Tuesday, 22 January 2013
Thursday, 17 January 2013
The Editor’s Blog: Worshipping a False Idol?
The eagle-eyed amongst you will have read TRF’s review of the men’s Olympic football tournament and noticed not one word is given over to the dismal performance of Spain’s youngsters. This was not an oversight on my part – it was such a disappointment that I deemed it worthy of especial attention.
La Roja went into the London Games as favourites for gold and instead they exited at the group stage with a whimper, having failed to even score a goal. If that didn’t bring Spanish football down to earth with a bump after the senior side’s unprecedented success in winning Euro 2012 then nothing will.
Football at the Olympics has its critics, including some of my friends and colleagues. The ‘it’s not the pinnacle of their career’ argument is a very persuasive one, but consider this: Luis Milla’s Spanish selection contained a crop of players that displayed their talents in and en route to the Europa League final last season.
Added to the Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao contingent were the likes of Jordi Alba and Juan Manuel Mata – goalscorers in La Roja’s record win for a European Championship final over Italy on July 1. If there was one other team that on paper looked to be taking the London Games as seriously as Brazil, then it was the Iberians.
Yet, as they sought to emulate their full national team’s dominance, Spain flattered to deceive. The probing we see from Xavi et al was replicated well enough, but not the penetration. It remains mystifying even now how a side with the pace of Iker Muniain and Adrian Lopez in wide areas could produce so little attacking threat.
Vicente Del Bosque certainly seems to have taken notice of the failure. No player that went to the London Games was selected in his latest senior La Roja squad for the friendly with Puerto Rico. Granted, this isn’t a competitive fixture and is against weak opposition, but such matches are usually seized upon by coaches to blood youngsters.
Being ‘rested’ – Euro winners Alba, Mata and Javi Martinez included – is for me very much a back-handed compliment here. The national boss had identified their struggles and only will time will tell if they and the next generation are in the picture for the World Cup qualifiers.
Their Olympic nightmare is by no means terminal for this crop of players that one day will have to take up the mantle from Andres Iniesta, Fernando Torres and company, thanks to the ravages of time if nothing else. What Spain’s inability to follow the senior blueprint in London illustrates is that possession stats do not win football matches alone.
End product and results are all, so the finger can be pointed squarely at the forwards. This Olympic team was not one that had goals coming from midfield; the club form of Isco, Koke and Martinez alone last term was evidence of that. The burden thus fell on the wingers and whoever played in the nominal centre forward role.
Unlike Brazil with Leandro Damiao, there was no goalscorer in La Roja’s team to fire them to a medal. Nor did the frontline’s defensive colleagues let them down. One clean sheet and two narrow 1-0 defeats, one of which the Iberians had to play the second half with ten men, was the best defensive record of any side competing.
Spain’s youngsters have unwittingly taken a backwards step after earning rave reviews for their clubs in Europe over the last year. In spite of this, we will see Alba, Adrian, Mata, Martinez and Muniain, as well as those from the rear-guard’s ranks, in national colours again because they are going to push the golden generation hard over the next few years.
What La Roja may have learned after four years of dominating football at the highest level is some humility, and that might not be such a bad thing. Del Bosque just has to hope this Olympic experience has not scarred the next generation, but rather made the players redouble their efforts to maintain and continue the legacy laid down by their elders.
First published August 13 2012, http://www.thefootballreporter.com/V2/Article/5661/Europa-League-Fernando-Torres-Javi-Martinez-Euro-2012-Andres-Iniesta.aspx
La Roja went into the London Games as favourites for gold and instead they exited at the group stage with a whimper, having failed to even score a goal. If that didn’t bring Spanish football down to earth with a bump after the senior side’s unprecedented success in winning Euro 2012 then nothing will.
Football at the Olympics has its critics, including some of my friends and colleagues. The ‘it’s not the pinnacle of their career’ argument is a very persuasive one, but consider this: Luis Milla’s Spanish selection contained a crop of players that displayed their talents in and en route to the Europa League final last season.
Added to the Atletico Madrid and Athletic Bilbao contingent were the likes of Jordi Alba and Juan Manuel Mata – goalscorers in La Roja’s record win for a European Championship final over Italy on July 1. If there was one other team that on paper looked to be taking the London Games as seriously as Brazil, then it was the Iberians.
Yet, as they sought to emulate their full national team’s dominance, Spain flattered to deceive. The probing we see from Xavi et al was replicated well enough, but not the penetration. It remains mystifying even now how a side with the pace of Iker Muniain and Adrian Lopez in wide areas could produce so little attacking threat.
