who knows, I may grumble about it along the way - you won’t find me saying "I told you so", because it seems to me to be as intelligent an appointment as we could have made under the circumstances. If he came across at interview like he did during all of his subsequent press conferences, I can see why he impressed.

In appointing Bignot we have successfully avoided some of the commonest pitfalls of appointing a manager. We haven’t gone for some hoary old bloke whose only talent is shouting; who has used a chance success in the 1980s to remain in work for decades afterwards despite undergoing nothing but serial failure; and who remains in the business only to give himself a payday. And there are plenty of those.

There are also, weirdly, managers who have inordinate difficulty putting their best eleven on the pitch in the right positions, and getting them to do the simple things correctly. I’m getting the strong impression Bignot isn’t one of those either

Others will just treat the whole thing as an exercise in gaining miniscule probabilistic advantages in terms of height, physicality, directness and cheating, and finish up turning you into Lincoln. Nor is Bignot that, I don’t think.

Some managers spend the chairman’s money with gay abandon and make the club’s entire future a hostage to short-term success, knowing that they won’t be there to pick up the pieces. And do it wearing eyeliner

Some managers will spend the chairman’s money with gay abandon and make the club’s entire future a hostage to short-term success, knowing that they won’t be there to pick up the pieces. And at least one I can think of will do it wearing eyeliner. Bignot seems the very opposite of this, which is very encouraging. Well actually I don’t know about the eyeliner. No, I’m not saying he wears eyeliner. Look, I don’t care about the eyeliner, ok?

Also, we haven’t gone for an ex-player again. Now I wouldn’t ever disqualify someone just for being an ex-player if all their other credentials were good. I believe, for instance, for all sorts of reasons, that Paul Groves might have made a better fist of it second time round. But sometimes a clean break is required, and this was clearly one of those times.

In the very silly world of football management, nobody knows how good many managers really are because they don’t get long enough in the job to overcome the laws of randomness. In a profession which is set up so that one team must overcome another, it seems unfair to sack someone whose team is overcome, when both managers may be exactly as good. The normal rules of unfair dismissal don’t seem to apply, and as a consequence, most managers barely survive the honeymoon.

We all know that the huge majority of success in football can be accounted for by playing budget. This has been shown statistically over and over again. This means that the manager probably has less influence than you might think. Indeed the qualities a manager must exhibit to be a success are probably rather few. The ability to engender respect among players both old and young is an obvious must. A modicum of tactical knowhow is probably a good idea, although Kevin Keegan showed that you can get as far as England manager without it. Foremost, perhaps, is the ability to get a team fired up about a common cause, bringing everyone into the fold using psychology which differs from person to person. These, at the end of the day, are no more than the good person-management skills which tend to succeed in any profession.

Marcus Bignot was loved by his players at Solihull – that is clear. He could have taken charge of Town before the Bolton match, but chose to stay on for a final game, a high-profile cup tie, to say goodbye to his players and fans. For me, this is a great gesture. Also, when was the last time you heard a new manager say he looked forward to relocating and "getting to know the town?" If anything was going to get him off on the right foot in this of all places, that was it.

As an aside, because I know you were wondering, 'Bignot' is not a common surname. Indeed it is the 1,232,731st most common name in the world. In the UK, only one in every 27,000,000 people is called Bignot, meaning that pretty much every Bignot in the country has now been employed by Town.

The name appears to be French, which means it should probably be pronounced ‘Bean-yo’. Funny, isn’t it, how Thierry Henry and Simon Mignolet, and indeed Thomas Pinault, seem to have their names pronounced properly, while Magnay, Bignot, and for that matter Thanoj (whose pronunciation should presumably be something like “Tannoy”) get the pie and chips, mutilated English versions. It’s probably, of course, to do with how long those guys or their families have been here as to whether they’ve finally given up trying to battle that peculiar English incompetence with languages. Ok, so ‘Big-not’ it is then, although apparently you have permission to slightly soften the ‘o’. Anyway, moving on.

Tomorrow it’s Barnet, who are a team I don’t really hate or anything, but I don’t care about them either. Sorry. They have small-time written into their DNA, they play in yellow, their ground is more of a training facility than a ground, they got away with building their one proper stand taller than they had planning permission for, and their relationship with Arsenal is much too cosy.

No. Tomorrow isn’t about them, it’s all about us and our new boss. I really hope we can pack BP and replicate the atmosphere of the first game against Morecambe, and give the new gaffer a proper Grimsby welcome.

UTM