For the second time this season, I ran into John Egan on a Saturday morning as he was heading off to play for Brentford.
by Niall Quinn, who continues his weekly JOE column by looking at Irish soccer and the untold stories from the Premier League
The first time we bumped into each other he scored two goals that afternoon. On Saturday Brentford won 5-0.
I am available to hang around hotel lobbies of wealthier clubs who are in need of a lucky charm. Call me, José. You never know. I could be what United need.
Next time I talk to John I will have to quiz him a little bit on the Scott Hogan business. With both John Egan and Alan Judge at Brentford looking like future Irish internationals, Scott Hogan could just tip the scales in making Brentford a club for Irish fans to follow.
What little I know about Hogan I like. The path to where he is now hasn’t been easy, there is a bit of the Jamie Vardy about him. He worked in the real world for a long time having been dropped by Rochdale as a young lad.
He played football in a lot of unfashionable, non-league places before becoming the Paul Pogba of Rochdale and being signed again three years after being let go. He scored nineteen goals in his first season and got sold on to Brentford for £750,000.
Things didn’t get any easier. He did his anterior cruciate on his league debut and then did it again almost straight away when he returned to training.
He only got back to playing at the back end of last season but, for a player who had missed so much, he hit the ground running and scored seven goals in the last seven games. He has kept that momentum up. His hat-trick on Saturday means he has now scored thirteen goals in sixteen league games for Brentford. All that and he’s still only twenty four.
He’s quick, hard working and confident. He was born in Salford but more importantly he has Irish grandparents.
As a player the impression I have of him is that he has Shane Long-type pace with John Aldridge finishing.
It’s said that Roy Keane went to see him play last spring. I’m not sure if any pressure was put on the lad but nothing came of it in terms of the Euros.
Hogan was quoted as saying afterwards that he was keeping his head down and sensibly trying to develop a career with Brentford.
He was’t worrying too much yet about international football.
He did add something promising though. “If Roy Keane rang me up,” he said, “I couldn’t say no to Roy Keane. He is one of my heroes.”
Now I’ve never been sweet talked by Roy so I can’t say how seductive he might be it but at this point do we have anything to lose by the making of that call?
One of the things that Roy brings to the job is his reputation in the world of football.
If we have a highly promising striker who is eilgible to play for us in a position where we could use re-enforcement and he may go weak at the knees if Roy calls, get it done.
And if he ever hits a slump after he declares for us he will know exactly where to find me in the lobby of the Brentford hotel. If Roy can turn his hand to seduction, I can live with being a lucky rabbit’s foot for Scott Hogan’s conquests.
Niall Quinn on ‘The Southampton Way’
Work took me to White Hart Lane yesterday but waiting for the game to begin I was keeping an eye on what was going on down on the south coast where Southampton were playing Swansea.
Southampton ended a good week with their first win of the Premier League season after two away losses and two home draws. On Thursday night they had picked up their first win of the season when they started their Europa League campaign.
Back to business as usual.
I smiled to myself and settled down to watch Spurs, a highly ambitious club who have done very well so far out of buying players (and poaching backroom staff) from the Saints. For clubs around the top end of the table, St. Mary’s has become a very good place to shop.
Last year I got to know the former Southampton chairman Nicola Cortese a little bit. It was an acquaintance I wished I had made long ago, before I got involved in the business side of the house at Sunderland.
Whereas I was surprised to find that I fell in love with Sunderland at the end of a long career, it was almost more perplexing that Nicola Cortese, an Italian guy working as a banker in Switzerland, should have fallen in love with Southampton FC.
Cortese was running the sports business practice for Banque Heritage in Geneva when he was asked to conduct the purchase of Southampton on behalf of Markus Liebherr, a German-born businessman based in Switzerland.
Looking in from the outside you might have thought that the best advice Cortese could have given his client was to keep his money. Southampton were in administration, in League One and would be starting the season with a ten-point deduction.
Cortese concluded the deal expertly and was asked to take over as chief executive of the club.
For some reason he said yes and what followed was one of the great success stories of modern English football. He and Liebherr developed something called the Southampton Way, which sounded like a slick slogan at the time but which has become the blueprint for a lot of clubs who don’t have billionaire sugar daddies.
Success in the modern game gets measured in different ways. If any Southampton fans are distressed that the club hasn’t won the Premier League or the Champions League by now they should try to remember how happy they were to win the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy in the spring of 2010. How happy they were just to still have a club to follow.
