It’s all working out rather well for Craig Shakespeare isn’t it?
A couple of weeks ago rumours circulated that it was Claudio Ranieri’s assistant who masterminded the player unrest that ultimately led to the Italian getting sacked by Leicester City.
This, of course, was strongly denied by Shakespeare.
“Of course I would never do anything so unscrupulous to my great Italian friend,” Shakespeare probably said, before scurrying off to measure the manager’s office for new curtains.
Okay, I made that up. I don’t even know if the Leicester manager’s office has curtains.
Yet the whole thing does look rather suspicious and it’s hard not to conclude that Shakespeare engineered the whole sorry saga just to hoist himself up the football management ladder.
Or, at the very least, he stood by and watched the relationship between players and manager deteriorate without trying to fix it, knowing he was likely to be given the manager’s role if Ranieri departed.
And look who is going to be made manager till the end of the season…
If you think about it, there is nobody better positioned in a club to get a manager fired than his assistant.
The right-hand man is perfectly placed to sow seeds of doubt in the players’ heads, questioning the manager’s team selections, tactics and decision-making with little more than the occasional quiet word on the side.
The fact that the club couldn’t buy a win while Ranieri was in charge but suddenly put together back-to-back victories under Shakespeare, does raise some serious questions
“I know you want to be playing further up the pitch, Jamie, and I am trying to get that message through to Claudio,” Craig might have happened to mention to Mr Vardy as they shared a Gatorade in the massage room.
Also, it isn’t unusual for an assistant to have direct access to the owners.
Considering Leicester’s appalling form this season I would imagine the directors would have been regularly meeting the entire coaching staff in their search for a solution.
Here too it wouldn’t have been hard for Shakespeare to employ a little skullduggery. A little comment here, a little suggestion there, and pretty soon the people who run the club are losing faith in the man who runs the team.
I could be wrong about this and Shakespeare may have been fighting tooth and nail to save Ranieri.
But when you put all the pieces together, especially the fact that the club couldn’t buy a win while Ranieri was in charge but suddenly put together back-to-back victories under Shakespeare, it does raise some serious questions about the latter’s goals and ambitions.
An incredible triumph followed by a tale of backstabbing, intrigue, manipulation and deceit, culminating in the rise of a new king… it’s almost like the Bard himself wrote the Leicester City story.
Obnoxious Luis Suarez rides again
Last Wednesday night’s Barcelona-Paris Saint-Germain game will live long in the memory. It was, quite probably, one of the most amazing European games I have ever seen. Thrills, excitement, despair, elation, frustration, triumph and tears – it had them all.
There is another reason, however, why I won’t forget that game in a hurry. It reminded me just why I think Luis Suarez is a truly obnoxious footballer.
I’m not denying his greatness – never have and never will. But watching him dive, whinge and complain his way round the pitch was an undeniable blot on the otherwise perfect landscape of a brilliant match.
A sublime footballer but a very questionable human being.
Big Sam in the money
It’s taken longer than expected, but Sam Allardyce is finally starting to turn things around at Selhurst Park.
The former West Ham United and Sunderland manager was brought in by Crystal Palace to arrest a slump that was rapidly propelling them towards relegation. That despite the London club, on paper at least, having one of their best ever teams.
But the expected instant impact and improvement in results – something Allardyce has been famed for throughout his fire-fighting management career – didn’t materialise.
In fact, if anything, the initial results under Allardyce were worse than they had been under Alan Pardew, including that 4-0 home defeat by Sunderland, which must have really stung the big man.
As Palace slipped into the relegation zone, speculation mounted that Big Sam had lost his magic touch, that his heart was no longer in football.
After achieving his lifelong dream of becoming England manager, and then throwing it away in such embarrassing fashion, maybe the drive and passion that made him so good at the job had disappeared.
But back-to-back wins over West Bromwich Albion and Middlesbrough have seen Palace creep out of the bottom three, and Big Sam is once again on course to rescue a team that was looking doomed.
His reputation as the Red Adair of football management looks like remaining intact.
In many ways, the trauma of his England debacle may turn out to make Allardyce even better at this sort of thing than he was before.
He no longer has a personal dream to achieve and he can’t possible harbour any serious ambitions of ever managing one of the very top teams.
So all that is motivating him now is the vast amount of money he can make by saving struggling clubs.
And his 67 days in charge of the Three Lions proved just what he is prepared to do for money…
Only one route to a dignified exit
There is now only one way for Arsene Wenger to restore some pride and dignity to a situation that is rapidly turning ugly: he has to announce he is leaving the club at the end of the season.
Last Tuesday’s 5-1 defeat at home to Bayern Munich was surely the final straw.
I can’t see any conceivable way he can continue in the role beyond the end of the season. He must know it and the club must know it too.
The problem is, however, that nobody directly involved in the situation has the guts to admit it.
They keep talking about how they are going to wait till the end of the season to make a decision when, in reality, Bayern, and Liverpool a few days earlier, took the decision for them.
All that is going to happen by prolonging the inevitable is that things are going to turn nasty. The supporter protests that have started to get bigger and more vocal will only get louder over the next few weeks.
And Wenger simply doesn’t deserve that.
He deserves to bow out with dignity, and the only way to do that is to say he is moving on come May.
Doing so would give the supporters the chance to get behind him and the team between now and the end of the season.
The protests would stop, the placards would be put away, and a man who has done immense amounts of good for the club will get to end his Arsenal career the way he deserves to – with his name being sung by the fans for the right reasons.
sportscolumnist@timesofmalta.com
Twitter: @maltablade