2014 Pinger Award

[anton pulisov]

Worst manager was Scolari?

Left the best Brazilian defenders at home (Miranda and Felipe Luis) and put his faith in David Luiz. That decision alone accounts for at least five of the goals against Germany.

[Borracho]

2014 Pinger Award

It simply has to be Capello. I've seen some stodgy Russia teams in my time but none as bad as that shower.

[garcia]

2014 Pinger Award

i think scolari was worse than capello. 7-1 at home in the semi, fucking hell. worse than trap against the germans.

i don't think marc wilmots did himself too many favours. slagging off opponents when his own idea of tactics was to stick fellaini and van buyten up front and boot it long. he made a bit of a mockery of all that stuff about the belgian players being drilled to play 4-3-3 from a young age.

[Borracho]

2014 Pinger Award

garcia wrote: i think scolari was worse than capello. 7-1 at home in the semi, fucking hell.

Sure, but at least it was a semi. Capello couldn't even win a single game in the weakest group of the lot.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

2014 Pinger Award

Big Phil had home refereeing though. A red card for neymar at 1 0 down against Croatia and you're looking at an elimination after two games. But big Phil gets the trap 2014 award for basically being trap.

Wilmots is an excellent shout for the pinger award. Ignorant, crazy, tactically disastrous. Just what the fuck was he doing?

[John Godot]

2014 Pinger Award

Wilmots barely qualifies as a manager. If the Belgian FA has any sense, they'll realise a half-decent manager could do much better with that Belgian side. Capello was awful as well but his team didn't seem any better than their manager. Zaccheroni didn't have a plan A for Japan, never mind a plan B.

But it has to be Scolari. He crippled his own team, couldn't manage their expectations or emotions and he was damn fortunate not to go out in the second round to Chile.

[garcia]

2014 Pinger Award

was he though? if that shot off the bar had gone in, brazil might have saved themselves a lot of pain.

not that the 7-1 is necessarily an unmitigated disaster for brazilian football if they react to it in the right way. it has the potential to be a transformative moment. but on balance, losing in the second round might have been preferable to the indelible disgrace of that 7-1.

[Nefertiti2]

2014 Pinger Award

Amazed that the second best paid manager in the competition is absent from the thread, given his team never looked like winning a game.

[The Bean Counter]

2014 Pinger Award

Ah, but Nef, once again while those technically gifted Europeans plumbed the depths of ineptitude, England's utterly untalented line up could only aspire to mere mediocrity. Still, if we're going to compare managers in the world cup to ex Ireland board, then Scolari is undoubtedly Staunton, Capello is trap and hodgson is Brian Kerr. Not that bad, not that good either, but most of all, not that memorable.

[The Awesome Berbaslug!!!]

2014 Pinger Award

Hodgson is just mediocre. I think you have misunderstood the criteria for the pinger award nef. Pinger. Imagine the media persona of kenny dalglish towards the end of his recent spell, the tactical nous of jean Alain boumsong, the positivity of Kevin the teenager, and the intelligence of a pigeon combined with the malevolent aggression of a fighting cock. Oh and the worst accent in the English speaking world.

Scolari won a World Cup, he has no place on this thread. Fabio capello beat Barcelona 4 0 in a cl final without two of the best defenders in world history. He has no place here. This award is for former players who have no real business in management, and who mAde a holy show of themselves.

[G-Man]

2014 Pinger Award

Hodgson was a fool for shifting Rooney out of his best position and playing the inexperienced Stirling there instead, against Italy, of all teams. That was an act of self-sabotage for which he deserves massive criticism.

For Scolari it would have been worse going out to Chile. It would have been seen as a humiliation of a side that he should have led to reaching their supposed potential (and destiny) by a side the Brazilians deem inferior.

With the 7-1, people will refer to Germany as a superior side that beat them so thoroughly that the ultimate response is resignation. It is bad, but losing to Chile in the second round would have created a massive amount of lingering anger.

By all appearances, it was the capitulation against Holland that got Scolari sacked.

[Borracho]

2014 Pinger Award

I'm afraid I still have to stick with Capello as the shittest of the shit. Not least because he was getting paid nearly three times as much money as Scolari.

Prandelli played it very tightly in an already tight group. The margins were razor-slim and he couldn't have known that Marchisio was going to be so stupid. I also think Italy would have seen out the final ten minutes if their concentration hadn't been broken by the sheer strangeness of the Suarez episode.

[Patrick Thistle]

2014 Pinger Award

The reason Roy isn't in with a shout on this one is because he had successfully made everyone expect not very much at all from England. And then delivered to expectations.

[anton pulisov]

2014 Pinger Award

Wilmots was indeed pretty bad. If his service-starved strikers didn't immediately deliver a deluge of goals, they would be dropped. Similar story for other players in the team, who were all one mistake away from being dropped and made a scapegoat for the fact that there was no system whatsoever. In November he also sacked the Belgian team bus driver, who had been in the job for five years. In June he sacked the team cook, who had been in the job for 14 years. It seems that everybody is one mistake away from being punished for unknown reasons. He seems to have the bizarre madness of Trap mixed in with the incompetence and inexperience of Pinger.

The Belgian media narrative is that Wilmots got them to their first QF since 1986, so deserves a lot of credit and respect. I would say that this Belgian team could have achieved the same, or better, if they had no manager at all.

[ursus arctos]

2014 Pinger Award

I wonder if there is a generational thing going on there.

I presume that Belgian media types are of a similar age to Wilmots or older, and have fond memories of him as a player. Whereas the current Belgian squad is full of guys with rather different backgrounds and life experiences. I would also expect there to be a linguistic divide, given that that is the case with virtually every other aspect of Belgian society.

But yeah, Wilmots was appalling. And as we noted during the group stage, there was a strong inverse correlation between salary and performance amongst the managers this time around.

Capello, Hodgson, Prandelli and Scolari were the top four in terms of wages. Herrera of Mexico was paid less than anyone else, followed by Appiah of Ghana.

[Borracho]

2014 Pinger Award

11 countries have already parted company with their managers: Japan, South Korea, Algeria, Nigeria, Ivory Coast, Honduras, Brazil, Greece, Switzerland, Netherlands and Italy.

Didn't know Ranieri had got the Greece job.