THE LAST WORD – Fergie says the Suarez incident got Kenny Dalglish sacked (pic: Inpho)
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By Aidan Elder | Chief Sports Writer
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Football
For no real reason, Sir Alex Ferguson has reignited the now tedious Luis Suarez racism row, this time aiming his mind games at someone who is unemployed. Fergie says he wasn’t surprised that Kenny Dalglish got shown the door and blames his handling of the unpleasant situation for the sacking. Although making QPR, Wigan and Newcastle looked like a 1970s Brazil near the end of the season also had rather a lot to do with it.
“I wasn’t surprised at Kenny leaving. I think that the Suarez incident … John Henry has obviously looked at that and felt it wasn’t handled in the right way,” said the Old Trafford boss, unnecessarily adding “It certainly wasn’t a nice thing to happen you know.
In other raking over bad episodes in Liverpool’s history, it has emerged that the club are willing to let Andy Carroll (23) go for a fee in the region of £20 million. Newcastle had offered to take the striker on loan, but Reds’ manager, Brendan Rodgers would prefer a permanent deal. Although he did seem to soften his stance on the ‘he’s not suited to my style of play’ theory that sparked all this transfer tittle-tattle.
“He’s a good player. People talk about whether he can fit into my style or not, but if you’re a club and you spend £35m on a player you’d like to think he can fit into whatever style the team plays,” explained Rodgers, echoing many a conversation that’s been had in the pub since the story broke.
Golf
You’ve barely digested your cornflakes, but already Day 2 of the Open Championship is well underway.
Not much has happened so far and BBC2 are still showing cartoons, but with McIlroy, Donald, Harrington and Mickelson all teeing off before 10am, something interesting should happen before too long.
Australian, Adam Scott leads the way with a score of -6 and he’ll begin his round of silly-pants wearing at 1.43pm. Because every golf article ever written needs to reference Tiger Woods, the adulterer-in-chief is out at 2.43pm.
Cycling
After comfortably negotiating the final mountain stage of the Tour de France, Bradley Wiggins looks nailed on to have the Yellow Jersey resting on his shoulders on Sunday afternoon in Paris. And he wasn’t shy about telling everyone.
With a relatively flat stage to go today and a time-trial that Wiggins excels at on Saturday, it would take an all time balls-up or a lot more carefully thrown tacks not to finish the job off. “You’d put your house on me not that sort of time. It’s all looking very good at the moment,” he modestly surmised. He’s 1/200 to win, so maybe we can forgive him.
Football
The Al Hasawi family promised they’d appoint ‘a well known name’ to manage Nottingham Forest and there are few names in world sport more identifiable than ‘O’Driscoll’. Just not really when it comes to football.
Sean O’Driscoll has been handed the hotseat at the City Ground after the big names supposedly linked with the job vanished like Roy Keane’s managerial credibility. O’Driscoll had been part of deposed manager Steve Cotterill’s coaching staff at Forest since January, but left in May to take the reins at Crawley Town. He leaves the money-bags League 1 side without having taken charge of a game.
After Mick McCarthy decided to rule himself out of the running, it’s hard to get away from the theory the Kuwaiti family are planning to use the club are their personal game of Championship Manager. We’ll probably be hearing a lot more about Forest in coming seasons and maybe not always for ideal reasons. The Reds are 7/2 to be promoted to the Premier League this season if you happen to think this is a good appointment.
O Driscoll is an excellent appointment , the only ones disappointed are the pundits and ‘so called experts’. For once substance wins out over image.
Noel Gallagher
Fair point Noel.
Criticism is probably based more around the fact the owners built the appointment far more than was advisable. If O’Driscoll had got the job without the addition of the ‘well known manager’ shtick it would be perfectly fine, but by saying that they heaped avoidable pressure on whoever was going to get the job.
Maybe it’s not the worst appointment, but it was poor PR.
Two Faced Fergie. When Pscho alledgedly made a racist remark to Paul Ince, Fergusson wanted the FA to ban him, and used the press to further that cause. When Peter Schmichel made a racist remark, I believe the same one, Fergusson said it meant nothing, it was just part of the game. I’m not surprised that he is still trying to fan the flames. Two faced scumbag.