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...
Sacking managers is the traditional response for teams in trouble but there are no easy ways to beat the drop and time is running out for the top flight’s bottom sixSack the manager? Keep the manager? Sell your best player and import seven new ones, five on loan? Go warm‑weather training in Dubai? Cancel the Gulf trip?Switch to a sweeper system? Revert to a flat back four? Play two up front? Keep the faith with a lone striker? Go cold‑weather training in New York? Go lukewarm‑weather training in Benidorm? Abolish days off? Start regretting Champions League progress? Related: Premier League: 10 talking points from the weekend’s action Continue reading...
AC Jimbo and co discuss what can be done to halt Leicester’s alarming slide. Plus: Hull’s renaissance continues against Liverpool; Romelu Lukaku puts Bournemouth to the sword; and Cameroon win the Africa Cup of NationsSubscribe and review: iTunes, Soundcloud, Audioboom, Mixcloud, Acast & Stitcher. And join the discussion on Facebook and TwitterToday’s Football Weekly line-up sees AC Jimbo and Barry Glendenning join forces with the continental élan of Rafa Honigstein and Philippe Auclair, and all four serve up a 60-plus-minute dose of controversy with two fierce debates taking centre stage. Continue reading...
Italian is the bookmakers’ favourite to be the next Premier League manager to be sacked after Leicester’s fourth Premier League defeat in a rowIt was this weekend last year when the dream started to take hold. “So if you’re just joining us #lcfc are leading 3-0 and Robert Huth is on a hat-trick” was the wonderful tweet that Leicester City posted from their account during a victory at Manchester City that convinced Claudio Ranieri and his players, as much as the watching football world, that something incredible was happening.Twelve months on and the fairytale has turned into a nightmare. Leicester, make no mistake, are in real danger of becoming the first top-flight champions to be relegated since Manchester City in...
How did the team who eased to the league title return to the relegation quicksands so soon?It can be strange for those of us who remember Manchester City in the pre-money years to think that their new generation of followers might never fully understand why Joe Royle used to talk about a debilitating condition, unique to the club, called “Cityitis”. Suffice to say, though, that it could be particularly virulent at times and Royle, in keeping with many managers, never did go through with his promise to find the antidote.“Poor old Joe,” Colin Shindler reflected in his book Manchester City Ruined My Life. “He never understood that Cityitis is not a bacterial infection that can be cured by the antibiotics...