I WOULD like to send very special congratulations to Gary Megson, manager of West Bromwich Albion. After all, it’s not every day that a manager sacks his chairman. Paul Thompson will no doubt get run over by a hedgehog on his way home and then open his post to read that he has not won the Reader’s Digest prize draw.
The joke of it all is that West Bromwich are in better shape than they have been for years: they have just won promotion to the Premiership, and it really should be time for an orgy of self-congratulation. But Megson saw that a moment of triumph is the moment to wield the knife.
“It is obvious from Gary Megson’s comments in the press and comments made to me that he wishes me to step down, and he has now got his wish,” Thompson said. Well, what else can a chairman do when he falls out with his manager? There are those who have tried to do such a thing, but only Megson has succeeded. Terry Venables, who had always believed that he is Dale Carnegie, Paul Getty and Howard Hughes rolled into one svelte Sinatra-like body, took on his chairman, Alan Sugar, when they were at Tottenham Hotspur. The affair went to court and Venables came second.
Sir Alex Ferguson has been involved for some years in a rumour that his racing friends are trying to buy up Manchester United and install him as chairman. They laugh the story off, but Ferguson changed his mind about retirement and is still there, flogging top-quality defenders and buying Argentinian luxuries. The story still has legs, just about, but nothing has happened in any demanding sense of the term.
But Megson has acted and his chairman is gone. Or going, anyway: you don’t sell off 29 per cent of a football club in five minutes. Megson exploited his moment to perfection. The only thing he needs to worry about is how long he can last at West Bromwich himself because what chairman would take him on? Who wants to become chairman of West Bromwich now that Megson has become the Deadly Doug Ellis of management? Chairmen are not supposed to interfere with the manager on footballing matters. The snag with this theory is that the crucial part of running a football club, is, oddly enough, football. Everything starts with football, everything comes back to football, and unless a chairman restricts himself to running the Golden Goal competition, he finds his job overlapping with the manager’s.
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If every chairman who ever “interfered on the footballing side”, got sacked by his manager, there would be no chairmen left. But Megson has pulled off the trick. What next? No doubt West Bromwich substitutes will summon players off the pitch, take their preferred place on the field and send off the referee.