IT used to be said that British managers do not get a chance to manage in the Premier League. They do. But only certain ones, and only at certain clubs. For a select band of aging British bosses, the next job arrives almost as soon as the last one has ended.

There was a depressing predictability to Everton’s decision to appoint Sam Allardyce this week, just as there had been to West Brom’s move for Alan Pardew a week or so after jettisoning Tony Pulis. The next time a lower-ranking Premier League team sack their boss, you can bet it will be Pulis who is next in line.

Earlier this season, David Moyes clambered back into management at West Ham despite having been an abject failure in his previous post at Sunderland. Go back a little further, and it was Roy Hodgson getting yet another chance at Crystal Palace.

Four British bosses, four plum jobs in the Premier League. All are over 50 – their average age is 60 and three quarters – and between them, they boast 17 previous spells at clubs in the English top-flight. Both Allardyce and Pardew are on to their sixth job with Premier League employers; Moyes is the relative novice of the group with three Premier League postings under his belt. None boasts a major trophy on their CV.

In terms of the clubs they have managed, it is Crystal Palace and West Ham that come closest to completing the set.  Palace have had Hodgson, Pardew and Allardyce in their managers’ chair – they have also employed Pulis for good measure – while the Hammers have called on Pardew, Allardyce and now Moyes. Welcome to the managerial merry-go-round that keeps on stopping in all the same places.

The clubs’ justification for their lack of imagination when appointing managers is that the financial impact of dropping out of the Premier League means they have to go with the tried-and-tested when they find themselves at risk of relegation.

The days of clubs happily yo-yoing between the top two divisions and trying to gradually build for the future are long gone, in all but a very small handful of cases. Most Premier League owners now regard relegation as the footballing equivalent of Armageddon, and are therefore extremely risk-averse when their club’s top-flight status is perceived to be at risk.

Allardyce and Hodgson might not have achieved much in terms of actually winning things, but their track record for keeping clubs in the top-flight has been established over a period of years. They come in, make a side hard to beat by organising them defensively, scrape enough points together to clamber to survival, then find themselves out on their ear when they are unable to take the next step of engineering a sustainable improvement.

Allardyce might well keep Everton up this season – especially if Wayne Rooney continues to play as he did on Wednesday night – but I dare bet that by the middle of next season, he is being forced out of Goodison Park with Everton fans complaining about their side’s unattractive football. Moyes faces a much tougher task in terms of keeping West Ham in the Premier League, but even if he achieves it, I’d be amazed if he was still in his current position at the end of next season.

When are clubs going to realise that scrambling to survival under a ‘fire-fighter’ boss is merely putting off having to address a much deeper problem? There might be a short-term gain, but look beyond the end of the season, and the issues that resulted in a relegation battle in the first place will still need addressing.

To tackle those issues successfully, you need a different type of boss. The saddest part about the latest tranche of appointments is that there are British bosses out there who might enable the likes of West Ham, Crystal Palace and West Brom to start enacting meaningful change.

Sean Dyche, for example, who took Burnley down, brought them back up, and has subsequently developed a side that deservedly sit in sixth position in the table after Wednesday’s win at Bournemouth. Why on earth haven’t any of this season’s Premier League strugglers zoned in on Dyche as the ideal man to turn their club around?

Everton considered him briefly, but quickly opted to look elsewhere. Perhaps it would have been extremely difficult to prise him out of Turf Moor, but here is an astute, upwardly-mobile coach who has been barred from taking the next step forward in his career because clubs either do not see his potential or do not regard establishing Burnley in the top half of the Premier League as any kind of an achievement.

Eddie Howe is not having the best of seasons at Bournemouth, but the 40-year-old has performed heroics in the last few years to create a situation where 15th in the Premier League is regarded as a poor position for a club that were playing in League Two as recently as eight seasons ago. There have been 20 managerial appointments in the Premier League since March 2016 – it is staggering that Howe has not made the shortlist for any of them.

Away from the English top-flight, Chris Wilder has performed heroics at Sheffield United, but does not appear to be regarded as ‘Premier League material’. Michael O’Neill transformed Northern Ireland on the international stage, but isn’t on the radar of top-flight clubs looking for a boss. Derek McInnes has carved out quite a reputation in Scotland with Aberdeen, but might as well be the invisible man when it comes to discussions about Premier League jobs in this country.

It is a sad situation that means a generation of young British managers are being prevented from progressing their careers. While they work away diligently with their current employers, the likes of Allardyce, Pardew and Moyes line their pockets at yet another Premier League club. The same old faces leaving behind the same old mess.


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THE second Ashes Test begins in Adelaide on Saturday, but over in Brisbane, another England vs Australia encounter deserves more exposure than it is getting.

This has been a cracking Rugby League World Cup, with Saturday’s final set to provide a fitting climax. The Kangaroos will deservedly start as favourites, but England have built steadily through the tournament and found a way to scrape past Tonga in a see-saw semi-final.

If, and it is a big if, they are crowned world champions for the first time since Great Britain triumphed in an early inception of the World Cup in 1972, it will be the biggest thing ever to happen to rugby league in this country.