Wigan don’t need all this Malky baggage
TAKE away the controversy and Wigan have got themselves a top-class manager in Malky Mackay. As Vincent Tan found to his cost, sacking him probably cost Cardiff City their place in the Premier League.
Unfortunately, you can’t take it away – and that makes him a big risk. Malky is still the subject of an FA investigation into the racist, sexist and homophobic texts he sent while in charge of Cardiff.
And these aren’t allegations. Those texts are there in black and white, publicly acknowledged by Malky himself. All the FA are doing is deciding whether to punish him.
Of course, nobody is perfect. Everybody has said something they later wish they hadn’t.What might be a bit of banter to one person means something far more serious to someone else. I’m sure Malky didn’t mean anything sinister, but that doesn’t change what he said and how he is seen by others.
Controversy
When you’re a manager, you’re dealing with the whole football club, not just the players. If Wigan have people from different ethnic backgrounds working in their offices and on the club staff, how are they going to react?
What about sponsors and charities – will they want to be associated with a club who have appointed a man who has said these things?
I’d love to know Dave Whelan’s thinking because there are some good managers out there who wouldn’t have brought half the baggage.
Yes,Wigan have a clause entitling them to terminate Malky’s contract if he is banned by the FA.
But we’re talking about a club in the Championship relegation zone, who aren’t playing well and have had four managers in 16 months.Why appoint a guy who might not be there in three, six, eight months’ time?
And what if he does really well then gets punished by the FA? Wigan will have a very tough decision to make and one that will bring huge controversy either way.
One thing Whelan did get right was replacing Uwe Rosler. I saw Wigan at Brighton a couple of games before he was sacked and they looked like a set of players who’d lost confidence in their manager.
They didn’t really look like they had a gameplan. They had a go in the last ten minutes but all that did was make everyone think ‘Why didn’t you do that from the start?’
It made you wonder if the manager was still able to motivate them and if they could even be bothered to play for him.
The way I always look at it is the identity of the team. Are they passing with conviction? Are they sticking to a system? Are they really putting their bodies on the STORY of the
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You look at the quality of player and if they should be doing better than they are, you know something is wrong.
It can be a million small things, like the way he treats players he wants out of the club. If you’ve got a team of individuals, that’s not so important. But if you’ve got an allfor-one, one-for-all type attitude, it has a big impact.
Or if you see a player flying in training, scoring goals left right and centre, yet the manager is persisting with someone else who is low on confidence, you can quickly think ‘This guy doesn’t have a clue’.
It’s not like players wake up one morning and think ‘Right, I’m not going to play for this manager any more’. It’s more that in the heat of battle, when things are going badly, they don’t try quite as hard as they might. Any club will have one or two players who do that. But if the majority start thinking that way, bad results are inevitable because four or five players can’t win matches week in, week out.
I saw it with Cardiff before Russell Slade took over. I saw it with Bolton under Dougie Freedman. And I saw it at Wigan under Rosler. It’s a big job for Malky Mackay – in every sense.