Not known for his football analysis, Ronan O'Gara took the unusual decision to devote a large chunk of his column with the Irish Examiner to the main story in the football world this week; the sacking of Gary Neville as manager of Valencia.
The Racket:
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O'Gara drew comparisons to his own experience out of his comfort zone at Racing Metro, and although the roles are/were vastly different, he raised some interesting points regarding why it may have gone wrong for the former Man United captain.
The focus of O'Gara's reasoning for why Neville's tenure at the Mestalla went awry is the 'culture' of a dressing room, something he feels he may have taken for granted at Munster.
Gary Neville got the boot this week from Valencia. He had problems with the language (the problem being he didn’t speak it), and results clearly weren’t good enough. Does that mean he jumped too soon into management, that he wasn’t up to such a job?
What he might have lacked was an understanding of the culture at the club, and that takes years, not months, to get a handle on. I like Neville’s analysis, and the posting in Valencia had an obvious appeal, for sure.
But saying no to some job offers is a skill in itself.
The rules change when you become the boss man. I am working as hard as a I can at Racing 92, but I am not the boss man, so ultimately I don’t have the final say and I can’t shape things as much as I’d like.
That can be frustrating at times. Hopefully that’ll come in time. Until you have that confidence in the scope of your knowledge and the project you are taking on, you have to say no to certain jobs.
How much damage has Neville done to his cv? People are deadly. They put you in a box and say, he’s a failure. Now he drops down a couple of rungs. But Neville couldn’t have got his stamp on the Mestalla dressing room.
He would have wanted to create a dressing room in his own likeness, but that’s a process that takes time. I am in Paris two years, but still getting to grips with the psychology of the dressing room.
So Ronan, how has Claudio Ranieri's lack of tactical demands played such a big role in Leicester's surge to the title?
In all seriousness, it's refreshing to see O'Gara bring other sports into his column, and it is always interesting to hear the thoughts of someone with a prominence in one sport discuss apply their knowledge to a different area.
You can read O'Gara's column in full over on IrishExaminer.com