Vicente Del Bosque certainly seems to have taken notice of the failure. No player that went to the London Games was selected in his latest senior La Roja squad for the friendly with Puerto Rico. Granted, this isn’t a competitive fixture and is against weak opposition, but such matches are usually seized upon by coaches to blood youngsters.
Being ‘rested’ – Euro winners Alba, Mata and Javi Martinez included – is for me very much a back-handed compliment here. The national boss had identified their struggles and only will time will tell if they and the next generation are in the picture for the World Cup qualifiers.
Their Olympic nightmare is by no means terminal for this crop of players that one day will have to take up the mantle from Andres Iniesta, Fernando Torres and company, thanks to the ravages of time if nothing else. What Spain’s inability to follow the senior blueprint in London illustrates is that possession stats do not win football matches alone.
End product and results are all, so the finger can be pointed squarely at the forwards. This Olympic team was not one that had goals coming from midfield; the club form of Isco, Koke and Martinez alone last term was evidence of that. The burden thus fell on the wingers and whoever played in the nominal centre forward role.
Unlike Brazil with Leandro Damiao, there was no goalscorer in La Roja’s team to fire them to a medal. Nor did the frontline’s defensive colleagues let them down. One clean sheet and two narrow 1-0 defeats, one of which the Iberians had to play the second half with ten men, was the best defensive record of any side competing.
Spain’s youngsters have unwittingly taken a backwards step after earning rave reviews for their clubs in Europe over the last year. In spite of this, we will see Alba, Adrian, Mata, Martinez and Muniain, as well as those from the rear-guard’s ranks, in national colours again because they are going to push the golden generation hard over the next few years.
What La Roja may have learned after four years of dominating football at the highest level is some humility, and that might not be such a bad thing. Del Bosque just has to hope this Olympic experience has not scarred the next generation, but rather made the players redouble their efforts to maintain and continue the legacy laid down by their elders.
First published August 13 2012, http://www.thefootballreporter.com/V2/Article/5661/Europa-League-Fernando-Torres-Javi-Martinez-Euro-2012-Andres-Iniesta.aspx
Monday, 14 March 2011
Lifting the lid on football's 'hire and fire' culture
Aidy Boothroyd’s sacking from the Ricoh Arena hotseat this morning, after getting just one win in the last sixteen matches at the helm of the Midlands club, was the thirty-sixth managerial change of the season made by Premier and Football League clubs.
In this case, after such a poor run of form that saw the Sky Blues’ play-off ambitions fade completely with the former Watford and Colchester boss seemingly unable to do anything to change their fortunes, there can be little argument with him getting the boot. And yet the mere statistic that his dismissal provides is both revealing about English football’s hire and fire culture as well as Coventry’s own instabilities over the last decade.
Martin O’Neill resigned from Aston Villa on 9 August and in the two hundred and seventeen days (thirty-one weeks exactly) since then, head coaches have parted company with their clubs at the alarming rate of just more than one per week. The first cut and dried sacking fell to Alan Pardew, removed from his post at Southampton on 30 August, but by Christmas he was installed at Premier League Newcastle; ironic, as the Saints board felt he had a poor start to the campaign with one of the League One promotion favourites.
Not everybody lands on their feet like Pardew, least of all the man he replaced at St. James’s Park, with fans still scratching their heads trying to fathom why Chris Hughton was sacked in the first place. Prior to Southampton signing Scunthorpe’s Nigel Adkins to take over, resignations were the order of the day with Steve Coppell (Bristol City) and Chris Turner (Hartlepool) joining O’Neill in walking away from their clubs in the early stages of the season.
Kevin Blackwell left Bramall Lane by mutual consent after just a handfull of matches. This was the beginning of what looks increasingly like a disastrous campaign for Sheffield United fans. His assistant Gary Speed got the nod to fill the void, but after an unspectacular four months in charge, the Welsh national team came calling for its most capped outfield player to replace John Toshack. Sheffield born and bred Micky Adams chose the sentimentality of managing his hometown club over finishing his project at League Two high flyers Port Vale and has just one win in fifteen in charge of the Blades to date.
The run-up to the Christmas fixture list also saw Chris Sutton resign from League Two Lincoln City, Paulo Sousa be replaced by Sven-Goran Eriksson at Leicester, Simon Davey leave Hereford United, Gordon Strachan walk away from Middlesbrough who finally have club legend Tony Mowbray at the helm and Craig Short be fired from Notts County in favour of Paul Ince. The festive season itself was particularly lethal, with fifteen managerial changes in the twenty eight days between 13 December and 10 January inclusive.
