Jim McLean severed his links with Dundee United in spectacular style. Ken Gall reflects on the fall of a hero who became an embarrassment
In a recent poll, the Great British Public selected the Apollo moon landing as television’s greatest moment, with the funeral of the Princess of Wales, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the release from prison of Nelson Mandela listed among other cherished memories of our time.
Spain's managerial strategy is non-existent, but the public hardly cares, says Phil Ball
The Spanish national team is called La Selección, as if it magically picked itself. Maybe the name has arisen from some sort of collective wish-fulfilment, for despite the surface appearance of relative stability (only two managers in the past 19 years) the story of their footballing representatives is certainly no happier than the present English one.
Like England, Holland have a tradition of using club managers to run the national team. Unlike England, it doesn't change the way the play, says Simon Kuper
Holland have a dastardly way of choosing a manager. It works like this: a few old men at the Dutch FA settle upon some appropriate chap, usually a good club coach, always overlooking the best candidate (Johan Cruyff) on the grounds that he is difficult.
The furore over Kevin Keegan's resignation masked deeper failures in the English game, says Stephen Wagg
Kevin Keegan’s resignation as England coach after the defeat by Germany on October 7 has to be seen as some kind of some kind of consummation. The ongoing melodrama that has been the England football team and its various administrations since the late 1960s had finally embraced the theatre of the absurd.
An unaccustomed and unsettling sense of well-being seems to be settling over some of the League’s recently troubled clubs. At Southend United, the unlikely partnership of George Soros and David Webb is in place and promising to take the Shrimpers out of debt and on to higher things. How much the renowned international financier knows about the Third Division may be questioned, but for the time being the property company Delancey Estates, which he controls, is shaping the destiny of the club that once discarded this month’s England manager.