Bilic???

The discussion on Bilic has focused on whether he can leave his present gig as the Croatian head coach.
I find this extremely surprising!
Generally when people are hired the question of qualifications is the one that is scrutinized.

Let’s look at what he has done so far and try to find out if he has the merits that we would like our new manager to have.

He is a success at the national team level guiding the Croatian U-21 side to the Euro-playoffs 2006.
At the senior level he has 2 years of experience, being appointed head coach of the Croatian national team in July 2006. There he was facing the task of taking the team, ranked 15:th in the world at the time, through to the Euro 2008 playoffs. The obstacles set up before him was England (ranked 5:th at the time), Russia (23) , Israel (44), Macedonia (55), Estonia (105) and Andorra (don’t know, didn’t have the time to scroll that far down on the FIFA homepage). So the task was really not to underachieve! Avoiding that and a top 2 placing would be secured.

Croatia didn’t underachieve, they made it to the playoffs by drawing Russia twice, winning with the odd goal against Macedonia at home and loosing away. All in all a fairly predictable series of games if it weren’t for the famous beatings of an underachieving England team led (?) by McClaren.

At the Euro 2008, some experts had them as favourites for the title and at the group stage they played 3 solid games, winning against Germany, Austria and Poland only to be knocked out by Turkey in an memorable quarter final.

When Turkey, with an unbelievable effort equalised after the surely game winning goal Croatia had scored in the last of 30 minutes of overtime, it was interesting to study Bilic (yes this article is still about Bilic and his CV). He totally broke down, crying and yelling out in despair over what was happening. Understandable – yes certainly, but he was the leader, the leader set to coach and inspire the team to win this still undecided game. I hardly think he by doing so instilled security in the players chosen to shoot the penalties only a few minutes later.
He gets a lot of due credit for comforting his players after the lost shoot-out, but maybe he had been better off doing that before.

To sum it up, he may well turn out to be a good club team coach but that is still very much unproven since he has no experience in managing a team on a day to day basis.
He has coached a national side to meet pretty much what was expected of them and he breaks under (OK, extreme) pressure.

Is the act of staying in West Ham to keep us up 11 years ago enough to compensate for this?
.