More mind games but Rafa still in title race

TWO managers under fire go head to head”. That’s how Saturday’s game was described in the big build-up.

How on earth has it come to this? How can someone who’s dragged a team into a springtime title race for the first time since 2002 be remotely comparable to a hapless failure like Adams? Thanks to perpetual quibblers like yours truly? Perhaps. There is always a need to step back, survey the landscape and make calm, rational judgements.

Then you think about Robbie Keane’s treatment and the wave of gratuitously nasty apologist tripe from our supporters and the blood starts boiling again, “I supported him as much as I could,” were the words that eked from the manager’s remarkably straight face, while Keane, Parry, the Yanks, the recession and presumably Lee Harvey Oswald himself took the rap for this mind-game madness.