I think they will be content enough with their lot though. Southampton fans know that the tag of being a ‘selling club’ has lost its sting largely due to their own club’s belief in its own system and ethos.
Schneiderlin, Lovren, Shaw, Wanyama, Lallana, Mane, Clyne, Pelle, Chambers and others have moved on in the last couple of seasons following a path well worn by players like Gareth Bale, Theo Walcott and Alex Oxlade Chamberlain.
Managers too. Pochettino left. Koeman has gone. Claude Puel has the seat now but the Southampton Way limits the potential for disaster. Potential managers at Southampton are scouted with the same due diligence as the players.
I know how hard it is to be in the position Nicola Cortese found himself in.
We started at Sunderland in the Championship, a level higher than Southampton were when Cortese came took the reigns. One of the greatest things about the club was the fans.
Conversely, one of the toughest things was dealing with the passionate impatience of those fans. We got promotion and consolidated. We tried to stick to our wage structure and our transfer policy and to develop our academy structure. All the good things.
Players are players though. Their careers are short and their expectations are high. If a guy has a good season in your colours the bigger clubs start sniffing around and offering multiples of what Darren Bent, Jordan Henderson and others were being paid by us, so they go.
We knew we couldn’t keep them because that is a fact of life in the business. Our trouble was creating a supply line through the academy to develop and blood players at a faster rate then we were losing them. Truth is we relied on quick fix, ready-made imports instead. I’d change that if I was back.
We also used Roy Keane’s connections with Manchester United and later Steve Bruce’s to borrow or buy what we could from Old Trafford. That has continued, funnily enough, with David Moyes bringing in Paddy McNair, Donald Love and Adnan Januzaj in the recent window.
The pressures come from both sides though. It is hard to attract established players. It is harder still to keep your own established guys.
Southampton, in fairness, had more time to build their model. In the first year after takeover they finished seventh in League One, having started with that ten point deduction. Then they got two straight promotions and have gone from strength to strength in the Premier League.
We found ourselves in the top flight, running while we were learning to walk. We did ok, but making success self sustaining is a tough trick.
Southampton invested heavily in what was already a very good academy system, insisting on young players taking their education seriously. Cortese would begin work at 7am and a part of most days involved speaking to young players, checking on their progress, academic first, then football.
“Smart heads on young shoulders make better footballers,” he told me time and time again.
If you were a young player at Southampton you knew you had a good chance of getting a break. And if you didn’t you had some qualifications to fall back on.
Apart from the academy and the ultimate development of what they call ‘the black box’ which is the technology application of the Southampton Way, what has interested me most about Southampton is the business model. Southampton don’t buy a player or hire a manager without knowing precisely how he will fit in and accepting that he will probably move on.
The Premier League is not a stable atmosphere. Lots of clubs put themselves under major pressure with misspent money on bad signings and managers who don’t fit their model.
Southampton prepare for everything. They know that good players will leave. The pressure of their sane wage structure and the bright lights of big name clubs mean that process is just inevitable.
Look at N’Golo Kanté. He won a Premiership wth Leicester. Treated like a God. About to be part of Leicester’s first adventure in the Champions League and he jumps to Chelsea, overturning the cliche about players leaving clubs because they want Champions League football.
Southampton live with that pressure by accepting it and preparing for it more thoroughly than anybody else in the division.
Cortese knew that players would move on. He believed that if he implemented a system that could find and develop younger players that in time the only players moving on from Southampton would be going to bigger clubs and Southampton would have a constant stream of new talents coming through. No giant steps, but slowly Southampton itself would become a bigger club but one with a sound and self sustaining financial basis.
Markus Liebherr sadly passed away in 2010, leaving his daughter Katharina in charge of the club. Nicola Cortese resigned in January 2014 after a ‘rift’ had opened between himself and Katharina Liebherr. Happily, the system he developed, which meant that nobody was irreplaceable, worked. Southampton have survived without him.
I watch for their results and I notice how they never blink when they hit the little speed bumps that all clubs hit. St. Mary’s and the Staplewood Campus are serene places.
They are not a top six club. Not yet. But neither are they a bubble waiting to pop. From the Johnstone’s Paint Trophy to where they are in just over six years, that’s some journey.
Niall Quinn is a former Arsenal, Manchester City, Sunderland and Republic of Ireland striker. He currently works as a pundit and co-commentator for Sky Sports, and also writes for Sportsvibe.
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