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Posts Tagged ‘successor’

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BLUE PETER

Unlike former Liverpool manager Rafael Benitez – the chippy Spaniard who was rightfully driven from Blighty’s shores for achieving nothing much of note bar winning some European bauble or other, and having the temerity to pass on the opportunity to share a £2.99 bottle of Jacob’s Creek with Salford sommelier Sir Alex Ferguson – his successor Peter Principle has, during his time at Anfield, enjoyed a fairly easy ride from the press.

And so he should have! How many managers have got to two Euro Vase finals, winning neither, like Peter? How many managers can claim to have won the 1976 John West Tuna Chunks Shield with Halmstad, like Peter? And how many elite managers have a LMA Boss of the Year badge proudly sewn on to their lapel, like Peter or Dave Jones or George Burley or Frank Clark or Joe Kinnear? Not many, that’s how many!

Anyway, Peter got yet another easy ride from the press today. But this was because his press conference, scheduled for early in the afternoon, was cancelled. Seems the press have suddenly cottoned on to the fact that Mr Principle’s CV is merely a deft exercise involving the adroit use of smoke and shiny reflective surfaces, and were planning to deviate from the usual deep probing – “British managers, they’re just the best, aren’t they?”, “What is your favourite colour?” and “Do you want to at least pretend that you hope to win at Old Trafford on Sunday?” – in order to ask Peter about his imminent sacking instead.

To fill the gap, Liverpool are releasing an interview with Peter on in-house channel Stalin TV today, when the answers to the questions put to the under-fire manager are expected to be: “It would be arrogant to presume British bosses are any better than ones from Montserrat, American Samoa or Papua New Guinea”; “Blue, no, hold on, what colour do we play in again? Red. Yes, red”; and “Nah, I’ll be happy with a 4-0 defeat, anything so long as Sir Alex isn’t cross with me and cracks open the Le Piat D’or.”

QUOTE OF THE DAY

“We decided that if the players did not want to go back there was no point in them being there” – Sir Alex Ferguson explains why three United players on loan at Preston just so happened to go back to Old Trafford in the same week his son Darren left Deepdale.

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FIVER LETTERS

“Re: David Arkley’s suggestion of settling drawn World Cup games by the fewest cards. Surely this would only encourage a culture of diving, play-acting and other forms of weasel-like skullduggery? Not the kind of thing we have come to expect at football’s showcase tourna…. oh” – Will Stapleton.

“Fewest cards wins?! The moral outrage I would feel at a, to pick a country at random, Portuguese player conning a free-kick, yellow card and possibly a victory at the same time would make me shove my head into my TV* and die like Dan Ackroyd at the end of Grosse Point Blank: dead but still twitching as if in annoyance from beyond the grave. *and for the 1,057 pedants: no, I don’t own an old-school telly, and no, this probably wouldn’t work with my plasma screen one, which would only serve to increase the frustration” – Simon Dunsby.

“Why not decide drawn games by shots or shots on target? At least that way it can be assured that Roberto Mancini is never going to manage a national team” – Luke Stevenson.

“Perhaps they could decide the outcome of drawn games by having both teams provide vanilla envelopes stuffed with [snip - Fiver lawyers] – Craig Sanderson.

“Roy Keane must be doubly annoyed about losing his job. He didn’t have the chance to throw in the towel as is his usual MO wherever he’s been” – Adam Murphy.

“Are Blackburn worth crossing the road for?” – John S Raffin.

“Re: those Blackburn chicken puns. I find that there’s usually a nugget of truth in all of them” – Mike Wilner.

Send your letters to the.boss@guardian.co.uk. And if you’ve nothing better to do you can also tweet the Fiver.

BITS AND BOBS

The red card Pablo Zabaleta received against Arsenal has been rescinded after the FA decided Bacary Sagna gave the more aggressive display of handbags at 10 paces during Wednesday’s 0-0 snooze.

‘Arry Redknapp reckons David Beckham will begin his two-month trip to Spurs at the weekend. “I think he could be here on Sunday possibly if what I’m being told on the grapevine is right,” he insisted, humming along to Marvin Gaye.

