Wild Brits are never hungry
FOR last year’s Championships at Wimbledon, organisers handed out 30 wild-card entries, 20 of which went to British players.
Eight of those entries were for the singles events – two men and six women.
Of the eight recipients, only two – Katie Boulter and Katie Swan – won a match and they were both knocked out in the second round.
The six who lost in the first round each received £39,000.
This year, first-round losers will pocket £45,000 and you can bet there will be plenty of British wild cards among them.
And tennis authorities wonder why Brits are not hungry enough. WHEN Sheffield United’s promotion to the Premier League was confirmed last Sunday, their boss conducted an interview while holding a bottle of Italian beer.
And brandishing a Birra Moretti is as close to being a Continental-style manager as Chris Wilder will get.
Not in tactical sophistication, you understand. Not in methods, not in preparation, not in attention to detail.
Only a brilliant coach gets a club with the limited resources of Sheffield United into the Premier League ahead of well-funded institutions such as Aston Villa.
Only a brilliant coach outperforms the great guru Marcelo Bielsa.
But he is quintessentially homebred in his plain-speaking.
Maybe that is what has put Premier League clubs off tapping him up over these past couple of years.
Maybe it has been a version of the old Sam Allardici scenario. Remember?
Had that been his name, Big Sam reckoned he would have managed one of the Big Six.
Maybe if Birra Moretti had been his name rather than his lager of choice, Wilder would have already been among the elite before finding his way there with his BUTCH Cassidy to Sundance Kid. “Boy, I got vision and the rest of the world wears bifocals.” In football, for Butch, read Lionel. beloved Blades. After all, this is a coach who won a quadruple with Alfreton Town, took Oxford United back into the Football League, kept Northampton Town in League Two and then won the league title with them and has now taken Sheffield United – whose club crest is tattooed on his torso – from League One to the Premier League.
This is a manager who has never been sacked.
This is a manager of a team with the best goal difference in the Championship, a team that has lost only one of their last 17 matches over the stretch that matters. The closing UNLESS you barge them off the road on a descent of Alpe d’Huez, a cyclist is unlikely to be killed by an opponent.
The brutal reality of boxing is that you can be killed by an opponent. It happens.
So, if you try to enhance your power using EPO, Endurobol and human growth hormone
– and get caught – you might expect the strongest possible sanction. Instead, the World Boxing Association has merely removed stretch. Should Norwich City be beaten at Villa Park on Sunday and Sheffield United win at Stoke City, they will win the title.
If Norwich finish top, then Daniel Farke, for the job he has done also with limited resources, will probably win the Championship Manager of the Year accolade at the League Managers’ Association awards evening on Tuesday week.
But their main gong, voted for by all their members, is THE Manager of the Year – across the board – and, until relatively recently, it has had the feel of British bias.
The past three to top the poll – in Jarrell Miller, who had been scheduled to face Anthony Joshua (below, left) on June 1, from its rankings for six months.
Six months is the time elite boxers have off between fights. In fact, when Joshua does get into the ring for real at the start of next month in Madison Square Garden, it will be for the first time in more than eight months. No wonder he is outraged and disgusted with Miller (above) and the authorities. Joshua is absolutely spot-on. Right now, it seems like it will only be when a drugged-up fighter kills an opponent – and is caught – that boxing will take the issue seriously. Claudio Ranieri, Antonio Conte and Pep Guardiola – were all born outside these shores, but, before that, there was just one foreign winner, Arsene Wenger in 2004, since it began in 1993.
During that time, David Moyes has won it on three occasions.
When Liverpool’s Gerard Houllier collected three trophies in the 2000-01 season, George Burley won it for finishing fifth in the Premier League with Ipswich.
Jose Mourinho, at Chelsea, claimed the FA Cup, the League Cup and finished second in the Premier League in 2006-07 and Steve Coppell won the award for an eighth-placed Premier League finish with Reading.
Roy Hodgson was voted the top man by his fellow managers throughout the English game after reaching a Europa League final with Fulham and finishing 12th in the Premier League.
That was at the end of a 2009-10 campaign that saw Carlo Ancelotti win the Double in his first season in English football at Stamford Bridge.
It is fair to say that the British majority in managerial ranks preferred to honour one of their own. And if they return to that way of thinking this time, you could not blame them.
For his straight-talking, fine-playing, hard-working progression from the Northern Counties (East) Premier Division to the Premier League, no one would deserve to be honoured more than the Blades manager.
There is nothing small beer about Chris Wilder.