WHAT’S your advice to beleaguered football managers facing the axe? I hear you ask. Well, it’s a funny and fickle old game, this management gig: one minute you’re being hoisted up on the shoulders of players taking the acclaim of the crowd, the next you’re standing in the dole queue with your coaching staff looking like Bobby Carlyle and his crew in The Full Monty. For Jim Goodwin at Aberdeen this week, perhaps the chorus to Hot Chocolate’s soundtrack to the movie is keeping him going: I believe in miracles…
Many of my colleagues over the years would attest to having carried me at regular intervals, and after recent columns bombed so hard they measured on the Richter scale, I was a touch unnerved when I received an email from the sports editor with the subject line “future direction”. Awaiting my summons to his office with the level of trepidation normally reserved for that brief pause before Bobby et all whip off their top hats and reveal all, I was doing the mental gymnastics required of self-preservation on such a scale.
I quickly dashed to the nearest coffee shop and returned armed with a freshly brewed cup to assuage any artillery coming my way during the tete-a-tete, and to my pleasant surprise the meeting passed without a hitch. I received a sort of pat on the tete, and the new direction thing was a suggestion that I write about his beloved Queen of the South, which I of course declined outright on the basis of good taste. Eventually, we settled on the travails of Aberdeen and under-fire boss Goodwin.
