Quote:
In the first of a two-part interview, West Brom captain Chris Brunt reflects on the managers that have had the biggest impact on him and the club — for better and worse…
Chris Brunt has experienced a lot in a dozen years at West Bromwich Albion.
But a couple of episodes stand out above all others from the Northern Irishman’s celebrated career which is why, during more than two hours reliving his it with The Athletic, they take up more time than the others.
There was the time that Albion’s players had their say to avert what they saw as looming disaster. And there was the time when, Brunt now believes, they should have done the same again to prevent another catastrophe that came to pass.
The reigns of Pepe Mel and Alan Pardew were both brief and in Brunt’s word: “shambolic”.
While he and his team-mates were criticised for their perceived role in sidelining Mel, the club captain believes they should have spoken out during Pardew’s stint, too.
In the most candid insider account to date of Mel’s infamous four months in charge in 2014, Brunt admits that he and his team-mates feared the worst from the Spaniard’s first training session, when he unveiled an unexpected plan to deal with Everton striker and former West Brom loanee Romelu Lukaku.
“Pepe put a team out in training — 11 versus 11 against some kids from the under-23s and their goalkeeper had the ball from a defender and all our team were in their half, charging at their goalie,” he says.
“We were playing Everton on the Monday. We had played with “Rom” the year before and we knew what he was about.
“We knew we needed to get at least two players behind (defender) Jonas Olsson and Lukaku, because if a ball went over the top of them Rom was going to win it — not just if it’s Jonas but whoever it was.
“But Pepe shouted, ‘Jonas, when Lukaku comes here, you go with him, and I want the rest of the team in their half.’ I was at left back and looked over my shoulder and there was about 60 yards of space behind me. I thought, ‘I don’t fancy that much.’
“We didn’t have a great deal of pace in our back four. If the ball gets booted over me, we have a 50-yard foot-race with the striker.
“Jonas and me walked off after training shaking our heads saying, ‘Oh no, this can’t be good’. If that’s Lukaku running in, he’s going to beat you for pace and strength, cut inside and have shots at goal. We knew that because he’d scored 17 of those for us the season before.
“We managed to get a draw in that game, but everything was just a shambles.”
The acrimony that blighted Mel’s time at the Hawthorns from January to May 2014 hinged on more than just his high-pressing approach.
The characters are well-known to West Brom fans: Steve Clarke, the head coach sacked midway through that 2013-14 season. Dave McDonough, the previously little-known former Liverpool and Valencia technical analyst whose influence grew throughout the campaign. Jeremy Peace, the chairman who was persuaded to hire Mel and swiftly had to rectify his error. Keith Downing and Dean Kiely, the coaches who ended the season as de facto manager and assistant.
And then there were Brunt and the other players, who were cast in the role of plotters by a section of fans who had bought into Mel’s adventurous rhetoric.
Brunt paints a more vivid picture than has ever been seen before.
“Pepe couldn’t speak very good English,” he recalls. “I can’t speak Spanish, so I’ll never take the mickey out of somebody for not speaking another language, but if you’re the coach of an English football team that should be a priority.
“So then Dave McDonough started coming out to translate. At first he came out in his suit or whatever he wore to work, then he got a tracksuit and eventually he got a pair of boots and ended up telling people what to do in training.
“I’ll always remember James Morrison telling him to ‘**** off’ and thinking, ‘Oh no, that’s not good’. The whole atmosphere wasn’t great.
“You’re not really believing what the manager is telling you, you’re being told by a video analyst what the manager is saying, and his fitness coach is just saying, ‘You need to run quicker’.
“He’s a new manager though and you have to give him a chance because we’re here to do a job for him. But the Villa game at Villa Park was it for me, and it was only a couple of games in.”
Brunt recalls Gareth McAuley had previously been injured but was fit to play Villa on January 29. With Mel intent on playing high-pressing football and ‘G-Mac’ the quickest centre back in the squad, his team-mates thought he had to play. But instead, he was left on the bench.
“We went 2-0 up early on and we’re thinking ‘This is all right, we can sit back and play sensibly’. But Pepe was shouting, ‘No! Go, go, go!’
“So we kept going and it was 3-3 at half-time. Villa just kept banging it long to Christian Benteke, who was pinning Diego Lugano and running alongside him and causing mayhem and we were all running up and down like lunatics.
