Alex Dicken and Brian Dick have picked out their favourites for the Birmingham City job and you can too
Who do you want to become Birmingham City’s new manager? The time has come for supporters to send a message to owners Knighthead about who they want to see succeed Tony Mowbray.
Mowbray, 60, stepped down on Tuesday due to a health issue having temporarily left the club in February to undergo treatment. Blues are now searching for their fourth manager of the Knighthead era and can ill-afford to make a mistake following relegation to League One.
Alex Neil has been spoken to and other candidates are being contacted over the position. BirminghamLive is keen to gauge fan opinion on the matter via our poll.
We have included eight potential candidates for you to vote for. First, take a look at who our Blues writers Alex Dicken and Brian Dick are leaning towards.
Alex Dicken
Blues face a simple choice: do they want to build with a project manager or do they want to return to the Championship immediately? I’m not saying that promotion couldn’t be achieved under Dave Challinor or Mike Williamson, but I would be extremely confident that promotion would be achieved if Blues appointed Alex Neil, Gary Rowett or Paul Heckingbottom. They aren’t project managers, they are instant hits.
However, the noises suggest Blues want to start building back with possession-based, attacking football so I have arrived at two contrasting managers who I would be quite content with. One of them is Frank Lampard who impressed in the first half of his brief managerial career and disappointed in the second. Lampard showed at Derby County and Chelsea (first time around) that he can be successful and that he can play stylish football. Under Lampard, Derby averaged 53.4 percent possession and 13.3 shots per game en route to losing the Championship play-off final in 2019.
The other manager who has really stood out to me is Williamson. Few people are mentioning his name but, on the face of it, he meets all of the requirements. His MK Dons side dominated possession with an average of 57.5 percent in their League Two matches last season. He took over when they were 16th in the league and guided them to a fourth-placed finish, narrowly missing out on promotion. At 40, Williamson – who played in the Premier League for Newcastle United – is far from the finished article, but his managerial record is impressive.
Brian Dick
Who do I want leading Birmingham City out of League One? Tony Mowbray, in fact I don’t think Blues would even be there but for his illness. However, that’s clearly not possible and the important thing is that Mowbray recovers and resumes his career at some point.
As for the here and now, I detect two competing forces in Blues’ latest recruitment drive – the demand for an immediate return to the Championship and the desire to play possession-based, attacking football. It’s possible to have both at the same time – Ipswich Town did – but Kieran McKenna is a unicorn, a rare exception and not the rule. Name the last one. Looking for the next McKenna is fraught with risk.
To my mind an immediate return is far more important than playing style and none of the contenders named by the oddsmakers really excite me. I think the name that ticks most boxes is Frank Lampard.
He has experience of being a No. 1, some success in the Championship with Derby and to be fair did OK with a bad hand in his first spell with Chelsea. His teams have played attractively, he’s a great communicator and he has the profile that Knighthead seem to want to be able to sell. It’s not ideal but neither is the situation.
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