Sunderland’s Danny Welbeck has been ruled out for three weeks after suffering hamstring twang in the 1-0 win over Aston Villa.

Having fully recovered from leg-knack Aaron Ramsey is expected to start for Arsenal against Leeds in the FA Cup.

And residents behind the goals at the Newport Stadium are boarding up their windows after hearing that Ade Akinbiyi has signed for the Conference National club.

STILL WANT MORE?

New year. New shirt. New cake. AC Jimbo returns to bring you his European newspaper review now that all those fancy-dan foreigners have come back off holiday.

Louise Taylor locked herself in a six-inch thick cobalt panic room and then penned this blog about why Roy Keane is too proud to take constructive criticism.

Most people welcome in the new year with six shots of memory-reducer but not Scott Murray, who says hello to 2011 by detailing half-a-dozen great sporting years instead, including 1889, the year of the real Invincibles: Preston North End. Woo!

Antonio Cassano may have taken an age to find his shinpads before making his Milan debut, but it didn’t take him long to find the net, whoops Paolo Bandini in his Serie A blog.

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VEGAS, A TWO-FOOT BURITTO AND A BILLY JOE ARMSTRONG IMPERSONATOR – NOW THAT’S HOW TO GET MARRIEDRoy HodgsonLiverpoolScott Murrayguardian.co.uk

• Reds’ players continue to back manager
• Bookies rank potential successors

There are some on the Kop so certain Roy Hodgson is not the right man for Liverpool that their response to this desperate victory would be the same as Elvis Presley’s manager, Colonel Tom Parker, when told his client was dead: “This changes nothing.”

In the long term they are right. If avoiding home league defeats to Bolton Wanderers is the yardstick for success at Anfield, then no manager has failed since the wretched Don Welsh, who relegated the club, having lost to Bolton in the same month Presley recorded I’ll Never Stand in Your Way.

Nevertheless, Joe Cole’s stab home from two yards has brought Hodgson that most precious of commodities, time, although it is unclear just how much. New England Sports Ventures has no desire to bring in an interim manager but defeat to Bolton after the debacle against Wolverhampton Wanderers could have short-circuited its plans to review Hodgson’s position in the summer.

The trees may have thinned a little but Hodgson acknowledges his regime is still deep in the woods. On Wednesday he returns to Blackburn Rovers, where after some early success he failed to revive a team built by Kenny Dalglish, and then come Manchester United in the FA

As Rafael Benítez’s relationship with Inter was going south the Spaniard was on Merseyside, and the number of Liverpool fans that would like him to stay is bad news for his successor

So much for the theory that Internazionale would hang on to Rafael Benítez at least until they went out of the Champions League. The former Liverpool manager has some expertise in engineering Champions League success from unpromising situations and, as becoming the first team to retain the trophy since the change of format from the European Cup is believed to be Inter’s main ambition this season, it had been thought he may have been able to achieve something of note with last season’s winners.

On the other hand, perhaps Benítez will be secretly relieved at not having to go through a repeat of last season’s final, when Inter take on Bayern Munich when the knockout stage commences in the new year. Anything less than perfection, which was pretty much what José Mourinho’s team achieved in Madrid last May – given that Italian fans tend to place a high value on defending securely and striking effectively on the break and would not necessarily expect to see their teams passing people to death like Barcelona – would serve only to underline the fact that Benítez had a hard, maybe impossible, act to follow in succeeding a coach who had delivered a stylish treble.

If Mourinho is a winner, pure and simple, then Benítez is an enigma, considerably more complicated. Over the course of his career he seems to have specialised in winning against the odds, doing the difficult and sometimes the unexpected, while not always making the best of situations that appear to be to his advantage. In his best league season at Liverpool he lost only two games and supervised home and away victories over both Chelsea and Manchester United, a considerable feat, yet had to be content with runners-up spot after drawing on too many occasions against teams such as Stoke, Hull, Fulham and Wigan. While he seemed to be on course for a fairly undistinguished league season at Inter, it is as well to remember that Liverpool were nothing to write home about in the league the season he won the European Cup with them at his first attempt. Everton actually finished above them in 2005, yet when it came to the individual battles in Europe Liverpool always found a way to win, whether it took a phantom goal against Chelsea or a ludicrously unlikely comeback from three goals down in the final.