“We ended up losing the game 4-3 and Pepe came in and tapped everybody on the head and said, ‘This is good, guys, this is the way.’
“I had my head in my towel because I was dead on my feet, but when he said that to me I just said ‘This is the way? We’ve just conceded four goals to a team that hasn’t scored four goals in six weeks!’
“We were at the bottom of the league, trying to score 50 goals a game! We disagreed with everything.”
The team were then taken on a training camp that Brunt says was “pointless.” They were coming back to play against fellow strugglers Fulham, but instead of focusing on that six-pointer, Mel had them playing “five-a-sides and stupid games”.
“Eventually in one of the sessions, G-Mac just lost his head and shouted at Dave McDonough ‘Dave, any chance of us doing anything about ****ing Fulham? We’ve been here for five days and done nothing.’
“So the next day Pepe comes in and says, ‘Today, we work on Fulham.’
“Pepe was a nice man and the fans liked him because he had a decent personality and wrote books and was interested in a lot of places in England. But we were coming in from training at 1pm and he’d be in his car going off to visit places in England.
“In the end, Keith and Dean pretty much took the team and kept us up that season.”
It was a season when controversy clung to Albion like a limpet.
High-profile summer signing Nicolas Anelka was pilloried, fined and eventually sacked for a “quenelle” hand gesture that was judged to be antisemitic, McDonough rose to prominence and was then shown the door and Morrison and Saido Berahino were involved in an ugly dressing-room fracas.
The anger did not stop there, Brunt reveals.
“It got a bit nasty towards the end in training,” he said. “There was Morrison and Saido, and Morgan Amalfitano was a bit fiery as well. There were no real restrictions on what we were trying to do, so a few lads were kicking lumps out of each other.
“There was one when Amalfitano got upset. People were flying into tackles and Deano had to come over and ref the game to make sure it didn’t turn into a full-scale riot.
“But as soon as the season was over, Pepe was gone. Jeremy is not stupid.”
The players were accused of undermining Mel and ensuring his plans never had a chance to succeed. Their actions were couched by some supporters as a coup. But Brunt is ready to set the record straight.
“The chairman was at risk of losing a Premier League football club so he wanted to know what was going on,” he recalls. “We would walk past the chairman’s office every day and on the odd occasion he would pull you in for a chat if something was bothering him.
“You have to give an honest opinion, otherwise what’s the point of giving it? I’m a firm believer that if something isn’t right you should put your hand up and say something. But ultimately, he made the decisions.
“It’s not like the secret service. We weren’t plotting to take somebody out!”
Brunt now wishes he’d acted upon his beliefs four years later, when Pardew’s attempts to halt Albion’s slide towards relegation ended with just one Premier League win from his four and a half months in charge.
The Pardew era reached its nadir in Barcelona, when a mid-season “bonding trip” descended into farce as four players were accused of stealing a taxi during a late-night visit to McDonald’s.
Gareth Barry, Boaz Myhill, Jonny Evans and Jake Livermore apologised for their actions.
It was at that moment, Brunt reflects, that the players missed a chance to pass comment on a reign which was clearly not working.
“The trip should never have happened because of the position we were in in the league,” he says. “I think Alan had done something similar at Newcastle, when they went to Dubai and played a bit of golf, did a bit of training and had some nights out.
“We played at Chelsea on Monday and went to Barcelona on Tuesday. We had a night out, did a bit of training on Wednesday, which wasn’t great and then he said, ‘The night is yours — don’t be doing anything daft.’
“Whenever you go away in that situation, something daft happens.
“Obviously that was a bit extreme but the lads held their hands up straight away and they’re all lads that don’t generally cause problems.
“At the time we probably should have said more. But you’ve got to give a new manager a chance, and Alan’s record suggested he does usually get a bounce. He just never got it here, and if you don’t get that you’ve got to find another way of getting a result. We didn’t do that.”
Brunt did have his say in a post-match dressing-room confrontation with Pardew, the details of which found their way to the media. But he has few regrets about the heated comments he made amid a period he would clearly rather forget.
“I was on the bench that day but it wasn’t anything to do with being left out. It was just frustrating seeing lads out on the pitch not knowing what they were doing,” he says.
