Black football managers

The number of black professional football managers in England, or should I say Britain has doubled recently to four. The reason I mention this is I was thinking how well Keith Curle has done at County since he took over (5 wins and 1 draw). This is not Curle's first job, that was at Mansfield where he was sacked after being accused of bullying a youth player. The case was unceremoniously kicked out and Curle was awarded damages and the Judge called Mansfield's disciplinary process as a "sham".

Things are not going so swimmingly for Terry Connor, who was about the only bloke who didn't turn down the Wolves job after Mick McCarthy was shown the door.

Incredibly after almost 20 years of Premier League football re-writing the beautiful game's history books Terry Connor becomes just the 5th black man to manage in it. I hope Connor can last until the end of the season but he hasn't been helped by his board's indecisiveness and I suspect like his colleague Chris Hughton no doubt at some point he will be turned over for some media darling.

Nobody can argue that the lack of black managers in our game is not a serious problem. The game of football is on the whole an incredibly diverse sector in Britain and it would be foolish to argue that all boardrooms are inherently racist in their selection of managers, but in the context that there are hundreds of black players in the football league currently and hundreds before that and only four current managers it is a topic that deserves to be continually debated.

Managers don't become managers by luck. Some players become obvious candidates during their playing days, others are promoted by the media and many are career managers or coaches and take it upon themselves to get their badges and are happy to start on the first rung of the ladder.

Des Walker, Les Ferdinand, Brian Stein, Paul Elliot, Des Walker and Viv Anderson all fit into one or more of the above criteria. Others such as Andy Preece, Leroy Rosenoir, Paul Davis, Iffy Onuora, Eddie Newton (just given the interim assistant's job at Chelsea) and Noel Blake are each fully qualified coaches at the highest possible level yet have rarely been given the chance to take a top job and instead work hard at the less glamorous end of the food chain.

Future managers are sometimes easy to spot. I give you of the top of my head Brad Freidel, Scott Parker, Jamie Carragher and Kevin Davies, but I could also easily add Jason Roberts, David James, Clarke Carlisle and Darren Moore.

Many ex-black players have turned to the media for their second careers, which is not unusual. Being able to string more than a sentence together seems to get you a spot on Soccer Saturday at least but ex-players such as Robbie Earle, Garth Crooks, Luther Blissett and Stan Collymore could easily have taken their passion for the game, knowledge and experience into a dressing room but even couldn't or wouldn't.

I don't know if the Rooney Rule is viable in English football or not. Most definitely it has raised the profile of black sportsmen at the higher echelon of the game in the NFL, yet let's not kid ourselves that everything is now all fluffy and equal. There are only five head coaches in the NFL and 32 teams in a game where 70% of the players are black.

The age old problem with our ball game is that when a job comes up, the same old mostly middle aged men get rolled out by the media and bookies alike. The same media who welcome ex-pro black footballers into their industry then do them a disservice by championing the same old failed managers.

If I look at the list of favourites for the permanent Wolves job (poor old Connor, he hasn't a hope in hell) it includes such luminaries as Iain Dowie, Gary Megson, Roy Keane, Glenn Roeder, Phil Brown, Alan Shearer and Gareth Southgate! Hardly inspiring is it?

I guess it's easy for us Addicks to talk about equality as we have Chris Powell, Alex Dyer and Damian Matthew on the sideline, but to be honest I didn't even know they were black because I never look at them in that way. That's where we need to get to.