From the moment Scott Parker came good on his perennial “Premier League player most likely to be a manager” vibe, he has always been an easy target.
There was the ramble after Fulham’s 2019-20 play-off final victory mockingly dubbed to The Street’s Dry Your Eyes. Relegation the following season with a side that included stars like Ademola Lookman, Aleksandar Mitrovic, Ruben Loftus-Cheek, Ola Aina and Joachim Andersen. “F**k off Scotty Parker” still starts one of Fulham fans’ most common chants.
There was that second top-flight season – well, four games with Bournemouth – probably best summed up by the GQ headline: “Premier League Manager Scott Parker Wore a Bunch of Thom Browne and Then Got Fired”.
Twelve games and two wins at Club Bruges having described the club’s “No Sweat, No Glory” mantra as “one million per cent” his own. Ongoing questions around his competence appeared to have been answered.
A return to the EFL, or the Sky Sports sofa, were really the only possibilities. But largely lost in his miserable Premier League and European record is the fact he is among the most successful Championship managers ever.
Since the 2004 rebrand, only Daniel Farke and Marcelo Bielsa have earned more points per match than Parker’s 1.88 of all managers to have spent more than a season in the second tier, having got both Fulham and Bournemouth promoted.
If he takes Burnley up this season, only Neil Warnock will have achieved Premier League promotion with more clubs than the 44-year-old. Yes, these have all been aided by parachute payments and strong squads, but that does not make it easy.
And now his Burnley side are on the best defensive run in Championship history having not conceded a goal since 21 December – 12 consecutive clean sheets and 25 for the season. Nine conceded in 34 games is 0.26 per match – the current English record is 0.38, from Liverpool’s 1978-79 campaign.
The flip side of this is 11 nil-nils and just 43 league goals, the joint-10th best attack, largely triggered by No 10 Zian Flemming, on loan from Millwall, leading the line all season. Midfielder Josh Brownhill is the top scorer with 10, and only he and Flemming (seven) have scored more than three goals in all competitions. But the result is just two losses and third in the table, two points from automatic promotion.
This cannot be luck, or just down to his players. Parker has always been defensive-minded, but something has changed.
Trying to discover the source of this transformation is an inexact science, but that 9-0 defeat to Liverpool, his last match before leaving Bournemouth, seems a good place to start. He recently told The Daily Mail: “Standing on that touchline at Anfield was one hell of a lonely place”. You cannot imagine three months touring Belgium as the chiselled face of a failing giant did much for his ego either.
Always a risk-averse manager, he has become risk-obsessed, determined never to return to that touchline, to that loneliness. The logic you cannot lose 9-0 if you never concede is pretty solid.
But the reality of actually not conceding is different. Diving into the statistics provides some answers, but not all of them. Parker’s Burnley side have conceded the second-fewest shots on target per 90 minutes, but the quality of those shots – 0.08 non-penalty expected goals – is the best. They sit only joint-17th in the league for tackles won, so they are happy to sit off their opponents, and they are second lowest for blocks.
They even average 56.2 per cent possession, fourth in the Championship, so this isn’t a Sean Dyche special. At its core, Parkerball is probably most similar in philosophy, if not execution, to early Jose Mourinho. Run more than the opposition, defend as a unit from striker to goalkeeper, attack hard and fast, but with precision and intent.
“We still try and have the majority of the ball, invite pressure and then try and play our way around it,” Burnley fan and TurfCast founder Joe Redmond tells The i Paper.
“It just can be very, very slow, and we don’t move the ball quick enough. That’s where all these 0-0s have come from. We can’t break down teams that come to Turf Moor and sit in two banks for four.
“There has been too many nil-nils and they’ve been frustrating, they can be tedious, sometimes you’re left thinking ‘well, that was awful’ – the Leeds home game for example. But when it’s picking up results, it doesn’t bother me.
“Defensively, it’s a mixture of everything. As individuals, they are all very good. Maxime Esteve is the best defender in the Championship. James Trafford has been fantastic. Conor Roberts drops a seven or eight out of 10 every week, he’s probably the most underrated player in our team.”
And it is at a player level Parker appears to do his best work. His motivational schtick can wear a bit thin publicly, but it clearly works with his squad. At points in his career he saw a psychologist three times a week, and built a reputation as the hardest worker on any team. A significant element of this is players who understand each other working harder and more intelligently than their opponents.
Centre-backs Esteve and CJ Egan-Riley live in the same apartment block in Manchester and commute in together. The whole squad have organised games based on The Traitors. But perhaps the biggest beneficiary has been Trafford, still remarkably young for a goalkeeper at 22.
Having departed the Premier League scarred by the sheer volume of the experience, the 5-0 losses and mistakes on mistakes, it could have broken him. Instead, he is the league’s leading keeper, with a post-shot expected goals stopped of 10, meaning he has stopped Burnley from more than doubling their goals conceded. Parker’s work in helping protect and bolster Trafford deserves plaudits.
The recent addition of Marcus Edwards – the product of Parker’s prior relationship with him from Tottenham Hotspur and another testament to his man-management – and return to fitness of Manuel Benson should help goals come in the final weeks of the season.
Parker has often felt trapped in the same yo-yo cycle as the clubs he has managed, and the big question is whether he can now escape that. Redmond backs Burnley to break Manchester United’s 14-game league clean sheet record in upcoming games against Cardiff, Luton and West Brom, but that will be immaterial unless promotion follows.
For Parker, that would be his third attempt at the top flight. Get it wrong, and it is hard to imagine another chance. But if he can translate his new brand of miserable brilliance into survival, prove he has genuinely learned and developed, then one-time talk of his England credentials will re-emerge. Neither he nor his Burnley side appear easy targets anymore.
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