Times Article on Levein - Well worth a read

[davieG]

The Sunday Times - Football

March 13, 2005

21st Century Fox

DOUGLAS ALEXANDER

Craig Levein admits he is invigorated after moving from Hearts to Leicester, who face Blackburn in an FA Cup quarter-final today

A Cup run can be camouflage for a club. Leicester City may be malfunctioning in the Championship right now, but the prospect of a semi-final in the FA Cup for the first time since 1982 is obscuring that mediocrity. Craig Levein, their manager, is not allowing himself to be fooled though. With typical pragmatism, he views the club’s progress to today’s quarter-final at Blackburn, and perhaps beyond, mainly as a source of extra revenue for the revamp that will be required this summer to turn them into serious contenders for a return to the Premiership.

With attendances below the average expected for league games, the shortfall must be made up somewhere in the strict budgets the club are working to after their brush with administration two years ago. Then the players were chipping in a tenner-a-head to keep on their laundry lady. The Premiership parachute payment of £7m-per-season over two years has helped soften the blow of last summer’s relegation, but Levein must still find a way of shaving £ 4m from the wage bill over the next few months.

The 41-year-old could be forgiven a weary sense of deja vu as getting more points for less pounds was his lot at Hearts, but instead he is invigorated. He is glad to be out of the grind of the Premierleague with four games a season against each club, and enlivened by the new challenge he felt he badly needed.

“Honestly, it’s a million times better,” he says, sitting in his office at the club’s training ground, a pocket of green amid the red-brick rows of a Leicester suburb. “The four games a season was the reason I left. It was not just as a coach, I had been there (Scotland) as a player since 1983. The only job up there better than the Hearts job is Celtic or Rangers and I didn’t think I had any chance of getting those with the managers that were in place. Don’t get me wrong, I loved Hearts, but it’s different down here. I wouldn’t say the people are less passionate but they are less intrusive. You go out in Leicester and nobody bats an eyelid. Everybody is so polite. At our games the supporters don’t go daft. At Tynecastle if we were drawing 0-0 at half-time we would get slaughtered.”

The flow of enthusiasm is interrupted only by the occasional knocks on his door. Jim McCahill, his chairman, wants a word, as does Nikos Dabizas, one of his players. Levein started to look south seriously a year ago, instructing John Colquhoun, his agent and former teammate, to keep his ear to the ground. The proposed takeover of Hearts by Vladimir Romanov, a Lithuanian millionaire, did not deflect him. “I was fed up with all the cutbacks and demonstrations (against leaving Tynecastle for Murrayfield) at Hearts. That wore me down eventually because, no matter how well we did, the headlines were about Murrayfield or Chris Robinson (Hearts’ former chief executive) getting attacked or all that stuff. With these new people coming, I still couldn’t see that changing.

“It’s so different down here. We have already been to Elland Road. As a kid, I watched Leeds playing there. Portman Road, where you watched Ipswich. West Ham. Just going to these places, walking in the door, seeing the history.

Nottingham Forest. It excites me just to look at the fixture list. Coming here has opened my eyes a little bit, made me work much harder. I don’t know if I got lazy, I don’t know if that’s the right word, but the place ran itself at Hearts. I knew every player in Scotland, even in the lower divisions. I think we were still improving but one of the things that was concerning me was that I kind of saw things being dismantled when I thought we should be bringing better quality in.”

The restless ambition in him is surely a sequel to a playing career that, while highly respectable with Hearts and Scotland, could have amounted to so much more had he not been cut down by serious knee injuries. Levein was dubbed the “next Alan Hansen” after twice winning Scotland’s young-player- of-the-year award in 1985 and 1986 and linked with a move to Liverpool, where the original version’s knees were just about to finally give out. Then Levein landed awkwardly after a header in a reserve game against Hibs and his cruciate ligament snapped as his knee buckled. He was never as good again, although his spirit and a series of operations kept him playing until 1997.

It is still easy to see why the comparisons were made with Hansen. Levein has the same intense eyes, the same dark hair and is roughly the same height. Like the Match of the Day pundit, he detests soft defending and tends to speak his mind on the subject. His obsession with getting this area of the team right is perhaps reflected by the fact that Leicester have conceded just one goal in their last three Championship matches but have also failed to score any themselves in that same sequence. With Mark Hughes having also tightened up Blackburn, a war of attrition may ensue today.

A propensity for draws (they have had 15 from their 35 league games) means Leicester are currently 18th in the Championship and not quite out of the relegation woods. Levein, though, is confident that some summer tweaking can quickly turn them into promotion candidates. “It (the Championship) is not that good. I think if you got a decent, settled squad together with plenty of energy, and defended set-pieces properly, you would be in the top six easily. We haven’t defended properly. We have lost goals to corner after corner after corner.Dion Dublin is a makeshift centre-back, he’s great in the other box but he’s just not got the awareness to do all that we ask him to do.”

Dublin, scorer of a last-minute winner at Charlton in the last round, could return from injury today but is more likely to feature in attack than defence. A lack of pace at the back is a particular concern and Levein’s heart is often in his mouth when his team are on the attack at home, such is their vulnerability to a quick counter. In their victory at The Valley, they compensated for this by sitting deep against Charlton’s pacy attack. Can it be repeated today? “We’ve got a chance,” he says simply.

