Team lost a couple of games in a row? Sack the manager. Team five places in the league below where you’d like them to be? Sack the manager. Couple of expensive signings have a bit of a whinge? Sack the manager.

I’m not saying that it’s always wrong to change the man at the top, since sometimes (for example at any club where Graeme Souness has been manager) it is his fault. But examples of that are so rare in comparison to the knee jerk reaction sacking as to be a collector’s item.

Equally occasionally, a change of manager can bring about a dramatic resuscitation of a flagging team’s fortunes. Harry Redknapp at Spurs is the most recent example (although he has done it before at Pompey), although Bryan Robson at West Brom was possibly the most dramatic. But, inevitably, most have a short honeymoon period and then end up in exactly the same spot as their predecessor.

In contrast, the most successful teams are almost invariably those who choose a manager carefully and retain him for a number of years, through thick and thin. By success, I mean where a team has consistently overachieved in relation to what an objective observer would expect.

Ferguson at United, Wenger at Arsenal, Allardyce at Bolton, Curbishley at Charlton, Hughes at Blackburn, O’Neill at Leicester and now Villa – all have been allowed to compile a squad within their respective resources, then given time to ride out early difficulties and fuse that squad into a successful team. When they moved on, the team they had cause to overachieve dropped back down to its natural place – that is the value of a good, well-supported manager.

Let’s look at the Keane and Ince cases closely, because they are very different.

Roy Keane

Unlike many former players, Keane was an instant hit in management. He took a chaotic Sunderland from the bottom of the Championship to an automatic promotion spot in his first season. In his second season, he kept Sunderland in the Premiership, which is all that a newly promoted team ever asks for. This summer, he has made a number of signings which I thought to be sensible – reasonably cheap players who either have bags of Premier League experience or with plenty of potential. He also backed his ability to manage a number of difficult personalities.

And now, after a month of bad results, that all counts for nothing. He has left Sunderland, apparently, because he had a bad November. What sort of blinkered, nonsensical thinking is that? An objective observer would expect Sunderland to be fighting against relegation for at least this season, and possibly next. So the fact that they have slipped into the relegation zone should be bad news, but not the end of the world.

Numerate readers of the Premier League table would point out that Sunderland are 4 points from 13th, 5 points from 9th and 8 points from 7th. Hardly cast adrift, with no hope other than a radical overhaul. They should have stuck with the man who got them this far – the absolute earliest that Keane should have either been pushed or allowed to leave should be if and when Sunderland are mathematically relegated.

Paul Ince

Here the case is different. Ince was brought in to succeed Mark Hughes, a manager who has overachieved wherever he has gone, and someone who had caused Blackburn to challenge at levels they had no right to. A tough act to follow for any manager, let alone such an inexperienced one.

Ince was appointed on the basis of two good runs with lower league teams and – we can’t get away from this – who he is, a former Premiership star and the most prominent black coach in the country. He had never managed top class players, and stories of his own dressing room exploits hardly spoke well of his ability to get on with others. I didn’t think it was the right choice at the time, although I could see how and why it was made.

Now it is becoming clear that – fancy this? – Ince is a bit tactically naive and isn’t as good a manager as Hughes. Blackburn fans are entirely right to question why their board appointed Ince in the first place. However, if Blackburn’s board are sentient beings who think through the possible consequences of their actions before taking them, they must have known in the summer that Ince was going to need a bedding-in period and that certain star players might fancy following Hughes.

If they were going to sack Ince at the first sign of trouble, then they should never have appointed him. My message to them now is “stick by your man, or resign yourselves”.

As a last thought, what will happen if both are sacked? Well, how about this – Keane to Blackburn and Allardyce to Sunderland. Ince will sit on the sidelines for a couple of months before the merry-go-round picks him up again, although if he has any sense he’ll go back to the Championship and learn his new trade a bit better. After all, there’ll be plenty of vacancies opening up in the near future.

PS. Note that I resisted mentioning Newcastle for the entire duration of the article, something I would deserve a medal for if the managerial comings-and-goings in Geordieland weren’t so ridiculous as to be beyond parody.

Also See: Safe or Not? The 08-09 Premier League Manager Sack Race.

Penguinissimo has recently set up his own Manchester United blog, Penguin United. He also writes a regular column for the popular United blog Red Rants.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

The Ronaldo saga, possibly the most tedious bout of “will-he-won’t-he” transfer talk ever, was the bane of most United fans lives over the summer. Here we were, champions of England, champions of Europe, and all anyone wanted talk about was whether our Portuguese winker was going to join Real Madrid.

Two months into the new season, it is still a big theme amongst United fans, who still rarely sing Ronaldo’s song and are quick to criticise every slip and every piece of neutral body language. In doing so, those same fans are turning Ronaldo’s possible move to Real into a self-fulfilling prophecy.

