Here at BoyleSports, we recently sat down with Sky Sports pundit who spoke about Rooney’s job at Birmingham and sensitive footballers.
Rooney recently returned from his American “soccer” excursion tot take the Birmingham City role on the 11th of October. It hasn’t been the best of starts with one point from his first five games, seeing his team fall from 6th to 18th in the table
However, he recently earned his first victory as Birmingham manager on the 25th of November 2-1 against Sheffield Wednesday.
Don Goodman recently sat down with us to discuss all thing Birmingham City about Rooney’s job at Birmingham and sensitive footballers.
ROONEY NOT UNDER-PRESSURE
Only he knows what internal discussions are going on. I expect he’s confident in his own ability and that he’s going to be supported in January, so I don’t imagine he’ll feel under pressure to lose his job.
The pressure will be there because he expects better of his team. There are only two games where most observers would have expected Birmingham to win – Sheffield Wednesday, which they did, and against Rotherham. Not only did they not beat Rotherham, they didn’t play particularly well.
What compounds it is that it was on their own patch. That element of frustration came to the surface with what he’d seen. The comment he made afterwards (about players needing to ‘grow some balls’) might not be the worst thing he’s ever done.
PLAYERS PLAYING FOR THEIR FUTURES
Matt Taylor said he’d lost trust in some of his Rotherham players a few weeks ago, and two games later he was gone. I don’t envisage the same thing happening at Birmingham. It can be a positive or it can be a negative. If I was a Birmingham player, I’d be thinking, ‘I’m playing for my future now’.
This is an ambitious club with ambitious owners. Wayne Rooney clearly wants to do very, very well. Even if the owners sack Wayne Rooney and bring in another manager, the ambition for them is clear, so the only way for those players to stay there and be part of those long-term plans is to play well. Not enough of them are doing that at the moment. The outburst was more in frustration than whether or not he’d be worried about an adverse reaction.
SENSITIVE FOOTBALLERS?
Players are more fragile now, they’re more sensitive, (but) Rooney hasn’t dug any individual players out, which is important. The players have got two choices. The players can have the attitude, ‘I’ll show you, I want to stay in the team, I want to be part of the success story’, or they can be annoyed at him.
I can’t relate to players being annoyed at the manager and not producing. I played for some managers that I really, really did not get on with, but I had some of the greatest moments of my career on the pitch. It’s about self-motivation. Too often managers take the blame for everything, but as a player you have an individual responsibility to look at yourself in the mirror and say, ‘have I done everything I can to be the best version of myself?’ I’m not too sure how many of those Birmingham players, at this moment in time, can look at themselves and say that they have.
COULD ROONEY UPSETTING THE DRESSING ROOM?
I’d be surprised. I don’t think they could have had a harder run in his first five or six games. The last three, less so, because they’ve played Sheffield Wednesday, Blackburn and Rotherham. Two of those three they would have been expected to win, but they won one, drew one and lost one.
They’ve got Coventry away, which will be a very tough game, then they’re away to Cardiff and then at home to Leicester. So it doesn’t really get that much easier. After that, they’ve got Plymouth, a cup final, Stoke, a cup final, Bristol City, which will be massive and then it’s Leeds.
So they’ve got some tough looking fixtures coming their way. While the owners will be patient, and he is their man, obviously they can’t keep not winning games of football. It’s one win in eight now, but if it’s one win in 12 then we might be having a different conversation.
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