SPECTATOR SPORT
KENNY Dalglish was the tenth soccer manager to clear his desk in the two months since new year's day, and the 20th since the beginning of the season. There are 92 clubs in the Football League, so that is one heck of a turnover. Dalglish's tearful leaving of Liverpool, saying the pressures had become too heavy, must have been greeted by a snort from the 91 other managers trailing behind him. They could all do with a bit of Dalglish's pressure Liverpool had become League champions almost by right in the last decade or two; they were once again top of the First Division, and still in the Cup. Nice press- ure, if you can get it. I know for a fact that the pressures on a Fourth Division team like Hereford United is to win an away point at, say, Darlington or Scarborough because it means the directors allow them to stop on the way back home at that damn good fish-and-chip shop in Wetherby. No point, no plaice. By fluke, on the day Dalglish took his leave of Anfield, I was talking with John Bond, now manager of shy little Shrews- bury Town and down among the dead men of the Third Division. They were preparing gleefully for the one-off visit this week of Arsenal in the Cup. As manager, Bond has had a colourful, rakish progress up and
An attitude of resignation
Frank Keating
down the divisions — eight clubs in all, and in his prime was one of those cheroot-and- champagne boasters who at least livened up the usual, dowdy, pre-match prognos- tications. Dalglish's pressures were cushioned by a salary of £200,000, five-star hotels and a la carte menus — Shrewsbury Town's pressures were scrapping for cru- cial relegation points at Mansfield Town, `peeing down with rain on a Tuesday night, watched by more slag-heaps than people'. Though not one to put a boot in when a man is down, you sensed Bond's still boundless, possibly almost reckless, love of his dopey game had in a way been vindi- cated by Dalglish's quivering surrender 'I was on the same golf course with him once. He walked past me without so much as a nod. As if I was a tree. He is the moaningest minny I've ever known'. The day after Dalglish's surprising announcement, the 11th League manager of the year tossed his tracksuit into the skip and departed. Alan Ball, once the carrot- topped little totem of England's forward line, was sacked by Stoke City, a few places higher than Shrewsbury in the Third Division. Ball has bounced around a num- ber of clubs in the lower divisions, working on nuppence and enthusiasm. I met him in the breakfast-television studios.
No end of his fellow supremos of the squads could have done as well as Dalglish, he said, had they had the luck of the former Liverpool manager — for Dalglish, who had been promoted straight from the players' dressing-room six years ago, had been presented it all on a plate, served no apprenticeship in management, and simply inherited a world-class team and a large bundle of booty. 'An absolute doddle', sighed Ball in his squeaky voice.
`If Liverpool's manager packs up be- cause of pressure, then what hope for any of us?' said Howard Wilkinson, of Leeds United. The eminence and longest survivor of this dotty, devoted, band of 92, Brian Clough, summed up, 'Resignations are for Prime Ministers, Cabinets, and those caught with their trousers down, not for football managers in work'.
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