da cassino online： One of the recurring themes throughout the second portion of the Premier League’s 25-year history has been the miraculous inconsistency of manager Alan Pardew.
da wazamba： The 56-year-old has managed four clubs in the top flight and despite recording a top-half finish with three who would all be more than pleased with that final standing next season – Newcastle United, Crystal Palace and West Ham – he went on to leave all of them on rather unceremonious terms. The other club, meanwhile, Charlton Athletic, he left just a matter of months prior to their relegation to League One.
Indeed, there are few managers quite like Alan Pardew, whose results are so polarised he’s often touted as a future England manager, only to be abruptly sacked six months later following a dismal run of defeats.
In fact, the two clubs he’s recorded his highest-ever Premier League finishes with – West Ham in 2005/06 when they also reached the FA Cup final and Newcastle United when they almost qualified for the Champions League in 2011/12 – are also where he’s suffered his biggest humiliations. He’s overseen Newcastle’s longest losing run in the Premier League to date, six games, and the second-longest losing run in West Ham’s history, just one shy of their nine consecutive defeats all the way back in 1932.
The Pardew polarisation is perhaps highlighted best by the modest number of draws throughout his Premier League career, just 21% of all his top-flight results to date. That’s incredibly unusual for a mid-table manager; to give some comparison, Steve McClaren has drawn 26%, Tony Pulis has drawn 29% and Sam Allardyce, David Moyes and Mark Hughes have all drawn 27%.
Perhaps that’s not such a significant margin at first glance, but it can make a real difference over the course of a season, let alone an entire tenure, and it also gives an insight into Pardew’s mindset – he’s an all-or-nothing manager ever-reluctant to settle for a point. Whether that’s a commendable or naïve strategy remains open debate, although most would argue the five contemporaries mentioned above have all enjoyed better, more successful careers than Pardew thus far.
However, to diagnose Pardew’s infamous streakiness as simply an entrenched desire to win would be to ignore a telling trend – the first half of Pardew’s managerial spells are always far more successful and positive than the second. Of course, that’s not exactly bizarre; most managerial sackings in the Premier League are a consequence of results taking a significant downturn, so most managers will fare worse during the second half of their tenures.
But even so, the differences are quite staggering in Pardew’s case. Looking at the four clubs he’s managed in the Premier League (although not exclusively using top-flight results), Pardew’s win rate drops by 11%, his lose rate rises by 13% – in total, that’s a 24% shift – his longest losing streak is larger, his biggest defeat is by a larger margin and his biggest win is by a smaller margin when combining the second halves of those spells.
The only exception is a seven-game winning run with West Ham during the second half of the 2005/06 season which ended in the famous FA Cup final with Liverpool. But once again, that only further highlights Pardew’s inconsistency; seven months later, he recorded the biggest losing streak of his career, eight games, with essentially the same team at the same club – in fact, it had been made even stronger with the arrivals of Carlos Tevez and Javier Mascherano after the World Cup in Germany. Two months on from that horrendous streak, not to mention just six months after reaching the FA Cup final, Pardew was sacked.
In some ways, Pardew is a victim of his own successes. As much as it’s a question of how poorly he performs during the second half of his tenures, how well he performs during the first half is equally mystifying – pushing a largely unspectacular Newcastle side to 5th place, an even less talented West Ham team to the FA Cup final the year after promotion and obtaining a tenth-placed finish with a Crystal Palace outfit that looked nailed on for relegation under Neil Warnock at the start of that season.
His teams reach a standard far beyond their actual means so when that honeymoon period comes to an end, the sudden drop in form and results seems even more staggering than perhaps it actually is. After all, for all the criticism Pardew received at Newcastle, he actually finished in the top half twice in four years and only spent six matchdays in the relegation zone. Likewise, West Ham actually spent as many matchdays at the top of the table as in the relegation zone during the 2006/07 campaign – one apiece – before sacking Pardew in December. Palace, meanwhile, sacked Pardew following narrow defeats to Chelsea and Manchester United when the Eagles were still a point clear of the drop line.
Nonetheless, at this point it’s clear the feel-good factor Pardew instantly brings to his new clubs proves impossible to maintain. In fact, it’s almost like an ecstasy trip – one night of pure joy and euphoria, followed by the most painful of comedowns. Whilst that’s an inevitable side effect, however, the comedown Pardew’s sides suffer seem far less natural. It’s not a steady fall back down to earth, so much as a sudden plummet from Europa League contention to relegation candidacy.
The causes remain open to interpretation. Although factually difficult to prove, there is a widely held belief of Pardew being a bit of a party animal – perhaps when results aren’t so easy to come by, that begins to rub certain players and staff the wrong way. Likewise, Pardew has an infamous knack of losing his cool on the touchline; something that rarely helps his team’s cause and once again may turn certain individuals against him. It could simply be a question of lazy tactics – not changing up his side enough and eventually becoming too predictable.
Or quite possibly, it’s a combination of all three and many factors more, the underlying theme being that Pardew becomes too settled and loses focus. It’s often said the real test of a manager isn’t how long he can go on winning for, but how quickly he can end losing runs. Based on that criteria, Pardew has a lot to learn.
For the foreseeable future, however, the true cause of Pardew’s incredible inconsistency remains one of the Premier League’s bigger mysteries, up there with who poisoned Tottenham’s lasagne and who once had the audacity to throw a pizza at Sir Alex Ferguson. The only thing for certain is what Pardew offers any Premier League chairman; a honeymoon period far longer, more exciting and more successful than most, until the wheels fall off and the engine explodes. The trick to it, as Crystal Palace found out last season, is to jump out, tuck and roll before Pardew takes you off the edge of a cliff.
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