Entertainer Coyle wins friends in high places

ALEX FERGUSON was nodding in approval. It was the 2009 Carling Cup quarter-final against Arsenal and, having started to hear Owen Coyle’s name crop up more and more in football circles, the Manchester United manager finally took up Alastair Campbell’s invitation to go and watch Burnley play.

“This is good football,” Ferguson told Turf Moor regular Campbell as Burnley led 2-0. “He’s playing Arsenal the way they don’t like it: high tempo, in their faces, don’t let them settle.”

Within a few months of that, of course, Coyle was doing the same to Ferguson’s team. On their first meeting as opposing managers, Burnley momentously beat United 1-0. And Coyle has already followed that at Bolton, with a daring 2-2 back in October. Despite such effrontery, Ferguson has seemingly brought Coyle into his stable of managerial protégés. The United boss invited him out to dinner with a group of them in Manchester recently and they regularly text — to which Coyle apparently responds with smiley faces.