There’s no safety net on the managerial merry-go-round
If their name was still on the parking list when they arrived, then they were safe, he explained. If it wasn’t, well…
Martin knew, better than pretty much anyone else, the vagaries of life in the hotseat. This was a guy who managed the New York Yankees on five different occasions. And he had other stints with the Minnesota Twins, Detroit Tigers, Texas Rangers and Oakland Athletics in a post-playing career that stretched for over 20 seasons.
That was back in the day.
English computer scientist Tim Berners-Lee was still finalising the last bits and bobs needed to get something called the World Wide Web off the ground when Martin passed away in 1989 and, as even the most Luddite among us know, the invention that came to be known as the internet has had a profound impact on all our lives.
Just ask Fredi Gonzalez.
It was reported this week the Atlanta Braves manager discovered the club’s decision to sack him when the itinerary for a one-way plane ticket popped into his inbox last Monday after his team’s loss at the Pittsburgh Braves.
The ticket was for the Tuesday. The Braves weren’t due to leave Pittsburgh until yesterday. Awkward.
With a record of just nine wins and 28 losses, Gonzalez probably feared the worst. Baseball is a sport where players can be traded at the drop of a hat, but he couldn’t have expected his marching orders to arrive as they did. If there was a bright side it was only that the email saved him a drive to Turner Field on his return to Georgia.
Gonzalez will be feeling many emotions now, but surprise probably isn’t one of them. This is a guy who was relieved of his previous role with the Florida Marlins despite winning more games in a season than any other manager had done, in 2010.
And a Marlins outfit carrying the lowest payroll in the entire MLB, too. Bob Uecker, who went on to become a sportscaster, comedian and actor after a career in Major League Baseball, wrote migrant fruit pickers enjoyed greater tenure than baseball managers, but Gonzalez got five full seasons before his present crop turned sour with a record of nine wins and 28 losses.
Only the manner of his latest exit is new. Malcolm Allison, a man who managed 18 clubs across five different countries and a span of 30 years, once opined that “you’re not a real manager until you’ve been sacked” and there was a similar line adopted on this most tenuous of career paths in Galway this week when Pat Lam harked back to the day he was let go by the Auckland Blues. Lam spoke about how he greeted the news with a smile, informing friends that he had just joined an illustrious group of coaches and managers who had been similarly discarded down the years.
“Few die on the job,” said Wellington Mara who saw a few come and go during his five decades as the owner of the New York Giants.
Mara was a better owner than most in professional sports given the achievements of the Giants down the years, but the ability of clubs across all codes around the world to foul up the appointment of the single most person in the entire organisation never ceases to amaze and tomorrow’s FA Cup final only highlights that again.
It’s well over a century since George Santayana wrote “The Life of Reason” and made the observation about those who cannot remember the past being condemned to repeat it.
Yet here Manchester United are, three years since Alex Ferguson called it quits and 47 since Matt Busby resigned, still scrambling for something approaching a succession pathway. The myopic and self-defeating means by which most clubs hire and fire managers is evident every season with reports suggesting someone or other has X amount of games to ‘save his job’ and that nonsensical approach is again attaching itself to Louis Van Gaal, who reports say will be safe if he wins the FA Cup but doomed if he doesn’t.
What a way to do business.
Few activities are as fraught with as much uncertainty as 90 minutes of football and if unfashionable Wimbledon could beat a Liverpool side still regarded as among the finest ever to emerge from England in this very game back in 1988 then there is no reason why an average Crystal Palace shouldn’t pull something off against a similarly limited United vintage.
United have brought this on themselves, as they did in the 1970s, but they aren’t alone and the quick fix approach to an issue that demands long-term thinking is only aided by the endless supply of men willing to object themselves to the demands of a job which Joe Kinnear once suggested could be lost for nothing more than “farting in the wrong direction”.
“It’s an incestuous business,” said Paul Fairclough who has been asked back to manage Barnet three times as caretaker in recent times after an initial spell overseeing the club. “It’s the only one I know where unqualified people are hired, allowed to spend £20m, fail miserably, toddle off to play golf for six months, walk straight back into another job and fail again.”
Brendan.obrien@examiner.ie.
@Rackob
