LOCKER ROOM:By December they had let me go. I didn't get to Christmas on my Christmas present, writes TOM HUMPHRIES
'TWAS THE night before Christmas and the Sports Editor and Man About Town Mr Bo Bleedin' Jangles spread his Christmas cheer over us all like spittle from the mouth of a spluttering drunk. He circulated a report about how the Washington Timesis scrapping its sports section altogether. All those clichés are to lie there gathering dust. It's the thin end of the wedge. The men and women who kept the clichés on life support are to stepped down.
It’s true. This is no longer a recession – it is a full-blown depression, a dark age for our species.
Listen. Don’t find yourself in years to come saying that when they came for the sports writers you did nothing and when they came for the disc jockeys you did nothing and when finally they came for you there was nobody left to do anything. You know we would walk the line for you.
Imagine. . . In a short while we sports hacks are likely to be found advising Mr Bo Bleeding Jangles on how to park his company car before his social engagements in the city. . . Lock hard Mr Jangles Sir. That’s it. Grand job.
We are to beg for permission to be allowed guard Mr Jangles’ car until he comes back. We know already he will play us off against each other. (Keith Duggan says he can mind it ’till 1am. Why are you knocking off at midnight?) When he returns illuminated by his stogie and buoyed by fine drink and good company he will describe his festive posting of the Washington Times story as his equivalent of pointing to the writing on the wall. Told yis! I bleedin’ told yis!
I don’t care! Me! I’m smart! I’m getting out of hackery and into management. Ahead of the curve. Sweet.
The girls (Mollski and Caitileva) bought me Fifa 10 for Christmas and I have been mired in Management Mode, learning the ropes, getting acquainted with the trade. I realise already how annoying sports hacks can be when you have a club to run and have hit a run of bad form that is in no way your fault.
Still, I’m obviously the sort of material that the EA Sports people have been looking for because I was offered literally dozens of jobs worldwide straight from the start. Headhunted in fact. I flirted shamelessly with Manchester City not because I was keen on the tasty £86 million budget but just to see if I could send Stephen Ireland on international duty. Still, I won’t have the deaths of more old people on my hands and I’m an old pal of Sparky’s. Ah the banter we used have! I miss the banter.
Anyway I decided instead to be like Keano and go and learn my trade at a less fashionable club but one with immense potential, Lechia Gdansk.
Keano often confides that he went to Sunderland thinking the city was a slightly more salubrious offshoot of Funderland, a playground blessed by fine weather. I made the same sort of mistake with Lechia Gdansk. I thought the club was called after Lech Walesa, the city’s famous shipyard builder, and that all the players would be sporting bushy moustaches that the Village People or Graeme Souness would envy. Turns out that Lechia is a poetic name for Poland. I might as well have joined Erin’s Isle.
None of the team wear big tashes and none of them look like anybody you would know; in fact three of them are identical twins with different surnames which I assume is a local tradition for telling them apart. They wear the green and white hoops of Ze Rovers, the ancient Tallaght club, but you’d have to be born in Gdansk to love them. Except me.
Peter Cooke once said he’d be a Scunnie man till he died. I’m that way about Lechia. Even after all that has happened, I love them goofy Gdanskers.
It was hard moving there and living on a diet of cabbage and carp but the real shocker was the budget. The chairman said I could try to buy a player but he’d advise getting myself a warm coat for the winter ahead. I was nonplussed in a situation where many other managers would have been very plussed. I took a look at the youth section.
I’m not sure what the youth section was doing before I arrived. Running discos and table tennis tournaments perhaps. I needed it to produce a Lioneleski Messiski. It kept offering me Lionelski Blairskis. Just saying.
There was a Chief Scout of course. The scout looked as if he spent more time looking for the next GlenLivet than he did looking for the next Glen Hoddle. I blew the budget sending him to Africa (I know, one drunk, an entire continent, maybe it was optimistic) on a costly “Deep Search” which threw up a series of players who in the soccer sense are differently abled. I couldn’t afford to turn them down but I did. With such poor capabilities the crowd would have been be on their backs and they would never have settled in Gdansk. I was touched however by their sincere attempts to grow bushy moustaches.
I’m not saying the season started well. It didn’t. Straight off I lost the dressingroom. Not literally. Figuratively. The Board received an unsigned Dear Board letter which cited a list of complaints. The name Mr MacNamara had been crossed out all the way through and my name inserted in biro.
Early on we reached a crossroads in terms of where our season would go. My crunch match with Korona Kielsk proved costly. In a budget-cutting exercise I had upped ticket prices (it was Korona Kielsk after all) and cut the panel to the bare minimum.
Then when it all went off in the last 10 minutes I had three sent off. The triplets as it happened. The unfashionable clubs never get the breaks and I am convinced two of the three red cards were a case of mistaken identity. Anyway Clive Tyldesley and Andy Gray, who have a lot of sneering to do when my forwards shoot from outside the box, kept schtum about this injustice and when it came to the next match a six-pointer with Polonia Bytom I was without my suspended men. As such I couldn’t field 11 players and had to concede the points and the gate.
Gray didn’t help things with his claim to have more points on his licence than we had on the league table.
The Board might have seen the funny side of it but they didn’t. Their little emailed messages at the end of each game got snippier and snippier.
Unless results improve in the near future the Board may have to review your current position as manager of the club.
Due to recent results the Board is reviewing your position.
Don’t let the door hit your fat ass on the way out.
By December they had let me go. I didn’t get to Christmas on my Christmas present. It hurt. The shop wouldn’t take the winter coat back. Lock hard there my Walesa. EA Sports tell me that now there are three openings available at my prestige level in England. Aldershot, Grimsby and Rotherham.
Lock hard there Mr Walesa, that’s it Sir.
