Keane on Leaving

By Jack Phillips

Inspired by Narain Karthikeyan’s out of the bluest of blues comebacks yesterday, and now that free time is no longer as rare as a full house at Portman Road, TFB is hopefully dusted off and spluttering back to life.

Rather fittingly today has seen the axe finally fall onto TFB’s favourite scapegoat, Roy Keane. The Longest Stand-Off In The East (as it will be known if I get my way) has been a tortuous one, and Ipswich Town lost. They stood, pistol cocked, waiting for his textbook walkaway. He stood, non-nonplussed, egging them on to do it. And they have.

From this side of the fence, he was on for a Manager of The Year award, well, fighting Our Saviour for it anyway. Mouthing off to the-owner-who-no-one-knows, mouthing off to the fans, even blaming Suffolk itself for hampering signings (we’re further away, Roy, and we signed the likes of Surman, Barnett and Ward), all the while signing nobodies and playing some dull, unsuccessful football.

He’s been willing them to do it for months, saying things along the lines of “if they want to sack me they should”, “if I feel I’m not fit for the job I’ll leave”, “I miss my dogs” after every match. He’ll be grinning for days, no doubt we won’t see him again until he’s calmed down a tad.

On the whole, the sacking is thoroughly irresponsible and has ramifications outside of the footballing world. The North East will shortly become over-run by average professional footballers that they can no longer get rid of. If I was Steve Bruce I would be asking Niall Quinn to look into renting a warehouse where they can store the players they want rid of until Keane gets another job. It’s a risk, his CV is hardly glowing, but then again Notts County will need another manager some point soon.

Club Racing England

By Joshua Rayman

Having gone to watch the Snetterton GT Trophy race just over a month ago, I left feeling that it once again highlighted the major problems with attending club car racing. With myriads of undefined series (and championships and races) taking place, it becomes very hard to understand what is actually happening. Reliant on the circuit commentary (which does an excellent job, although you’d be lucky to hear it most of the time) and a race program vaguely indicating who is what number, unless there’s a lot of action, it’s tricky to place the value of the event for the spectator.

It’s days like these when it becomes more clear why NASCAR is so prominent in America – lots of place changes and quite regular wrecks. Although that too is badgered by over-zealous yellow-flag periods (see also : Korean GP).

More problems come in simple logistics such as the weekend structure. With one solitary 15 minute race before the hour long lunch break, it seems unlikely that any traveling spectator would bother to come in time for the that particular.

The Formula Libre series was a mash-up of inappropriately paced cars which resulted in a procession – it may as well have been an open-pit test session. The Golf GTi series (which I partook in 3 years ago) has grown in strength and now attracts very good grids, however it too was fairly processional (as I discovered when I raced in it, the pace is usually down to the preparation of the car rather than the drivers merits).