Craig Shakespeare sacking, however unfair, once again damages the perception of British managers
Craig Shakespeare said last week that Premier League managers are only ever four games away from a crisis. In the end, for him, it turned out to be just the one.
The dismal 1-1 draw at home to West Bromwich Albion left Leicester City in the bottom three and for a club that won the league two campaigns ago, that reached the quarter-finals of the Champions League last season, and, however realistically, expected more, that was never going to be accepted for long.
That a manager is sacked four months after signing a three-year contract, and after just eight league games, is always a surprise but, at the same time, there was always something of a decidedly temporary feel to Shakespeare’s stewardship.
In fact, it always appeared that contract had not been wholeheartedly awarded in the first place. If it had been, he would have been given more time. Shakespeare came in to fire-fight and appeared to be dampening down the flames ever since.
Undoubtedly, Leicester’s ambition – realistic or otherwise – partly did for him. It is tough for any owner to taste such glory as winning the league and then settle for a relegation fight. Season after season. Leicester’s Thai owners expected the team to be challenging the top six after a second summer of investment with £80 million spent without maybe taking into account that the Big Six had re-armed themselves to an even greater degree.
Craig Shakespear
So just how realistic their expectation is remains open to question. At the very least, though, Leicester believed they belonged to that small band of clubs regarded as just below the big boys, along with maybe Everton and Southampton. The counter-view is that outside the Top Six the priority of every club is simply staying up.
Shakespeare had to contend not only with the loss of Danny Drinkwater, sold to Chelsea for £35million - and the full story of the midfielder’s departure surely has not yet been told given the manager appeared to be against it - but the ridiculous chaos that his replacement, Adrien Silva, cannot play until January after his registration was submitted 14 seconds too late to Fifa.
That was not Shakespeare’s fault, and both incidents emphatically point to a deeper malaise at the club, but it is the kind of thing that happens when it is going wrong.
There was also the transfer request by Riyad Mahrez and, whether justified or not, it did not given the impression of a manager fully in control of the situation and fed the theory that Shakespeare maybe was better suited to the role he has fulfilled most successfully: a track-suited assistant who works best on the training ground.
There is a bigger picture, also. Here is another British manager failing to cut it in the Premier League and although Leicester are looking at the likes of Sean Dyche, Brendan Rodgers and – possibly – Sam Allardyce there is a sense that their preference would be a bigger name foreign manager, just as they enjoyed their greatest triumph under Claudio Ranieri. It is a sacking that, however unfair, damages the perception of British managers.
