Last night it emerged a verbal agreement on Mancini’s three-and-a-half-year contract was reached on December 2, as City beat Arsenal in the Carling Cup, but the board wanted to delay the appointment until after tough games against Chelsea, Bolton and Tottenham.
This is bad enough: keeping on a condemned man just to make the new guy's job easier. Worse still is the news that Garry Cook could not find it within himself to break the news to Mark Hughes:
Confronted by Hughes before the game, City’s executive chairman Garry Cook was unable, or perhaps unwilling, to give the man he appointed in the summer of 2008 any assurances about his future.
Some reports, unconfirmed yesterday, suggested that the conversation became heated. Who could blame Hughes if it did?
Cook, after all, was the man who sat in the Abu Dhabi sunshine just five weeks or so ago and mentioned Hughes in the same breath as Michael Jordan and Muhammad Ali.
Or as James Ducker reports the same conversation:
“Am I being sacked?” Hughes asked the sheepish-looking chief executive. Cook was non-committal. The man who had told anyone who cared to listen that Hughes was the best young manager around did not have the decency to tell him the truth. Hughes had to wait until after the game to be told to pack his bags during a ten-minute conversation with al-Mubarak, the man who had driven through Mancini’s appointment.
A member of Hughes' coaching staff told the Mail:
‘It was weird,’ said one of Hughes’s inner circle yesterday. ‘Nobody would meet our gaze before kick-off. Our wives were upstairs having their lunch and we were beginning to realise we were effectively out of work. But nobody would actually tell us.’
There's a lot more in the papers today and I will come back to it later in the day. But this all reflects very poorly on those running MCFC.
8 comments:
This does indeed reflect poorly on those running MCFC. What concerns me the most is that are Cook, Marwood, and ADUG the businessmen of the highest standard and integrity they've been so busy promoting themselves as over the past 18 months or are they all Mike Ashley clones in more expensive suits?
Personally I think Cook should tender his resignation immediately as should Marwood. Not because the decision to sack Hughes was necessarily wrong but for simply the spineless way in which it was conducted. In a word Mr. Cook you "bottled it."
Firstly, I do not agree with the sacking of Hughes however, the board believed this had to happen to improve results, performance and ultimately take advantage of a vulnerable CL position. So, how should this transition be conducted without destabilizing things?
The most obvious action is to have a new manager in place immediately - imagine the column inches devoted to rumour and speculation of managerial targets without the swift appointment of Mancini. It would've been vulgar.
It's obvious that clandestine negotiations have to take place for this to happen.......to happen in the name of stability. I would be more upset had Cook and Marwood left us in limbo approaching a crucial transfer window.
In all, the premature sacking of Hughes leaves a sour taste but the recent press reaction and their attacks on the board are predictable and selective.
I welcome the immediate appointment of a new manager and still have complete trust in our owners to steer the good ship MCFC on to the promised land.
I'm sure I'm not the only City fan who feels duped and betrayed; not by Cook - he has always shown himself to be an untrustworthy corporate shark with a rubber spine. The real betrayal comes from Khaldoon al-Mubarak who led City fans down the garden path with his mealy-mouthed guff about stability and patience and not being like other clubs.
Whether or not Hughes was good enough is beside the point. He was set targets and he was clearly on course to achieve them (assuming we glean a minimum of 4pts from the next two matches). The average points tally for sixth place (averaging all totals since the Prem was reduced to 20 teams) is 59pts; 5th place 62pts; 4th place 68pts. We were heading for a probable 66pts on current form. In fact, it would only take a marginal improvement in results in the second half of the season to achieve that coveted 4th place (on paper).
The owners simply cannot demonstrate that Hughes was incapable of achieving the targets upon which his contract appears to have relied. It was, therefore ethically and perhaps even legally wrong for them to terminate his contract. If I were Hughes I'd be consulting my lawyer.
Nor am I going to condemn Mancini before he has had a chance to prove his worth. My concern is the Cooks, the Marwoods, the Kidds and all the other spineless backstabbers who seem to have been lurking in the shadows if what we are now hearing contains a grain of truth.
We have seen this kind of power struggle skullduggery at City before and it sent us to the third tier last time. Money isn't everything and even if it was I now have little faith in anything the owners say. I fear the plug could be pulled whenever they get the frights. I hope I'm wrong.
Absolute rubbish Lonesome. The Club did nothing wrong - there is no pain-free of changing a manager & his team who are failing to deliver. Khaldoon flew in to sack him face to face, spot on, and Cook made himself scarce because of that meeting. Hughes knew it was coming and any pretence that he didn't is just to up the compo.
Absolute rubbish Lonesome. The Club did nothing wrong - there is no pain-free way of changing a manager & his team who are failing to deliver. Khaldoon flew in to sack him face to face, spot on, and Cook made himself scarce because of that meeting. Hughes knew it was coming and any pretence that he didn't is just to up the compo.
Johhny Crossan, I think you do that name an injustice.
Hughes's sacking was constructive dismissal, and if he took the club to the cleaners over it, I wouldn't blame him.
Yes, football is results based. But those results rely on more factors than just targets set by men in suits. The whole thing smacks of a "corporate" decision rather than a rational footballing one. The modern corporate world allows no time for new systems to be bedded in before the morons in HR, Compliance or uther useless department announce "changes" (merely to justify their own existence). It seems the same mentality has now crept into Manchester City - a soulless, corporate entity driven by bottom line bean counters and fucking shoe salesmen.
FWIW, I expect that results will improve over the next few weeks, Robinho will play out of his skin for the next month or so before reverting to type, but I'll be very surprised if we finish any higher than 6th.
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