I was applying for jobs but the phone stopped ringing SPARKY COULDN’T FIND ANOTHER CLUB

But the performances, there is nothing to get excited about whatsoever.”

He added: “If there was a change it would have made more sense to do that before these two games.

Games

“The fact we don’t have any games until

March, maybe they are going to stick by him. It will be a big campaign for him and there will need to be a lot of improvements.” Gillespie was left deflated by another drab performance from Baraclough’s side in

Greece.

Shayne Lavery’s goal was a rare bright spark in a game that saw the North under-perform.

“So many of the performances in this were going through the motions,” Gillespie said.

“We get ourselves back in the game tonight and you think Greece are there for the taking in the second half. But we go through the motions.”

HE led Blackburn into Europe, saved QPR and Southampton from relegation and helped to clear the skies for a Blue Moon to rise above Manchester.

But for reasons he couldn’t understand, the tide went out fast on Mark Hughes as a Premier League manager and the phone stopped ringing.

So when lowly Bradford City of League Two came calling, Hughes was neither too proud to turn them down.

Promising

‘Sparky’ had been out of the game for more than three years until the Bantams offered him a lifeline in February and they’ve made a promising start in the muck and nettles, currently in the play-off places.

You don’t get many players who once plied their trade at Manchester United, Barcelona, Bayern Munich, Chelsea and Everton patrolling the technical areas at Barrow, Hartlepool and Newport.

Hughes, who will soon turn 59, eventually came to terms with his managerial style falling out of favour among the elite.

But he admitted: “A lot of the appointments that were made, before I landed this role, caused me to scratch my head on occasions. I was applying for jobs but the phone stopped ringing.

“Maybe my network ran out of leads — in most cases, appointments in this business are made because somebody knows somebody and the club looking for a new manager is already closer to somebody else than people applying from the outside.

Style

“I know how it works, and I came to a point where I finally understood that.”

If clubs turned their backs on him because his style of play was supposedly going out of fashion, their snobbery does not match the evidence at Bradford.