Another day, and more inconsequential rumblings on the manager front. John Terry was a name thrown into the mix recently by a clickbait site trying to stir the soup.
The names are just going to keep on coming until we take a decision on Lennon and then hire a new manager. The board has created this uncertainty and only they can resolve it.
As we all scramble around looking for clues as to what might be happening – again, a perverse state of affairs which our board has dropped us into – the one place we should definitely not be looking to for answers are the bookies.
They don’t know anything, and nothing in the way the EM 2021 odds constantly fluctuate is a real indicator of what’s going on.
I find the bookies fascinating. I like to bet, and I watch odds with great interest.
A story which has been doing the rounds this week is about how a three-horse treble almost took £10 million off the UK bookmakers at the weekend after what some sort of inside information made its way into the public domain.
Three rank outsiders saw their odds dramatically drop.
If you were lucky enough to get in on the action before they did you’d have found yourself sitting on a line that was offering a payoff of many thousands of pounds for every quid you invested.
Those who cashed out after the second race would have been well chuffed with their return … if you held on for the third then you were out of luck, although the horse involved performed much better than expected a week before.
So the treble itself didn’t pay out … but there’s no doubt at all that those odds started to collapse because serious professional players had come into some good information and were putting heavy paper behind it.
Likewise, on the night before Brendan Rodgers went to Leicester his odds collapsed completely; before I went to bed he was at 1-11, a price so out of the ordinary I knew that either the bookies had got the tip-off themselves or that there had to be some “in the know” folks staking big bucks on it.
I knew at that point that it was a done deal and the headlines which greeted me when I got up in the morning came as no surprise whatsoever.
But I see nothing in the bookies odds that would suggest there’s anyone out there who knows who the next manager is going to be. Favourites come and go.
The latest – to the horror of some – is John Kennedy.
I can confidently predict that there’s no chance of that, or the board would have appointed him already. The outcry would be too fierce and I don’t think that even this board considers him to be remotely ready for the gig. It simply will not happen. He will leave when Lennon does; anything else would be a huge surprise.
Every time a manager loses his job he will go right into the running; this is so predictable.
It doesn’t mean that there’s any truth to any of it.
You have to hope that there’s something going on behind the scenes.
You have to hope that this club is not idle.
But you just don’t know, and neither do William Hills or any of the others out there.