In his exclusive column for CaughtOffside, former Aston Villa attacker Stan Collymore discusses some of football’s biggest talking points, including which team has had the best transfer window, is Kieran McKenna showing his naivety at Ipswich, should Chelsea players sue the club and much more. 

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Ridiculous Carabao Cup draw shames the game

The Carabao Cup draw was an absolute shambles. It was a loaded, managed, overseeded draw, and we are now getting to the point whereby clubs with clout are having too much say in tournaments.

It’s massively subservient to the Premier League and the Champions League and the FA Cup will end up doing it too.

We’ve got the situation even as low as the National League, where U18 teams are playing senior men’s teams in their cup competition, and I just want to get back to having just one tournament somewhere where there’s 50 teams that go in a pot, they get drawn out and they play each other.

Back in 1978/79, Liverpool were champions of Europe and Nottingham Forest were the newly crowned champions of England when the draw was made for the European Cup.

Lo and behold, champions of England, Nottingham Forest, come out against defending European champions, Liverpool, and Forest beat Liverpool over two legs in an unseeded first round.

I think the fact that we’ve gone from a very common sense European Cup draw to an artificially constructed draw, which skews the draw towards clubs in the Champions League or high end in the Premier League, is killing the game with 1000 cuts.

It’s a really bad look for the Carabao Cup, but it’s a really bad look for football in England too.

Let’s get back to at least having one or two tournaments where you have an open draw, and every smaller club up and down the country is going ‘happy days, we might actually get an opportunity to win this.’

In the meantime… the game’s gone.

Transfer window common sense has been restored

It just goes to show that for Premier League clubs this summer, there’s a lot of creative accounting gymnastics going on.

I think it’s been a lukewarm window, and I think that I’m quite happy with that. The fact that clubs are having to look at alternative ways of creating squads and having to look for more value in the market is something that we’ve all been screaming for, for years.

Now it’s happening, people seem to feel a little bit short changed because a club hasn’t spent half a billion, the Sky Sports News ticker hasn’t gone over a billion pounds for the window….

There’s a degree of the Emperor’s New Clothes about the transfer window in that fans feel you’ve got to get three, four or five big name players in during every window to compete. You don’t.

Because of the academies – where you can promote players – and because squads are big enough nowadays anyway.

I actually think that my takeaway from this transfer window is that finally there’s some sort of common sense that has come back into English football, instead of turning on Sky Sports News and concerning ourselves with how many players have come in.

That’s a very healthy thing.

Kieran McKenna needs to be more pragmatic this season

If you go into a league and you play how you want but are getting done threes and fours and fives every week, that shows you are getting punished for having philosophies and theories that don’t work in your working environment.

It’s still very early days for Kieran McKenna at Ipswich, but I think he’s found, like Vincent Kompany did after managing to get the Bayern Munich job despite getting Burnley relegated, that football club owners like managers who play exciting and entertaining football.

They like entertainment because a decade ago in the Premier League, during the old Tony Pulis days at Stoke for example, football was stale and attendances were going down. That’s not a good look when you’re in the Premier League and you’re losing money season in, season out.

So of course, now every owner of a football club wants an entertaining coach that plays entertaining football and risk laden football, but the whole point of the Premier League is to compete and to stay in the league.

That enables a club to get enough money to be able to invite better players to them and for the club to stay in the league.

So I would like to think that Kieran McKenna has more about him than just ‘I’m going to play the way that I play, regardless if we get relegated.’

The Premier League is littered with maybe managers including Paul Jewell who had a couple of seasons in the top flight, possibly thought he was going to go on and be a manager in the top flight forever and was spat out. The phone didn’t ring and he hasn’t been a manager since.

I think that what Kieran needs to do is, if he wants to be a Premier League manager with Ipswich over a period of years, or even be a Premier League manager with somebody else over a period of years, is that he’s got to play with a degree of pragmatism.

