Inside Track: Focus on managers larger then ever before

It’s all about managers nowadays. A bit too much, I would say.

They’re wheeled out for interviews, given credit if their team is winning, blamed if it’s losing. I’d say most would prefer to be a thousand miles from a mic, a camera, or – if there are hacks still using them – a notebook.

Most of them, especially those guiding soccer teams, have no choice but to be there. It’s part of the contract, and if signing that contract – always lucrative - has them in charge of an English Premier League side, there’s Sky to be facilitated. And maybe the BBC as well.

There have been some comings and goings across the water in recent times. Brendan Rodgers got the heave-ho from Leicester even though he led the club to FA Cup glory two years ago.

Getting rid of a winner is nothing new at the King Power Stadium. Claudio Ranieri achieved what many considered an impossibility when he guided the Foxes to a 500/1 win in the Premier League, but was gone within 18 months.

Rodgers is middle-aged, Ranieri eligible for what we know in this country to be the ‘Charlie Haughey’. Roy Hodgson is even older than the Italian, but is obviously still very young at heart.  How can you explain him stepping into the breach at Crystal Palace a few weeks ago, his brief, to stave off relegation? And a good job he’s doing.

By the way, Palace are the new ‘us’ and ‘we’ among the soccer followers about the place from where this column emanates. Members of the next generation and the one after that have been to London on a number of occasions to visit a relation who lives close to the Palace grounds.

They’ve been to see the local team quite often, and are now going around wearing blue-and-red jerseys. What next? Speaking with a South London accent? Spare me.

Hodgson’s appointment is not the only one to – if I can use a phrase that’s long being growing old – raise a few eyebrows. Frank Lampard, a right good footballer in his day, but like many others who were smart on the field, unable, so far, to transfer his talents to the line, has been recalled to Chelsea to try to steady the ship.

Which was the biggest surprise, the Stamford Bridge crowd making the appointment or Lampard accepting it?

Another ‘by the way’: Everton, a team previously managed by Lampard, were tipped by this page to make the top four. You shouldn’t be surprised that it won’t happen: McIlroy, Lowry and Willett carried our hopes to win the Augusta Masters last weekend.

I did wonder last week would Joe Biden mention New York’s historic win over Leitrim in last weekend’s Connacht championship match on his visit this week. It was a first-ever, but, then, New York are not all that long playing in championship football.

There was a time when New York used to play the National League champions in the final ‘proper’. In 1967, they won the title for the second time with Dundalk FC 1958 FAI Cup winner, Ken Finn, and his brother, Dermot, in the line-up.

This wasn’t Connacht’s only surprise. Roscommon beat the recently-crowned National League champions, Mayo, and talk about managers: Davy Burke is the Rossies boss, and you could ask, does he not give it as much, if not more, than the guys across the water who are probably earning more in a few days than he does in a year. One thing is for certain: none of them has his enthusiasm.

But that’s it. Although, as suggested earlier, English football managers are having too much attention – and pressure - heaped on them, they’re more than compensated when they open their pay packets at the end of the week.