Knockout adventures, albeit in the League Cup, were part of life for Leicester under Martin O’Neill but so, too, was the consistency that saw them manage four consecutive top 10 finishes in the Premiership during the charismatic Irishman’s reign. At Hearts, Levein saw his task as getting as close as he could to the standards set by O’Neill’s Celtic. It was often a thankless one and attempting to live up to his legacy at Leicester could be similarly unforgiving. Already, promising managers such as Peter Taylor and Micky Adams have struggled with it.

Taylor started well but an FA Cup quarter-final proved his undoing. Four years ago, Leicester, then fifth in the Premiership, lost 2-1 at home to Wycombe Wanderers at this stage of the tournament. Roy Essandoh, a striker who had responded to a desperate plea for players posted on Teletext, scored Wycombe’s winner with a header four minutes into stoppage time. Leicester then lost nine of their remaining 10 Premierleague matches to trundle home in 13th place. A poor start to the following season and the man previously seen as a potential England manager was out the door by October. Relegation and administration soon followed.

“Martin’s been away too long for it to be a problem for me,” says Levein. “They have had people not do so well since and that helps. The expectation that there would have been following Martin, I think Peter Taylor had that unfortunately. I like what Martin’s about. He’s a decent guy and he’s good at his job. We have had our run-ins but for the right reasons, because he believes in something and I believe in something. Fair enough. I admire his ability to sign the right players and get them to play for him. He turned Celtic around, didn’t he?” One such “run-in” came last January when the phone lines between Tynecastle and Celtic Park buzzed after John Hartson and Andy Webster clashed in an off-the-ball incident and both managers predictably defended their players to the hilt. The abrasive Webster, who Levein signed from Arbroath for £70,000 four years ago and moulded into a Scotland international, could solve his defensive headaches but would probably cost at least 10 times that amount now. He has already raided his old club for Alan Maybury and Mark de Vries, whose contracts were close to expiry and who he considers to be Premiership quality. “Maybury was man of the match for Ireland against Holland last summer. I think he can play in the Premiership, so if we go up I don’t need to look for another right- or left-back because he can play equally well both sides. De Vries scored a lot of his goals in Scotland against the Old Firm. He’s a proven goalscorer but he’s more than that, he’s a target man. He gave Jean-Alain Boumsong the biggest doing I have seen when Hearts played Rangers at Ibrox. He couldn’t handle him. I think Mark could play in the Premiership because, with what he is, no matter who you are, he is difficult to control.”

A pre-contract has also been agreed with Patrick Kisnorbo, the versatile Australian international. Stephen Hughes has arrived from Rangers, while Patrick McCarthy, from Manchester City, and Darren Kenton, on loan from Southampton, provide younger, quicker legs for that defence. Levein believes the Championship, with its 46-game season, will require a fresher squad with higher energy levels. “There are too many players in their mid-30s. I wouldn’t say they aren’t fit but they are fit for 35-year-olds. It is not quite the same as being a 25-year-old and being fit.”

In this vein, he is in the process of converting Gareth Williams, previously a stylish stroller at Nottingham Forest, into a more dynamic midfielder. “We are trying to change him from what he was at Forest, which was a sitter, into a box-to-box player, a similar thing that we tried to do with Paul Hartley at Hearts. Gareth wanted to get on it, swanny about, but we put a rocket up his backside. It’s an energetic role, it’s not a laidback ‘do it in my own time’ one in this league. He ’s now getting in touch with the strikers and he’s scored some goals. He’s got that swagger, but he’s a good boy. For next season, we will need that energy in there.”

Levein admits he is still getting up to speed with the English game himself, which involves a punishing schedule of taking in as many games as possible and a lot of time on motorways. This partly explains the signings of De Vries and Maybury, who he knows well. For today’s match he at least has a Blackburn insider in his camp. Rob Kelly, his assistant, previously worked for Rovers. “He’s been invaluable. He knows the scene in England inside out. He was at Blackburn’s academy for years and years when it came up with Damien Duff and people like that, so he knows all the kids who are now 22, 23, 24. What I have found here is it’s a bigger job, it’s a bigger thing altogether and sometimes I don’t get out to the training pitch. At Hearts that never happened, I always took the training. Rob’s a great coach and I have been using that to my advantage. My coaching maybe has more of an impact if I am not at them all the time.”

Another Premiership scalp today would be proof that he is getting his message across

[Chandler]

Sounds like the sort of man who doesn't let the grass grow under his feet. Now that he's already walked through the hallowed portals of Gresty Road, Mill Moor and er Priestfield, I don't think we should encourage him to repeat his experiences at these shrines of football - he will lose his sense of awe.

Before he has his illusions shattered about the 'polite people of Leicester' I think we should give him a helping hand on his way out of the hallowed portals of The Walkers and over the wall to you-know-where (with MDV for company if he chooses).

[Guest]

Now that he's already walked through the hallowed portals of Gresty Road, Mill Moor and er Priestfield, I don't think we should encourage him to repeat his experiences at these shrines of football - he will lose his sense of awe.

78158[/snapback]

I'm sure that was your precious Micky in charge for that one?