On The Premiership:It's been a bad week for the good guys. So bad, in fact, that English football - so often likened to the frothiest soap opera - now seems to have morphed into a particularly macho revival of Glengarry Glen Ross.
"I made $970,000 last year," Alec Baldwin's chief ball-breaker Blake tells a fellow estate agent in the gloriously foul-mouthed film version of David Mamet's Broadway play.
"How much you make? You see pal, that's who I am, and you're nothing. Nice guy? I don't give a shit. Go home and play with your kids."
With cruelly poignant timing, Chris Coleman remarked just 10 days ago that one of the drawbacks of his profitable but prohibitive job as Fulham manager was the corrosive effect it had on his family life. Well, now he can spend more time with the kids: he was fired last Tuesday.
Coleman was a nice guy. Still is, in fact, but when a Premiership manager loses his job it's always difficult to avoid making him sound as if he is recently deceased. In a sense, though, Coleman's career prospects are as good as dead: the stigma of a sacking is hard to shake and, having failed to transform Fulham into one of the top flight's trophy hunters, he is unlikely to be deluged with frantic voice messages from beleaguered Premiership chairmen.
Yet Coleman can hardly be labelled a failure.
Keeping Fulham - who jostle with Wigan for the title of the Premiership's smallest, least marketable club - among the elite for three seasons is an achievement in itself: all the more so if you consider that, 10 years ago last weekend, the Londoners were losing at home to Northampton Town in front of 11,000 en route to winning promotion from League Two.
Maybe Coleman, an affable man with all the earthiness you would expect from a native of rough 'n ready Swansea, was just too nice for life in the dug-out. Managers - or the best ones, at least - are bloody-minded so-and-sos, as proved by the unseemly squabble going at the top of the Premiership between the notoriously grouchy Alex Ferguson and the Portuguese Pout, Jose Mourinho.
Both are incorrigible, irascible characters - capable, as the old saying goes, of sparking a brawl in an empty bar; ruthless autocrats who rule by fear and freeze out the hardy few who are brave, or foolish, enough to cross them.
But whatever they lack in social graces they make up by being spectacularly good at their jobs and the prospect of the two men going head-to-head in no less than three competitions has transformed a hitherto humdrum season into perhaps an unforgettable one.
The moral seems to be that nice guys win friends while nasty ones win trophies, and the same goes for players. It was heart-breaking, and yet utterly predictable, to watch Watford being sliced and diced by Manchester United in Saturday's FA Cup semi-final, for if silverware was handed out on the basis of being good eggs, the Happy Hornets would be all-conquering.
Jay DeMerit, whose head is probably still spinning after the bewitching performance of Cristiano Ronaldo and company, provides a case in point. The American is that rarest of creatures: a Premiership footballer who appreciates that just because he earns the sort of money normally reserved for Hollywood actors, he does not have to behave like one.
A quick tale to prove a point. A journalist colleague of mine, up against a deadline, had to find a top-flight player to complete a quick question-and-answer session over the phone after his original target, all too inevitably, pulled out at the last minute. In desperation, he telephoned DeMerit, unaware that the American was asleep across the Atlantic, recovering from an international fixture.
This is the sort of transgression that would usually earn a reporter an indelible black mark, but DeMerit is different. The bleary-eyed defender not only answered all 20 questions, but even apologised for not being more alert when taking the phone call. Now that's class.
No surprise, then, that I was rooting for DeMerit at Villa Park, especially as his opposite number was Rio Ferdinand, a man who apparently believes that the most constructive way to react to adversity is by belting a football into the face of one of his own supporters, as he did at Old Trafford earlier this month. Still, he half-heartedly waved a hand in apology, so let's not be too hard on the brainless oaf.
Alas, Ferdinand won and DeMerit finished the biggest sporting occasion of his life bruised and bewildered, just another name in football's long list of good-guy losers. But that's the game. As Blake put it: "You wanna work here? Close. You don't like it? Leave."
