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| <-Page | <-Team | Sat 28 Oct 2006 Hearts 1 Dunfermline Athletic 1 | Team-> | Page-> |
| <-Srce | <-Type | Herald ------ Top | Type-> | Srce-> |
| Eduard Malofeev | <-auth | GRAHAM SPIERS | auth-> | Brian Winter |
| 35 | of 111 | Andrius Velicka 12 Jim Hamilton 48 | L SPL | H |
Strachan wants ‘sacking’ window for managersGRAHAM SPIERS October 28 2006 While some of his fellow denizens of the dugout face the sack all over Britain, Gordon Strachan, the Celtic manager yesterday came up with a novel idea to stop all the carnage. Strachan wants it to be made unlawful for clubs to dismiss a manager during a season. At the very hour that he was speaking there was mayhem at Tynecastle, where, with coach Valdas Ivanauskas off with stress, some Hearts players hijacked a press conference to express their concern at the club's turmoil. At Tannadice, meanwhile, Craig Brewster is clinging to his job, while Jim Leishman has already relieved himself from the firing line at Dunfermline. All the while in England a clutch of Premiership managers, such as Alan Pardew, Iain Dowie, Glenn Roeder and Stuart Pearce, are said to be on death row in their jobs. There is a bloodlust across Britain for managers' heads, even if the Hearts situation seems unique, which is perturbing the Celtic man. "The pressure is greater on every manager today," said Strachan. "We live in a blame culture today, a blame culture that can kick in after just two games. And the media contribute to it. You've got these phone-ins where people are urged to 'vote now' for a manager to be sacked, and desperate programmes such as when Sky Sports hang around a merchandising shop at 5.30pm waiting for some sad people to come out and say 'the manager must go'. "As a manager you've got to protect yourself from the fantasy around this job. I think it's the case that, 10 years ago, the average time for a football manager [to survive] was three years and nine months, whereas today it is something like one year and eight months. So it has come down by two years in that time. "It is all over the media and society, so please, don't get me going on society, because I'd be here forever. I think today in Britain we generate a yob culture for the rest of the world. And a blame culture." Strachan's view, and one with more than a hint of justification about it, is that the media play a role in "whipping-up" the feelings of supporters and club chairmen (The exception is surely Hearts, where Vladimir Romanov is a loose cannon). To that end Strachan suggests one answer: to have clauses in contracts whereby managers cannot be sacked in the course of a football season. "You guys [the media] do help to get managers sacked," insisted the Celtic manager. "Some [media coverage] does whip up the fans, who then get to a chairman, and then a manager, and so it goes on. That is how it evolves. "I would like to see contracts where a manager cannot be sacked during a season. It would save a lot of problems. If you cannot transfer a player until the window, then why not say a manager cannot be sacked during the season? "You'd have to be brave about it, and the club chairmen would have to make the right choice. He'd have to say: 'Right, the manager is with us until the end of the season.' In that case, there'd be no point in having your phone-ins, with people shouting 'He should go now!' because it would be a waste of time. "So the fans would say: 'What's the point of shouting at the chairman, because he's not going to move?' Or what would be the point of shouting and swearing at the dugout, because he's not going to move for another year. You might even get a better quality of football, rather than the scare football we see when people are trying to save their jobs." The Celtic manager could speak like this yesterday from a relative position of strength, knowing that his team are riding impressively high in the league and in Europe, and there appears no visible threat to him. Strachan did confess, though, that his soldiering years as manager of Coventry, where he was sacked, and Southampton had left him wary of his occupation. "I've been in football for 30 years and I've had three or four terrible lows, and I think having these lows always protects you from getting too excited," he said. "As a manager today all you can ever feel is a glow of satisfaction, especially at a club like Celtic, because you are always only one game away from a crisis. "Don't get me wrong, it's not all a horror show. It can be fantastic being out there as a manager trying to do things, a great challenge trying to win. In my job, if we win we make 60,000 people happy out there, and millions more around the world. So that's the buzz you get. There are the positives. "But there are stressful periods, when you're not winning, and people are shouting for change. And we won't get [sanity] because then it wouldn't be exciting. If you took a reality-check, it wouldn't be as exciting for your [the media's] line of work. If you decided to give a manager another 10 games in the job, that wouldn't be good enough for your editors and producers. It's just the culture we live in."  Taken from the Herald |
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