Football clubs are usually criticised for the manner of their sackings but it is a long time since anyone made such a mess of a managerial appointment than Sunderland and their owner, Ellis Short.
It was as if Roman Abramovich had written the script to take the heat off himself. At least the Chelsea boss, in hiring Rafa Benitez, merely offended the taste of supporters; he didn’t play games with their political morality, as Short seems to have done in choosing the formerly blatant posturer Paolo di Canio.
A person’s political views are his own affair. Unless he decides to make them public, as Di Canio did in repeatedly giving the straight-arm salute and declaring his admiration for aspects of Benito Mussolini.
The latter would have been no problem without the former, for the Lazio adherents he used to gratify are direct descendants of the thugs who roamed Italy in the 1930s — and the Premier League has enough problems without that.
If Short was not aware of this concern, he is no better than the rest of the silent custodians who have slipped into our game. The American could at least have turned up to explain his thinking at this morning’s media conference.
Instead, there was the customary disdain for the many supporters who share David Miliband’s dismay and Di Canio, having promised to discuss only footballing issues, was left to dance around the other like a headless chicken.
Mussolini, incidentally, was the first man to win Italy a World Cup. Or so many thought in 1934, when the tournament was held there and Il Duce exerted such an influence over referees that Jules Rimet of FIFA complained: “We’re not running the World Cup — he is.”
Maybe that is what Di Canio so admired.
