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Fondue Fenians Weblog
Sonntag, 17. Mai 2009 - 00:41 Uhr
Battling to the bitter end
LAST DAY DRAMA: Former Celtic striker Chris Sutton remembers only too well the thin line that can lie between success and failure when the title race goes right to the finish, finds Stewart Fisher
CHRIS SUTTON'S most strenuous physical exercise these days is opening the batting for his village cricket team, even if some Celtic fans still wish he was coming out to bat for them. Six years have passed since the former Celtic striker accused Jimmy Calderwood's Dunfermline side of "lying down" against Rangers as the 2002/03 season reached a climactic and acrimonious conclusion on goal difference on the last day of the campaign, a scenario which could well be re-enacted in seven days' time.
A problem with his eyesight caused Sutton to give up the game earlier than he would have liked, but that ailment has nothing to do with the involuntary cringe he experiences every time that infamous interview footage intrudes upon his rural idyll in East Anglia.
"That was the heat of the moment, and you say things," Sutton said. "You saw that after the Chelsea- Barcelona game a fortnight ago - people say things they shouldn't say. Football is an emotional game, you get caught up in the moment. It is something I look back on now and regret doing. When you work hard all season and get yourself in a position to win something, only to have it taken away in that manner, it is natural to have those kind of emotions, especially straight after the game. Possibly interviews shouldn't be conducted straight after the game like that. In hindsight it is better to wait 24 hours."
Sutton is more scarred by "Helicopter Sunday" in 2005 than the version of two years earlier when at least Celtic had a fulfilling season in which they earned a thrilling Uefa Cup final appearance - but would rather a league campaign didn't boil down to goal difference in any case. Goal difference, goals scored and a play-off are the SPL's preferred manner of deciding the outcome, but Sutton would rather the teams' head-to-head record came into the reckoning, as it does in Spain, Portugal and Italy. Even if such a process would favour Rangers rather than Celtic this season.
"It is not nice for either team to lose the league on goal difference," Sutton said. "In Spain I think they do it on head-to-head-records and I think that or a play-off would be a fairer way. But I suppose that is just the nature of sport. I was more disappointed the season we lost at Motherwell than the one where we lost out on goal difference after beating Kilmarnock on the last day. We had had a really good season that year, we got to the Uefa final. But Rangers did the business in the league and we didn't."
In addition to coaching youngsters at Sheringham Cricket Club, based near Cromer in Norfolk, and studying for his Uefa A licence under Roy Millar at the Irish FA, Sutton keeps a keen eye on Scottish football. Not only does he have a sprinkling of pals up here, such as Falkirk's Jackie McNamara, but his younger brother John plays for Motherwell, and the former Parkhead striker was close enough to the Inverness Caledonian Thistle job prior to the appointment of Terry Butcher back in January to be granted an interview.
Regardless of the inability of Georgios Samaras or Jan Vennegoor of Hesselink to prove a consistent partner to Scott McDonald this season (how do they compare to a Sutton and Henrik Larsson in their prime?), Sutton feels Celtic have a slight advantage.
He said: "I think Celtic do just have the edge. I would rather be in their shoes rather than Rangers'. I think if Celtic win their two games that will be enough. Rangers possibly have a more difficult final match and because they are trailing might have to think more about goal difference.
"A lot will come down to the away games and they're not a foregone conclusion. You need to make sure you get six points and see what happens. Get in front and then maybe try to score more goals."
Sutton, now 36, fractured a cheekbone just 17 minutes into Gordon Strachan's first match in charge, the 5-0 drubbing away to Artmedia Bratislava, and lasted just six months of his reign before being given a free transfer to Birmingham City. But he is an admirer of what O'Neill's successor has achieved in four years as manager.
"Gordon has done a good job," Sutton said. "It has been difficult for Celtic. I don't think, in the current climate, they seem to spend too much money. Much the same as Rangers, they need to gain their success by developing players from within and being clever in the transfer market. They have certainly done well in the league. I think it is unfortunate that Rangers are in such a poor financial position at the moment. I think both sets of fans would like to see both teams spending more money and having a better standard of football."
Blurred vision first diagnosed after a game against Manchester United in December 2006 caused Sutton to retire from the game the following July. But for that, Sutton reckons he would still be playing today.
He said: "I wanted to carry on playing, in fact I might still have been playing now. It was disappointing to have to finish so early but it would have been far, far worse if I'd had to finish in my mid-20s."
Now, like contemporaries Alan Shearer, Paul Lambert and Neil Lennon, Sutton is ready to make the step into management, even if his East Anglian home isn't exactly the "centre of the footballing world". He would have no qualms about moving to Scotland.
