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Ten years on, it is time for John Terry to be made into an example

 

Oliver Kay

Boxing Day 1999. Leeds United were top of the Premier League table, with a vibrant young team full of British players, and Chelsea, lagging eight places and 17 points behind, had just made history with a 2-1 victory over Southampton at The Dell by becoming the first team in English league history to field an XI filled entirely by overseas players.

That Chelsea team in full: Ed de Goey, Albert Ferrer, Emerson Thome, Frank Leboeuf, Celestine Babayaro, Dan Petrescu, Didier Deschamps, Roberto Di Matteo, Gabriele Ambrosetti, Gustavo Poyet, Tore Andre Flo.

As The Times match report the next morning put it, “if it is not possible for the likes of Jon Harley and Jody Morris to get more than a few minutes at the end of the game, when the Chelsea squad is down to its bare bones, what hope is there for them?” Very little, as it transpired. Harley, regarded at the time as England’s most promising left back, has had a journeyman career and is now with Watford. Morris is enjoying a renaissance of sorts with St Johnstone after spells with Rotherham United and Millwall. Mark Nicholls, another of Chelsea’s substitutes at The Dell that day, has spent the past seven years at clubs as prestigious as Maidenhead United, Northwood (two spells) and Uxbridge. Now, at 32, he can be found at Beaconsfield SYCOB.

Ruthless Arab owners still rank among the best of a bad lot

Oliver Kay

In the space of 48 hours, Manchester City’s Arab owners have, apparently, gone from the best in the business to the worst. Of this morning’s headlines, take your pick from “Cowards”, “Men With No Class” and “Desert Rats”.

It is quite a turnaround, but it is the type of reaction you invite when you sack a dignified man such as Mark Hughes in such an unedifying manner. Truly, the handling of his departure – not only the decision to get rid of him but the way he was marooned on the touchline on Saturday afternoon with the club announcing that they would be making on a statement later that evening, with Roberto Mancini already booked into a Manchester hotel – was appalling.

Instinctively, I also have certain reservations about the appointment of Mancini. Is he, a man who has been out of work for 18 months and has never worked in England (save for a forgettable four-match spell on loan to Leicester City in 2001) the man to fulfil the ambitions and the grandiose visions laid out in Abu Dhabi?

While I do not doubt his ability or his pedigree, that lack of experience in England makes the appointment of Mancini, midway through a Premier League season, a gamble, rather than a guaranteed improvement on Hughes.

Life could be worse for United ... but then again a lot better

 

Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent

In his 1998 book Manchester United Ruined My Life, Colin Shindler lamented how every triumph that his beloved Manchester City enjoyed, no matter how minor, was obscured by the enormous shadow cast from Old Trafford.
 
It was just the kind of mindset, the kind of weary, depressed air of resignation, that the new regime at City have fought to challenge. Even before the club were bought by Sheikh Mansour, Garry Cook, a blue-sky thinker imported from Nike, was talking up the prospects of eclipsing United — of the need to shake employees and supporters out of their deeply entrenched inferiority complex.
 
From their blank-cheque transfer policy to that now infamous “Welcome to Manchester” billboard in the city centre, City’s new-found swagger has met with predictable disdain from Sir Alex Ferguson. He would complain sneeringly about “noisy neighbours”, saying that the only way to deal with them was to “get on with your life, put your television on and turn it up a bit louder”. In recent weeks the noises from next door have become more fractious. It was only a matter of time before news came through of yet another divorce.

Why McCarthy's pragmatism is no outrage

Oliver Kay

The instinctive reaction upon hearing about the Wolverhampton Wanderers team that Mick McCarthy would be sending out at Old Trafford last night was one of disappointment. Not outrage, not disgust, just disappointment.
 
It was not a great moment for Premier League football, but nor, in my view at least, was this the start of a national scandal.
 
Call it wishful thinking, but I don’t regard this as the thin of the wedge, with managers content to field a reserve XI at Old Trafford, Stamford Bridge and elsewhere in the belief that it is better to conserve their first-team players’ energies for the more winnable games that lie ahead.
 
It took a particular set of circumstances to prompt McCarthy to field the team he did. It is relatively rare, over the course of the season, for a club to have three Premier League fixtures in eight days – unless they are involved in the later stages of a European competition, in which case they are likely to have assembled a squad in which to deal with such scenarios.

Transfer gambles could leave Manchester United short

Oliver Kay's Final Word

From the moment Cristiano Ronaldo was sold to Real Madrid for a world-record fee last summer, the word from Old Trafford has been that the £80 million proceeds are there to reinvest in the squad, but that any activity would depend on whether Sir Alex Ferguson and the board find deals that offer “value”.

As any economist will tell you, there are numerous theories about what is meant by value. In football terms, value has always been subjective, rather than intrinsic. It is why, when it came to the transfer market last summer, Real and Manchester City, with the greatest needs and the deepest pockets, were willing to spend sums that look astronomical to their competitors.

Three concerns for Aquilani, Owen's game-plan and the manager of the year is ...

