IS SERIE A SERIOUS?
IT’S SCOTT TO BE A SIR KENNY
IF Alex Scott was serious about becoming an ultra high-level football operator, then for a good chunk of last season she wouldn’t have been off doing Strictly Come Dancing.
If she was a serious football person, she’d have been giving all of her time to developing her punditry or developing her administrative knowledge.
Instead, she has spread herself thinly and has become a part-time pundit, part-time The One Show presenter, part-time dancer and now part-time task force guru.
And, as much as I love the fact someone of colour has been chosen from football to help the Government, there are so many more viable candidates they could have turned to.
Sir Alex Ferguson, Gary Lineker, Gary Neville or Jamie Carragher perhaps. Or what about Sir Kenny Dalglish? He knows how stadiums work, how players and managers think, he has contacts from players to administrators – he could pick up the phone and they’d all take his call.
Could we say the same about Scott? Hell, Sir Kenny’s even had the coronavirus as well, so he knows what people suffering from it can feel.
Scott seems a lovely person, a good pundit and may well go on to be huge in football administration one day.
But her appointment smacks of the Government saying, “Let’s just get someone who will be happy-clappy, who smiles a lot, is on the telly and has a link with football”.
This isn’t a job for someone who just has a link with football, though, it’s a specialist position at an important crossroads for the game.
THE scheduling for the conclusion of Serie A in Italy concerns me.
They’re talking about finishing the 2019-20 season by August 20 and then kicking off the 2020-21 campaign on September 1 – a mere 12 days later – which is bonkers.
Many of you will shout: “Come on, they’ll have had a three-month break by the time they start again, so they should be set to crack on.”
But every player in Europe’s big leagues has been in switched-on mode throughout lockdown. And my big worry is that we’ll see a serious drop-off in quality in those leagues that don’t have a proper break and in the Champions League as well.
Add next summer’s Euros into the mix and the World Cup at a strange time of year in 2022 and I’m afraid we’ll be into flogging-dead-horses territory before we know it.