Alex McLeish takes over when Walter Smith walks out. Neil Forsyth is worried
It takes a special kind of team to suffer an apparent plummet in stature and expectations without the players taking to the field. Scotland may be the unlikely leaders of a Euro 2008 qualifying group that includes Italy and France, but recent events have made this situation appear more like a temporary aberration soon to be rectified rather than a possible springboard to qualification.
It’s time for a little optimistic thinking. Six WSC writers say how they would shake up the game this year, if the football genie appeared to them and granted them one wish
Downgrade Managers
Think of any Premiership manager: you’ll probably be able to hear his voice too. Sam Allardyce, for example: “We have a problem in this country playing to our traditional strengths.” Stuart Pearce: “Maybe I’m too honest, but that’s just me.” Rafa Benítez: “We play technical very good first half.” Even proven duds such as David O’Leary (“I’m not criticising those players in that dressing room”) and Graeme Souness (“Was it a penalty? You tell me”) have an easily recognisable presence in the white noise of football sound bites. It’s easy to forget that it hasn’t always been like this; and that one of the most consistently irritating side-effects of 15 years of Premiership overexposure has been the revolution in the public profile of managers.
The abnormally high profile of the current crop adds nothing to the spectacle of going to a match. Even their physical presence is a distraction, creating a compelling case for abolishing the “technical area”. What form of entertainment wouldn’t be ruined by the intrusion of an angrily gesturing Portuguese in the corner of your vision; or, on TV, the back of a fiery Ulsterman’s head repeatedly popping up at the bottom of your screen? Exhibitionist, embarrassing dad-style “coaching” from the sidelines should be classified as ungentlemanly conduct and deemed a bookable offence. Volleying the ball back, putting your arm around the fourth official’s shoulder, getting in on the goal celebrations: these are all very new and deeply undesirable things. Only the reintroduction of proper dug-out dugouts, populated by scowling men in horrible coats, can put an end to it all. Not to mention a three-day embargo on any form of managerial public comment before or after a game. They’d soon stop doing it.
There was a time when managers barely got a look in. Walter Winterbottom was England manager for the catastrophic 6‑3 defeat by Hungary at Wembley in 1953.There wasn’t a single reference to him in the hand-wringing press reports the following day. The national press singularly forgot to morph his head into a cauldron of goulash. So little-regarded was the job of “trainer” that Winterbottom’s name simply wasn’t mentioned. This state of affairs lasted until the appointment of his successor, Alf Ramsey, but even the celebrity managers that followed were really only on TV very occasionally compared to, say, Carlos Queiroz or Alan Pardew. Brian Clough’s celebrity gained its momentum from the impressions of Mike Yarwood and a million playground mimics.
In recent times, the need to manage “the media side of things” has led to appointments, and even whole careers, that would otherwise barely have got off the ground. Nobody can be good at everything; the general standard of nuts-and-bolts football management is bound to have suffered as a result. Can anyone even remember what Bob Paisley’s voice sounded like? As recently as the early 1980s, talking a lot on television just wasn’t in the job description. Paisley still seemed to do all right for himself. Imagine how much more interesting, and how much more widely respected, José Mourinho might be if he just kept on winning things without feeling the need to make a daily public pronouncement.
Barney Ronay
Cameron Carter sees that diving and simulation has become the BBC's current topic for discussion
The big topic on the BBC last month was diving and, in particular, how terrible and somehow foreign it is. During the last FA Cup quarter-final, Garth Crooks gamely attempted to turn a half-time studio debate into a political bear pit when the subject was introduced by Ray Stubbs. Some days later, on Match of the Day II, Stubbs seemed to get a little peevish when Graeme Le Saux and Lee Sharpe didn’t appear to treat his debate on Didier Drogba heatedly enough. At one point he jokingly asked Sharpe why he was smirking, in the way that someone jokingly asks you why you can’t get your own cup of tea. Stubbs is obviously of the view that there are some subjects one simply doesn’t joke about.
Cameron Carter gets more than an eyeful
Often technology, while improving the quality of one part of our lives, has an adverse effect on another. And so it is with widescreen television, because, while it allows us to see Alan Shearer, Alan Hansen and Gary Lineker’s arm and shoulder in one shot – wider than we’ve ever seen before – it also gives us the unholy spectacle of Shearer’s too-tight trousers in fuller detail than we could ever need. Watching the England v Argentina punditry in widescreen “cinema” mode, I could descry the exact lie of the man’s genitals, right down to the fact that he is clearly not of Orthodox Jewish faith. This detracted from my enjoyment of thousands of Argentina fans looking shell-shocked and, indeed, if I know in advance that Shearer is guesting again in the studio I shall make sure I am watching on the grainy upstairs portable. Also his trousers are shiny grey, like an employee of the Trumpton biscuit factory.
Few players have made more impressive starts at a club than scoring 30 goals in half a season; few have then done less to earn their wages, writes Gordon Cairns
Marco Negri’s four years at Glasgow Rangers is one of the strangest episodes in the club’s history. Signed from Perugia for £3.5 million, the Italian striker scored 30 goals before Christmas in 1997-98, then barely made another appearance as he saw out the remainder of his four-year, £18,000-a-week contract.