Sporting Madness

[Photo from BSketti ] The Guardian is reporting that Roy Keane may return to English football as the manager of Championship side Ipswich Town. This is a terrific move in my view. As I wrote back when he left Sunderland, Keane has shown his managerial chops before, especially in the Championship; he took a mediocre side up to the Premiership and then held them there. I speculated back then that backroom intrigue involving owner Ellis Short may have been involved in his exit from Sunderland, and it appears that that may have been the case . Keane was far from perfect as a Premier League manager, especially in the transfer market, but he was learning and there's a good chance he'll be able to do well there in the future. This looks like a good situation for Keane as well. Jim Magilton was just fired , but the team isn't actually in bad shape. They're ninth out of 24 Championship squads at the moment and have some decent talent, including 22-year-old Argentine winge...

According to a Reuters story today, Jose Mourinho has ruled himself out of contention for the England national soccer team manager's job. As I laid out in an earlier post on my Journal blog, Mourinho was far and away the best candidate for the job: he had enjoyed fantastic success with both minnows (FC Porto) and giants (Chelsea), and had also proven himself capable of both managing superstar egos and getting the most out of limited talent. He is also perhaps the only person adequately prepared to survive the storm of scrutiny that goes with the England job, which is unparalled in professional sports. In fact, Richard Starnes muses that it may have been the prospect of this scrutiny itself that led Mourinho to decline. If the self-anointed "Special One" who played the media like a fiddle during his time at Chelsea can't handle the prospect of even more invasive media coverage, who possibly can? Of the remaining candidates , Martin O'Neill and Jurgen Klinsmann s...