Colin Sheridan: Beleaguered Rodgers may have given up the battle

The Leicester boss will do well to survive the current crisis.

FOX HOLE: Leicester City manager Brendan Rodgers shakes hands with Harvey Barnes. 

There exists a lexicon that breathes only in the oxygen of sports and political commentary…an ocean of verbiage obsolete in everyday conversation, but flourishing on the front and back pages of broadsheets and redtops alike. 

We’re talking “beleaguered” and “besieged”, and yes, we’re talking “embattled”. You’ll never hear words like these atop a high stool or in a college canteen, but you will read them, usually describing a cabinet minister three weeks into a crisis that will inevitably end in apology and resignation. Or a Premier League manager who has just received the dreaded backing of the board. 

Currently, there is nobody more embattled than Leicester City’s boss Brendan Rodgers, who is as beleaguered as he is besieged as the Foxes languish (another word) bottom of the table, with one point from seven games, having conceded more goals at this point of a season than any other Premier League side in history.

It’s a sad fall for a club and manager who are used to making sweet music together. In his two full seasons at the club, Rodgers guided them to fifth and Europa League football, a hugely respectable achievement for a club for whom a solitary title in 2016 was viewed as such an outlier that many expected them to be relegated the following season. Indeed, that looked likely when Claudio Ranieri was sacked six months after winning the league, a single point above the relegation zone with a dozen games left.

Two permanent managers and a couple of caretakers later, Rodgers was poached from Celtic, where he had cemented his reputation as a manager on the rise following his glorious honeymoon and brutal breakup with Liverpool.

Everything since pointed to a club and a manager to be admired. It was never in the tea leaves for Leicester City to be a team overly accustomed to European football, and yet here we are. Champions League nights, Europa League semi-finals, fighting for a top-four finish, they had become a club nobody liked to play but many liked to watch.

There was fragility, sure - both their top five finishes came after mini-collapses at season's end - but in the main this was a great time to be a Foxes fan. Until now.

The most worrying thing about Leicester's early season woes has not been the lack of investment in the team — despite amplified noise to the contrary, they only lost two key players in the off-season, Kasper Schmeichel and Wesley Fofana (who only played a seven games last season) — but the body language of their embattled manager. 

In the aftermath of the 6-2 thrashing at Spurs, the Antrim man cut a demoralised figure, referring to the team as “they” while lamenting that the club's board will “do what it is that they feel they need to do. I’m not daft - I know football. Losing the last six games doesn’t make great reading…”  He unconvincingly added that he wanted to stay on “100 percent”. 

A manager who at various times in the last six years has been linked to all of Arsenal, Chelsea, Manchester United and Spurs, and a coach who has been credited with doing the initial turning round of Liverpool's fortunes this decade, Rodgers’ stock has consolidated during his time at the King Power, but his recent words and demeanour amounted to an invite to the club to break up with him, a kind of a “it’s not you, it’s us” type of thing.

His team is tired. Jamie Vardy is old. James Maddison is brilliant but brittle. His defence... porous. Rodgers, so often a vibes man, a character often lampooned for his post-match pseudo-philosophising, could always be admired for his almost innocent energy. Now, he appears to be quickly willing himself to the waterfall, like an old elephant on his final journey.

Butler warmed a winter afternoon

Even for the most ardent of rugby deniers, Eddie Butler’s voice on a frosty Saturday was a poetic panacea to all manner of ills born from winter's womb. The most dour game of international rugby was made palatable by Butler’s baritone. His soft Welsh lilt, his ability to elevate the ordinary with a quip, his wry humour as one team imploded and another excelled - he was neither cheerleader nor naysayer, but the perfect narrator of the unpredictability of an afternoon’s sporting action. His passing has only served to remind of his brilliance. Winter Saturdays will be lesser for his loss.

Pearlman throws book at Favre

Jeff Pearlman, the American sportswriter responsible for bestsellers Showtime: Magic, Kareem, Riley, and the Los Angeles Lakers Dynasty, Football for a Buck and Three Ring Circus, took to Twitter last week to do the most counterintuitive thing imaginable for an author - implore people not to buy one of his books. 

Pearlman’s 2016 biography of Hall of Fame quarterback Brett Favre Gunslinger was a New York Times bestseller, and although Favre himself did not contribute to the book, Pearlman described his opus as "fairly positive" despite the fact he included anecdotes about Favre's "grossness, addiction, treatment of women." 

So why the sudden self-flagellation? Last week, an investigation in the state of Mississippi made public text messages that detail Favre’s alleged involvement in a welfare fraud scheme that saw millions of dollars diverted to Favre and others, instead of their designated use, which, according to the 1996 Welfare Act, were specifically intended for “assisting families in need so children can be cared for in their own homes or the homes of relatives''. 

It is further alleged Favre was paid over $1million for speaking engagements he never undertook. Favre, as famous for his on field bravery as he was for a behemoth ego off it (he retired and unretired three times) earned over $100m in a playing career that spanned two decades, 16 of those seasons spent under-centre for the Green Bay Packers, the most blueblood of American Football teams thanks to its storied associations to legendary coach Vince Lombardi.

The allegations, and the damning text messages from Favre which appear to corroborate them - have proven too much for Pearlman and many others who viewed Favre with respect - albeit a tad reluctantly. "He's a bad guy. He doesn't deserve the icon treatment,” wrote Pearlman. "So, sincerely, don't buy the book, don't take it out from the library. Leave it."

Rowing in right direction

It's been exactly five years since Antonio Maurogiovanni became High Performance Director at Rowing Ireland. Since his appointment, the sport of rowing - for so long synonymous with near misses when it came to Irish athletes and major events - has experienced a level of success so prolific it appears we take it for granted.

This week's World Rowing Championships in the Czech Republic mark another opportunity for McCarthy, O’Donovan, Puspure et al to enhance their global reputations as heavyweights of the sport. How much of this success is down to the Italian is unquantifiable, but the overlap is surely no coincidence. Good governance enables better performance. All other sports should take note.