Alan Shearer should climb off sofa and show that he wants to manage

By the Times’s chief sports correspondent, Matt Dickinson

If Alan Shearer was unusually impatient to have become a manager, he could have been one at 25. It is amazing to reflect that, in his desperation to keep his star striker, Jack Walker, the then-Blackburn Rovers owner, offered Shearer the opportunity to be player-manager at Ewood Park in the summer of 1996.

Remarkably, Shearer took the offer seriously enough to have phoned Kenny Dalglish to ask his advice. More extraordinary still, Dalglish told him to take the job. “There are not many players of your age,” Dalglish said, “who would get that kind of chance.” Indeed there aren’t, and for good reasons.

Managing a top-flight club is no job for a 25-year-old striker without a day’s experience, whatever his status. There is an argument to say that such a high-ranking role should not even be given to a 37-year-old who has never previously coached a team except to gain his badges.

As Fabio Capello said of the decision to make Gianluca Vialli manager of Chelsea, it was “like putting someone who has never driven behind the wheel of a Formula One car”. Even so, quite a few people seem to think that Shearer is equipped to manage England.

It is a campaign that has a fair degree of public support, but it fails to convince, however many references are made to Jürgen Klinsmann or Marco van Basten, two other great strikers who took over their national teams after minimal time at coaching’s coal face.

At least Van Basten had spent a year with the Ajax B team while, in Klinsmann’s case, the circumstances were unusual in that he did not have to worry about qualification for the 2006 World Cup. Shearer would be thrown straight into a hazardous campaign and it really would be a step into the unknown, with trips to Kazakhstan and Belarus. After the traumas of the past 18 months, the last thing that the FA needs is to be taking a gamble on England’s 2010 World Cup prospects with an unknown quantity.

Shearer may have the making of a decent England head coach, but not now, even if he would have the instant respect of the dressing-room. That is easily lost by a couple of defeats.

So if we are ruling out Shearer for England, what about Shearer for Newcastle United, where he is an idol, a legend, a god? Tyneside would hold street parties if he became manager, particularly if it was in place of Sam Allardyce, who is not exactly garnering popularity in the North East.

The assumption ever since Shearer left Blackburn for Newcastle is that it will happen one day and, while the former No 9 has been very careful not to fan the flames or to heap any pressure on Allardyce in his remarks on Match of the Day, the speculation will mount if results continue to be abject, as they may well do, with Blackburn Rovers and Arsenal in opposition over the next eight days.

The assumption that Shearer will take the job on one day comes hand in hand with an assumption that he will be good at it. But can we be certain? Perhaps all we know for sure is that there is something about Shearer, a seriousness of purpose, that would make you think twice about betting against him.