Official Football Thread

What follows is a list of manegerial casualties in the Premiership within the next few weeks:

Avram Grant - bottom of the pile does not bode well for him, so he'll go first.
Roy Hodgson - with over half the season gone, Liverpool - yes, Liverpool - are still in a relegation battle. He will be second to go especially if Man U beat them in the cup this weekend.
Gerard Houllier - Again, Villa are in a more serious relegation battle than Liverpool, but the Villa board seem keen to give him more time. But time will eventually run out. Third to go.
 
How sweet it would be if United could be the team to give Woy the "coup de grace"  :D However, I feel bad for him. Liverpool haven't done much worse than last season under Benitez, Hodgson basically took over a team in turmoil. He also had to cope with the uncertainty related to the club ownership for much of last autumn, and some key players being either injured or completely out of form. Yet some seem to demand that their performances should be better than last year. It takes longer to fix what was broken during the Gillett/Hicks era.

As for Villa - the loss of Martin O'Neill as manager must have been a tremendous blow. I'm not surprised they're struggling this season. O'Neill is a great manager and it was an ungrateful job to take over.
 
Eddies Wingman said:
As for Villa - the loss of Martin O'Neill as manager must have been a tremendous blow. I'm not surprised they're struggling this season. O'Neill is a great manager and it was an ungrateful job to take over.
Click to expand...

Not as a great a blow as the retention of Emile Heskey as striker.

O'Neill did a great job, but with the sale of Milner and not getting those funds to spend, he knew that the club was on the decline and I don't think he had the appetite for it. If you look at his managerial career he seems always to quit before the club has a deterioration of success - and I don't think the drop in those club's fortunes is simply down to him leaving. This season you can see Villa's reliance on their youth (out of necessity), who were only given a chance by O'Neill in cup games to give a rest to his first XI which he very rarely tinkered with, and so didn't develop as much as they should.

Houllier is a train-wreck. It can only get worse once he's given time and money to spend on second-rate French players.

Albie said:
Avram Grant - bottom of the pile does not bode well for him, so he'll go first.
Roy Hodgson - with over half the season gone, Liverpool - yes, Liverpool - are still in a relegation battle. He will be second to go especially if Man U beat them in the cup this weekend.
Click to expand...

Avram Grant must be the most uninspiring manager in the league (in the dressing room, I imagine), but West Ham do have a very weak squad being carried by Scott Parker.

Hodgson is clearly out of his depth, but if Liverpool fans think Daglish will do much better they're deluded.
 
national acrobat said:
Not as a great a blow as the retention of Emile Heskey as striker.

O'Neill did a great job, but with the sale of Milner and not getting those funds to spend, he knew that the club was on the decline and I don't think he had the appetite for it. If you look at his managerial career he seems always to quit before the club has a deterioration of success - and I don't think the drop in those club's fortunes is simply down to him leaving. This season you can see Villa's reliance on their youth (out of necessity), who were only given a chance by O'Neill in cup games to give a rest to his first XI which he very rarely tinkered with, and so didn't develop as much as they should.
Click to expand...

You have a point there, but it can not be swept under the carpet that Villa did quite well under him. But of course, there are many managers that would come out better when followed by Houllier ...
 
Albie said:
Avram Grant - bottom of the pile does not bode well for him, so he'll go first.
Roy Hodgson - with over half the season gone, Liverpool - yes, Liverpool - are still in a relegation battle. He will be second to go especially if Man U beat them in the cup this weekend.
Click to expand...
Got that the wrong way round - assuming Grant is still poised with his neck resting firmly on the proverbial chopping block. Which I think it still is.
 
No surprise that Woy had to go. Wonder what Dalglish can do to the minds of the players before tomorrow's FA Cup tie at Old Trafford. Fortunately, Liverpool are not shitty these days just due to Hodgson or a lack of confidence, but due to crap form in some key players. That won't necessarily return just because Dalglish takes over.

Now who's next? The odds for it being Grant aren't very high.
 
Theoretically Dalglish will inspire Liverpool for the Utd game and hopefully for the rest of the season just based on the fans reaction and his own legacy. If you could offer me any manager in the world I'd take Benitez back right now. Most people think I'm crazy for it but I just think he is a great manager.
 
He is, and I think many Liverpool fans were unfair when blaming him for all the problems the club had. There was great unrest in the entire club last season, some key players were (like now) out of form or frequently injured. Liverpools greatest on-pitch problem, as I see it, is that they are too reliant on Torres to score, and his injury frequency is too high for him to carry that responsibility alone. I'm not saying Liverpool is a one-man team, but when it comes to goal-scoring they depend a lot on him. Compare to Chelsea who have three who can score a lot (Drogba, Anelka and Malouda) - or United where Rooney's lack of form this season has been compensated for by Berbatov scoring a lot more (he has already scored more than he did all last season).

I'm curious to see what Dalglish can do to the team's performances, but I can't see the current Liverpool squad challenging for the title in the next few years. Some rebuiliding will be needed, will Dalglish get time to do that?

