Roger Alton Roger Alton

Spectator Sport: Heroic failures

issue 10 March 2012

Good old Pearcey, I say. England’s excitable stand-in manager refreshingly ruled himself out of the full-time job after his back-of-a-fag-packet team just lost out to Holland last week, because, he said, he wasn’t good enough. His actual words were, ‘I don’t think I have the experience for the job… the full-time manager of England at this moment in time is probably somebody else, not me.’

Well, full marks for honesty, but you might say the evidence is too scant — there’s insufficent sample size. Kevin Keegan could say that he wasn’t good enough to be England coach with the real authority of a man who had not been good enough for quite a long time. As he put it after losing 1-0 to Germany in 2000, ‘I feel I fall short of what is required in this massive job. Although I knew things were going wrong I just couldn’t think of what to do to put it right.’

All very unusual, especially as men are broadly hardwired to say yes to most things, even if they have as much chance of succeeding as they have of jogging across the Sahara.

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