Says Gordon Waddell
It’s like taking a baseball bat to Santa. Making the Tooth Fairy redundant. Turning all the magic in the world to ashes.
Because if Leicester City can sack Claudio Ranieri this season, if the greatest odds- against achievement in the history of football – sport even – doesn’t buy you 12 months of grace or one scintilla of faith or loyalty, dub the place up.
Nothing – and I mean nothing – is sacred any more.
English football lost its soul long ago, we all know that.
But there was something about last season that gave you a flickering hope at least a sliver of it could be recaptured.
Okay, it was bil lionaires spending less than richer billionaires – but it was still a miracle what the Foxes achieved.
Their Premier League triumph represented a combination of every possible circumstance to produce an outcome even Nostradamus would have put a line through in a draft as too far out there.
You need to go back 20 years for Chelsea to have a campaign as bad, seven years for Manchester City while only the Davie Moyes year was worse for Man United in the past 25 years.
All of these things can happen in a single season, of course they can. But all of them at once?
And all at the same time that a team considered favourites for relegation pull an 81-point season from the depths of nowhere?
That a former non- leaguer scores in 11 straight games, becomes an England regular and produces the season of his life at the age of 29?
That a kid from France adds another 17 goals and 11 assists when no one had batted an eyelid at him before?
People have been sainted for less than Ranieri managed. Yet here we are nine months on and instead of a statue he’s just another statistic.
What is it about money and status that makes you incapable of seeing beyond the surface of any situation?
Why is the ambition of getting something always eclipsed by the fear of losing it?
Look at the way the ownership of clubs in the English league have treated managers in recent seasons. Look at a megalomaniac like Vincent Tan losing the plot because it was his manager rather than him who got the praise for taking Cardiff into the Premier League.
What chance do you have as a boss when the expectation on you isn’t just to meet expectations but exceed them by a mile – every season?
Surely failure is inevitable when success is measured in days and hours rather than eras.
If the manager responsible for arguably the greatest sporting upset in histor y isn’t cut any slack, no one is.
There are no such things as projects any more. If you haven’t carried out a revolution in two windows to have your team purring like a Rolls Royce you’re toast.
All of which tells me it’s surely time for a transfer window for managers as well as players.
I f bosses, head coaches, whatever they’re called, are held to account and live or die by their recruitment, why aren’t clubs’ boards, directors or chief executives? If they make bad decisions, live with them.
Maybe then they’ll find a way to offer support to their manager, be creative and constructive to help him get more from his team in times of flux rather than just take the easy way out and bomb him in the hope the next guy will get the “kick” simply because he’s not the last guy.
That’s what Leicester are doing, right? Was Ranieri struggling this season? Sure. Made mistakes? Almost certainly. Has he meddled with a winning formula? Yes. But which came first – the cart or the horse?
Instead of supporting him they bowed to the kind of insurrection behind his back that sure as hell should tell you more about the players than it does your manager.
Only 21 of England’s 92 league clubs have a manager in place who has served more than two years. And it’s fair to say at least a quarter of them are on a shaky nail.
In Scotland that figure is 17 out of 42. Maybe if chairmen were only allowed to hire and fire at the start of a season they would assess their own role in a club’s success or f a i lu r e mo r e effectively.
No one is saying a l l ma na g e r s should keep their jobs at all costs – they have to be measured against some kind of yardstick.
But what about players taking individual responsibility for their actions? Or inaction?
What responsibility do the Leicester players take for not being able to produce what they did for their manager or their fans last year? They think because they’ve done it all once they never need to do it again?
That’s what makes the greats great. The fact they’re never satisfied.
It appears though that Leicester’s players and board think they can rest on their laurels whi le stripping the manager of his.
Sad. And sadder still that while every fan of every other club now hopes for the poetic justice of relegation, it’s exactly what Ranieri wouldn’t want to tarnish his legacy.