Kidney and Wenger eras at natural end
Ever since the implosion that cost Arsenal the 2008 Premier League title there have been questions about Arsene Wenger’s transfer policy and ambition and for the last three years it’s been a constant, tiresome question whether or not he’s the man to lead the club forward.
The fact he’s still at the Emirates is proof there’s been a strong case for his retention but the fact the question still hangs over the club is proof that it’s time he moved along.
Whether anyone else would be more capable of retaining their perennial Champions League status is almost a moot point. A new dynamism and dynamic is required. The narrative must change.
Irish rugby is approaching that same point with Declan Kidney. Just like Wenger, there should be no doubt about his greatness as a coach. Along with Mickey Harte and Brian Cody he had claim to be the greatest Irish sports coach of the noughties. But now, in 2013, he is not great for this Irish team. They’re probably not right for him. It may be time to move along before he’s moved along.
Eddie O’Sullivan reached that point. Almost everyone does. The trick is to do it with as much dignity and as little rancour as possible.
Last week one of the greatest team owners in world sport died. Jerry Buss owned not just the LA Lakers; he saw it to it that he and the Lakers owned LA. What was striking about all the tributes paid to him was not so much how much he seemed to love life and winning but how much everyone seemed to love him: former players traded or resigned, former coaches, fired or rehired. At his memorial service at the same theatre that would host the Oscars a few nights later, one of the speakers was Pat Riley, coach to four of the NBA titles the Lakers won in the glorious 80s.
He resides these days in Miami as the general manager of the current NBA champions, the brains behind bringing LeBron James’s talents to South Beach, but when he took to the podium he declared: “I feel like I’m back home.”
That was as much because he finished amicably in LA as well as won so much there. By 1990 after two consecutive seasons without winning the NBA championship, he sensed it was time he left and that Buss and the players were sensing it too. Magic Johnson had seen it all from him: the constant search for a cause and theme for a season, looking for and throwing a chair to jolt them after a careless loss. He could no longer surprise them. He could still affect them, but not nearly as much as he previously did.
“The decline of the Lakers was nobody’s fault,” Riley would reflect a few years later. “Not mine, not management, not the players. It was simply time for us to sit in the same room, look each other in the eye and say ‘We had a great run. All of us. Now, instead of wounding each other, let’s say thanks and goodbye.’”
By having that awareness and humility, Riley felt both obliged and welcome to offer a final thanks and goodbye to Buss and LA last week.
You just wonder and hope that Kidney and Wenger have it too.
Ronan O’Gara has known and been coached by Declan Kidney since he was 12. Just like Magic could, he can read a mile away how his old coach is likely to react or act in a given situation; most of the Irish players can. There was a time — for a very long time — that Kidney retained the power to affect him but there were tell-tale signs their relationship has been somewhat strained well before the Munster out-half was passed over for Paddy Jackson.
O’Gara may not be the future or present but for what he and Kidney achieved together in the past you would hate to see them now wound or resent each other.
Of course Ireland would have won if Jackson’s kicking had been better but the team and results are too erratic now under Kidney.
This will be the third consecutive year we’ll finish outside the top two in the Six Nations.
Under O’Sullivan, we never went more than a year outside the top two.
Wenger’s had — and won — bigger games before. It was like his whole time at Arsenal had been reduced to mere survival instead of the excellence that characterised most of it.
Wenger deserves better than that. He was better than that. His time there has just run its course, that’s all.
At the end of season, just like Kidney, it’s time to sit down with some people and for them to thank, not wound, each other.
Anything else is too long a goodbye.
