The buck stops with Barwick It is the man who employed Steve McClaren, rather than the manager himself, who is to blame for England's demise. Matt Scott October 18, 2007 1:10 PM Guardian Imagine for a while being offered the top job, the very top job in your trade. Perhaps you might believe you are not going to be up to it. But you would probably accept the offer all the same, just in case your hunch is wrong. And, anyway, the rewards would be pretty spectacular even if you fail. Now imagine you are a football manager and the England job comes up. You would probably take it, just like Steve McClaren did. So what if you picked someone to play in goal who, every time he sees it, pushes the ball into the path of an oncoming forward. No matter. You might even pick a guy to play at left-back who is so green he needs to stand on the shoulders of his centre-half, inviting attackers to overrun that flank. That, in the grand scheme, would not be your fault. No: you were out of your depth but you gave it your best shot. Because although the difference between you and McClaren is that his CV says he has managed football clubs, he was never much better qualified to be England manager than you. Look at that CV: a 15th-place finish for Middlesbrough in the Premier League and a fluked Uefa Cup run. (And if you think it was not fluked, listen to Gareth Southgate's comments about McClaren. And if you think the ambitious Southgate might have been compromised, fair enough, but look at what Massimo Maccarone then had to say about his former manager.) These are the performances that led to the Football Association's chief executive, Brian Barwick, unbelievably referring to McClaren as his "first-choice candidate" for the position. That in a field containing, inter alia, Luis Felipe Scolari (England's nemesis at the 2002 and 2006 World Cups and Euro 2004 tournament) and Guus Hiddink (the man who devised England's demise last night). It should not be forgotten just how badly Barwick handled the selection process, which was always going to be the oil slick that would ultimately lead to last night's car crash. Hiddink, a European Cup-winning coach with PSV Eindhoven and a World Cup semi-finalist with South Korea, was asked to discuss his coaching qualities just to see if he might be worth adding to the shortlist. Indignant at the arrogance of the English FA, Hiddink quite rightly told Barwick to stuff his job. How Barwick managed the attempt to secure Scolari, a World Cup winner in 2002 and Euro 2004 finalist, was a quite different level of incompetence. Marching through Heathrow airport on his way to Lisbon one afternoon with Simon Johnson, the director of corporate affairs, in tow, Barwick was inevitably snapped by the paparazzi. It led to a media storm that was so excruciatingly embarrassing for Scolari that he, too, pulled out of Barwick's process. Barwick has three tasks as chief executive of the FA: the first is to generate big broadcast income. Here he scores high - the ITV-Setanta deal is worth £425m over four years. The next is to keep Wembley ticking over. Here he singularly failed: the 12-month delay to the stadium's opening came on his watch. It cost his organisation the opportunity to refinance its loans at a favourable rate and it is now groaning under the weight of a 13-year repayment schedule. The third is to make sure England remains the most marketable European team in international football. On Barwick's watch, England look pretty certain to fail to reach the finals of a major tournament for the first time in 14 years, a failure made all the more miserable by the fact that they look unable to emerge from a group containing Estonia, Macedonia, Israel and Andorra. Just do not blame McClaren. http://blogs.guardian.co.uk/sport/2007/10/18/the_buck_stops_with_barwick.html
No - skill at kicking a ball around a grassy field is pretty insignificant in the larger scheme of things.