Get relegated, struggle in lower league, give up and coming young manager a chance, realise it hasn’t worked, release said manager and employ current INTERNATIONAL TEAM manager. Well done Stoke City!
I get what you're saying, what my worry would be is he has been with Northern Ireland for 8/9 years now, seeing his group of players for a couple of weeks at a time every few months. Now he's going to be thrown into day to day management which he might thrive, but then you've got a group of mixed nationalities to get your ideas across to, I think he would take more time for an international manager to make the swap than it would for someone out of club football, given where they are in the league he's got to hit the ground running.
Mmm, only managed in Scotland div 2 with Brechin and Shamrock in Ireland at club level, not exactly outstanding level. Could argue over achieved at NI though.
Yeah, could argue as in for balance of my comment about club experience I thought he’d done a decent job with NI.
At the end of the day any appointment is a risk, some you win some you lose, Clough lasted a month and half at Leeds then won 2 European cups at forest. I just our next appointment is the right one
According to the BBC O'Neill will be paid twice the £750,000 he is being paid by the Irish FA. I make that £1.5m (I am an accountant!). I doubt that our board will be offering our new head coach anything like that, when eventually they get round to appointing someone. I am sure that being second choice to Alex Neil will not seem to bad with that sort of cash hitting your bank account. It does be the question though - was one of Stoke's criteria that the new person had to have "neil" in there name somewhere?
