Age doesn’t make football men wiser or better.. just look at Roy and Sir Dave
IN most professions by the time retirement age is reached the workers are glad to see their job go to someone younger.
Not football, where there’s a belief that the older you get the more qualified you become, so no matter how detached from reality your methods or brain becomes, you must stay in your cushy post to show the young ’uns how it’s done.
Take Roy Hodgson. He may be 70 next year, had 20 managerial jobs, the last one ending in national humiliation, but now he’s had time to reflect, he is raring to be employed again.
Reflection has taught him the major culprits for England’s Euro embarrassment were a “dangerous” media that twisted his words and naive players unable to take in his pearls of coaching wisdom.
It definitely wasn’t his fault that he sucked £ 14mil lion out of English football for a part- time job which he wasn’t up to. But who gave it to him? Who decided, that despite Hodgson failing his one big test in English football, at Liverpool, and being almost 65, that he was the only candidate to approach?
The then FA chairman David Bernstein (right).
Who now, along with four other former FA chiefs, claims the organisation is programmed to fail because it’s riddled with an old school tie mentality that only wants power to reside with mediocre, elderly white men.
Go figure. It’s easy to ask whathat the five rebels did to change the status
quo when they had power, and to view their letter demanding FA reform as two sets of bald men fighting over a toothless comb.
But it doesn’t make them wrong.
It is an obscenity that the FA Council has 122 members, only four from minorities, only eight women and 85 of them over 60.
And it is beyond dispute that it’s a masonic closed shop which refuses to yield power and protects its own at all costs.
There were other angry missives heading to the FA on Monday, from viewers who watched ITV’s documentar y about the smears and lies surrounding the Hillsborough disaster and wanted action to be taken against one of its board members Sir Dave Richards. At the 1989 semifinal, Richards, who was soon to become Sheffield Wednesday chairman, helped a doctor attend to a dying woman. In his police statement he said jeering fans asked him to throw her into their pens so they could have sex with her. The same discredited slur, co-ordinated in a black propaganda campaign, that made The Sun’s front page. No other witness corroborated his claim and his description of the woman’s clothing matched none of the seven females who died that day. When ITV contacted Richards through a series of l e tt er s he returned them all, unopened. In his head, as an FA Big Cheese, he’s not accountable to anyone, you see. Outraged viewers contacted the FA demanding he be suspended, but so far, nothing. Just as they said nothing in 2012 when Richards told a conference in Qatar that football had been stolen from the British by foreigners at FIFA and UEFA. Adding that his hosts needed to drop their alcohol ban for the 2022 World Cup because us Brits like a pint and care little for their customs. Before falling head-first into a fountain in the Museum of Islamic Art. But not too many people at home are laughing right now at an FA which has ceded all power to the Premier League commercial juggernaut and whose structure belongs in the 19th century. A ruling body of mainly old, white, unaccountable men, many of whom seem unfit for office.