Bruce gone? About time too………

01 Dec 2011 1 Comment

by representingthemambo in Football, Individuals worthy of contempt

November 30 was a sober day for the Mambo’s chief correspondent. Naturally he was busy reflecting on the day’s industrial action, and he was cursing Birmingham’s imminent exit from the Europa League, but one thing did raise a smile. Steve Bruce getting his comeuppance (albeit a ridiculously well-paid one) is a great source of joy for anyone who likes football. And we all thought it would be Venky’s boot-licker Steve Kean who would be first out the door.

And yes, I am discussing myself in the third person.

One thing DC and I share in common is a passionate loathing for the now-departed Sunderland boss. A man frequently touted as ‘the next England manager’ has finally been put out of his misery by Sunderland’s American owner, after a miserable run of results dating back nearly a year, and countless millions of pounds spent hoovering up other clubs cast-offs.  They have won two games at home in 2011. A feeble effort, considering the huge investment in players and patience shown by the club’s owners.

The Steve Bruce phenomenon: accident or design?

Bruce’s continued ability to secure jobs in football, despite being a clueless, disloyal wanker, is that he does have this unerring ability to start well in his new job. It happened at Birmingham, Palace and Sunderland. Remember Bruce’s Sunderland beating Chelsea last year at Stamford Bridge and the talk being of European qualification? The unerring early success is unerringly followed by a collapse into mediocrity. He normally jumps before he is found out though, and this is what makes his time at Sunderland different. He had nowhere to go. No bigger club to jump to when things fell apart, as he normally does. He had to stay. And so, as night follows day, he had to be sacked. He wouldn’t have the decency to resign even though he was hopelessly out of his depth and must have been aware of it.

The shit football would be slightly less difficult to take if there was some sense that Bruce had a plan. There isn’t. He has spent hugely at Sunderland, by some estimates signing 30 new players, and are they really any better than when he joined them? No.

At Birmingham, he is  remembered fondly by a large section of the faithful for getting us into the Premier League after all of the years of close-calls and disappointments. True, he did. But I also recall that he left Crystal Palace in the lurch to jump ship, and our late season surge may have had something to do with a huge overhaul of the squad mid-season when he took over, the likes of which has probably never been seen in the Championship. He also got us back up following relegation. But again, we had by some distance the best team in the division and we were fairly disappointing, and the football was uniformly joyless.

I vividly recall the build-up to an FA cup quarter final with a fairly mediocre Liverpool a few years ago during histime at the Blues. Before the game Bruce, with his usual brand of substance free bullshit, told us that Blues would ‘get in their faces’, stop them playing and give them a hard night.

We lost 7-1.

Firstly, if giving a fairly middling team ‘a  hard time’ was the limit of our ambitions when the squad on show was by some distance the most expensively assembled in Birmingham’s history, and we were at home, then you have an idea of Bruce’s thought processes and limitations as a manager.

Secondly, we couldn’t even do that.

He was also the first manager to describe a game as potentially ‘tickly’. Only he knows what he meant.

By his own admission he has no faith or great interest in tactics, so how has he got away with it for so long in a football world ever more obssessed with tactics, stats and formations?

For the life of me I don’t know. It is one of life’s enduring mysteries that businessmen with a lifetime of selfish, greedy ruthlessness behind them can go soft in the head when they take over a football club, and hand over millions of pounds in salaries and transfer budgets to men who couldn’t organise a piss-up in a brewery. What Ellis Short was thinking when he offered Bruce a lucrative contract extension in February, when the rest of the sentient beings in the world had long since discovered that Bruce was a flaccid dick, is anyone’s guess. I like to think of myself as a student of human behaviour but I am honestly baffled.

Of course Bruce is always ‘one player short.’ Apparently he was blaming this seasons abysmal start on the failure of the club’s owners to give him the money to sign Charles N’Zogbia, a fairly gifted but only very sporadically impressive winger who hasn’t pulled up any trees at his new club Aston Villa thus far. A typically Bruce-esque excuse that only the most naive simpletons would fall for.

Sadly, there are plenty of naive simpletons in football so he will get another chance, somewhere. He won’t get another big job though. He couldn’t. Could he………….?

Bruce is a man that when he gets it right, it is purely by luck. And when things are going wrong, he can do nothing except hope that it will turn round. He has no plan. He is a useless, brainless buffoon. It is a tragedy that it has cost millions of pounds of loyal fans money for him to be found out so comprehensively. I hate him. Not as much as I hate Jeremy Clarkson. But I still hate him.

jc