Oftentimes the media love nothing better than to stick the knife in. Predators, hands hovering over malicious keyboards, chase their quarry day after day, setting them up for the fall, waiting patiently for the right time and then bam! They land that killer blow.Usually that hapless prey is a luckless manager, a man with pressure bearing down from all sides: the club’s fans, the board, the players whose careers are taking a hit from the poor form and accusations of underperformance, and the media themselves.And that’s the situation in which Gary Neville finds himself these days. The walls are closing in, and whilst he may well be a Manchester United legend, he evokes no such felicity on Spain’s eastern seaboard. He has taken the club from four points off the Champions League places and has positioned them four points off the relegation places. It may not all be his fault, but he’s certainly finding out the hard way that there’s more to this managerial lark than there might appear at first glance.At least, that seems to be the opinion of one big name in the game. Former Chelsea star Hernan Crespo, himself a manager at Serie B side Modena these days, has decided to play the role of troll at Neville’s problems, declaring himself ‘almost happy’ at Neville’s failure.
Despite his own team being in the relegation play-off places in Italy’s second tier, Crespo seems miffed that after his glittering playing career he’s ended up in the lower reaches of Italian football whilst Gary Neville can snipe from the sidelines as a pundit before landing a job at one of Europe’s top clubs.
Is he right that Neville shouldn’t have been given the Valencia job? Possibly – after all, he has no managerial experience, though he clearly possesses an astute footballing brain. Was Neville too harsh as a pundit? We don’t think so, he always seemed articulate and fair, even if he was a little demanding. But what’s wrong with being demanding of stars earning millions of pounds a year? He was stern but fair.
We think Hernan should concentrate on his own relegation battle instead of sticking his nose into Valencia’s; and his knife into Gary Neville.
[ad_pod id=’football-survey’ align=’center’]
[ad_pod id=’ricco’ align=’center’]
