Many a time, when a manager is under pressure, one of the team’s star players will decide, unwisely, that he should speak up on behalf of the beleaguered boss.
Usually it is the captain who will step forward to the microphone and recent examples have included John Terry, during the last few games of Jose Mourinho’s reign at Chelsea and Wayne Rooney at Manchester United.
The reason it is not necessarily the brightest move to make is because it puts even more pressure on the manager.
The captains in question no doubt feel that they are doing the manager a service by voicing their opinion that the players “are the ones who go out onto the pitch”, and that “the manager can only pick the team, he can’t play the game”, but, in fact, the reverse is true.
Yes the manager picks the team so, it can be argued, he isn’t doing so very well if they keep losing! Also, the captain is indirectly admitting that the players aren’t performing for this manager. So surely it would be better to keep mum and get on with trying to help the manager with the performances ON the pitch rather than OFF it.
It all depends, of course, on whether or not there exists a hidden agenda. What if, for example, John Terry was part of the mutiny at Chelsea? What better way to contribute than by telling the world that the players weren’t playing for Mourinho, but in such a way that it sounded as though the team were taking the blame for the poor results Chelsea had been suffering?
The Rooney example does tend to disprove this in the case of Louis van Gaal, as he would probably be the one with the most to lose should van Gaal be shown the exit door. He was, for most of the season, Manchester United’s worst player but van Gaal has a particularly strange philosophy amongst his many others, which is that the captain enjoys special privileges because he is the captain. One of these “special privileges” is that he doesn’t get dropped irrespective of how abysmal his play is.
So for Rooney to think he is doing anything other than trying to help his boss is probably not realistic.
Either way, the players in question rarely have anything to lose themselves. As has been shown with the recent sacking of Jose Mourinho, it is easier to replace one manager than five or six players, although some would argue that this is dependant upon the manager you are trying to replace.
There will be some departures from Stamford Bridge at the end of the season but that will be of little or no consolation to Mourinho.
In the same way as, should van Gaal depart Old Trafford at the end of the season, the fact that his captain spoke on his behalf will be meaningless.
So the players carry on under the new manager. They continue collecting obscene amounts of money and are either motivated or not to play for their team. If they are motivated and playing well, then they can expect to be selected every week. If not, they will move to another club, continue to collect obscene amounts of money and finally, when they run out of clubs in England they will go to America.
Similarly, managers tend to move to another club and I don’t seriously expect Jose Mourinho to be out of work for long even if he IS waiting for THAT job!
In other words these highly paid managers, who always appear to be able to find another top job having just lost the previous one, don’t really need our sympathy in the same way as they don’t really need the money.
They should also have realised, by now, that they don’t really need their captains speaking to the media on their behalf, it will make little or no difference to their eventual fate and, in some instances, it may help seal it.
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 