David Gwilliam
Well-Known Member
I came across an article in The Times archive which I thought amusing and interesting - especially in view of Sven being sacked just over a year later. Because of the Times Paywall few members will have read it . As a link to The Times would not work I have put the whole article below.
Rod Liddle: Gun-for-hire Sven lured into the Mandaric lair
A sensible chairman would have chosen Richard Dawkins or Dappy from N-Dubz to manage Leicester. Instead they will have Sven
The Sunday Times Published: 3 October 2010
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I wonder who will be the eighth manager at Leicester City inside the past three years, now we know Sven-Göran Eriksson is likely to be introduced as the seventh at a press conference this morning? My own choice would be Dappy from N-Dubz, or perhaps Richard Dawkins. Or a combination of the two, maybe Dappy to do long-term strategy and Richard to concentrate on the playing side.
Actually, my numbers might be wrong because I haven’t counted the caretaker managers. Do that and we’re well into double figures.
Little wonder the League Managers Association (LMA) is wringing its hands: “Knee-jerk dismissals and the chopping and changing of managers will not deliver success . . . Paulo’s sacking is even more disappointing in light of the chairman’s comments on Paulo’s appointment in the summer, when he stated he was ‘delighted to acquire a manager of such great calibre’.†Well, they are right about the U-turn, at least.
Quite what it was that commended Sousa to the entertaining (for the rest of us) Serbian chairman Milan Mandaric may remain forever a mystery. The Portuguese flair that saw Swansea score fewer goals than Grimsby?
Sousa seemed to think that not scoring goals was a devilishly clever plan and put it into practice at Leicester by keeping top scorer Matty Fryatt well away from the field of play. Fryatt was allowed out of his kennel only eight times in league and cup games this season and betrayed his new manager by posting a scoring ratio of 50%, as good as any forward in the division.
One sympathises with the LMA, but if ever there was a case for precipitous action it was at the Walkers stadium. But there is an inevitability about Eriksson’s appointment; he has become a sort of talisman of the deranged chairman, a gun for hire only by the egotistical or the preposterously, ambitious.
You and I both knew exactly what would happen, for example, at Notts County; there would be tears, if not before bedtime then before Bonfire Night. So it proved, and if Eriksson behaved with decency and even magnanimity when he left the club then it does not quite cancel out either his gullibility or opportunism in having taken the post in the first place. It was a scenario scripted by Lewis Carroll and filmed by Luis Bunuel.
Eriksson’s record as a manager is, on paper, rather good. Statistically he did poorly only at Fiorentina, comparatively early on in his managerial career. But these statistics sometimes obscure more than they reveal.
Critics suspect that Sven’s teams are flat-track bullies — capable of winning against the dross but rarely achieving something out of the ordinary. This was certainly true at, for example, Gothenburg and to a lesser degree at Benfica, where there was only Sporting Lisbon and Porto to worry about.
It is true, too, of his tenure in charge of England; basic managerial competence hindered by an innate conservatism when it comes to doing something out of the ordinary, something to win a game that cannot be won solely by solid organisation.
Still, a bit of solid organisation and consistency is precisely what Leicester City need right now, and you sort of hope that Mandaric allows him the time to achieve this.
Meanwhile, I wonder how long Gordon Strachan has got at Middlesbrough? His expensively assembled assortment of expatriate porridge-lickers have spent the season doing a passable recreation of the Battle of Culloden. They hover precariously a few places above the Foxes having been installed as everybody’s (except mine) pre-season favourites for the title.
They lack pace, guile, wit and, more importantly perhaps, conviction — Strachan recently revealed in a post-match interview following another capitulation that he has “tried everythingâ€.
Gareth Southgate, you suspect, will allow himself a wry smile — Boro were not far off the top of the Championship when he was disposed of. On the Boro message-boards there are calls for the return of Steve McClaren, a yearning that in any other circumstance you would assume unthinkable. Cometh the hour cometh the man, huh, Leicester?
Rod Liddle: Gun-for-hire Sven lured into the Mandaric lair
A sensible chairman would have chosen Richard Dawkins or Dappy from N-Dubz to manage Leicester. Instead they will have Sven
The Sunday Times Published: 3 October 2010
Recommend (2)
Comment (0)
I wonder who will be the eighth manager at Leicester City inside the past three years, now we know Sven-Göran Eriksson is likely to be introduced as the seventh at a press conference this morning? My own choice would be Dappy from N-Dubz, or perhaps Richard Dawkins. Or a combination of the two, maybe Dappy to do long-term strategy and Richard to concentrate on the playing side.
Actually, my numbers might be wrong because I haven’t counted the caretaker managers. Do that and we’re well into double figures.
Little wonder the League Managers Association (LMA) is wringing its hands: “Knee-jerk dismissals and the chopping and changing of managers will not deliver success . . . Paulo’s sacking is even more disappointing in light of the chairman’s comments on Paulo’s appointment in the summer, when he stated he was ‘delighted to acquire a manager of such great calibre’.†Well, they are right about the U-turn, at least.
Quite what it was that commended Sousa to the entertaining (for the rest of us) Serbian chairman Milan Mandaric may remain forever a mystery. The Portuguese flair that saw Swansea score fewer goals than Grimsby?
Sousa seemed to think that not scoring goals was a devilishly clever plan and put it into practice at Leicester by keeping top scorer Matty Fryatt well away from the field of play. Fryatt was allowed out of his kennel only eight times in league and cup games this season and betrayed his new manager by posting a scoring ratio of 50%, as good as any forward in the division.
One sympathises with the LMA, but if ever there was a case for precipitous action it was at the Walkers stadium. But there is an inevitability about Eriksson’s appointment; he has become a sort of talisman of the deranged chairman, a gun for hire only by the egotistical or the preposterously, ambitious.
You and I both knew exactly what would happen, for example, at Notts County; there would be tears, if not before bedtime then before Bonfire Night. So it proved, and if Eriksson behaved with decency and even magnanimity when he left the club then it does not quite cancel out either his gullibility or opportunism in having taken the post in the first place. It was a scenario scripted by Lewis Carroll and filmed by Luis Bunuel.
Eriksson’s record as a manager is, on paper, rather good. Statistically he did poorly only at Fiorentina, comparatively early on in his managerial career. But these statistics sometimes obscure more than they reveal.
Critics suspect that Sven’s teams are flat-track bullies — capable of winning against the dross but rarely achieving something out of the ordinary. This was certainly true at, for example, Gothenburg and to a lesser degree at Benfica, where there was only Sporting Lisbon and Porto to worry about.
It is true, too, of his tenure in charge of England; basic managerial competence hindered by an innate conservatism when it comes to doing something out of the ordinary, something to win a game that cannot be won solely by solid organisation.
Still, a bit of solid organisation and consistency is precisely what Leicester City need right now, and you sort of hope that Mandaric allows him the time to achieve this.
Meanwhile, I wonder how long Gordon Strachan has got at Middlesbrough? His expensively assembled assortment of expatriate porridge-lickers have spent the season doing a passable recreation of the Battle of Culloden. They hover precariously a few places above the Foxes having been installed as everybody’s (except mine) pre-season favourites for the title.
They lack pace, guile, wit and, more importantly perhaps, conviction — Strachan recently revealed in a post-match interview following another capitulation that he has “tried everythingâ€.
Gareth Southgate, you suspect, will allow himself a wry smile — Boro were not far off the top of the Championship when he was disposed of. On the Boro message-boards there are calls for the return of Steve McClaren, a yearning that in any other circumstance you would assume unthinkable. Cometh the hour cometh the man, huh, Leicester?
