Well, Andre Villas-Boas got himself sacked. Didn’t see that one coming…oh, wait!
Time and time again, it’s the same old story: impatient chairmen and their new managers.
At first everyone is chuffed, “he’s the best man for the job”, the first photo shoot is all smiles and everyone is the best of friends.
Then reality kicks in. The reality that new management inevitably comes hand in hand with teething problems.
It takes times to settle in for a manager and players and even more time to find a consistently winning formula. Right?
Not in the world of a football chairman, it seems. Patience is a virtue that’s in short supply and time is money. Results need to come overnight and anything else is just downright unacceptable.
The unrelenting football fan doesn’t help either. A few losses and they’re on the warpath, calling for resignations, sackings, jail time, Guantanamo-style torture, hangings, electrocutions, slow poisoning, decapitations…
Okay, I’m getting slightly carried away, but you get the idea.
In the case of AVB it had to be sheer embarrassment on the part of Franco Baldini and Daniel Levy, seeing no return having gone on a £100 million spending spree that would have put a WAG to shame.
But as we all know, it’s the manager who has to pay.
It will be interesting to see what AVB has to say about the summer antics and who it was that actually bought almost a whole new team of players.
Foreign players who would have had to adjust to a new country, language, climate, culture and an unfamiliar, relentless footballing style that the English Premier League boasts.
Even more interesting will be to try and understand why the hierarchy at Tottenham Hotspur thought that all these players would click instantly. Don’t these things take time?
Where would the footballing world be if Manchester United had sacked Sir Alex Ferguson after a year or two? Whether we like to admit it or not, we would all have been denied a managerial legend.
Of course no one is comparing AVB to Fergie but surely four months is not nearly enough time for a whole new group of players to gel, especially when half of them were spending most of their time keeping the subs bench warm.
Maybe AVB will enlighten us further on why he was sent packing. By mutual consent, of course!
The thankless task of a being a football manager doesn’t seem like it’s going to get any easier.
In fact, in a sport (and world) driven by commercialism and money, it’s only going to get infinitely harder.
I’m no footballing expert, but I say to all chairmen and technical directors or whatever the hell they’re called nowadays: sit back, relax and let the man that YOU chose do his damn job!
Written by Umarah Naz