"I am playing a bit of cricket and helping out with the youth teams there and stuff," Sutton said. "It is good fun. I do enjoy my life but I do want to get back into football and think I have something to offer. I have been fortunate enough to be in some good dressing rooms and want to pass that on. I really enjoyed my time in Scotland and going back there to start my management career would be something I would look at seriously.
"I really liked living up there, as did my family. It is a place close to my heart. However, getting into management is very competitive now, a lot of people have all the qualifications and when a job becomes vacant there are always a lot of applicants involved."
That is something which was underlined when Sutton was passed over in favour of Terry Butcher for the Inverness job. But Sutton is not the type to take such things lying down.
Freitag, 15. Mai 2009 - 06:50 Uhr
Thomas "Tommy" Burns 16 Dec 1956 – 15 May 2008
gone but never to be forgotten
rest in peace tommy......you'll never walk alone
Montag, 20. April 2009 - 13:00 Uhr
Post Split Fixtures announced
1. Celtic 33 22 8 3 74Pts (+45 Goal Difference)
2. huns 33 22 7 4 73Pts (+42 Goal Difference)
3. Mini Huns 33 15 9 9 54Pts (+3 Goal Difference)
4. Dundee United 33 12 13 8 49Pts (+3 Goal Difference)
5. Aberdeen 33 13 9 11 48Pts (+3 Goal Difference)
6. Hibernian 33 10 12 11 42Pts (-3 Goal Difference)
Here are the key fixtures in the Title race (all times are Swiss time):
Saturday May 2nd
Aberdeen v Celtic (Live on Setanta) 13:30
Sunday May 3rd
huns v Mini Huns (Live on Setanta) 16:30
Saturday May 9th
huns v Celtic (Live on Setanta) 13:30
Tuesday May 12th
Celtic v Dundee Utd (Live on Setanta) 20:45
Wednesday May 13th
Hibs v huns (Live on Setanta) 20:45
Saturday May 16th
huns v Aberdeen (Live on Setanta) 13:30
Sunday May 17th
Hibs v Celtic (Live on Setanta) 14:00
Sunday May 24th
Celtic v Mini Huns 14:00
Dundee United v huns 14:00
TV Coverage of last day of the Season is to be confirmed nearer the Time.
The race for the Europa League Positions (3rd and 4th) could have a bearing on the Title race, too.
Matt
Donnerstag, 16. April 2009 - 22:00 Uhr
Naka v the huns
Jinty
Mittwoch, 15. April 2009 - 11:17 Uhr
Maloney - "I shouldn't have left Celtic"
Maloney on the mend in more ways than one after grim spell
Graham Spiers, The Times
The Celtic striker talks about his lingering regret over moving south of the border
Shaun Maloney has made quite a few significant journeys. The first was at the age of four, moving to Scotland from Malaysia, the place of Maloney’s birth where his father had worked as a helicopter pilot, to settle in the north-east. Then, at 15, came his journey to Glasgow to sign for Celtic, the club having filched the little striker from under the noses of Aberdeen, his local team.
Then, more fatefully, came Maloney’s return ticket between Glasgow and Birmingham, having spent a largely sorrowful 18 months at Aston Villa under Martin O’Neill. The intriguing and complex relationship between Maloney and O’Neill says much about both men, let alone about some of the pitfalls of professional football.
When I met Maloney recently for coffee to go over all this, he had also just made another significant journey: to Munich to see the mercurial Dr Hans Wilhelm Muller-Wohlfahrt, whose innovative techniques have finally brought closure to a longstanding hamstring problem. The striker is just days away from reappearing for Celtic and is full of gratitude towards Muller-Wohlfahrt, whose procedures have brought him growing fame around the world.
“My hamstring had become a problem — I’d torn it twice in nine weeks — so I went to see this guy,” Maloney said. “I’d heard about him, read more about him on the internet and was happy to seek his help. He explained a lot to me about how all the body’s muscles interact and he traced my hamstring problem to something in my back. Some people think his methods are unusual but they have worked for me, so I’m glad I went to see him.”
Maloney’s flight to Munich to see Muller-Wohlfahrt was just the latest in a series of fateful decisions he has made. This shy, introspective Celtic player is not one of football’s loudmouths, yet there is something single-minded about him that has brought good and bad fortune.
He now admits he probably made a mistake in leaving Celtic in January 2007, when a long-running dispute about a new contract resulted in him signing for Aston Villa in peculiarly rushed circumstances. The move took Maloney back under the wing of O’Neill, who had given him his Celtic debut, and with whom fresh tension would soon develop.
“It’s easy to say so now, but I probably shouldn’t have left Celtic in the first place — it was mostly my own fault,” Maloney says. “For about six months prior to leaving Celtic, I hadn’t dealt with my contract situation very well. It was eating away at me, it wasn’t getting sorted and I didn’t cope with it properly. We couldn’t agree terms and it all came to a head on the last day of January 2007, when Villa came in with their offer.