Amongst those casualties was Sam Allardyce, dismissed from Blackburn by the club’s new Indian owners who plumped for his assistant Steve Kean with no previous experience in being the boss. Only three months down the line his place at the helm at Ewood Park has now been speculated on in the press. Only Pardew, Darren Ferguson, Roy Hodgson and Gary Johnson have got themselves back into work in relatively quick time, the latter trio making a return to Peterborough, replacing Roberto di Matteo at West Bromwich Albion and stepping down to League Two Northampton from London Road respectively.
Dave Penney was given just two months to turn around Bristol Rovers relegation threatened season in League One. Two wins in thirteen is a poor return, but will thirty-three year old club captain Stuart Campbell do a better job? Here the lack of ambition the board had about Penney’s successor raises question marks over why he wasn’t given time and makes you wonder if the Pirates haven’t accepted going down already.
Similar analysis with all the other changes could go on and on forever, but this trigger-happy season from football club boards is going to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to further shorten the average tenure for managers, perhaps even to a length of time that makes it unfeasible for bosses to achieve the targets set for them.
Turning attentions back to Coventry, since their relegation from the Premier League in 2001 and Gordon Strachan’s departure after five years in charge, eight permanent managers have now followed suit. The Sky Blues went on to alternate between not having the steam to make the play-offs and flirting with relegation for the next five seasons. Since then they have been in mid-table obscurity, apart from 2007-08 when they came very close to the drop, surviving in the end by a single point.
In the decade since they last graced the top flight, City have brought in successful managers from elsewhere to take charge. The likes of Peter Reid, Iain Dowie and Chris Coleman, all with Premier League experience, took the job on, but they couldn’t deliver the same success at the Ricoh (and Highfield Road before that). Have Sky Blues fans and board members alike expected too much? The new stadium was not cheap to build and the parachute payments have long since dried up.
Signings haven’t worked out for Boothroyd and his predecessors. Freddy Eastwood has shown he is only a hot shot in front of goal at lower league level and giving a contract to disgraced striker Marlon King was a move that got a mixed reaction from Coventry supporters at best. The Jamaican has since gone on to show his indiscipline on the pitch still persists, being sent off twice this season so far.
This has placed a burden on the twenty-one year old Lukas Jutkiewicz and crowd favourite Gary McSheffrey, who has never been the same since the persistent knee injuries he picked up whilst on Birmingham’s books, which they just haven’t been able to bear. City are the Championship’s fifth lowest scorers with a very average defensive record and that explains why only Middlesbrough and Crystal Palace are between them and the bottom three.
It must difficult being a Sky Blues fan with so many other teams in that part of the country doing well or in the Promised Land where they want to return to. Their West Midland rivals are all in the Premier League (until the end of the season at least) and Nottingham Forest are in with a shout of automatic promotion to the top flight, not forgetting Leicester’s play-off push.
With money being the all-powerful influence that it is on the modern game, pleas to give managers time to turn things around after a bad run to any end are probably going to fall on deaf ears with directors and chief executives who run clubs as though they are like any other business. Looking at this problem from a different angle, it would be naive to say, as some pundits frequently do, that no manager deserves the sack.
Take Roy Keane for example. At Ipswich there was no return on the substantial investment their board made into supposedly improving the squad. The ex-Republic of Ireland and Manchester United star has developed a fetish for purchasing his fellow countrymen since going into management that worked at Sunderland, but didn’t at Portman Road.
Gordon Strachan is guilty as charged for employing a similar approach, bringing players he worked with at Celtic or that lit up the SPL to the Riverside. Middlesbrough remain in a relegation fight even after his departure. If managers ask their chairmen to open their wallets there has to be some sort of improvement on the club’s position after the spending spree.
There is a middle ground here. Between the hire and fire culture that is evident in football today and the infinite chances people get in other walks of life there exists a space in which managers can and should be given time if necessary to remedy poor runs of form. Too often the easy option is taken, but are chairmen thinking up and down the country when they reach for the trigger?
The saddest thing about the here today, gone tomorrow attitude is that nobody wins. More often than not, football clubs’ fortunes aren’t turned around by chopping and changing. We can all point to the ‘great escapes’ of the Premier League in recent times. Fulham (2007-08), West Ham (2006-07) and West Brom (2004-05) spring to mind, but if Brian Clough himself had risen from the dead he couldn’t have saved Derby County from a humiliating record low points total for a top flight campaign whilst Hodgson pulled off miracles in West London.