Before I explain in more detail, let’s look back and try to apply a bit of perspective. A lot of conflicts came to the fore during those two months of hell. United V Real Madrid, United v Marca (the Spanish newspaper acting as Real’s unofficial mouthpiece), United v Fifa, Fergie v Calderon, Fergie v Ronaldo…the list goes on and on, and very exciting and dramatic they all were at the time. Or something.

The most tragic, though, was the conflict that developed between Ronaldo and the Manchester United fans. Tragic because within two weeks of that glorious night in Moscow, those fans who had loved Ronaldo like a son, who had publically praised his every move, who had revelled in his meteoric ascent to the top of the game, suddenly hated him.

The adoration turned into bile, and that bile spilled over into every sort of football conversation, from the mainstream media to the pubs to the blogosphere. Looking back on it now, it seems like such a storm in a teacup – having won nearly every honour available with United, Ronaldo was offered fabulous wealth to go and do something he’d always dreamed of doing. The United fans may have hated it, but they should have understood it.

But disloyalty is the ultimate sin for United fans. With notable exceptions like Dennis Law, it is tough to go back and find another example of a leading player leaving United at the peak of his powers and against United’s will. It is essentially unprecedented under Fergie’s management, where whole rafts of players have given United the majority of their career, leaving only when close to retirement. Or, in the case of players like Giggs and Scholes, some have literally only played for one club.

Regardless of the rational motives put before them, many fans refuse to forgive Ronaldo for threatening to leave – it just doesn’t happen to us, they think. Well, it didn’t. Ronaldo stayed, in spite of everything. He gave a very frank, very honest press conference, where he admitted that he had considered leaving, but ultimately realised that it wasn’t the right thing to do. Where he promised to give his best for United, and apologised for contributing so much to the mayhem. He also apologised in private to the United players and staff, who in turn presented him with a Real Madrid kit as a joke – the players and the management have moved on.

Many fans accepted that on face value, but needed to be shown that he was prepared to do his best for the club, rather than just waiting it out a year and agitating for a move again. So, what evidence do we have so far? Ronaldo devoted himself entirely to recovering from his injury, and did so with such success that he returned a full month early to assist United’s misfiring attack. Despite being below his best, he is contributing goals and assists on a regular basis. In his rare interviews, he talks of regaining the fans’ love.

It seems, though, that the fans don’t want to love him anymore. They talk of supporting him out of a sense of duty, as they would any other player who wears the red shirt, but nothing more. They will not sing his song unless he scores – and then only once – and they criticise him for things they previously were prepared to overlook. On Saturday, Ronaldo hardly smiled when he scored – and he was pilloried for it.

When Fergie talks of bringing Ronaldo back, he talks of a chance to leave Old Trafford as a United legend. I think this appeals to Ronaldo – I think it is the sort of goal he understands, and a masterstroke of man management by Fergie. But it will only work if the fans are prepared to be swayed again – no player, no matter how motivated or well managed, will stay for long at a club where the fans dislike him. If they only support him out of a sense of duty, he will only perform at the level required by professionalism – it’s a two way street.

Ironically, the justification for this lack of love is the assumption that Ronaldo will join Real Madrid next summer, come what may. We’ve seen nothing to back that up. But if the Stretford End want to ensure the best player in the world leaves United at the peak of his powers, they’re going the right way about it.

It’s two months on from the start of the season, and I think the appropriate level of displeasure has been conveyed. The fans need to give Ronaldo a second chance, to welcome him back into the fold, albeit on the condition that if he strays once more there will be no redemption. If the cold shouldering continues, at some point the relationship will be sundered for good and United will lose one of the best players ever to grace the Theatre of Dreams.

What do you make of Ronaldo’s continuing alienation? Can you forgive him, or would you prefer him to leave and end the pain? Let’s hear your views.

Penguinissimo has recently set up his own Manchester United blog, Penguin United. He also writes a regular column for the popular United blog Red Rants.

From Soccerlens.com - Football News

One of the most mocked aspects of the Premier League season so far has been the FA’s much vaunted Respect The Ref campaign. This initiative, as we all know, is designed to encourage players to behave better towards the referee – no dissent, no abuse, no crowding, just a polite dialogue, preferably channeled through the captain.

From day one, it has been under attack from all sides. Former players have lined up to use their feather-bedded media roles to whinge about how “it wasn’t a problem in my day”. Newspapers drop ironic references to it into reports, often alongside a picture of a player being anything but respectful. Fans scream blue murder when their own players are punished, and then scream louder when others get away with similar crimes. And the players largely ignore it.

In this article, I’m going to:

1) give an alternative perspective on why the Respect campaign deserves everyone’s support

3) outline how I think it should work.

