It's clear some managers are just not up to the job

Don't look now! Yet another English club manager may be out of a job! They have lately been falling like autumn leaves and there are surely still, more to come. All very well for the League Managers' Association to deplore the trend and insist that managers be given more time. It's all too clear that some of them should never have been given time at all.

Of course, there have been some strange sackings. That of Roy Keane by Ipswich town, for one. Not that he deserved to stay in office after such an abysmal run of defeats in the so called Championship, but to sack him just days before Ipswich were due to play a difficult cup tie at Stamford Bridge, against a Chelsea side itself in disarray, seemed a crass thing to do.

For many years, Ipswich were run by the Cobbold family, pillars of the establishment.

Chairman John Cobbold had infinite charm and generosity. With Alf Ramsey in charge, under Cobbold's chairmanship, Ipswich rose dramatically from the third division to league Champions.

The present Chairman, seldom seen but wholly influential, is the millionaire Marcus Evans. The contrast in styles with the Cobbolds is huge.

Near win

I could never make sense at all of West Ham's signing of Avram Grant, whose reign at Upton Park has largely been disastrous and, to my mind, predictably so. For what were his credentials?

True, under his aegis, Chelsea had reached a European Cup Final in Moscow, which they very nearly won, but Grant was simply maintaining the impetus imparted by ‘the special one', Jose Mourinho.

Grant did what he could with an all but bankrupt Portsmouth team: no one given their huge, points fine, could have saved them from relegation, but at Chelsea the tale was, though the club angrily denied it, that before a major European game, the players held a meeting without him.

Sharp contrast

A sharp contrast here with Liverpool's appointment of Roy Hodgson who, in my view, should never have taken the job. Hodgson, whom I've known liked and admired for many years, has till now had a remarkable managerial career. Those Scouse dimwits who have publicly derided his club record plainly know nothing of the way he inspired Sweden's Malmo Club in the European Cup.

— The author is a football expert based in England