Many teams with greater heritage than Coventry have fallen from the top flight. Leeds and Nottingham Forest look like they could claw their way back, but others, Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday, have even further to climb than the Sky Blues. Over the same timescale since their last adventure at the zenith of the English football pyramid, Bradford City have gone from being relegated from the Premier League with the Midlands club to the bottom of the Football League.
Any solution to the managerial turnover issue lies in the re-adoption of old-fashioned attitudes. You only have to look to Old Trafford to see how stability over a long period of time has brought success. Europe’s other heavyweights, Real Madrid and Barcelona, the likes of the Milan clubs and Juventus in Italy, and even closer to home in the shape of Arsenal and Liverpool, all these have only enjoyed silverware when there has been a settled presence in the dugout. The quick fix flatters to deceive.
In this case, after such a poor run of form that saw the Sky Blues’ play-off ambitions fade completely with the former Watford and Colchester boss seemingly unable to do anything to change their fortunes, there can be little argument with him getting the boot. And yet the mere statistic that his dismissal provides is both revealing about English football’s hire and fire culture as well as Coventry’s own instabilities over the last decade.
Martin O’Neill resigned from Aston Villa on 9 August and in the two hundred and seventeen days (thirty-one weeks exactly) since then, head coaches have parted company with their clubs at the alarming rate of just more than one per week. The first cut and dried sacking fell to Alan Pardew, removed from his post at Southampton on 30 August, but by Christmas he was installed at Premier League Newcastle; ironic, as the Saints board felt he had a poor start to the campaign with one of the League One promotion favourites.
Not everybody lands on their feet like Pardew, least of all the man he replaced at St. James’s Park, with fans still scratching their heads trying to fathom why Chris Hughton was sacked in the first place. Prior to Southampton signing Scunthorpe’s Nigel Adkins to take over, resignations were the order of the day with Steve Coppell (Bristol City) and Chris Turner (Hartlepool) joining O’Neill in walking away from their clubs in the early stages of the season.
Kevin Blackwell left Bramall Lane by mutual consent after just a handfull of matches. This was the beginning of what looks increasingly like a disastrous campaign for Sheffield United fans. His assistant Gary Speed got the nod to fill the void, but after an unspectacular four months in charge, the Welsh national team came calling for its most capped outfield player to replace John Toshack. Sheffield born and bred Micky Adams chose the sentimentality of managing his hometown club over finishing his project at League Two high flyers Port Vale and has just one win in fifteen in charge of the Blades to date.
The run-up to the Christmas fixture list also saw Chris Sutton resign from League Two Lincoln City, Paulo Sousa be replaced by Sven-Goran Eriksson at Leicester, Simon Davey leave Hereford United, Gordon Strachan walk away from Middlesbrough who finally have club legend Tony Mowbray at the helm and Craig Short be fired from Notts County in favour of Paul Ince. The festive season itself was particularly lethal, with fifteen managerial changes in the twenty eight days between 13 December and 10 January inclusive.
Amongst those casualties was Sam Allardyce, dismissed from Blackburn by the club’s new Indian owners who plumped for his assistant Steve Kean with no previous experience in being the boss. Only three months down the line his place at the helm at Ewood Park has now been speculated on in the press. Only Pardew, Darren Ferguson, Roy Hodgson and Gary Johnson have got themselves back into work in relatively quick time, the latter trio making a return to Peterborough, replacing Roberto di Matteo at West Bromwich Albion and stepping down to League Two Northampton from London Road respectively.
Dave Penney was given just two months to turn around Bristol Rovers relegation threatened season in League One. Two wins in thirteen is a poor return, but will thirty-three year old club captain Stuart Campbell do a better job? Here the lack of ambition the board had about Penney’s successor raises question marks over why he wasn’t given time and makes you wonder if the Pirates haven’t accepted going down already.
Similar analysis with all the other changes could go on and on forever, but this trigger-happy season from football club boards is going to do one thing and one thing only, and that is to further shorten the average tenure for managers, perhaps even to a length of time that makes it unfeasible for bosses to achieve the targets set for them.
Turning attentions back to Coventry, since their relegation from the Premier League in 2001 and Gordon Strachan’s departure after five years in charge, eight permanent managers have now followed suit. The Sky Blues went on to alternate between not having the steam to make the play-offs and flirting with relegation for the next five seasons. Since then they have been in mid-table obscurity, apart from 2007-08 when they came very close to the drop, surviving in the end by a single point.
