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Athletics Interview
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It’s awards season at Dundee Uni Page 33
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We speak to Badminton player Allan Nixon Page 33
Remember When Football Was A Gentleman’s Game? CLARE MCCAUGHNEY
T
here is something rotten in thew state of English football. While watching “Match of the Day” during a visit home for the Easter holidays, I was struck by the indiscipline and lack of team ethic on view in many of the games. In the Bolton Wanderers v Wolverhampton Wanderers match, the away team’s goalkeeper, Wayne Hennessey, and up to this point inspriational central defender Roger Johnson squared up to each other after poor defending, this unseemly confrontation made all the worse by the fact that Johnson is the club captain. On the same day over on Merseyside, West Brom were 2-0 behind at Everton when Nigerian striker Peter Odemwingie, having been castigated by his goalkeeper Ben Foster for twice failing to pick up Everton’s playmaker Steven Pienaar at corner kicks, reacted by thrusting his head into the goalkeeper’s face. When another player, McAuley, tried to calm things down, the West Brom striker tried to start a fight with him aswell. However, undoubtedly the most unedifying moment of the whole programme, was the sight of the vastly overpaid players of Manchester City squabbling over who should take a free kick. City’s maverick Italian, Mario Balotelli, had to be hauled away from Aleksandar Kolarov and Vincent Kompany after a juvenile spat over the free kick. This happened during a week where Balotelli turned up uninvited at Inter Milan’s press conference, completely gate-crashing the party for the unveiling of his former club’s new manager. The fact that he was on a two-day break from training, and spent his teenage years in the Italian giants academy does little to mask an almost constant desire to be the centre of attention. City’s manager, Roberto Mancini, seems to be a thoroughly decent man, but appears lacking in the steel of the famous Scottish
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The Magdalen
managers like Stein, Busby and Shankly who would not have had such an individual about the place. It is also difficult to envisage his counterpart at Manchester United, Sir Alex Ferguson allowing such mutinous behaviour to permeate the corridors of Old Trafford, as the Scot has several times in the past sold prima donnas at the first sign of them causing trouble, a lesson Mancini appears yet to learn. Ferguson’s recent spat with City regarding the return of former United striker Carlos Tevez to their fold illuminated this point. Here we have a player reputedly earning £250K per week, who refused to prepare himself to come on as a substitute for City in a champions league match against Bayern Munich, at a time when his side where trailing by two goals to nil and desperately needed his ability to drag them back into the game. At the time Mancini declared that the Argentine would never play for City again, and yet six months later all is forgiven. Meanwhile, over in London the situation is even worse. Chelsea Football Club’s overpaid senior players appear to have so much power that John Terry, Frank Lampard and Ashley Cole, to name but a few, severely undermined the promising management career of the young Portuguese boss, Andre Villas Boas, to the point where he has now been sacked. Indeed it could be argued that he may not recover from this setback, coming at such an early stage of what is often a high-pressure career. It is worth noting that Chelsea have now had nine managers since the Russian Billionaire, Roman Abramovich, assumed control of the club in 2003, only two of whom, Jose Mourinho and Carlo Ancelotti could be considered to be successful in their time at Stamford Bridge. Evidently, there is something rotten in the state of English Football.
NO. 29 - MAY 2012
SPORT 03/05/2012 12:04