football

The future according to Liebherr

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The dust has settled, more dust has been kicked up and us Saints fans no longer have the Sword of Damocles – more commonly known as liquidation – hanging over us. Instead, we have the far more familiar upheaval of searching for a new manager to be getting on with. Being a Southampton fan is never dull.

To be fair, we haven’t had a proper speculation season on a new manager since Burley took his baffling substitutions to Hampden Park.

So while supporters come up with fanciful, terrifying and downright odd suggestions (Ivan Golac is my personal favourite) for the man who will be pinning the team sheet to the St Mary’s wall next year, the men entrusted by new owner Markus Liebherr go about the serious work of trying to find someone competent yet foolhardy enough to take the job on.

The problem I have is that we simply have no idea of what Liebherr (or rather, Nicola Cortese and Andy Oldknow) are after. Discipline? Continental flair? A big name?

Not. A. Scooby.

An interview with Cortese certainly provided something of an insight, but as with anything like this, it is easy to read far too much in to it. After all, he had barely got his feet under the desk so you’d imagine that by now he’s got a firmer grasp of exactly what is wanted – and needed.

Still, I do love the ‘in the know’ rumours – which of course, almost without fail are so wide of the mark they make the Sunday Sport look on the money – flying around. Between the comments on the Echo’s stories and SaintsWeb:
– Strachan has already supposed to have been unveiled three times,
– Tony Adams has single handedly engineered his odds with subtle betting patterns, and
– Darren Ferguson would love the chance to drop down a division and leave upwardly mobile Peterborough for the chance to work with the talents of Anthony Pulis.

It keeps those few quiet moments at work interesting, at least.

Does Mahwinney think he can turn back time?

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The statement today by the Football League chairman Lord Mawhinney paints the possibility of a fairer, more harmonious world for football fans across the nation.

In fact, it’s almost like going back to 1990, before a little thing called the Premier League was born. Money was shared between the four divisions of the Football League, players could move clubs at almost anytime in the season, and footballers weren’t completely out of touch with the fans in the terraces.

Mawhinney’s proposal for the Premier League to negotiate combined deals for both it and the Football League will never get off the ground, as it is the main reason the the 22-clubs broke away in the first place. Why would they suddenly turn around now and decide they want to give their vast wealth back to the clubs that were cut adrift by the schism of 1992?

Allowing players to move domestically at any time of the season seems like an okay idea, although personally I don’t mind the transfer window, it does limit the ability of clubs in the lower leagues to raise cash when they need to by selling players. The likelyhood of FIFA allowing their rule to be flouted though must surely be slim at best.

One of his proposals that I see no problem with is the suggestion that clubs who have fallen behind with tax payments to be banned from transfers. As far as HMRC are concerned, it probably isn’t going far enough, but from a purely footballing perspective it has to be a good move.

Of course, it would seem that Mawhinney is simply doing this at the behest of culture secretary Andy Burnham who has demanded that football clean up its act, and while Burnham’s timing also suggests this is being done for political rather than purely for the ‘good of the game’, at least it’s nice to know something is at least being talked about being done.

Emotional rollercoaster

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The missus choose a good weekend to go away for a couple of hen dos – a huge emotional trauma struck me on Saturday.

The R word.

Not recession. Not redundancy. The worst possible R word. Relegation.

There are only two things you can do to overcome the heartbreak  associated with your team being demoted – mope and drink.

These are two things that are very hard to do when your better half is around. They just don’t understand, you see. “It’s only a game” or “There’s always next year” and “Well why don’t you do something else that won’t make you depressed?” are not the things any man wants to hear when the overpaid bunch of dinlos whose wages you pay cock-up monumentally and lose to teams from glamorous locales such as Doncaster.

I’ve heard it said numerous times that a bad result can ruin her weekend (and the weekend’s of my mates’ girlfriends) when the Saints fail to hit the arse of a cow with a banjo. The mood such miserable failures put us menfolk in is, well, not the greatest. But as all football fans will tell you, the lows only make you enjoy the highs even more. So surely, in a few years I can guarantee endless weekends of ecstasy pleasure not known by anyone since Venus herself.

I just hope the missus is patient…