Football is unlike any other industry – power has shifted more and more to the players
leaked that – it wasn’t, I didn’t even want to leave – and we fell out. I still gave 100 per cent, though,and he never left me out of the team. It’s probably the case that players who don’t wantto play for a managergenerally end up injured. They’vealways got an injury sothey’re not going to play.”
History suggests it’s best not to mention previous success.just as Brian Clough’s “You canthrow all your medals in the bin” monologueat Leeds United became infamous, things quickly started to go wrong for Graham Westley when he announced to the Preston squad he’d inherited: “My kids don’t call me ‘Dad’; they call me ‘Medal winner’.”
At Real Madrid in 2004, Jose Antonio Camacho didn’t need long to upset his players; in total, he lasted 115 days and a wholethree league games with the club. The notoriously hard-line coach wasn’thappy with Madrid’s Galactico culture – which can’texactlyhave come as a surprise – and riskilymade the decision to dropdavid Beckham and Raul. It was not a popular move. Subsequent discussions with several of the seniorplayers led him to the conclusion that he wasn’t capable of getting the best out of the squad, and he quit.
“When you thump a fist on the desk you either break the desk or break your hand,” was Roberto Carlos’ poetic assessment of Camacho’s authoritarian style. Owen was at the Santiago Bernabeu for Camacho’s short reign, and recalls: “I’d only just signed for the cluband I didn’t understand Spanish at the time. He wasonly there for a few games and then he left, so he must have upset the players pretty quickly!
“Players will always react badly if they’re put on the bench, and with squads getting biggernow, there are more disappointed people to cause a problem; tohave a pop behind the scenes and get other people within the group to start thinking the same way.”
Both Walter Samuel and Michel Salgado were sent off in Camacho’s final game, a 1-0 defeat at Espanyol.st Mirren’s Farrell, who chronicles what it waslike to be in an unhappy dressing room in his book Taxi For Farrell: Football Between The Lines, says a proliferation of red cards is not that uncommon when a manager is losing the faith of his players.
“The telltale sign of a manager losing the dressing room is indiscipline – on the pitch and around the place,” he says. “You get petty bookings, red cards for things that players wouldn’t normally get sent off for, off-field misdemeanours... they’re the sort of things a manager would generally clamp down