In the decade since they last graced the top flight, City have brought in successful managers from elsewhere to take charge. The likes of Peter Reid, Iain Dowie and Chris Coleman, all with Premier League experience, took the job on, but they couldn’t deliver the same success at the Ricoh (and Highfield Road before that). Have Sky Blues fans and board members alike expected too much? The new stadium was not cheap to build and the parachute payments have long since dried up.
Signings haven’t worked out for Boothroyd and his predecessors. Freddy Eastwood has shown he is only a hot shot in front of goal at lower league level and giving a contract to disgraced striker Marlon King was a move that got a mixed reaction from Coventry supporters at best. The Jamaican has since gone on to show his indiscipline on the pitch still persists, being sent off twice this season so far.
This has placed a burden on the twenty-one year old Lukas Jutkiewicz and crowd favourite Gary McSheffrey, who has never been the same since the persistent knee injuries he picked up whilst on Birmingham’s books, which they just haven’t been able to bear. City are the Championship’s fifth lowest scorers with a very average defensive record and that explains why only Middlesbrough and Crystal Palace are between them and the bottom three.
It must difficult being a Sky Blues fan with so many other teams in that part of the country doing well or in the Promised Land where they want to return to. Their West Midland rivals are all in the Premier League (until the end of the season at least) and Nottingham Forest are in with a shout of automatic promotion to the top flight, not forgetting Leicester’s play-off push.
With money being the all-powerful influence that it is on the modern game, pleas to give managers time to turn things around after a bad run to any end are probably going to fall on deaf ears with directors and chief executives who run clubs as though they are like any other business. Looking at this problem from a different angle, it would be naive to say, as some pundits frequently do, that no manager deserves the sack.
Take Roy Keane for example. At Ipswich there was no return on the substantial investment their board made into supposedly improving the squad. The ex-Republic of Ireland and Manchester United star has developed a fetish for purchasing his fellow countrymen since going into management that worked at Sunderland, but didn’t at Portman Road.
Gordon Strachan is guilty as charged for employing a similar approach, bringing players he worked with at Celtic or that lit up the SPL to the Riverside. Middlesbrough remain in a relegation fight even after his departure. If managers ask their chairmen to open their wallets there has to be some sort of improvement on the club’s position after the spending spree.
There is a middle ground here. Between the hire and fire culture that is evident in football today and the infinite chances people get in other walks of life there exists a space in which managers can and should be given time if necessary to remedy poor runs of form. Too often the easy option is taken, but are chairmen thinking up and down the country when they reach for the trigger?
The saddest thing about the here today, gone tomorrow attitude is that nobody wins. More often than not, football clubs’ fortunes aren’t turned around by chopping and changing. We can all point to the ‘great escapes’ of the Premier League in recent times. Fulham (2007-08), West Ham (2006-07) and West Brom (2004-05) spring to mind, but if Brian Clough himself had risen from the dead he couldn’t have saved Derby County from a humiliating record low points total for a top flight campaign whilst Hodgson pulled off miracles in West London.
Many teams with greater heritage than Coventry have fallen from the top flight. Leeds and Nottingham Forest look like they could claw their way back, but others, Southampton and Sheffield Wednesday, have even further to climb than the Sky Blues. Over the same timescale since their last adventure at the zenith of the English football pyramid, Bradford City have gone from being relegated from the Premier League with the Midlands club to the bottom of the Football League.
Any solution to the managerial turnover issue lies in the re-adoption of old-fashioned attitudes. You only have to look to Old Trafford to see how stability over a long period of time has brought success. Europe’s other heavyweights, Real Madrid and Barcelona, the likes of the Milan clubs and Juventus in Italy, and even closer to home in the shape of Arsenal and Liverpool, all these have only enjoyed silverware when there has been a settled presence in the dugout. The quick fix flatters to deceive.
Wednesday, 9 March 2011
Champions League roundup
Courtesy of Suite101:
First Arsenal in Barcelona:
http://www.suite101.com/content/arsenal-outclassed-by-brilliant-barca-a356992
And Spurs against Milan:
http://www.suite101.com/content/goalless-draw-dumps-milan-out-and-sees-spurs-advance-a357350
First Arsenal in Barcelona:
http://www.suite101.com/content/arsenal-outclassed-by-brilliant-barca-a356992
And Spurs against Milan:
http://www.suite101.com/content/goalless-draw-dumps-milan-out-and-sees-spurs-advance-a357350
Thursday, 3 March 2011
Kolo Toure Fails Drugs Test
Reports have emerged today that the Manchester City defender has tested positive for a 'specified substance'. This will result in suspension from playing in all competitions, but an appeal will clearly be launched by the Ivorain centre half's agent and representatives.
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