Sack race: time for players to feel the flak rather than just the managers
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Version 0 of 1. A couple of weeks ago, the Peterborough chairman, Darragh MacAnthony, embarked on a very modern kind of outburst that would probably still be generating headlines now if he were at a more prominent club. His team had just lost 2-0 at home to Colchester, their fourth defeat in five home games, and the directors’ box can be a grumpy place sometimes when the ground is two-thirds empty and the football leaden. MacAnthony’s mood was coal-mine black and he chose Twitter as his form of artillery. He started as he meant to go on. “Like many Posh fans and our manager, there are many things I’m well and truly p...d off and have the hump with after today. Care to know them all?” There were 13 follow-up messages and it probably gives you an accurate barometer of his mood that the first 11 started with the same censored two words. He felt that way, for starters, not just because “a player of Joe Newell’s ability can miss an open goal from five yards” but that the player should be scoring 10 to 15 goals a season (Newell has one). It was the same again about another of his forwards, Luke James, and the way “a striker I paid half a million for scuffs a great chance eight yards out with nobody near him”. His centre-half was picked out because of the way “he runs 50 yards to the edge of the opposition box, doesn’t pass or shoot, loses the ball and they go to the other end and score”. The full-backs annoyed him because they “had plenty of the ball but couldn’t deliver any crosses of any merit or quality or with urgency”. And on it went. By the time he had stopped jabbing a finger at his keypad, MacAnthony had had a go at his goalkeeper, the midfielder he blamed for one of the goals, the referee and the fans; everyone other than the manager, Darren Ferguson. “P...d off it is always the manager who is held responsible when a team fold like a stack of cards when the going gets tough,” he explained. “Oh, and finally, if any of my players are a bit too sensitive to what’s been said, feel free to let me know anytime. Or alternatively just do your job.” The modern-day chairman does not generally speak this way and whoever it is at the Football Association whose job is to police social media was quickly scrolling through his words to ascertain whether he had said enough to talk himself into trouble. Yet I suspect there are quite a few people who are glad nothing more came of it and actually agree with what he says about the default setting of some people to shovel all the blame on the manager. Gary Neville floated the idea a few days ago that he might leave his punditry work eventually to put himself on the frontline and have a stab at management. Jamie Carragher might be tempted as well at some point and when you hear the clarity of thought they deliver from the television studios then at least we know they are men of substance with an acute understanding of how the sport operates. Then you look through the League Managers Association’s quarterly report and that tells us there has never been a higher number of dismissals – 27 – before the turn of the year (the previous record being 24 last season) and it is tempting to wonder if there has ever been a worse time for someone to dip their toes in the waters. Thirteen have been first-time managers and, on average, those sacked have been in their jobs 1.04 years. The record number in one season – 46 sackings in 2006-07 – is on course to be overtaken and, going back to Peterborough, the reality for Ferguson is he is working at a club where he has been fired once and his job is to return the club to a league, the Championship, where a manager’s job has changed hands on average every 10 days this season. Not just that, but it is the way that managers are let go that sticks in the throat sometimes. Did you know, for example, that when Nigel Clough was sacked by Derby County he was effectively told not to set foot in the place while they sorted out his payoff? Derby may contest it was the right decision bearing in mind the improvement since Steve McClaren took over. Yet we are talking about a good man who gave everything to the club, with a statue of his dad outside, and who was sacked over the phone and then asked to keep his distance. Clough, suffice to say, now thinks of the current regime at Derby in the same way the old man once regarded everyone in the Sam Longson days. Neville, incidentally, knows what it is like to be in the other position and it is certainly peculiar, taking into account the number of times he has called for managers to be given more time, that he was part of the Salford City set-up that sacked the manager, Phil Power, a few weeks ago with the team second in the Evo Stik Northern First Division. Nothing, though, should really surprise us in an age when bookmakers are firing off press releases every other day to announce the new favourite for the “sack race” and there is now a website dedicated to the hobby, including a section marked “job centre” and a promise to bring its visitors “the best gossip surrounding which managers are facing the chop”. We newspapers are guilty of overdoing it as well sometimes and MacAnthony may be on to something if he thinks managers are getting a raw deal and that it is not such a bad thing to question the players occasionally. The case of Shaun Wright-Phillips is just one example and that was certainly an interesting choice of words he used on his Twitter account recently to thank, and plug, his sportswear company for