Adam Virgo
BRIGHTON LEGEND AND TV PUNDIT
BIRMINGHAM City’s American owners took all sorts of stick for appointing Wayne Rooney last season – and rightly so.
The former England captain took the Blues from sixth to 20th in just 83 days and that run ultimately cost them a place in the Championship.
So it’s only fair that we give Tom Wagner and his Knight-head Consortium great credit for the way Birmingham have bounced straight back.
Yes, they’ve spent a lot of money. By all accounts, it’s the most expensively-assembled squad in third tier history, spearheaded by £12m striker Jay Stansfield.
But even players of that calibre need the right manager, and in Chris Davies that’s exactly what the owners chose.
The 40-year-old was almost completely unknown when he was plucked from Tottenham’s coaching staff last summer. He’d never managed a professional club. Coming so soon after the Rooney debacle, it was a major risk.
But the more you speak to people in and around the game, the more you listen to Chris and the more you watch his players, it’s clear he’s the real deal.
On the pitch, they look so much more organised and so much more fluent on the counter-attack than last season. Almost every single player has improved.
If you speak to Birmingham’s staff and players, they’ll all give you glowing references in terms of his training sessions, his tactical intelligence and his one-toone management, which I think is actually the most important skill in a modern dressing room.
Players these days aren’t impressed by your CV or your status. It’s all about how you talk to them, how you communicate your ideas, how you vary your training sessions to keep them stimulated and how the things you are doing will improve them as individuals.
That must have come across when Chris was interviewed, and choosing him shows you the owners learned a big lesson from what happened with Rooney.
Now the key is to stick with him. With Chris Davies at the helm, I look at Birmingham and I see a team who can challenge for promotion to the Premier League next season.
They’ve got the nucleus of a decent Championship squad. They’ve got the money and the ambition to improve it. But they’ve got to do it in the right way.
When everybody knows you’ve got money, it’s so easy to overspend and bring in the wrong type of player. Birmingham themselves have been guilty of that in the past. Recruitment will be really important this summer, finding players who -like Stansfield – have the right blend of quality and personality.
Head start
Like every successful team, they’ll also need to ask tough questions. Alfie May has scored a lot of goals this season but can the 31-year-old do it again in the Championship? For me, another striker is essential.
What’s massive for them is that they have a huge head start on everyone else. Between the Championship and League One, there are probably 11 or 12 clubs who don’t yet know which division they’ll be in next season. Whoever wins the play-offs won’t be able to start recruiting until May 26.
Because they’ve won promotion with six games to spare, Birmingham can start doing deals right now, and could feasibly have the bulk of their business completed before anyone else has even got out of the blocks.
Whatever happens, everyone deserves huge credit. From the owners who learned from their mistakes to Davies and Stansfield, who coped admirably with the huge price tag hung around his neck, everyone has done their jobs. It’s been a brilliant season and a fully-deserved promotion.
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