FAO: Clare

A slightly more reasoned riposte to your suggestion that I wasn?t being entirely logical by complaining that, for example, Matty Svensson had been replaced by an unknown quantity ? and then in the same breath calling for the same thing to happen to Nigel Worthington.
Firstly, I don?t think that players and managers are analogous. One of the biggest problems we have on the playing side at the moment is Leon MacKenzie. The obvious way to deal with this is simply to drop him, and hopefully rebuild his confidence by removing him from the limelight and playing him in the reserves. This approach to dealing with a player suffering a temporary loss of form has worked in the past with Robert Green and, more recently, with Adam Drury. I don?t see how you can temporarily ?hide? the manager in the same way. Certainly it has been my view over nearly 40 years of watching City that once a manager loses the plot it stays lost. Ron Saunders, who I regard as the greatest, had unquestionably lost the plot in the autumn of 1973, and although I was devastated by it, and hated Sir Arthur for it, he had to go. It didn?t mean he had become a bad manager ? look what he did at Villa.
Secondly, just because you applied the same logic as me to the situation and reached the opposite conclusion doesn?t mean that either of us is being illogical. I rather suspect that we have a different starting point: in my view things have been going wrong since May 2004, so that what we are experiencing with Worthington is rather more than a temporary loss of form ? and it has lasted so long that I don?t see how he can snap out of it. And his public pronouncements suggest that he doesn?t know how either. So, if we?re going to compare him to a player I think it might be Gary Holt. I think if there had been any chance of Holty returning to his form of even 18 months ago the club would have retained him. But they obviously took the view that the loss of form was permanent. That's not a judgement I'd care to second guess. In the case of MacKay, Edworthy and Svensson I didn?t see anything to suggest that they couldn?t have continued to perform perfectly capably for us, so in those cases I think it was unnecessary to replace them. Particularly when two of the ?new? players were even older than the ones they replaced.
Does that make sense?

Posted By: Winged Eel Creosote, Aug 31, 00:26:02