Andrew Fifield On The Premiership: It is easy to warm to Gareth Southgate. He has the sort of open, earnest face and casual charm which make budding mothers-in-law go weak at the knees, and his refusal to adhere to tired cliches in his dealings with the media makes him one of the more engaging members of the managers' guild.
He certainly showed a neat line in self-deprecation last week when he was asked to ponder the latest broadside launched his way by the League Managers' Association.
"It's funny," he reflected, with a smile. "I've had lots of conversations with the LMA recently and they've always said that it's nothing personal. Then they spend the next few days hammering me. Maybe they're trying to tell me something?"
It is rare indeed for John Barnwell's union to turn so ferociously on one of their own. The LMA might not be quite as one-eyed as the Professional Footballers' Association, who remain unshakeable in the belief that their members are never anything less than beacons of moral integrity, but it generally takes something pretty spectacular - an admission of rank corruption, perhaps, or the secret stock-piling of nuclear weapons in the boot-room - for any criticisms of the coaching fraternity to be publicly aired.
But Barnwell and his minions now have a cause and, in Southgate, a convenient target. The former England defender's crime is his failure to accord with the Premier League ruling - drawn up in consultation with the LMA - that states every top-flight manager must possess a Uefa Pro Licence. Southgate, who was only appointed in the summer, has yet to finish his B licence and in the eyes of the LMA is therefore qualified to do little more than lay out plastic cones and distribute day-glo training bibs.
Barnwell is, perhaps, to be congratulated for refusing to cow to the more belligerent members of football's old school, who insist the managerial art is innate and unteachable - as if Arsene Wenger and Jose Mourinho are modern-day Michaelangelos, hunched over their chalk-boards, awaiting inspiration from a mystical sporting muse.
This argument might have held water 30 years ago, when a football manager could focus solely on motivating, training and picking his players, but their 21st-century descendents do not have it so easy. Now, the gaffer has to be a PR expert, an accountant and a diplomat all rolled into one: only a lucky few - the "head coaches" - are allowed to dedicate themselves to on-pitch matters.
The LMA's coaching courses are designed to give budding managers a grounding in these alien skills, and they can hardly be worse off for the experience.
But Barnwell's dogged insistence that managers complete their badges before accepting Premiership posts is utterly incompatible with his demand for more top players - whose giddying wage packets mean that a post-playing career is no longer a financial necessity - to enter the managerial fray.
Southgate, far from being the villain of the piece, is actually the highest-profile victim of an ill-conceived and clumsily executed system. The 36-year-old was a regular in Middlesbrough's back line last season and, as he has pointed out, simply did not have the time to earn his badges.
Rather than chastising him for having the temerity to accept a job with an established Premiership club - an opportunity denied to many talented coaches - perhaps Barnwell's organisation should busy themselves with clarifying their muddled regulations.
The solution is simple. Either toughen up the Premier League's currently flimsy rules and make it illegal for top-flight clubs to appoint coaches who do not have the necessary accreditation or, preferably, give badge-less managers a set time-frame - 12 months, say - in which to earn them.
Apply this latter rule with an iron fist and the integrity of the LMA's courses would be upheld without blameless individuals like Southgate being punished.
Barnwell would do well, however, to remind his proteges that a certificate is not a passport to a long, fulfilling career. In the notoriously fickle world of football management, yesterday's heroes are all too often tomorrow's zeroes and some of the most notable victims of that trend this season would probably, under different circumstances, be considered case studies by the LMA.
Iain Dowie and Kevin Blackwell both attended the same Pro Licence course at Warwick University; both led their clubs, Crystal Palace and Leeds United respectively, into the Championship play-offs last season; both now find themselves scouring the job pages having been unceremoniously sacked by impatient employers.
In their darker moments, both men will doubtless reflect ruefully on how a manager's most valuable asset - luck - is also the one thing which really cannot be learnt from a textbook.
