Football: Koeman gets the sack
Pick of the week’s correspondence
There’s no longer any “element of surprise” when a Premier League manager loses his job, said Phil Mcnulty on BBC Sport online. After all, if Claudio Ranieri can get the chop, nine months after leading Leicester to the title, then no one is truly safe. Sure enough, Ranieri’s successor at Leicester, Craig Shakespeare, got the boot last week, having spent a mere seven months in the job. And on Monday, Everton sacked Ronald Koeman – a man tipped earlier this year as a potential Barcelona manager. Nine matches into the season, the Toffees are in dire straits: they have just eight points, and sit in the relegation zone.
Everton’s dismal form has come as a huge shock, said Alyson Rudd in The Times. Last season, his first at the club, Koeman guided them to seventh place. This season, after spending £140m over the summer, he thought he had a side he could “stamp his personality on” – and the results were expected to be “scintillating”. What we failed to see, however, was that Koeman squandered most of that money. He signed a surfeit of attacking midfielders – Gylfi Sigurdsson and Wayne Rooney among them – while failing to buy a striker to replace Romelu Lukaku. As a result, the team has scored just seven goals in nine Premier League matches. Koeman was, admittedly, unlucky with injuries, said Paul Wilson in The Observer. Key players, including Yannick Bolasie and Séamus Coleman, have suffered “potentially careerthreatening setbacks”. And he had a brutal fixture list, playing Chelsea and the two Manchester clubs in the first five matches. But even so, the manager’s tactics have been “an unfocused mishmash”. He has neutered Sigurdsson by playing him wide rather than in his favoured No.10 role; he has been so unsure of his best side that he made nine half-time substitutions in his last 15 matches.
On a personal level, Koeman never quite fitted in at Goodison Park, said Joe Bernstein in The Mail on Sunday. He only let players get lunch in the canteen after he and his staff had been served; in training, “he stood apart until a correction had to be barked out”. No wonder some players felt as if they were “being treated like schoolkids”. And Koeman struggled to dispel the impression that he saw Everton as a stepping stone: he is so enamoured of Barcelona, where he played for six years as a defender, that his licence plate carries the letters “BAR”. Be that as it may, Koeman, like Ranieri and Shakespeare, is the victim of “the thin skins in the boardroom and unrealistic expectations beyond”, said Martin Samuel in the Daily Mail. We aren’t even a quarter of the way through the season, and three of the clubs in the bottom seven have already “ditched their manager”. Expect more to follow. “Sacking the manager was once the last resort. Now it’s the first.”
Triggering debate To The Daily Telegraph
Academics are right to be annoyed by silly “trigger warnings” about supposedly distressing content in classes. But the problem is not “hypersensitive” students. Rather, it is out-of-touch university management.
The management are understandably terrified about tiny drops in scores on the National Student Survey. Such dips can lead to major damage to the university’s league table position. University leaders fear that not giving in to exotic demands from student unions will cause this to happen because they suppose that the elected officers of student unions are in some way representative of students. This is not the case.
Student union officers are often individuals trying to get on the first rung of the ladder of a political career. They are elected on tiny turnouts that would embarrass a parish council election. Their campaigns on various matters are driven by fashions among a minuscule minority of students who get together through the National Union of Students for debates that would have been considered naive and unrealistic by the members of the Tooting Popular Front.
Management fears are almost certainly unfounded, as nearly all students care nothing about the student union except as a social space, and are in fact sensible, intelligent and reasonable young people. Most of them would consider a trigger warning that, for example, “Romeo and Juliet raises issues of gang violence, underage sex and suicide” to be utterly preposterous. Dr Richard Austen-baker, Lancaster
Extrajudicial killing To The Guardian
Although not sharing Rory Stewart’s politics, I have always had a lot of respect for him. So I am appalled by his advocacy of killing British Islamic State fighters in Syria “in almost every case... as the only way of dealing with them”. What happened to the rule of law, the right to a fair trial, the absence of the death
penalty in the UK? Indeed, the human values that we are supposed to be defending? Hateful though their mindset may be, these are still human beings, and the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights still applies to them. Arbitrarily killing them can only leave a legacy of hatred, and enhance their status as “martyrs”.
The most urgent need is to stop the killing on all sides. Then the long-term work to remove the root causes of conflict, to change hearts and minds, and to rebuild Syrian society can start. Frank Jackson, former co-chair, World Disarmament Campaign
Clearing the jams To The Times
The £9bn reported cost of traffic jams is likely an underestimate, particularly if you
include the frustration felt by drivers. A solution is to spend more on improvements and repairs, including night-time working. Drivers pay four times more in vehicle and fuel duties than is spent on the roads. They deserve better.
A second solution is to replace fuel duties with road pricing, so that drivers are not charged merely for their mileage but on how they use the roads, including the congestion they impose on others. Traffic speeds in Singapore, for example, are nearly three times those in London (a sluggish 7.4mph) because they have the technology to adjust road-use charges so as to coax traffic away from busy areas at peak time. Is it not time our cities did the same? Dr Eamonn Butler, director, Adam Smith Institute
Not-so-lazy MPS To The Times
I did not expect to have to call in the lawyers after being labelled as one of Britain’s “Top Ten laziest MPS” by one newspaper for taking time away after the birth of my son. Campaign groups, too, are often guilty of encouraging voters to chastise MPS when they have missed a vote – but they do not explain the reason for that absence. As it happens, the voting record is actually a small part of being an effective constituency MP.
Harriet Harman’s proposals for “baby leave” are a vital part of making Parliament more representative, and of recognising that MPS are human. If Parliament wants to dictate family-friendly practices to employers, it’s about time we got our own act together. Lucy Powell, MP, Manchester Central
Overlooking Syria To the Financial Times
In your editorial you say that Washington and its allies need to decide quickly what they want to happen next in Raqqa; the stakeholders you list are “from Turks to Kurds, Iranians, Saudis, Americans and Russians”.
To put not too fine a point to it, Raqqa is Syrian territory. If your publication, which is hopefully supportive of international law, can blithely airbrush out the UN member whose territory is affected, then we need look no further for reasons for the bloody, hopeless mess we in the West have made of the Middle East. Dr Jürg Gassmann, Ireland