Filed under: Champions League, Premier League, Football
How distasteful the game of football can be. It inspires great deeds and great passions, as Barcelona and Manchester United showed us in the Champions League semi-finals. It can also, however, bring out the worst in such as Jose Mourinho, a small minority of Manchester City fans and those speculating about Gerard Houllier's successor at Aston Villa.Mourinho's antics around his Real Madrid side's tie against Barcelona reached a new low. Those of us who have admired his managerial achievements were left sickened and saddened by his finger-pointing at all but himself for his side's 2-0 home defeat and embarrassed by our defence of his talents.
Now we are left to wonder whether the Emperor is in need of some new clothes. Where once he found inventive ways to overcome opponents, his limitations as a tactician, his side a brutal reflection of his lack of ideas for countering Lionel Messi and Barca, will scarcely have done his chances of a job back in England any good.
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Owners and chairmen may be pragmatic enough to put up with the controversy if it brings trophies. If it just brings vilification, though, who needs the hassle?
Two nights earlier, we heard a section of Manchester City's support at Blackburn singing odious references to the Munich air disaster that befell their neighbours United. It came just 24 hours after a moving television drama about that fateful event in 1958.
If those City fans were dancing on graves, some have been metaphorically creating a tomb for Gerard Houllier and tripping the light fantastic across it. The man has been in hospital with a heart problem but it has not stopped the critics who never wanted him at Villa Park in the first place and never given him a chance.
Speculation is rife about who his successor might be, Rafael Benitez the latest name to be mentioned. It would be ironic; Benitez succeeded Houllier at Liverpool, too.
It is all unpleasantly premature. Houllier is on the road to recovery and has to be allowed to make his own decision about whether, or when, to return. I doubt the speculators would enjoy it much if they had a health scare and people talked openly about whether someone else should get their job.
Besides, the Villa owner Randy Lerner believes that Houllier has been doing a good job in modernising the club, improving training methods and rebalancing the squad to get better value for money ahead of a challenge for honours next season.
What can be done to silence the bitter voices of crass bad taste such as Mourinho, the Manchester City minority and Houllier's detractors? Nothing, and nor should anything be done. We live in a country of free speech. Let them damn themselves with their own voices.
Barcelona were no angels in the Bernabeu and some of United's support can be nasty too. Houllier has been known to have a go back at his critics as well. The instinct is always to respond when provoked - quite rightly on occasions in this game to get bullies to back down. The best policy over the next week, though, would surely be to rise above it all.
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Source: http://www.fanhouse.co.uk/2011/04/28/football-champions-league-munich-gerard-houllier/
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