“At that Huddersfield game, the atmosphere at the ground was toxic. It was just after the Barcelona thing and a lot of the lads were public enemy number one, which is not nice. They’re on the pitch getting slated by 25,000 people and they’re not being given the best chance to do better.
“In any walk of life, if you’re in charge and you’re not giving everybody the best opportunity to do their best then it reflects badly on you.
“I didn’t say anything that everybody else wasn’t thinking. When I sat down afterwards, I did say a couple of things that I questioned myself about — you probably shouldn’t say stuff straight after a game. But our situation was that bad that something needed to be said.
“It was a shambles. We deserved to go down.
“Tony Pulis had come in with a plan for 10 clean sheets. When Alan came in, he decided we weren’t scoring enough goals. He was trying to get away from us being a Tony Pulis team, which is fair enough because that’s not the way he wants to manage, but at that time, with us fighting for our Premier League safety, it was not the right thing to do.
“When you have a group of players signed to play in a Tony Pulis team, you do what’s best for that group of players and then think again in the summer.
“That’s what I’d do, but here we are, two years down the line and still in the Championship.”
Pardew had taken over after Pulis was sacked in December 2017. It was a parting of the ways Brunt had seen coming for a while, despite the Welshman keeping the West Brom in the top flight in successive seasons after his arrival early in 2015.
And, while his tone hints at a grudging professional respect for Pulis’s achievements, there is clearly little affection towards the former Stoke and Crystal Palace manager.
“He steadied the ship,” concedes Brunt, 34. “The first thing he said was, ‘We’re going to get 10 clean sheets between now and the end of the season, and if we do that we’ll stay up.’ He was exactly what we needed at the time he took over. But going forward, the effect he has on a football club is maybe not as good.
“I didn’t agree with a lot of the things he was telling us to do and I didn’t agree with a lot of things things he did around the place. It was very much, ‘I’m doing this and I don’t care what you think.’ It’s about him. It was his way or you weren’t playing.
“The season before he left, we’d stayed up in March, we got to May and we hadn’t won in about 10 games and maybe that was the time to change it rather than letting it drag to the next season — which was a shambles.
“The Tony Pulis from two years before would have kept us up, but by then he wasn’t the Tony Pulis who first came in.
“At the start of the season we won two games and drew one, then we had the international break and the end of the transfer window. Then he changed the whole team and put some of the new lads in, even though we’d come off the back of not losing for three games.
“In the two seasons before, and probably for 10 years at Stoke, he would never have done that.”
If Brunt gives the impression he considered Mel, Pulis and Pardew sub-standard, it is no surprise given the esteem in which he holds one of their famous predecessors.
Roy Hodgson led Albion to some of their most memorable Premier League achievements — a 5-1 derby victory at Wolves being the pinnacle — and Brunt admits the man who left the Hawthorns to manage England set the bar incredibly high in the eyes of his players.
“At West Brom, I compare everything to when Roy was the manager — the way he conducted himself, the way he structured his teams and the way he did his sessions,” Brunt says.
“You could have put me anywhere on the pitch with Roy and I would have known what to do. I might not have been able to do it as well as somebody else, because it wouldn’t be my position, but I would have known the basics of what he wanted from me. That’s the way he coached.”
Brunt does though admit that “some people wouldn’t like his sessions.”
“If you threw it out for an under-18s or under-21s team they might think, ‘What the hell is this? We’re not getting to run around or do any tricks.’ But he wasn’t interested in that. He wanted functional things that helped his team on a Saturday, and that’s what training should be.
“A lot of managers and players will do training and then throw in a five-a-side at the end. Roy always used to say, ‘You can have a game if you want. I don’t care’. He wouldn’t even watch, because in five-a-side your centre half can end up playing centre forward and that didn’t help his team on a Saturday. But I really enjoyed his training, because I think it made me a better player.
“We all just trusted each other and you knew if you made a mistake somebody would be there to help you out. His coaching was so good that he didn’t really need to man-manage. Everyone knew everyone else’s job so if you didn’t do it somebody else told you.
“He is the best manager I have worked with. And a good guy, too.
“He is an intelligent man who has been around the world and you could talk to him about anything — your family, his family, places in the world… all kinds of things. He was a gentleman and I don’t think I’ve heard anyone here say anything different.
“Though obviously he does lose it sometimes, and he’s quite funny when he does!”
