'England Boss Hunt Puts FA In Farce'

From Football365.com. I didn't realise Brian Barwick was so well qualified to choose the next England manager :</p><h2>'England Boss Hunt Puts FA In Farce'</h2><div class="storydate">Wednesday April 19 2006</div>

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So who's it going to be then?</p>

I think we've all been looking at the farcical process to find the next England manager with a mixture of contempt, amusement and disgust.
 
The man who will make the decision is Brian Barwick, a man whose qualification for the job of selecting the England manager is that he used to put football on the telly for ITV and he edited MotD. </p>

So essentially he's like you or me or the fat bloke who sits at the end of the bar. We all watch a lot of football on the telly and that's Barwick's only qualification. He has no special footballing insight beyond that. He has no professional involvement in football on his CV. No. He's just a man from the telly. Wow.
 
This hopelessly amateur approach to selecting the manager of the national game is bad enough, but the criteria which they have apparently given themselves - largely I think because they're scared witless of the press - to get a British or English manager, is embarrassingly narrow, shallow and stupid given the available talent.
 
It's an approach which no one in the FA has intelligently attempted to justify or explain except for the occasional vague reference to that what-does-it-mean-anyway word, 'passion'. 
 
The time it's taking to make a decision is inexplicable. There's just not that many people on the 'possibles' list. One suggestion is that they're trying to find any skeletons in cupboards that the press might unearth once the new man is in place. Having been needlessly red-faced during the Sven regime, they want to avoid being caught with their pants down again. Literally. </p>

This again shows their paranoia about and craven indulgence of the tabloid press and also fails to understand that in fact Sven has led a pretty blameless life while manager. Having sex with women is not yet a crime, nor is talking to potential employers and, lest we forget, that is all Sven has done.
 
What do the FA want? A sexless mute perhaps. Why not employ one of those talking Action Man dolls with the string you pull and out comes a selection of choice phrases. I'm sure they'd really like one of those to do the job, not least because he doesn't have any genitals. Or indeed any underpants.
 
This petty and immature attitude by all concerned already put off Guus Hiddink, who not unreasonably doesn't fancy the likes of the Daily Mail's Jeff Powell looking through his dustbins for evidence of look-how-evil-johnny-foreigner-is type scandal. But he was ruled out for not being of these Isles anyway.
 
If Big Phil Scolari isn't good enough, having won the World Cup and got to the Euro final, then what possible qualification does anyone have to have? Well, maybe we shall find out this week. The decision is supposedly imminent. It will be interesting to hear how they justify not appointing Scolari, who will inevitably be more qualified than the new England boss.</p>

Perhaps Big Sam speaks better English.
 
Perhaps. 
 
This weeks latest flavour-of-the-minute is, we are told, Steve McLaren. Oh. I don't know a Boro fan who thinks he's the man for the job. We know what he's like.
 
Trevor Brooking has said that current form is not being considered in the judgement of the England manager, but that's impossible to believe because they know that if they appointed a manager who is in the middle of a ten-game losing streak and his club is plummeting down the league, everyone will think they're mad and pressure will be on the new man from the start. It'd only take a bad result and the 'loser' tag would become established and hard to shake off...and within a few months they'd be looking for a manager again.
 
No one can convince me that if this decision was being made in the week that Boro were thrashed senseless at Arsenal and then lost 4-0 at home to Villa, McLaren would be allowed anywhere near the job. It would have looked ludicrous.</p>

Similarly, if it was being made when Bolton were in the top four, Big Sam would now be in pole position. The fact that Bolton have lost five on the run must have damaged his chances even though he is, in truth, no less qualified in April than he was in December.
 
And it is this entrenched short-termism that is the problem and always has been. What's happening now blinds us to what has happened in the past.
 
A couple of good wins seems to cure everyone of their ills. McClaren was forced by fan pressure and by the abject failure of his negative tactics into playing a more expansive, attacking game, and in two months Boro's season has been transformed.</p>

However, he's still the same manager that has, with a lot of money at his disposal, made Boro until these past two months a fairly average and often boring Premiership side. That's quite good, but let's not delude ourselves that suddenly somehow he's this fantastic, progressive manager who will carry England to unprecedented success. No-one, and I repeat this slowly for the benefit of any FA officials reading, no one believes that.</p>

Being ginger and from York does not inevitably make you a good national coach or better than a Swede or a Brazilian, even if the xenophobic press would wish it were so.
 
Alan Curbishley looks like he's breaking under the pressure already, but you can understand his frustration as days pass by and nothing is done. Don't we all already know almost everything about all the potential candidates anyway?
 
Martin O'Neill remains aloof from this process because he's not in work right now and that's probably his best asset. He can't do anything wrong. He only has his reputation to be judged on. And if it is O'Neill, I won't complain, I'll be behind him 100%.</p>

But let's be in no doubt that the governing body of football in England has once again been revealed as a poorly qualified, ineffective, inefficient, meddling, flabby organisation that has no authority or wisdom in how it runs the national game. Every time it has to do anything, it seems to make a fool of itself, makes itself a laughing stock.
 
Its handling of the whole England manger situation from the ridiculous dismissal of Sven and all that went before it to the 'search' for his replacement has been woeful, though I suspect a lot of it is just PR to pretend they're trying really hard. </p>

The business of trying to secretly interview people in an Oxfordshire country mansions smacks of head-up-arse self-indulgence and self-importance in the extreme. We all know it's going on, why don't they say we're interviewing these people on this day and we'll announce the results on that day? Would that be so dreadful or impractical?
 
By choosing to start this process when they did - again, all due to their weakness in dealing with the admittedly-despicable tabloid media (who they don't seem to have twigged that large swathes of the football public hold in contempt anyway), they cocked the whole thing up from the start. Their timing is all wrong. If they appoint McClaren now and in Germany we lose three games and are kicked out, as Sven's man, he already looks like a loser. Can they risk that? I doubt it.
 
The FA seem to run everything like a bunch of old ladies organising a jumble sale. They're puffed up with importance but without any wisdom or authority to do the job properly. Ironically, if they do appoint O'Neill, as a man who famously will stand no ********, I can see his relationship with the FA windbags being fractious in the extreme considering the entire FA culture seems built on ********.
 
Well bring that on. Now. </p>

 

The bit about O'Neill not liking ******** is exactly the reason why Brian Clough never got the England Job.

Steve McClaren. I can't get my breath.