English football has always had a thing about leadership. What is it exactly? How loud should it be? How many layers of bandage should be entwined around its blood-caked temples? More to the point, without it who will keep the men in check, prevent them from fleeing the trenches, retain some sense of fragile, orderly decline?
More often than not leadership is defined as an absence, a feeling that something brusque and manly and vital has been allowed to wither. Arsenal lack leadership. England lack leadership. In both cases the leadership lacked is of one kind: forceful, muscular, collar-grabbing. Last week Teddy Sheringham suggested Leicester’s players could solve their problems with conditioning, tactics, motivation and personnel not by working on the training field but by getting drunk and “having a bit of a fight”, thereby settling their differences like men, or at least like primates.
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