Unless England get another chance to play every game at Wembley, which nowadays certainly wouldn’t guarantee them anything, they will be nowhere near winning another World Cup.
Considering that they haven’t come close to winning anything in all that time, this is a very sad indictment of the nation who like to keep reminding the world that they invented football. (more…)
Czechoslovakia, Greece, Denmark and Portugal spring to mind as relatively recent winners of the European Championships. None of the four could be considered as serial winners of competitions.
Wales also stayed in the last competition for longer than England and even managed a 3-1 win over Belgium while England couldn’t even scrape a draw with Iceland and exited the tournament in their usual fashion, ie when there was still plenty of it left! (more…)
The same may possibly be said about Antonio Conte but, as yet, we don’t know enough about him or his motives to put forward a case one way or the other.
Other older managers such as Arsene Wenger, Sir Alex Ferguson, Sir Bobby Robson and even, to a lesser extent, Manuel Pelligrini, Louis van Gaal and Claudio Ranieri took jobs at clubs where there was a challenge. (more…)
Given that the top coaches in club football have a few million £/€/$ in their bank accounts, why would they want to take up positions where, at best, they win a trophy at a club where that is the least that is expected anyway and, at worst, they face a humiliating exit, sacked for failing to deliver the least that was expected anyway?
One of the obvious answers to this question is, “not money!” So what is a less obvious answer?
If we take Jose Mourinho as the first example, he is driven by the desire to succeed. As with many megalomaniacs he only desires success at the top level. He doesn’t see taking over a first division side, as Brian Clough did for example, as his type of challenge. It would take too long and Jose craves almost instant success.
Mourinho wanted to win the title in three countries. He has achieved that. He also wants to win the Champion’s League with three different clubs, he is one away from achieving that particular goal. His problem is that, if he were to take a job at a lower league club, then the chances of attaining his particular goals are reduced tremendously. (more…)
(Jose waves goodbye to Chelsea again, probably for the last time, but who really knows?)
For a while it was a match made in heaven. Jose and Chelsea had a passionate marriage which lasted three years and only ended in divorce when the bubble appeared to have burst and the passion went out of it.
After a short separation, Mourinho and Chelsea realised that they could no longer live without each other and decided to give it another go. The passion returned for a short while and everything was fine for a short while. The problem is that “short while” has come to define the marriages between Mourinho and Chelsea.
Now he has gone, probably for good, because of the vow “for better or worse” in the wedding ceremony. To Jose’s way of thinking this meant that the “better” bit was for him and the “worse” bit was for Chelsea and everybody else. In other words he was quite happy to take all the praise when winning, but turned into a spoiled brat when losing.
The final straw, in my humble opinion, was when he turned on his own players after the Leicester City game, which Chelsea lost 2-1. (more…)
WHY SAY ANYTHING? 