In any vocation, you accept the terrain that you’re on, and don’t just say ‘I don’t care if I’m on Mount Snowden or I’m on Mont Blanc, I’m going to wear some flip flops and shorts and a vest.’ Do that, metaphorically speaking, and you’re going to get found out.

I don’t think the manager should come out of the season with any credit whatsoever if his team are being smashed every week but if he adds a little bit of pragmatism, I think he can achieve his achieve his aims this season, and perhaps more importantly, have some longevity as a top class manager over the next 10-15 years.

I’ll be bitterly disappointed in Trent if he’s trying to force a move

I’d be really disappointed if the thought had even crossed Trent’s mind that if he starts to be a bit of a mardy arse, he’ll get a move to Real Madrid. That would lower his stock significantly, because fans generally aren’t fans of people that want out of a club that is their club.

I remember Steve McManaman’s own move to Madrid, and his reputation at Liverpool never really recovered. I think there’s always a little bit of holding your nose in Liverpool where he’s concerned, and I think that it would be an awful look for Trent.

His attitude after being subbed was probably a case of professional pride in not wanting to come off the pitch, as well as thinking (about Arne Slot) ‘who does this guy think he is.’

Slot knows he’s on camera, and just said ‘I’ve subbed you off to give you a bit of a rest, it’s a long old season.’ No big deal.

I like that and the way that Slot’s going about his business. The style of play is to keep a little bit more possession, let’s not be as gung ho, but still at times having those kind of bursts we saw with Jota, Diaz and Salah.

I know Trent won’t listen to me, but please, please, please, you are the scouser in the team, you are the totem for the club. A lot of people, young Liverpool fans, look up to you as somebody that drives them forward. You’re needed for the marathon not the sprint.

Chelsea ‘bomb squad’ a prime example of why players could end up suing clubs

When I was a pro and got bombed out by John Gregory, it was just the norm. It was just the done thing. You’d still come in and train but it was a dispiriting experience, and one that, like a lot of other things football replicated at the time, was based around the armed forces.

There has to be some sort of significant cultural context to this to be able to give the younger readers an idea why football clubs behave the way they do sometimes.

Football back in the day effectively mirrored the army in terms of training methodology and behavioural methodology. Often football teams would literally go and train at army camps. Certainly, when I was at Crystal Palace, although I didn’t go, the first team squad went to Aldershot barracks and trained for a little while.

The whole thing was about team discipline.

The Army is very closely aligned to football in the sense that playing football in front of 50,000 people is quite an extreme thing to do just as being in the Army is extreme.

Football apprentices had to spend seven or eight hours sweeping the stands and it felt like a punishment. You got punished too if you didn’t clean the dressing rooms properly, or if you didn’t clean your pros kit properly.

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The bomb squad, as it was known across football, was another example of that. ‘If you don’t do this right, you’re going to get the army discipline treatment.’

Of course, things have changed greatly and for the better, so that we now are very aware that if you sign an employment contract, you should be signing an employment contract for the duration of that contract and be what you were bought as, which is a senior professional footballer.

When players are told by clubs that they’ll be banished from training and won’t play again so it would be best they were sold – Chelsea is the perfect recent example – those players have now stood up and said that’s not right. Clubs can’t be doing that and they couldn’t get away with it in any other industry.

I think that unless the PFA come out and say ‘we need to stop this practice and if you are at a professional football club and are surplus to requirements, that’s fine, but you still train with the first team until you are sold,’ and make it almost a dictat, then there might be a situation whereby a player says ‘this is restriction of trade, this is workplace bullying, and I’m going to sue the club.’

My preference would be that the PFA now step in, they sit down with the Premier League, the FA and the EFL, and they all put statements out next week saying the long standing and old practice of the bomb squad is now finished.

I think that that way, you also get to a position whereby players would get sold quicker because players wouldn’t dig their heels in and not turn up for training amongst other things.