Quinn to Port Vale?

Imagine you’re a football manager and your name is, lets say, Quinny Jimm. Now, you’re contract your current club ends at the end of the season. This club is, lets imagine, 200 miles from your home, and a vacancy has come up with a team in a higher division which is just down the road from your house. You apply for this job but get turned down. Do you:

a) Put in down to experience and move on.
b) Vow to reap bloody revenge on the bastards who have rejected you.
c) Get the chairman who rejected you to ‘leak’ the information to the press that you applied for his job, thereby strengthening your negotiating position at your current club by creating the illusion that you are in demand.

Answers on a post card please.

Call me a cynic, but I take Jimmy Quinn’s strongly worded denial that he was ever interested in the Port Vale job with a pinch of salt.

There are a couple of reasons for this: Firstly, what interest would the Vale chairman have in releasing JQ’s name, but not any of the others that applied for the job, unless he was specifically asked to do so? Secondly, there is Jimmy’s assertion that someone representing him contacted Vale on his behalf but without his permission. Are we expected to believe that the man who has in the past expressed his hatred of the sub-human scum that call themselves football agents has one himself, let alone one who doesn’t do what he’s asked? The whole thing makes no sense.

I don’t blame Jimmy for going for a job nearer to home with a job in a higher division – he has to look after himself after all. But, as I said in a previous post, I hope our board don’t get pressured into giving him a longer contract just yet. We’re not playing brilliantly at the moment, and it would be nice to think that JQ will get us back to winning ways ASAP, and that we’ll still be in and around the play offs come Christmas. Then we can give him a new contract, hopefully get back into the football league, and everyone will live happily ever after.

Of course I might be being totally unfair on our Jimmy, and his not-me-honest-guv comments may have been totally sincere, but it seems a big coincidence that all this speculation about him joining other clubs has come about since he started hinting that he wanted a new contract.

Anyways, on the pitch hopefully we can beat Stafford tomorrow and progress to the second round of the FA Cup for the first time in what seems like decades. Although Aldershot/Crawley in the next round isn’t exactly the most glamorous of ties, it would be nice to get a little cup run going. Plus losing to Stafford, one of the worst football teams I’ve ever seen at this level, would be the kind of embarrassment that belongs among last seasons ‘performances’.