Oliver Kay

I liked what I saw of Alberto Aquilani on his long-awaited first start for Liverpool last night. Elegant, intelligent and blessed with a sublime touch, he is undoubtedly a class act, though it will clearly take time for him and his team to adjust to his role alongside Javier Mascherano and behind Steven Gerrard, who is generally at his best when he has space in which to roam through the middle of the pitch.
 
My concerns for Aquilani are three-fold. First of all, he is not Xabi Alonso and, in a team where a loss of defensive nous has been the main effect of the Spaniard’s departure to Real Madrid, the immediate priority must be to play safe. Second, some excellent Italian players have struggled to adapt to the physical demands of the Premier League, where the prerequisite for any central midfielder is not to play or even to think, but to run. And third, can Aquilani stay fit long enough?
 
It is far from unknown for a manager to sign an injured player – and, to use two very different examples of how it can work, Sir Alex Ferguson got it right when signing Ruud van Nistelrooy, who had barely recovered from cruciate knee ligament damage, but seemingly failed to do his homework on Owen Hargreaves, who arrived with a tendinitis problem in the summer of 2006 and has struggled with it ever since. Aquilani’s terrible injury record in recent years leads you to think he may be a Hargreaves, rather than a Van Nistelrooy. The difference is that Manchester United had the players to cover for Hargreaves’s long absences. At Liverpool, as ever, the margin for error just isn’t there.

Maradona: a genius on the pitch, a liability on the touchline

Oliver Kay

There was quite a meeting of minds around the swimming pool at the Cullinan Hotel in Cape Town last week. Fabio Capello, the England manager, chatted away to Marcello Lippi, who led Italy to the World Cup in 2006, while Ottmar Hitzfeld, who won the Champions League with two clubs, sat on the next table.

As the coach of Switzerland, Hitzfeld has little or no chance of adding the World Cup to his illustrious roll of honour, but Capello and Lippi will fancy their prospects in South Africa next summer, with little to fear except from Brazil and Spain, and, perhaps at a push, Holland and Germany.

Why no mention of Argentina, whose squad, on paper, would hold comparison to any of the above? Because, in electing first to appoint Diego Maradona as coach and then to persist in the face of chaos and glaring underachievement, the Argentine football federation has decided against giving Lionel Messi, Carlos Tévez, Maxi Rodríguez et al the best chance to win a World Cup.

Is England's World Cup bid really lagging behind the rest?

Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent

On the day that England’s bid to reach the 2018 World Cup finals was lurching towards crisis point last week, the temptation arose to check out the competition, starting with the "extremely impressive" campaign that has the joint Spanish-Portuguese bid emerging as favourite.

Guess what. Its website is not up and running yet. "Pagina web en construcción" — or, to put it another way, "pagina web em construção". Spain and Portugal did not even launch their bid until last month, five months after the English bid, but they are in no rush, it seems, to make up for lost time. Mañana, presumably.

Clearly, a bid should not be judged on whether or not it has a website, but, given that this is a competition in which England has been criticised for some trivial mistakes (sending Mulberry handbags to the wives of the Fifa committee members, deliberating over whether to meet the huge cost of getting David Beckham to next month’s World Cup draw so that he could flash a few smiles), it does seem rather an oversight.

Beneath the façade, Brown must be quite some manager

Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent

There is a certain perception of Phil Brown: year-round tan, Britney Spears headpiece, natty dress sense. Likes: sound of own voice, talking people down from suicide spots, karaoke. Dislikes: spitting.

It is a caricature that Brown has been happy to live up to since he first led Hull City on to the Premier League stage 15 months ago. By his own admission, he enjoys the limelight, having concluded, just as Sam Allardyce did when they were together at Bolton Wanderers, that he should take every opportunity to publicise himself and, by extension, his club.

The irony is that, in an age in which image has assumed such importance, Brown should be regarded as someone whose authority has been weakened, rather than enhanced, by his self-projection. Brown is characterised as football’s answer to Icarus — and not merely because of the tan. Having flown so close to the Sun — and the Mirror, but also The Times and every other media outlet — he is in danger of being burnt. Having established himself as the focus of the Hull City story, he is the fall guy when things start to slip.

Owen inching closer to England recall

Oliver Kay, Football Correspondent

Some time over the next few days, Michael Owen will receive a text message that tells him that he is in the pre-selection squad for England’s match against Brazil on November 14. Nothing new in that, but, perhaps for the first time in almost 18 months, the Manchester United forward has cause to wonder if it will be followed on Sunday evening with another text telling him that he has made the final cut.

A convincing performance and a goal against CSKA Moscow in the Champions League tomorrow evening would add to the media clamour behind Owen, but for now Fabio Capello, having examined the case for recalling him, is entitled to conclude that a rethink is not required.

Capello made headlines last week by describing Owen as his “tormentor”, prompting some to wonder whether the England manager has been having sleepless nights about the forward’s irresistible form.

But those close to the England manager suggest that, while he brought up the United player in response to questions about Antonio Cassano, the bête noire of Marcello Lippi, the Italy coach, the two situations are not comparable because, whereas Cassano is playing wonderfully for Sampdoria, Owen has yet to make an entirely convincing case.