Trash talking a pundit

Jose Mourinho had some harsh words to say about a certain pundit after Tuesday's League Cup semi-final. He said that 

"you are very well paid, much more than some managers that have to put their ass for 90 minutes every week on the bench. You have a very good seat, very good money, no pressure. They are always right, they never lose, they always win.”

I sympathise with Mourinho's frustration over pundits who often come close to spoiling my enjoyment of the game with their idiotic, often uneducated comments. And I am going to be strongly criticizing some of them in the next few weeks in a vain attempt to somehow hold them to account.

So, let's start with the presumed target of Mourinho's criticism, Sky TV's sharply-dressed Premier League pundit cockney, Jamie Redknapp.

As a player, his time with Liverpool coincided with the club's longest trophy drought since the 1950s (between 1992 and 2001 they won one League Cup). As a pundit, his time on TV has coincided with some of the worst broadcasting I've ever seen.

In his defence, he hasn't been afraid to criticize Mourinho on a number of occasions when he probably deserved it. But he's made far too many gaffes to be credible. See here, for example, where he misunderstands Jamie Carragher's proposition to award either a red card or a penalty, but not both, for a professional foul inside the box.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=lGvw0q-vbEA

Talk about missing the point!

And here Redknapp is on transfer deadline day earlier in the season when he said that Arsenal should sign Falcao because they don't have any world class strikers (despite just having signed Alexei Sanchez).

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=642qGOPLnkk

Sanchez is now of course one of the favorites for footballer of the year whereas Falcao has been a complete flop. Redknapp is a wazzock.

I also have never seen him give the kind of intelligent, in-depth analysis which the likes of Gary Neville and Jamie Carragher provide. Redknapp just seems to be an undeniably good-looking but rather thick, ex-footballer celebrity Spice-boy.

Quite frankly, I wish he would just stick to the film premiers and leave punditry to the smart lads.

A correspondent writes

Q. I'm sure it's on the way but why can't the league do action replay reviews for contentious issues like offside calls and penalties?

In fact it's not on the way, unfortunately Kelly. I'm totally with you that we should have it though. The sinister Swiss, Sepp Blatter and other administrators in the game believe that reviewing action replays would slow the game down too much. Others say that refereeing mistakes for and against a particular team even themselves out over the course of a season. But I'm just not buying it.

I do think that having one or more challenge per game would be too much. The danger then would be that they could be misused as a tactical ploy in order to disrupt the flow of the game.

One solution might be to give every team something like five opportunities to challenge a referee's decision per season. In that case teams would only use their reviews for serious incidents and would be unlikely to misuse them.

Q. Why do teams often bring on substitutes with only one or two minutes left?

Good question. I think the main reason is to waste time. Referees are supposed to give 30 seconds added time for every substitution, but in reality I don't think this always happens. Also, if a player walks of slowly he can waste a lot more than 30 seconds.

Added time itself has become a kind of archaic anachronism. The amount of time which is added is no more than a best guess from the referee and I don't think there is an established method for how it's calculated. In any case, referees are not even bound by the amount of added time given. There was a famous incident in 2007 where the referee ended the match two minutes into four minutes of injury time..........in the Champions League final!!

I'm sure that an algorithm could be designed to accurately calculate how much added time there should be at the end of each half. And an automatic hooter could be used to finish games. It's only the intransigence of Blatter and his corrupt cronies stopping that from happening.

Q.  What is the point of making decisions on red cards retrospectively?

I agree that the way it is done currently is not good enough.

The corpulent West Ham manager Sam Allardyce has argued that a team can be doubly punished if an opposition player is not sent off during a game but is banned retrospectively. For example, if Chelsea play Leicester City and Diego Costa is not sent off but is given a three match ban afterwards that would negatively affect Leicester again if Chelsea were due to play Burnley next.

Perhaps any red card could automatically be reviewed on the action replay since there is a stoppage anyway. If not, opposition teams should be given a choice of whether an opponent be banned retrospectively or not.

On Bony and Monk

Well, it's been a tumultuous last few days for me personally. It's nice to be able to settle down to write this and forget about everything for a couple of hours.

I think Wilfried Bony is a bargain at £28 million (including performance related bonuses) for Man City. First and foremost he's a proven goal scorer in the Premier League (he was the top scorer in the 2014 calendar year with 20) which is crucial. Plenty of strikers have come in on big money from other leagues (e.g. Soldado, van Wolfswinkle,) and found it very difficult. City can be very confident that Bony will settle in quickly and start scoring goals. That's invaluable and they should have to pay a premium for that. Secondly, he's the perfect age, 26. He's old enough to have already proved himself but he still has his peak years ahead of him. Thirdly, he's not cup-tied for the Champions League like most other top strikers are. Fourthly, strikers with similar Premier League goal scoring records have gone for significantly more money at the same stage in their careers, Suarez was £65 million, Bale was £80 million, Torres was £50 million a few years ago. Now obviously Bony doesn't have the flair and entertainment value of those players, and I'm not comparing him directly to them, but I am saying that I would have thought that he would be worth a bit closer to those sorts of figures.