It annoys the hell out of me that I'll miss today's match - I'll be sitting on a plane to Copenhagen  :(
 
Eddies Wingman said:
It annoys the hell out of me that I'll miss today's match - I'll be sitting on a plane to Copenhagen  :(
Click to expand...
Aside from a controversial penalty decision that could of gone either way (opinions will be divided on this) and a red-card for Gerrard, you didn't miss much. However, on Ryan Babels twitter account, he posted a link to a picture of Howard Webb doing his ref bit in a Man U top along with a sarcastic remark. Not very professional is it? And it's got him in trouble with the FA. Seriously, as I've said loads of times before on this forum - think before you post. It's not worth the effort of posting with a knee-jerk reaction. He's not the first and won't be the last sportsman to make stupid comments on a social networking site for the whole world to see. More here - and with the picture of Webb.
 
Well, I received an sms from a fellow United fan while I was sitting at the airport in Copenhagen having a beer. The beer tasted even better when I heard United had won  :D I agree the penalty was soft. Berbatov went down easily. Maybe he's been watching Stevie Me ...

The red card was correct. The fact that Gerrard has got away with that kind of tackles before doesn't mean he always should get away with it. However, I'm a bit surprised Webb, of all referees, would give it, as he often keeps the cards in his pocket even when many other refs would give them.

Babel's twitter post was just stupid, and he will possibly pay for his stupidity by spending a match or two in the stands rather than on the pitch.
 
Have you see Galatasaray's new stadium, Türk Telekom Arena ? We said goodbye to our legendary stadium Ali Sami Yen two weeks ago. I couldn't find any good pictures because the stadium is really new. There are some but they aren't so good. You can find some informations on Wikipedia.
 
national acrobat said:
...but don't you think it's harsh to sack someone for an opinion expressed off-air, however primitive it may have been?
Click to expand...
Yes, it does seem harsh. But he really has to be a bit more professional than that, they should never trust a microphone is off or not. After all, Ron Atkinson did something similar and has not worked on TV since (aside from an appearance in Wife Swap - the future for Richard Keys is likely to be on "celebrity" reality shows as well). And it probably didn't help Gordon Brown in the last election.

Unfortunately, the way media is and how political a lot of this stuff gets, he won't be the last to do this.
 
Now Atkinson did say worse things than that women don't know the offside rule. I recall he called someone a "fat, lazy ni****", which is a bit more inflammatory. But considering episodes like this have happened several times before, TV people should have learned by now. If they want to exchange politically incorrect opinions, they'll have to do it when they're not at work. I think Gray and Keys will be getting a lot of trouble for this. However, I really hope they don't get fired. They have already apologized (although they were probably forced to) and that should be sufficient.

PS: National Acrobat, things are looking bright for QPR now, still in the driving seat in the promotion race!
 
It's a case of rank stupidity, but if everyone got sacked when they did something stupid nobody would be in a job. But as you both say, when you're in a high-profile or media intensive role, you have to take care to be professional at all times.

Eddies Wingman said:
PS: National Acrobat, things are looking bright for QPR now, still in the driving seat in the promotion race!
Click to expand...

Looking very good, we've signed a few players in the transfer window which should be enough to drag us over the finishing line.
 
Eddies Wingman said:
Now Atkinson did say worse things than that women don't know the offside rule.
Click to expand...
Well, that depends on whether you think what he said was sexists or not. However, Keys did not just stop at claiming women do not know the offside rule, he went on to say something about Karen Brady's piece in a newspaper where she claimed football still has a lot of sexism. Him saying what he said has just added more weight to Brady's argument. Personally, I don't really care for Karen Brady and her comments.

NA is right in saying that if people got sacked for saying stupid things.
 
(There goes my 1.500 post count  :S)

I understand from what I've read that Gray was actually only cautioned over last week's comments, and that the sacking was due to some other comments that fell earlier - but surfaced now. I must say that's quite harsh if he wasn't even cautioned over the previous comments. However, the sum of it all does make Gray look quite unprofessional, because it is easy to interpret his comments as sexist, and that is bound to cause problems. Such comments belong in the pub after too many pints, not at work.

By the way, Keys has now also resigned from Sky Sports - he doesn't want to keep on without Andy Gray. http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport2/hi/football/9376139.stm

From that article I see Keys has commented on Rio Ferdinand's remark:

BBC said:
The comments made by Keys and Gray were criticised by Manchester United captain Rio Ferdinand, who described them as "pre-historic" on Twitter.

"I noticed he tweeted and said what we said was pre-historic - but are you saying it does not happen in the Manchester United dressing room?" Keys asked. "My information is that it does."
Click to expand...

I'm sure there is a lot of banter going on in the Man Utd dressing room, just like in any football dressing room. That's hardly the same as saying the similar on TV, is it? I'd say that's more like the pub ... having been in a football team myself, I know what the dressing room is like, and many things are said that few of us would find appropriate to say in public.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top