The outgoing coach oversaw a wretched half-season but the club’s problems run deep – as his replacement soon found outGennaro Gattuso’s debut as Napoli manager had to be delayed by half an hour on Saturday after pieces of the Stadio San Paolo’s roof broke off amid a heavy rainstorm. When the game against Parma finally did begin, it took only four more minutes for his team to start to come apartA throw-in for the visitors inside their own half looked innocuous enough. The ball was launched towards Parma’s target man, Andreas Cornelius, but sailed clean over his head. It ought to have been straightforward for the Napoli centre-back Kalidou Koulibaly to bring it under control. But he misjudged the bounce,...
The Arsenal job needs someone with the kind of bone-deep composure that is born to only a few men and surely it makes sense to go for the candidate with the superior credentials?Apparently, Arsène Wenger does not want too much fuss. Wenger has not even held a press conference before what Ivan Gazidis, Arsenal’s chief executive, promised a couple of weeks ago would be a “send-off the world will take notice of”. Somehow, I wonder whether Gazidis was getting a little carried away. Arsenal have not even decided yet if they want a statue of Wenger when, frankly, one should have been announced on the day the abdication was announced. They will give away 60,000 “Merci Arsène” T-shirts but nobody...
The sacked manager has many fine attributes but could never live up to his predecessor and Wednesday’s defeat by PSG was the final strawWhen Bayern Munich came to London in March to face Arsenal, following one 5-1 victory and just about to register another, everything seemed rosy in the kingdom of FC Hollywood. Sure, their football in the Bundesliga had hardly been edge-of-the-seat stuff, but Carlo Ancelotti spoke confidently, almost bullishly, of his team before the game in the press room at the Emirates Stadium.He talked of his side approaching their physical best and of their “real energy”. It felt like his plan to take them back to Champions League glory – the reason that he was appointed to replace...
Coverciano outside Florence has been the nerve centre of the Italian game for almost 60 years and the reverence in which it is held by many seems to have had a positive effect on plenty of its graduatesAs long as he doesn’t blow it, and nothing in his record suggests that he will, sometime within the next three months Antonio Conte will become the fourth Italian manager to lead a team to the Premier League title. Remarkably, that quartet – in which he would join Carlo Ancelotti, Roberto Mancini and Claudio Ranieri – will have claimed the English championship in four of the past eight seasons.No English-born manager, of course, has won the title since Howard Wilkinson in 1991-92, the...