With that sort of track record one would have thought Inter could have extended Benítez the benefit of the doubt for a little while longer, especially as he has been at odds with the owners of the club – heard that before, anywhere? – and not the fans. Yet Italian clubs generally and Inter in particular are not noted for overindulging coaches, especially foreign ones. Inter have had 13 managers in 13 years since Roy Hodgson’s first crack at the job and as soon as one heard Benítez effectively inviting the club to back him or sack him a few days ago it was possible to imagine a swift outcome. What works for a manager at Anfield does not necessarily transfer to San Siro.

From the sound of it Benítez must have known what was coming, otherwise he would not have received the news while on holiday in Liverpool. How depressed do you have to be, Manchester United fans have been queueing up to ask, to go on holiday to Liverpool? Especially when most of Europe’s airports are clogged with frustrated travellers who cannot get anywhere, and Crosby was the coldest place in England the other night with temperatures of -17C. Perhaps the guy just needs a rest from football, and thought watching Hodgson’s team a couple of times might do the trick. Sorry, I’ll give the Mancunian jokes a rest now.

What is even odder than Rafa’s choice of getaway location and stranger than some of his pronouncements about milk and sugar mountains in recent months is that a sizeable proportion of Liverpool fans would have him back in a flash. As there is also a sizeable proportion of Liverpool fans who wouldn’t, this is not a course of action likely to recommend itself to the club board, yet even so it is fascinating to hear Liverpool fans arguing between themselves over the respective merits and demerits of the present manager and his predecessor.

Broadly speaking, around a third of Liverpool fans (I have not taken a representative sample of Merseyside opinion, I am only reflecting stances taken by the vociferous element on the message boards I have seen) think Benítez still capable of delivering major silverware and never wanted him to leave in the first place. Another third, roughly, were happy to see him go but would have him back straight away because Hodgson is merely a limp imitation of the same thing. The rest do not want Benítez back at any price and, while they grudgingly accept that even he would be better than Hodgson, they want the club to sack the present manager and move on to someone else. Hodgson, it will be seen, has very few friends at the moment. Almost every Liverpool fan wants to see the back of him and ultimately in this situation, even if it is widely suspected that Liverpool fans have been spoiled in the past and have no right to expect success all the time, when the people speak as one the people usually get their own way.

Ladbrokes is offering 12-1 on Benítez to return to Liverpool in the next five years. “If a vacancy occurs at Anfield then Rafa’s name would be in the hat,” a spokesman said. Perhaps such a quick return would be a bad idea from Benítez’s point of view and could only be incredibly messy. The way things are going there will be a vacancy at Liverpool quite soon, though, and were I to have a flutter on who might fill it I would put my money on Owen Coyle. A rank outsider, it could be argued, but an ambitious young manager who is clearly going places. He lacks European experience but Liverpool want someone primarily to put a smile back on everyone’s face, not joust with Mourinho. Just a thought.

The obvious English destination for Benítez is Blackburn, since a) they have a vacancy and b) the owners have indicated they wish to finish fourth or fifth or even better, which is what Benítez is good at. His Champions League experience will prove invaluable once Blackburn force their way into the elite, too. So expect Venky’s to be on the phone to Merseyside almost immediately, and then Rafa to be straight on the phone to Sam Allardyce, for confirmation that he may not have been working for the worst owners in the world in Liverpool and Milan after all.

If Benítez fancies working in England again he should award himself a rest and wait for the Manchester City job to come up, which it is likely to do before long. Allardyce should be on the phone to Inter right away, stressing his defensive know-how and reiterating his line about being wasted in England. That’s not a joke, actually. Allardyce might find Italian football suits him, and were he to put any kind of overseas achievement on to his CV he would strengthen his case for managing England. Always assuming that vacancy does not arise in the next few weeks due to the FA practically pushing Fabio Capello into Inter’s arms. In that event, Benítez for England, anyone? He may not be English but he takes his holidays in Liverpool. Merry Christmas.

Rafael BenítezLiverpoolInternazionalePaul Wilsonguardian.co.uk