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Megson: “West Brom players have to improve”

Tony Pulis
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Gary Megson has become West Brom’s temporary manager after Tony Pulis was sacked and the new coach said that the entire situation is mostly caused by the players who have to improve a lot and as soon as possible.

“I don’t think you need to be Sir Alf Ramsey to suss out that we’ve got some players here that can play better than they have been,” he told BBC. He continued: “They need to pitch up and start playing like we know they can play.The first thing you do is the easiest thing. You just roll your sleeves up and have a real good go.”

Megson used to work with manager Jack Charlton who gave him a great advice which could partly explain Pulis’ end: “Jack was a terrific manager and a great guy. He once gave me a terrific piece of advice. He said ‘If you get into management, three years, then move on’. The first year, you tell them to jump, they jump. The second year, you tell them to jump and they say ‘how high do we jump?’ In the third year, when you tell them to jump, they turn round and say we’ve been jumping for the past two years.”

He knows that this solution is not a permanent one as he claimed: “I don’t know what short-term is. The chairman told me what had happened and I was just asked to do the job interim. Who knows how long interim is? You won’t hear me saying ‘I think this, I think that’. It’s my job just to keep things moving along and give the board the time they need to make the right decisions for the club. We’ll get to the Tottenham game and see what happens after that.”

In the end, the manager insisted: “We got the players in and it was like the elephant in the room. Nobody wants to talk about it. We just told them the position and that there won’t be wholesale changes in terms of what we do.”