The time between Christmas and New Year can make soccer careers appear as transitory as the life of butterflies. Neil Warnock became the first manager to be fired in England’s Premier League this season when struggling Crystal Palace dismissed him on Saturday.
Fernando Torres, the Spanish striker, has finally been released from Chelsea, where his once prolific career had stalled and sputtered ever since he moved there in the transfer window of January 2011. He cost Chelsea a then-British record fee of 50 million pounds, or about $78 million, and he leaves for nothing.
Warnock, 66, is a veteran of the hire-and-fire game of team management. Torres, 30, is on a tortuous journey that ended back where he started, at his first love in soccer, Atlético Madrid.
– The Warnock situation has a simple arithmetic explanation. He was hired by Palace two days before this season began to fill the shoes of Tony Pulis, a coach who had turned around the south London team at this time a year ago.
The club was in peril of being dropped from the Premier League when Pulis, well known for his pragmatic ability to get the best out of limited playing resources, took on the task of saving the team. He made it solid on defense, quick on the break, and he gave players a belief in themselves.
Palace finished last season in the middle of the standings in the richest league in the world. The Eagles, as the team is known, had soared. And then, Pulis and the board fell out over the way forward — and Warnock was plucked from retirement to fill the void.
The bottom line is that Pulis has never been relegated with any team. Warnock has taken two clubs down, and sometimes battled back. Their roles had reversed. Last summer, Warnock sat in a TV studio, giving his comments on where other coaches were failing; now Pulis is broadcasting while he awaits the right job to re-enter the hire-and-fire game.
The time is ripe. January is the designated midseason window when clubs can transfer players in or out — and so a club that has no faith in the manager or head coach will dismiss him first rather than allow him to recruit players his successor may not approve. While the media (and the eager stock of unemployed coaches sitting in front of the microphones) speculate, Crystal Palace should already know whom it wants in place of Warnock.
Time is of the essence for Palace. Its team has won only three times all season long, and only once in the last dozen games. The numbers do not tell us everything about form, and if they did then Fernando Torres might already have found his game is up.
Torres has been in limbo for some considerable time. His continued…
