Notes from the Habbin: Oh Neil!
Neil Harris is gone. Will anyone notice?
Of all the things I thought might derail what was shaping up to be a fairly low-key end to what has been a wholly low-key season, Neil Harris getting poached by a Championship team was not high on my list.
In fact, when news broke yesterday morning that our manager was heading back to his spiritual home of Millwall, my first response was to laugh. Only at Cambridge United could we go from a position of relative stability to losing our manager and, arguably, most important player (the suspended Lyle Taylor) in the space of 24 hours, two days before we play our biggest rivals. What. A. Club.
Harris was in an uncharacteristically prickly mood on Tuesday night after the defeat to Bolton, taking offence at a fairly innocuous question about how the game had gone and generally seeming a bit irked by life; clearly he already had a lot on his mind.
Neil before me?
I don’t think anyone can blame Harris for taking this move; he’s going up a division to a club where he is one of the biggest legends in its history. He might never get offered another Championship job (realistically at this point it’s hard to imagine him getting offered *any other* Championship job) and it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that, had he stayed with us, he could have found himself back in League Two with a second relegation on his CV. I don’t particularly wish him well, but I understand his decision.
Will we miss him though? That’s more difficult to say and will depend, I guess, on who his replacement is. Like many U’s fans I found his spell in charge to be ok but not great. At the time he was appointed, I felt like we had plumped for a slightly upgraded version of Mark Bonner, someone whose teams play a similar brand of functional football, but who had a better CV and could be relied on to deliver more consistently.
This has just about been born out in the results; Harris improved our points tally by mainly beating teams we’d expect to beat - the 2-1 win against Blackpool is arguably the only game where we’ve exceeded expectations - and competing well but ultimately failing against the teams at the top of the league.
The football on display has been patchy, and for me the most enjoyable three games to watch were Harris’s first three in charge - against Charlton, Blackpool and Exeter - where we played some high-tempo, direct, stuff using Gassan Ahadme as a focal point. Since Ahadme’s injury we haven’t really seen this repeated, instead relying on being largely solid in defence and looking to the likes of Taylor, Sullay Kaikai and Elias Kachunga to come up with moments of quality to win us games.
Under Harris we did improve our attacking output. Our xG numbers were considerably better than the end of Bonner’s tenure, and we won the ‘xG battle’ in all but three of his league games in charge - Exeter away, Portsmouth and Bolton. I’m unsure how meaningful this is given that a lot of the games were pretty close, but none-the-less you can see a clear change compared to the previous manager.
If you prefer your goals actual rather than expected, this also improved after Harris arrived. We scored at a rate of 1.4 goals per game in his 12 league matches in charge, compared to 0.7 per game in the preceding 20. Our defensive numbers were unchanged, conceding an average 1.25 goals per game under both games.
Farewell to the fist pumps
But overall I never felt Harris showed much to suggest that he would do anything as our manager other than make us difficult to beat and stabilise us as a fairly boring mid-table League One team. And there’s nothing wrong with that, I think most United fans would be happy with a few seasons bobbing along not threatening the top or bottom of the table while the stadium redevelopment gets going.
The flipside of that is it’s difficult to get too upset about his departure. One thing I won’t miss are his victory fist pumps at the end of games; while I don’t think he was faking it in the way some managers drum up false PASSION to try and get the fans on side (hi Shaun!), it was a bit cringe to see from a 46-year-old man. Maybe they go in for that stuff down at the Den, the South London weirdos.
The most annoying thing about the whole situation is that it leaves us without a proper manager ahead of a week where we face three very difficult games against promotion chasing opposition. Barry Corr seemed like a fairly reluctant caretaker last time, and I can’t imagine he is relishing the prospect of a second spell in the hot seat, with matches against P*sh, Stevenage and Bolton coming up.
Unlike last time, I would not be averse to seeing Corr given the job until the end of the season - we should be able to gain enough points to survive simply by pottering along as we have been so far, and then can reassess the direction we want to go in with the next appointment. But if the next week goes particularly badly, finding a permanent Harris replacement may suddenly take on a greater sense of urgency.