Big John's weekend bets
07:00, 10 Feb 2012
John Kelly
The whole Fabio Capello hoopla reminded me I completely forgot about my Premier League Fantasy Football team. On rechecking it I found I am still persisting with Asamoah Gyan and Kenwyne Jones up front, which was a very nasty surprise to get. On the plus side, Joe Hart is still captain and Kyle Walker is on a healthy points tally. Still, they have been directionless for half a season with no discernible shape or formation. But that only really makes them the equivalent of Aston Villa.
England are getting very close to exhausting the pool of every single possible type of manager they think is suitable for the job to the point where they might be better off not having a manager at all. That might sound silly but, if one thinks about it, they have been managerless for two days and already the morale of everyone has been lifted. Appointing a new manager now will surely only lead to the slow, inexorable decline that every previous boss, even Alf Ramsey, has suffered.
Yet they still have faith that Harry Redknapp will be different and, in a way, they are right. Harry is now an abstract idea; there is no need to appoint him. He has already lifted the morale of the squad, and even the morale of those who will never, ever play for England again, like Jay Bothroyd and Michael Owen. And all by dint of the fact that he is not in prison. Now that is a magic touch.
The most important characteristic the new England coach has to possess — according to the English media anyway — is, it seems, an ability to not make the players feel sad when they are playing for England. We have been hearing about how sad they were when they were playing for Fabio. It is not certain how Fabio was making them sad — maybe he was telling them the end of movies they hadn’t seen — but he was. Harry was sad for a while, too, but he is very, very happy now and rightly so. And that is all feeding into the feel-good factor English football is enjoying at the moment, something it hasn’t experienced since Sven said he read Tibetan poetry.
A word of caution, however. The media could not get rid of the last English manager quick enough and he has hardly set foot in the country since, only sneaking in to do a bit of management at Nottingham Forest and then sneaking back out again quickly before anyone really noticed.
The one before that was a little bit mad anyway but then went completely la-la on the fumes of the job and used Gareth Southgate as a playmaker against Germany, thus ensuring that the last player to score under the twin towers of the old Wembley was a foreigner. Worse, he was a German.
Howard Wilkinson got stuck in a time warp and played the great Arsenal back four from 1993 against France. The problem with that tactic was, of course, that it was 1999 and England lost two-nil to France, whom they then said they wanted to be like.
The England manager before that fled to Spain where he had to invent his own team just so he could coach again and then smuggle players in who didn’t cut it in England to play for him.
The manager before that has not been seen on television this century. Graham Taylor was likened to a turnip and all the rest are no longer with us. If Harry had any sense at all he would resign from the England job now and say he is happy to leave the squad in a much better position than he found it. He cannot do a better job than he has done in the last two days.
A manager doesn’t even have to have managed England to be doomed to obscurity. It is enough to be linked with the job to suffer irreversible career damage.
Take Bryan Robson, who seemed to be a decent manager around 1997. Then he was linked with England and he instantly undid all his good work by deciding his team would not fulfil a fixture against Blackburn Rovers. Middlesbrough were relegated that season as a direct result of being docked three points for not showing up. It was pointed out at the time that had Robson sent out the kids to play, Boro would have survived. And that tactic, of turning up for the game while making a statement by playing the kids that he was not happy with the decision of the league in insisting the game should go ahead, would have been enough for him to get the top job. The English media would have spun it in such a way as to make out that, just by turning up — which really is the least that should be expected of any team — Robson showed diplomacy, maturity, cleverness and defiance. That would have been more than enough to qualify him to lead England to penalty shoot-outs in major tournaments.
And it is not just Robson. No sooner had Sam Allardyce been linked with it than he found himself losing jobs at Newcastle United and Blackburn Rovers. Steve Coppell disappeared off the face of the earth. Phil Brown was sacked by Preston in December. Alan Curbishley still thinks he is the manager of West Ham, like the Japanese soldier who was skulking through jungles with a rusted rifle still believing World War II was going on 30 years after it had ended. The list goes on.
So, if he wants, Harry should keep on serving England as he is doing now: smiling out of car windows denying he wants the job and all the while doing it better than anyone did in the 150 years before him.
That is the only way to keep everyone connected with the England national team as happy as they are now. And I’m off to make Scottie Parker my captain for the rest of the season.
Manchester United to win and keep Liverpool scoreless 9/4
Everton and Chelsea to draw 9/4
Manchester City to beat Aston Villa 8/11
A treble on the above will pay €90
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