Once derided as “The Wally with the Brolly,” Steve McClaren has bounced back in style from his England nightmare by leading unfashionable Dutch side FC Twente to a place in the Champions League.
On Sunday, Twente signed off their domestic league campaign with a 1-0 defeat at Ajax, but they had already secured second place and a berth in next season’s premier European competition with a 3-0 victory over champions AZ Alkmaar the previous weekend.
“At the end of the ride you end up where you are supposed to in the table,” McClaren said. “We deservedly came second because of the play we’ve shown this season.”
Twente’s achievement is rendered all the more impressive by the fact that they, along with AZ, have kept the Netherlands’ “Big Three” of Ajax, Feyenoord and PSV Eindhoven out of the top two for the first time in 50 years.
In his first season in charge McClaren has already led Twente to their best ever league finish and he could even cap that with a piece of silverware if Twente prevail against Heerenveen in the Dutch Cup final on Sunday.
It’s all a far cry from the dark days that followed England’s failure to qualify for Euro 2008.
The sight of a forlorn McClaren standing beneath an umbrella on the Wembley touchline as England slumped to a 3-2 defeat against Croatia in November 2007 became the defining image of a disastrous qualifying campaign.
McClaren, derided for being a weak coach who was too in thrall to the celebrity status of his top stars, was promptly sacked, paving the way for Fabio Capello to sweep in and re-energize the entire England set-up.
The Yorkshireman retreated to lick his wounds, but after seven months in the wilderness he pitched up in Enschede — a small city in the eastern Netherlands with a population of just 150,000.
It appeared to be the perfect location for McClaren to re-establish the coaching credentials that led him to the assistant manager’s job at Manchester United and a spell at Middlesbrough that included a League Cup triumph in 2004 and a run to the 2006 UEFA Cup final.
But McClaren was quickly thrust back into the spotlight when Twente were drawn to face Arsenal in a Champions League qualifier, and he became the subject of further mockery when video footage emerged of a pre-match interview in which he appeared to be speaking in a Dutch accent.
This time, though, the 48-year-old turned his back on the jeers and got to work.
Impressed by what he saw on the training ground, McClaren decided not to meddle with the side he had inherited from predecessor Fred Rutten and after an indifferent start, Twente were soon flying.
“I was surprised by how good FC Twente’s organization is,” McClaren said. “The team was described as playing the best football in the Eredivisie [Dutch first division] last year. They were already very ambitious. All I could do was not get in the way.”
Playing in the traditional Dutch 4-3-3 formation, Twente assembled a 20-game unbeaten run in the league and took French giants Marseille the distance in a keenly contested third-round UEFA Cup tie before eventually being beaten on penalties.
McClaren’s success has seen him linked with the newly vacated managerial position at Ajax, who recently sacked former Netherlands great Marco van Basten.
Twente’s young guns are also attracting covetous glances from Europe’s big clubs, with Dutch winger Eljero Elia and 21-year-old Brazilian center-back Douglas both tipped for summer moves.
McClaren, though, has vowed to keep his squad together as he targets even greater glory next season, when a second tilt at the Champions League will give him the chance he craves to pit his wits against the cream of European coaching.
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