Perhaps Sullivan should keep quiet about the debts. He’s made his point and surely talk of a wage cuts would be better done in the close season.
Zola has said David Sullivan’s Radio 5 musings about a 25 per cent pay cut for the players was badly timed. Yesterday Sullivan’s comments were all over the likes of the Sun and Daily Mail warning us that the club face "Armageddon" if relegated.
Zola responded: "It would have been better to maybe talk to us before talking to a newspaper.” For Nice Guy Zola this is unprecedented and indicates relationships are already strained.
Zola won't like Sullivan ruminating in print about whether his manager is "too nice" or possibly the next Ossie Ardiles. It's a fair question to ask in private or after the manager's gone, but there's little point in doing it now.
The players aren’t going to be happy either hearing about possible pay cuts and Zola and Clarke must also be annoyed to hear all the comments about their salaries being too high in the press. It’s probably true, but not their fault if the Icelanders were spending money like Lottery winners. (And it’s a sobering thought that we’d only owe £80 million and not £110 million if we’d never signed Dyer.)
Meanwhile Sullivan seems to be backtracking. He’s told Radio 5
the pay-cut plea was merely a way of focusing attention on the need to cut costs. "If we can cut our salaries by 25%, that would solve our problems. But it's not something that you are actually going to go out and do."
1 comment:
DC recommends Paul Doyle’s blog at www. guardian.co.uk.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/football/blog/2010/feb/10/gianfranco-zola-west-ham-relegation-battle
DC Comments: “This is worth a read. No sentiment; just hard, inescapable facts, and what seems to me reasonable conjecture based upon them. Simply: neither the team nor the management team are doing what they should. Unpalatable, unromantic, brutish etc, but true. Despite today's latest pledges that Zola's job is safe I suspect in reality he's got a few games left until they fire him; and necessarily so. Better a payoff than relegation, they'll think, I suspect. Does anyone really, in their heart of hearts, truly believe that this season's on-field witlessness -- four wins -- is all the fault of the players/the injuries/the endless off-field stuff etc etc? Ossies Ardiles (the manager) Mark II? That might actually be accurate.”
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