[ad_pod ]After a distinguished 19 year playing career and several stints as an assistant coach, Dean Saunders took to management like a dead duck to water. He bombed at Doncaster and Chesterfield. Say his name in Wolverhampton and they will shudder long into the night after the Welshman managed to relegate a side that had been tipped for promotion in 2013.With Wolves facing the drop and on a losing streak Saunders said this: “And another thing that has pleased me is in Ladbrokes, we’re not one of the three favourites to get relegated and they don’t normally get it wrong.”In the same press conference, he also said this: “I have got self-belief. If you said to me ‘Do you want to open the batting for England. They are playing down the road’, I’d say ‘Go on then, give me a bat’. Then I’d get to the bottom step and see the fast bowler marking his run-up and realise I can’t do that. But my first reaction is ‘I will give it a go’.â€Inspiring stuff I’m sure you’ll agree.With his coaching credentials shredded Saunders then turned to punditry and would pop up from time to time on our tellies scatter-gunning his patented brand of pure gibberish. He got his big break in the autumn of 2016 when an anecdote he told on talkSPORT went viral. In a nutshell – because it is a long, meandering tale – it concerns Brian Clough’s attempts to sign him for Nottingham Forest in 1991. Saunders turned up for a meeting to find a heavily inebriated Clough staring close-up to a wall. At various subsequent points in the story, the great man crawls on his hands and knees along the carpet, rips up a bunch of flowers from a pot, and follows the striker back home to cuddle up to his mother-in-law on the family sofa.Charitably we can say that the details had been embellished over time on the after-dinner circuit. Or we could claim the tale is a compendium of untruths. Either way, a disgusted Daniel Taylor debunked the account in the Guardian soon after and it should be noted that Brian Clough at the time of the alleged farce was a seriously ill man ravaged by alcoholism.The hits and attention his imaginative retelling gained, however, saw him promoted into the TalkSport ranks and ever since the Joey Essex of football has become synonymous with uttering tripe.
This past month alone he has claimed that sacked Birmingham boss Garry Monk could be in the running for the West Brom hot-seat and this despite the fact that the seat in question was filled by Slaven Bilic only days earlier. Then there was his recent assertion that Aston Villa are a bigger club than Chelsea and don’t even get me started on his exasperation at neutrals not being completely smitten by Liverpool. Jealousy at the Reds’ history was his only possible reasoning.
A particular favourite of mine occurred in early 2017 with Arsenal set to take on a formidable Bayern Munich side. Espousing a somewhat idealistic blend of caution and gung-ho ambition Saunders advised Arsene Wenger to set his team up with three at the back and two wing-backs who ‘don’t go over the halfway line’. Ahead of them two midfielders sit thus allowing four attackers to roam free. Maybe this explains his failure in management: a refusal by the FA to allow Saunders to pick twelve players.
It would be extremely naïve not to acknowledge that talkSPORT purposely seek out pundits who divide opinion and certainly provoke strong reactions. The bland and the sensible need not apply. But surely there is a base level to this requirement: a need for logic to be the foundation to any argument put forward.
In short, we deserve better – infinitely better – than to be subjected to the professional idiot Dean Saunders on our airwaves. Football is dumbing down season on season, but we’re nowhere close to his pit of despair yet.
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