Snippets: Terry Venables on The Chairman-Manager Relationship...Raving About Waddock...No Pickens Signing...Ex-QPR Birthday

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Yanks Abroad/Darren Chantler - NO SCOTTISH DEAL FOR PICKENS
- Former Chicago Fire goalkeeper Matt Pickens will not be offered a deal by Scottish Premier League club Falkirk after completing a two-day trial.
The Missouri State alum had an eye on stepping into the shoes of outgoing incumbent Scott Flinders.
"Matt was with us for a couple of days", Falkirk Director of Operations Keith Hogg confirmed to YA. "We had received good reports about him and decided to invite him up to have a look for ourselves."
"Our head coach has the final decision on all new signings and, although Matt put in a solid display, it has been decided not to offer him a contract."
Pickens, who has not played in a league match since 2007, last was a member of English Championship club Queens Park Rangers. The Herald


Terry Venables The Sun - Sacking a manager is easy. The hard bit is sticking with him
WE’RE at that time of the season when quite a few managers get the sack.
Chairmen have to be strong and make the right decision.
Fans often like a change but the right decision is normally to stick with the manager.
Sacking someone is a too-easy solution. When it’s easy, it’s often the wrong one.
Sometimes, a manager doesn’t always lose the players — the players can lose the manager as we saw with Roy Keane.
Looking at the Premier League right now, Blackburn’s Paul Ince seems to have a bit of a problem along with Mark Hughes at Manchester City.
Ince did well at Macclesfield and MK Dons and is still adjusting while Hughes impressed with Wales and Blackburn. I think he could turn City into a Champions League club but he needs time. And he needs to be in complete control.
It’s not tough to sack someone, it’s tough to make the right decision. Getting it right is the hard part. That’s where you need to be single-minded.
The chairmen at these clubs have to be big and, if that means resisting pressure from fans, then so be it.
In the past, I’ve known chairmen go round the back to the players to try to justify their actions.
There are always some players who will oblige and say ‘It’s not my fault’ to get a new manager and a clean slate.
When the chairman does that, once he gets inside the dressing room, it’s all over.
Above everything else, the key to how long a manager survives in a job comes down to the relationship he has with his chairman.
After a few months in charge of Barcelona, I needed to come home for a couple of days.
But when I returned to Spain, the club president Josep Nunez told me he’d bought me ‘a present’.
The gift didn’t exactly come in wrapping paper.
It was a Paraguayan centre-forward from Real Zaragoza by the name of Raul Amarilla.
This was nothing to do with me and, I’ll be honest with you, I wasn’t happy. Nunez said we needed a tall centre-forward and while I knew of the player, he wasn’t my choice.
A chairman and a manager have to respect each other’s jobs.
They have to talk to each other regularly, share thoughts, anxieties and dreams and build a solid relationship.
And if a chairman knows little about football, then he has to trust in his manager — and not listen to all the hangers-on desperate to stick an oar in.
In the end, I enjoyed an absolutely wonderful relationship with Nunez. He was a top man — among my best three bosses.
The bloke was an absolute pleasure to work with.
Jim Gregory at QPR — who paid Crystal Palace £100,000 to take me to Loftus Road — was equally as easy to work alongside.
Steve Gibson at Middlesbrough is another chairman who I cannot speak highly enough of — a man who loves football but who also knows a hell of a lot about it.
Gareth Southgate is incredibly fortunate to work for someone like that — someone who has stood by him during the leaner spells.
In fact, they are fortunate to have each other.
The worrying thing for me is that not enough managers these days enjoy a close, healthy relationship with their chairmen like that. If you don’t have a close bond then you’ll always struggle.
It’s always a lot easier when you are dealing with just the one man, like Gibson.
It becomes tricky when you are dealing with a board of, say, nine or 10 people with no one in charge.
At no stage in management have I ever had anyone tell me how to pick the team.
People have tried to persuade me and sometimes I have thought ‘You have a point’.
There are occasions you don’t see the wood for the trees and you need a different voice.
People think stubborn is strong and it’s not. Equally, though, you have to be in charge of the team.
The one club where I struggled with the board was Leeds.
That wasn’t only their fault but mine as well.
It was a reminder how important it is to gel with the people you work with each and every day.
Only then can managers like Hughes and Ince pull through the tough times and build towards the success their abilities richly deserve.
TERRY VENABLES was talking to CHARLIE WYETT The Sun


The Sun - Gary Waddock - Oi, just look at my Wad
ALDERSHOT are doing far more than simply making a good fist of life back in the Football League ranks this season.
Gary Waddock’s men are proving the role model for just about every club which has run into financial problems and gone bust over the years.
The Shots ceased to exist as a league outfit back in 1992 and were only saved when die-hard fan Terry Owen formed a new club inside a week.
They were forced to start life some five divisions below the professional ranks and must have thought at the time they would never get back to that level again.
Fifteen years later, and just one division below League Two, chairman John McGinty took a punt on appointing Gary as boss, having been impressed by his short stint in charge of QPR.
Full marks to John for that, because Waddock could quite easily have been lost to the managerial ranks — but what a decision it proved to be.
He led them to promotion in his first season, winning the league with a staggering 101 points and bringing their spell in the wilderness to an impressive end.
The Shots are moving forward on all fronts and, personally, I can’t see any way they will be going back there again.
Last week they gained the best result of their flying start when they ended Wycombe’s unbeaten opening in the league.
But really that should have come as no surprise as Aldershot have the best home record in that division and are snapping at the heels of the play-off places.
People have said for a long time that there’s not much difference between the Blue Square Premier and League Two but, in reality, it’s still very hard to bulldoze your way through in your first season back.
Yet Aldershot are certainly managing it right now and they’re doing it all on the back of playing decent football as well — more credit to Gary for that one.
He has turned the EBB Stadium, or Recreation Ground as I remember it, into a fortress and plenty more will go the way of Wycombe before the season is out.
One man who’s really catching the eye is winger Kirk Hudson, a free transfer from Bournemouth two years ago, but now attracting the interest of bigger clubs.
Little wonder Gary is so bullish about how things are going right now. And there is no sign of the journey ending either.
With him at the helm, a forward-thinking chairman like McGinty in charge, and the team playing such good stuff, who knows what’s possible.
It may have been a nightmare for Shots fans all those years ago but they are living the dream in fine style at the moment. The Sun


Glenn Roeder Turns 55
- Signed at the end of the Frank Sibley "era" from Orient; had his time at QPR under Tommy Docherty and Terry Venables playing at Center back or even midfield; captained QPR to the Cup Final. Was banned in the replay...And that's basically when Terry Fenwick "stole" his place as he was injured for the start of the new season...Subsequently sold to Newcastle.
See Glenn Roeder/Wikipedia