Yes, many a transplant have failed to make it in the English leagues. That's because...

MOST MANAGERS FAIL.

It isn't a Scottish thing. The way we hold the English league up as some miraculously different whole new level - whereas the Championship is in fact a run-of-the-mill league full of run-of-the-mill football clubs (as is the bottom half of the Prem too) - is just unbelievable. Arrogant too, breathtakingly so at times.

You're basing your entire judgement of Neil and the team on ONE GAME. We play 46 of those in a season: and sorry, no research that I'm aware of bases its conclusions on just over 2% of a sample.

This season, Norwich have been s**t at Middlesbrough, s**t at home to Brighton, s**t at home to Reading, s**t at Reading, s**t at Preston, and s**t at home to Brentford. We've been rank average in a whole bunch of other games (including, in most fans' views, at Fulham: where I thought we were s**t as well).

The manager departed with us 7th in the table. That itself confirms how poor we've been for much of the campaign - because how many clubs get rid when 7th? Expecting such poor performances never to happen again when Neil's barely in the door and doesn't even have his assistant working with him yet beggars belief.

Do you want to know how many football managers in the history of the game have never presided over a single awful performance? Zero. None at all. Even probably the greatest manager in history lost a 5-2 lead in the last 5 minutes of his career (as well as losing 5-0 twice, 5-1 and 6-1 to his club's local rivals, and 6-3 at Southampton for heavens' sake). Mourinho got done over at home by a League 1 club yesterday; Pellegrini's been knocked out in successive years by lower division clubs; Otto Rehhagel started an incredible managerial career, in which he won Bundesliga titles with different clubs (neither of whom were Bayern Munich) and led Greece (!) to a major trophy, by losing 12-0 - that's TWELVE-NIL - to Borussia Moenchengladbach in 1978.

Imagine what Dortmund fans would've said if you'd told them then that their manager was anything other than a joke. Yet look what happened. I don't say any of this because I think Alex Neil is the second coming of any of these greats of the game or anything like it; I say it because judging a football manager on one game is total and utter nonsense.

And yes, I know your focus is on McNally. So why have you posted this after a defeat? Why have you posted this after something which happened not off the park, but on it? Because McNally's fate is tied to what happens with Neil. 'Dictated by the ruling elite'? Gimme a break. What is this, FOX News?

Finally, on Phelan: Phelan left because a) we didn't make him manager (but where's his managerial experience? He has none of it, so he'd have been a big gamble too); and (b) because we can't and shouldn't stop our choice as manager bringing his own people in. Meaning that before long, Phelan wouldn't have been number 2 either. He couldn't hack the thought of that - because what would've been the point of him being here then? - and fair enough.

To have kept him, we'd have had to make him boss. Doing McNally for failing to do so strikes me as pretty bloody ridiculous. Just as ridiculous as doing him when his and the club's choice as manager loses one single game of football.

Posted By: thebigfeller on January 25th 2015 at 04:48:37

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