sending him some new footwear. “Looking forward to training in my new boots,” he announced. Note the way it’s “training” rather than playing, and that is the awkward truth about what Wright-Phillips has become – a non-footballing footballer, fully aware he is not in Queens Park Rangers’ first-team plans but unwilling, according to Harry Redknapp, to lose his formidable salary by taking up one of several loan offers to play elsewhere. Wayne Bridge did something similar at Manchester City a few years back when he turned down Celtic to stick with the cycle of training on his own and empty Saturday afternoons on millionaire’s row and when it comes to footballers who appear to have abandoned their professional pride, none of us should probably be too surprised by the news from Manchester United over the past few days that they have not generated a single inquiry for Anderson in the current transfer window. They tell a story at Old Trafford going back to the early part of the David Moyes era and the new manager raising his concerns about Anderson’s physical shape with the club’s fitness coaches. The response was that he was in better nick than normal and Louis van Gaal, I suspect, may recognise the symptoms of what Leo Beenhakker used to call patatgeneratie, meaning the “French fries generation” to describe the group of players who have let their careers slip because of blurred priorities. Anderson did not get a place on the bus for Friday’s game at Cambridge but it hardly seemed to be noticed. He was fit, according to his club, but that just reminds me of the unfortunate slip by John Helm in the commentary box that time about Viv Anderson “pissing a fatness test”. It’s no surprise, really, if the people paying the wages don’t see the funny side sometimes and the managers feel like they are riding a crisis-carousel. And, no, it wouldn’t have been a total shock if Peterborough had lost again this weekend (they won 2-1 at Notts County) and Ferguson was sacked. Ginola’s Fifa gamble fails to answer the question of ethics A week on, David Ginola has hopefully discovered Wikipedia by now and can maybe reel off some of the names of those people at Fifa he hopes will soon be calling him Mr President (though only for two terms now he has made it clear he is not a greedy man and wouldn’t seek a third election because “too much of anything is never a good thing”). The campaign is certainly kicking on judging by the messages of support that have been pouring in from the likes of Duncan Bannatyne, Piers Morgan and Carlton Cole. Ginola has been to a primary school in Newport and sat on the sofa on Good Morning Britain. He still needs people like you and me to be more generous – PayPal will do just fine – but he and his new friends continue to make it absolutely clear there is no way this was all a publicity stunt initiated by the bookmaker that is paying him £250,000 and call the cad who does their PR their “Head of Mischief”. Ginola has also had backing from Clare Balding, Trevor Nelson and Lee Hendrie (albeit after he had retweeted something nice about the Lee Hendrie Academy). Interestingly, though, not one interviewer has asked him yet whether he is aware of point 25 in Fifa’s code of ethics that states: “Persons bound by this code shall be forbidden from taking part in, either directly or indirectly, or being associated with betting, gambling, lotteries and similar events … and forbidden from having stakes, either actively or passively, in companies, concerns, organisations, etc that promote, broker, arrange or conduct such events.” Which is all very awkward, because that appears to be a very wordy way of saying Ginola does not even pass the code of ethics at one of the least ethical sporting organisations there has ever been. If you are interested, by the way, in how the £2.3m appeal is doing – well, let’s be generous and say these are still early days. In total, the first week totted up £6,226, ignoring for one moment the quarter of a million the bookmaker stumped up, and by my reckoning that’s about 0.3% of what they need, putting them on course to reach their target some time around mid-2021. One other thing, too, seems to have passed under the radar. Ginola says it is a “scandal” and “grossly unfair” that Fifa, with its Swiss base, does not pay more tax at its biggest event and: “We stronglybelieve that Fifa has a moral duty to pay the going rate of taxation in the country which hosts the World Cup finals.” Well, a lot of us would agree with that, David, just in case you are starting to forget many of us would also like to see Sepp Blatter and his cronies escorted off the premises. It’s just strange to hear it from someone – and we have double-checked this with the man himself – who has lived in London for almost 30 years but has his company, Ginola International, registered in Dublin because of the relevant tax perks. Keep those donations coming, people. Wenger’s list of missed targets Name the thing all these players have in common: Gerard Piqué, Lionel Messi, Zlatan Ibrahimovic, Cristiano Ronaldo, Didier Drogba, Claude Makelele and Paul Pogba. Arsenal fans might get there first given that Arsène Wenger has named all of them in the past few years as players he came close to signing when they were relatively unknown in England. Ángel di María can be added to an already lengthening list after Wenger’s admission that the Manchester United player was another one to slip through his fingers. Nobody should doubt Wenger’s eye for a player but somebody should gently point out it might be more impressive if he had a better rate of getting his man. |