The XI: Greatest Managerial Hooters (British Isles)
They say – yes, “They”; again – that a manager’s greatest attribute is having a good nose for a player (or is it a good eye? Are they the same thing?). If that were true, They, you big smart-arse, then how come half of this lot weren’t any good at the ol’ big coat-wearing gesticulation game, eh? They all have formidable snot-boxes. The best/worst XI ever to come from these islands, no less…*
11: Ron Atkinson
With early onset combover and a soft, flat, wide,Niledelta of a snout, Big Ron was a man who built a career trying to use the gift of the gab to distract you from his washed-up old Brit gangster on the Costa del Crime look. Trouble was, he also needed the gift of the gab to distract you from the fact that he talked a lot of unholy gibberish (“Let Incey have his rabbit; just make sure you pick up any eyebrows at the front stick”), which is a logical impossibility that he’d have been well served in recognizing. Eventually, having already slipped beyond bargepole-touching range of employers hawking the sort of managerial jobs that might pay for his bling insurance, all this stream-of-consciousness gobbledegook-spouting caught up with his other career, punditry, which fell foul of that most sanctified of football’s hypocrisies: i.e. that all benighted views are permissible – nay, are encouraged – provided they’re expressed behind closed doors and/or when the microphones are off. That Marcel Desailly declined to break Ron’s nose was not due to any particular gallantry on his part, nor because he was lazy (careful!), but for the simple reason that he couldn’t actually locate the bone. He did ask if he could borrow it as a makeshift beanbag in the ITV studio, however. Ron declined.
10: Harry Redknapp
What with everything else that’s going on with ‘Arry’s sodden-potato, hangdog phizog – the twitching, the saddle-bags, puffy facial contours akin to a giant flesh-duvet beneath which his eyes and mouth are drowning – it’s easy to overlook what an extraordinary hooter he has, a gnarled old thing that looks from underneath like an old ball that his dogs have been chewing at. Somewhere in the Pooleregion, I’d imagine.
There was more than one legendary manager in Nottingham during the 1970s and 80s, as supporters of the world’s oldest professional club will gladly mither you about given half a chance. With his windswept canopy of vertical hair, a set of Scooby Doo-graveyard teeth, and a conk that looked like an illegal immigrant hiding in a rolled-up carpet (or possibly an axolotl), Jimmy Sirrell had the appearance of someone about a month off launching as a Ken Dodd tribute act on the northern variety club circuit. These days, he’d probably be lynched by some hysterical curtain-twitching vigilantes just for looking like that.
8: Iain Dowie
Iain Dowie has the face of a man who’s just arrived at the sanctuary of home after a 3-day ketamine bender that has effectively transformed his sinuses into a large bucket of wallpaper paste, only to trip over his doorstep, break his nose, and have to go and sit in A&E for 17 hours. Indeed, Dowie – who did not name his daughter Zowie – has the sort of beak that, lacking suture between bridge and frontal bone, looks like something hurriedly glued back on to that Toby jug that only a free-floating fear of death is persuading you to keep. Anyway, ill-suited both to summarising (due to words tumbling out of his mouth like knickers out of a broken suitcase) and management (due to words…), the goal-every-thirteen-games frontman has taken his bunged-up, cloth-mouthed blather to the by-and-large non-linguacratic Sky Soccer Saturday [See Thompson, Phil, below] where he regularly has viewers recommending him decongestion options.
7: John Sillett
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