He will be a big loss to Swansea City of course. But Gary Monk is a great young British manager and they'll be fine. The only problem I have with Monk is his complaining about referees all the time.

I understand why managers complain about referees. It's a tactic in order to get more decisions in your favour further down the line. If the referee knows that he'll have hell to pay if he makes decisions against a certain team then he less likely to actually do so. This isn't dishonesty on the referee's part, it's human psychology - the pleasure/pain principle. Subconsciously, referees know they will get more negative media coverage if they give a 50/50 decision against a Chelsea or a Manchester United than against a Swansea or a Burnley.

Monk is just trying to stick up for his team....but he's driving me nuts!

Neville and Carragher: The Odd Couple

Jamie Carragher and Gary Neville on Monday Night Football on Sky Sports are the best Premier League pundits around, in my view.

Obviously they both played for teams who were (and still are) incredibly bitter rivals. Neville, as Manchester United captain was despised by Liverpool fans and he only made matters worse by infamously goading them back in 2006.  https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=o2DwSZdB5VE But he generally had a good reputation within the game by then of his career. While Jamie Carragher recovered from an embarrassing incident at a players' Christmas party (involving a female stripper and a dollop of whipped cream; I'll let you use your imagination with the rest of it) to become a highly respected and admired defender. 

But they have a surprisingly good on-screen chemistry as a Manc/Scouse odd-couple partnership. Neville is obviously the outspoken extrovert while Carragher is more of a quiet introvert. Neville came across as spiky as a player but has obviously mellowed considerably and both ex-footballers have a self-deprecating sense of humor. 

But what impresses me most is the in-depth analysis of technical issues.They are particularly good at analyzing good and bad positional play and explaining it in terms which laymen can understand. See, for example the excellent Carragher on Dejan Lovren here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=cZiYeQcaQXY. Although both men played as defenders, they still have the knowledge to talk about other areas of the game (see Neville's illuminating analysis of goalkeeper David de Gea here https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=_t2t1M-5FqY

They regularly take seven to eight minutes to deliver these detailed mini-lectures on technical issues. Both pundits are surprisingly articulate and use concrete examples to back up their points. Neville in particular is obviously a smart guy and uses contrast and comparison to make sophisticated arguments which are a cut above anything produced by any other pundit (particularly at the BBC). 

Neville and Carragher have contributed to my understanding and enjoyment of the Premier League immensely. This is particularly so in terms of aspects of the game which are less obvious to lay people such as positional play, body shape, reading the game and making runs into space.

One little gripe, they sometimes put the absolutely awful Jamie Redknapp on as well. His cockney accent, his boring voice, his over-use of cliches, his superficial comments; he just makes me want to go to sleep.

But overall I strongly recommend Monday Night Football with Carragher and Neville. Long may it continue.

Who'd be a manager?

The myth of managers being judged on results.

In this post I want to argue that managers are judged on results far less than we are led to believe.

Plenty of managers have lost their jobs for non-footballing reasons. Kenny Dalglish at Liverpool is a prime example of that He was forced out because of his poor handling of the Luis Suarez case even though Liverpool won the League Cup and reached the F.A Cup final that year. Now I'm not saying that Liverpool should have kept Dalglish, but I am saying that if judged on results alone he should have kept his job. Another example is Harry Rednapp who achieved 4th place with Spurs in 2011/12 but still got sacked (presumably because of his supposed disloyalty in declaring himself interested in the England job).

Other managers have lost their jobs or been forced to quit over 'differences of opinion' with the chairman despite excellent results. The most famous example in British football is Brian Clough way back in 1973 who was given no option but to resign at Derby County by Chairman Sam Longson even after winning the league for the first time in the club's history. Recent examples include Tony Pulis at Crystal Palace in 2014, Kevin Keegan at Newcastle United in 2010 and Martin O'Neil at Aston Villa in 2011.

But surely if you are a chairman and your manager is getting the results you need you let him get on with it (within an agreed budget) and not interfere by telling him who to buy and sell, etc? Screw the strategy! Isn't the best long-term strategy simply to keep hold of a great manager who meets your minimum targets every year?

Other times managers get treated unfairly because of media bias. Journalists just seem to like some managers but dislike others. A good example of this is Mark Hughes. In his recent blog Phil McNulty said that Hughes was doing 'an excellent job' at Stoke despite Stoke being 11th in the table. Sure, Hughes has done a good job at Stoke (and has proved me wrong because I thought he would fail) but it's ridiculous to say he's done an excellent job.

However, McNulty seems not to like ex-Crystal Palace manager Neil Warnock saying that his 'confrontational style is more suited to the Championship'. So, according to McNulty even if Warnock had stayed at Palace and kept them up he still wouldn't be Premiership manager material.

There will be more to say about Phil McNulty in a later post (Clue: I think he's the biggest tosser in football), but for now let's try and forget the misguided idea that managers are only (or even primarily) judged on results. There's a lot more to it than that!