“I felt like I was backed into a corner and I had a choice to make: I see out the last five months of my Celtic contract or I go to Villa. In that situation, staying at Celtic didn’t lie easily with me. It seemed a massive gamble — I had five months left on my contract, but what would happen if I got injured? I believed that going to Villa was the only decision I could make.
“It was the last day of the transfer window. I got a call saying that Villa wanted me to do my medical, so I did that at Newcastle, where they had a game that night. I knew Villa had been interested but I still didn’t think it would happen like that. I saw Martin after that game and signed.”
Almost, but not quite, from the moment he made his move, Maloney says that his brain began to nag away at him. It must have been a highly uncomfortable experience, gradually becoming convinced that he had done the wrong thing.
“I’m not sure it sunk in properly — it all happened so quickly,” he says. “I drove down to Birmingham to start the next day with Villa. I’d never been to Birmingham before, and I’d never seen the Villa stadium. So it all felt new, a bit like being away on an international trip from Celtic for a few days. Then it started to hit home and I started to struggle and wonder about my decision. I never felt comfortable at Villa, and I didn’t play great, either. It was a bit like when I was with Martin O’Neill at Celtic. I was a sub, and I would come on and do OK, and that was my role. I didn’t enjoy it, but to be honest, I didn’t do enough to be a regular in Villa’s starting XI. It just wasn’t the place I wanted to be.
“Martin has obviously done brilliantly with them, so you can’t take that away from him. But it wasn’t where I was going to play my best football.”
The writing was on the wall for Maloney when he and O’Neill fell out after a 4-0 hammering by Manchester United at Old Trafford in February 2008. O’Neill made it known that in part he blamed Maloney for the defeat, even though Villa had been utterly quashed.
“We lost 4-0 that day but at 2-0 I had a one-on-one with their goalkeeper when my shot went by the post,” he says. “It was my last game for Villa. After that I lost all relationship with Martin for about three months. It was bad on my side and it was probably bad on his side, too. I’d known him for so long, so to not be able to speak to someone you’d known for that length of time just wasn’t right.
“You’ve interviewed Martin, haven’t you? He doesn’t give much away at the best of times. But that Old Trafford match signalled a change in fate for me. I wasn’t part of his plans any more and it took quite a while to sort out. We finally sat down and talked and in the end it was fine. I get on fine with Martin, I respect him, and a manager has to have his place. But I knew I had to leave Villa.”
Maloney had originally wanted to leave Birmingham to go back to Celtic in July 2007, but O’Neill talked him round, asking him to do a full season at Villa before deciding on his future. Things only got worse for the player, though, before his return to Celtic was finally secured in July 2008.
“I left Celtic because I thought it was the only option open to me, but I should have done it all differently,” he says. “I should have been a lot more hands-on with the actual contract terms, like I was when I came back. My new deal was all done within a couple of hours. It was just me, a Celtic director, and Peter \ who sorted it out. Quick and no problem. If I’d done it better the first time around, things might have been very different. I might never have left in the first place. But, hey, it happened.”
Now back with Gordon Strachan, Maloney believes that, once he gets back into the Celtic team, there is the potential for him to be as content on and off the field as he has been for three years. And Strachan and O’Neill, he confirms, are two quite different operators.
“I think Gordon is a very good manager,” he says. “He loves coaching, he loves being out on the training pitch. I think a lot of the players enjoy training. Strachan is a very good coach — we start early in the week talking about how he wants you to play on a Saturday. One of his big things is, when he puts a team out, every player knows what he is supposed to do. He is very organised.
“Gordon and Martin are very different. Martin was more a manager than a coach. Martin did most of his talking on match day, whereas Gordon talks a lot throughout the week. Gordon takes a lot of sessions — Martin didn’t do that — and he talks a lot about what he wants you to do. They are two very different people.”
Magic of Muller-Wohlfahrt
— Dr Muller-Wohlfahrt, the Munich-based surgeon who treated Shaun Maloney, has been prominent for a decade for his innovative procedures. He has treated a host of big names, such as Michael Owen, Paula Radcliffe, Wayne Rooney, Jürgen Klinsmann and Kelly Holmes, when many of them had doubted their injuries would ever clear.
— Arguably, Muller-Wohlfahrt’s greatest triumph was in restoring José María Olazábal, the golfer, to full health in 1997. The Spaniard had to give up after winning the Masters in 1994, suffering a form of rheumatoid arthritis.
— Six months after being able to play again, Olazábal was a member of Europe’s victorious 1997 Ryder Cup team, and broke down in tears at the winners’ press conference at Valderrama while trying to explain his gratitude to Muller-Wohlfahrt. Olazábal won the Masters again in 1999.