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Slipperduke

The Camden Cad
Joined
Aug 24, 2004
Messages
4,333
Location
North London
In 2001, in the wake of the dotcom crash, I lost my job. For 18 months, I had been the deputy shift leader of a surly band of financial journalists, charged with staying up all night and reviewing the first editions of the newspapers for a raft of corporate clients. It wasn't much, but it was a 'job in journalism' and when you lose your grip on the bottom rung of that ladder, it's never easy to get it back. Heart-broken, I went to my father and asked for counsel.

"Get yourself down to McDonalds," he said, peering over his newspaper. "They're always looking for staff."

I tried to explain to him that serving Big Macs and gloomily mopping up the vomit of the Friday night drunks wasn't really going to put me on the path to a Pulitzer Prize, but he was adamant. Having a job, he insisted, was far better than not having a job. Apparently, he's been dishing out similar advice to Sven Goran Eriksson.

The former England manager is reported to be on the verge of taking the Director of Football role at League Two strugglers Notts County, which is a little like Donald Trump opening up a hotdog stand in The Bronx. Notts County came very close to being relegated out of the Football League last season, which means that Eriksson is about to go from the white-hot fervour of the World Cup qualifers with Mexico to turgid, mud-encrusted hoof-fests against the likes of Barnet and Accrington Stanley. Something's not adding up here.

County have recently been acquired by a consortium of Arab investors, Munto Finance, who you can only assume came up with this hare-brained scheme in the pub as the barman called 'last orders'. Given that Eriksson usually earns more in a year than some of smaller members of the United Nations, we can assume that he is being well compensated for his sudden drop in status, but what exactly is he bringing to the party? Ian McParland will keep his job as manager, at least until a combination of high expectations and a slump in form costs him his job, so he can't coach the players. I'd be amazed if he knows anything at all about the lower echelons of English football, so he can't be there to scout for new signings. In fact, beyond a furtive assessment of the ladies in the ticket office, there's not much to occupy his time.

Eriksson isn't the first big name to drop into the lower leagues. Brian Clough convalesced from the trauma of his Derby County departure with a spell as manager of Brighton & Hove Albion, but he found it impossible to squeeze anything out of such limited players. Kevin Keegan was Director of Football at third-flight Fulham but he ended up seizing the controls, sacking manager Ray Wilkins days before a play-off semi-final. Which path awaits Eriksson?

Looking back, my father was right. Working at McDonalds while looking for another job would have been far more constructive than my eventual course of action; three months of playing Championship Manager 2001/02, the complete consumption of my meagre savings and an eventual surrender to a long, sweaty summer on an East London building site. However, I hadn't just picked up multi-million pound pay-offs from the football associations of England and Mexico, as well as the wallet of Thaksin Shinawatra. Eriksson doesn't know this level of football and, more pertinently, he doesn't need it either. As excited as the Notts County fans are today, I can't help thinking that this will all end in tears.
 
He wouldn't put pen to paper if there wasn't. If I was Notts County's chairman, I'd give token jobs to three fitties right now, just to keep him happy.

I'm not chairman of a football club, and have never had to keep SGE happy, but that's always been my hiring policy anyway.
 
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