Two managerial casualties on the same Monday is some going even for the panic room environment of the English Premier League.
Tony Adams looked a dead man walking around Portsmouth for months. Even Arsene Wenger had suggested to him before Christmas that maybe he needed a more upbeat personality than himself alongside him at Fratton Park. Like Gordon Brown, perhaps.
The alarm bells starting ringing for me the second Adams spoke at his first press conference that people shouldn’t expect to see “a Tony Adams team” until next season. Talking about yourself in the third person is a giveaway sign of either megalomania or delusion (if there’s a difference), while winning just two league games since succeeding Harry Redknapp guaranteed that his early lack of managerial promise would be fulfilled. So, another ‘great’ player then who couldn’t cut it as a boss. How long will it be before the press misplace Gareth Southgate in that category.
‘Big Phil’ Scolari never fitted with Chelsea’s sense of faux sophistication. He’s as old school as they come, rather than a student of fashionable football trends, and “senior pros”, who were smitten by Jose Mourinho’s perceived cosmo ‘cool’ weren’t gone on the Brazilian’s apparently basic approach to training; probably reckoning that players who are paid a prime minister’s annual salary every fortnight should be able to keep fit and pass a ball by the age of 30.
Yeah, with his stg£7m pay-off, poor Luiz Felipe, World Cup-winning manager or not, just wasn’t with the programme. Which must be why John Terry skewed that early sitter miles over the bar from two yards out when drawing 0-0 with Hull on Saturday.
