Gary Megson’s (mis)interpretation of the Respect campaign
Tuesday November 18th, 2008
The Bolton boss appears to be taking it a little too far…
Fair play to Gary Megson for somehow managing to keep a lid on his anger on the two occasions that Rob Styles has worked his magic on us this season (this occurred to me after watching Neil Warnock’s latest undignified rant over the weekend).
But I fear Megson may be taking the FA’s much talked about Respect campaign a little too literally.
I wrote prior to the Liverpool game that I hoped he would be less complimentary about Liverpool during his team talk with the players than he was in the press, where he lavished praise on Rafa Benitez’s side.
Was Megson showing them too much respect? Judging by our first-half performance, he may well have been.
There’s also a more serious tactical point to be made here. Clearly Megson showed too much respect to Steven Gerrard too, who he man-marked with Fabrice Muamba. It didn’t work: Liverpool ran amok, Muamba was hauled off at half-time and Megson was again forced to admit that his original game plan had totally failed.
I noticed on the Liverpool website that they gave Xabi Alonso the man of the match, and as this match report from The Independent points out, the biggest flaw in Megson’s game plan was that in giving Gerrard so much respect, he showed an ignorance of the amount of influence both Alonso and Javier Mascherano have on making Liverpool tick.
The implication is that while the uneducated layman (that’s you and me) might think Liverpool’s success begins and end with Gerrard, a highly-paid Premier League manager should have the ability to see the bigger picture.
And that, in a nutshell, is why the only person who didn’t get any respect at the Reebok Stadium on Saturday was Megson himself.
BWFC People, Fabrice Muamba, Gary Megson
1 Comment to Gary Megson’s (mis)interpretation of the Respect campaign
[...] Following his recent love-ins with Liverpool and Middlesbrough’s youth team (metaphorically, not literally, I hasten to add), Gary Megson [...]
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November 28, 2008