Читать книгу You Cannot Be Serious!: The 101 Most Frustrating Things in Sport - Matthew Norman - Страница 33

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David O’Leary

No entry in this book has caused me as much grief as that for this oiliest of rags on the managerial bonfire. Acknowledging that Mr O’Leary evokes fierce distaste is the easy bit. Pinning down precisely why has proved the problem.

A portion of it, having said that, is easily explained. The former Ireland and Arsenal central defender memorably disgraced himself as manager of Leeds United. I refer here not to the grandiose £100 million transfer-market splurge that contributed to the club’s flirtation with bankruptcy a few short years after it had come within a game of the Champions League final. As detached analysts of Leeds United will agree, that was greatly to the credit of O’Leary and his anagrammatic chairman Peter Ridsdale (dire Leeds prat), the sadness being that they so narrowly failed to pull it off.

The incident that best illuminates Mr O’Leary’s odiousness was the publication of his book Leeds United: A Season on Trial within days of an assault case involving two of his players, Jonathan Woodgate (convicted) and Lee Bowyer (acquitted), being concluded. When he denied intending to profit from the beating up of an Asian man by insisting that the book’s title was a hapless coincidence, he mixed the defining twin traits of arch hypocrisy and rampant self-righteousness into a lethal cocktail. Blithely continuing to select Mr Woodgate added a needlessly bitter twist.

More than anything, however, I suspect that the violent reaction to O’Leary is visceral. The sight of that overly smooth face and those shifty cow eyes, and the sound of that creepy, unctuous voice rouse subliminal memories of Jungle Book python Kaa, or possibly early-era Celebrity Squares Bob Monkhouse, and the guts respond by piping acid up towards the oesophagus.

You don’t see or hear much of him any more. Either he weaned himself off the addiction to linking his name with managerial vacancies he had less chance of being invited to fill than the late Professor Stanley Unwin, or football hacks finally tired of giving credence to these fantasies. But it pays tribute to the enduring influence of David O’Leary, from whom insincerity oozes like toxic treacle, that the thought of him retains the power to send you scurrying for the anti-emetics to this day.