However, before I do that, I want to make one thing absolutely clear. I am not a politically correct, grey-suited bore. I think political correctness is one of the banes of modern life; if everything was sanitised, it would be so tedious as to make previously rational people want to stick blunt objects into their eyes. If you’re going to disagree with me (and I expect a lot of you might), don’t be so cheap as to do so on these grounds. With that in mind, read on…

Why we should support Respect

Most people look at a proposed new rule, work out how it’s going to affect the team they support, then decide whether or not it’s a good thing. I maintain that the current Respect rules are pretty much neutral for most high level teams – sometimes you’ll be on the receiving end (as United were against Chelsea), others you’ll benefit. The main way it will currently influence the games you or I watch on TV will be an additional level of regulation and therefore controversy once in a while. But look deeper.

Football goes beyond the game we see on our TV screens. Football is an international pastime, played by millions of ordinary people every day of the week. They often play to a pretty bad standard, but the weekly game with the lads (or gals, nowadays) can be the focal point of someone’s weekend, social calendar, and sometimes community. Football has a vital role in all sorts of communities all across the world.

A few years ago, I played in a Saturday league team. We played at a low-ish standard, but there was a squad of 20 or so, and we in turn were part of a bigger club that fielded 5 teams and had nearly 150 members. The one thing that struck me again and again during those games was the appalling way referees were treated. They were screamed at, verbally abused for no reason, called every name under the sun, and occasionally physically intimidated. 

Both sides were guilty – indeed our captain, who fancied himself as a Roy Keane figure, spent far more of the game whinging at the ref than he did chasing the ball. There was one memorable game where the home team literally rugby-tackled and two-footed our guys all game, but the ref did nothing for fear of being beaten up. And that was the games which had referees. You try playing a game where two competitive teams have to self-referee, and then try to criticise any referee.

People talk on about the pros being role models, but they really are. An amateur player will often work out which pro he is closest too or wants to be, and then copy him religiously - so a Keane wannabe will not rule out leg-breaking tackles against a guy who has annoyed him; a Rooney wannabe will charge after the ref hurling streams of expletives whenever he doesn’t get a decision; and so on.

The result is that the vast majority of refs at lower levels are quitting. Twenty quid and a half-time orange isn’t a good enough incentive to spend the afternoon of a freezing cold pitch being a verbal punchbag. And where do the top level refs (who we all complain aren’t good enough) come from? Oh, that’s right, the pool of lower league refs. Not to mention that without refs, the games which so many people look forward to will simply stop taking place.

Anything that can be done to make life easier for refs everywhere, at every level, in any game, should be done. Ultimately, everyone, from the armchair fan to the superstar pro to the amateur in the park will be all the better for it.

Flaws with the current approach

The first, and most obvious, is that the Respect campaign is the baby of the English FA only. In the world of global competition (and notwithstanding my thoughts on local football above), if players in the Premier League were disciplined into never talking to refs, they would be at a real disadvantage in European and international competition. Working the ref is a dark art, but one which is not restricted to Chelsea – in Spain and Italy, it is viewed as “cleverness”, for example. A campaign like this will only have teeth if it is a global campaign, backed to the hilt by FIFA. And Sepp Blatter. Oh…

Second, the existing approach allows too much inconsistency. Different refs on different days in different conditions will pay the new rules different amounts of attention. The United v Chelsea game where United’s players were rigorously punished for dissent was a fairly clean game, which it could be argued allowed Mike Riley to focus on these finer points. And when on one day a team receives 7 yellows, and the next a team can surround the ref to protest a sending-off and receive no sanction at all, people will get pissed off and the important underlying message will get lost in a mire of controversy.

The Solution

It’s simple, really. 

Next season, before the pre-season games, make it clear to every club in Europe that any dissent or abuse of any sort will receive a yellow card.  A muttered “fuck off, ref” will be on a par with a Rooney-esque tirade. Yellow, yellow, yellow. The captain will be permitted to approach the referee calmly, and politely ask for the reason for the referee’s decision, but will not be permitted to debate it. No discretion for the referee, no room for inconsistency.

For the first few pre-season games (there should be no suspensions in this pre-season), most teams will end the game with seven players on the pitch. But once you’ve been sent off in the twelfth minute for disputing a throw-in on the halfway line and a tackle in the centre circle, you’ll probably bite your tongue next time. It won’t take long for everyone to get the idea.

The game will look a bit different, and those who view a football match as an excuse for a fight and a shouting match will be disappointed. Butdifferent isn’t necessarily worse, and I contend that the sport as a whole would be the better for it now and in the future.

What do you make of the Respect campaign, and how do you think it should be changed?

This article is a submission for the Soccerlens 2008 Writing Competition; to participate, please read the details here. The competition is sponsored by Subside Sports (premier online store for football shirts) and Icons (official signed football jerseys).

From Soccerlens.com - Football News