Burnley sacking Sean Dyche with eight games of the season left to play feels like a huge gamble with few to no upsides for the club’s owners.
What is most striking about the sacking of Sean Dyche by Burnley is, in terms of managerial sackings, how counterintuitive it all feels. It falls between the two stools of what we expect from such a decision. If jettisoning their manager of almost a decade was, as has been suggested, a reflex reaction to either the gravity of their current league position or to losing badly to Norwich City, we might have expected it to come within 24 hours of the match itself.
But if, on the other hand, this was a call that had been playing on the minds of the club’s (relatively new) owners for some time, then why did they not have someone ready to go and lined up for Burnley’s critical last eight games of this season? Why pull the trigger on a highly experienced manager, who knows the club inside out and who has been in this position before, and replace him with a wholly inexperienced, cobbled together, temporary coaching staff, with another match coming just 48 hours later? Were one of football’s great Machiavellian minds behind such a peculiar decision, they may be given a degree of wiggle room. But this lot?
The decision to replace a manager seldom comes without risk. And the risk spreads far beyond the results of their next eight Premier League matches. Burnley are four points shy of safety, meaning that they likely need a minimum of four wins to tip the scales in their favour. That’s as many Premier League games as they’ve won from their previous 30. A 50% win rate for a Premier League manager is a tall order at the best of times. The temporary team will have to hit the ground running and at this time of the year there are fewer managers available than at just about any other time. Burnley are in a sticky situation and a specialist is likely required; to replace Sean Dyche, it might even be that the manager that Burnley…
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