Crossing over?

Celtic's O'Neill could be the man for the job at Stamford Bridge

By Brian Glanville, World Soccer magazine

MARTIN O'Neill to Chelsea from Celtic? It would seem so, failing Sven-Goran Eriksson, a good choice both for the club and the manager.

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For all their local success, Celtic after all are no more than a huge fish in a small pond. Reality lies across the border, and to take over at Stamford Bridge would be an ideal challenge for the accomplished O'Neill.

While Ken Bates, now reduced to sniping from the sidelines, decries the vast amounts Roman Abramovich -- exploited by agents, Bates believes -- has been induced to spend on players, whether foreign or English, Claudio Ranieri's position seems shakier than ever. Only the elimination of Arsenal in the European Cup could, one imagines, give him any chance of surviving.

But if his tactics, like some of his pronouncements, have often been baffling, if he has become famed for his chopping and changing, surely he has been cursed rather than blessed with such an embarrassment of riches, players bought, one assumed, at the behest of his billionaire agent-advised chairman rather than on his own.

Bates believes he could have had the two young London midfielders, Joe Cole and Scott Parker, much cheaper. Perhaps. Either or both these players could be a substantial help in England's quest in the coming European Championship finals, but neither can command a regular place at Chelsea.

I still think Parker was daft to move to Chelsea where, as I remarked to his former manager Alan Curbishley the week the transfer took place, even the man who runs the car park at Stamford Bridge is a midfielder. Alan's answer was that Parker would obviously have been convinced that he could win a first team regular place at The Bridge.

Someone should have disabused him.

IS Gordon Taylor, grand panjandrum of the PFA, overpaid at more than £500,000 a year? Did the PFA overpay when they lashed out the best part of £2 million for L.S. Lowry's nostalgic Bolton painting, Going To The Match? And what should we make of Gordon's public pronouncements on the antics of the Leicester City men of La Manga?

Let me first declare an interest. I've known Gordon for a long time and like him very much. As for his salary, it does seem immense by comparison with that of other trade union leaders, but as he himself points out, substantially less than that earned, or at least pocketed, by so many of his members.

The Lowry painting, he has insisted, may have been expensive, but was well worth it given its subject, quality and sentimental importance to the PFA. Though thereby still lies a mystery.

I myself was asked when Christie's auctioned the painting to write an appreciation of it for the sales catalogue, which I duly did. But neither I nor anyone else was able to find out who sold it and how they ever came by it. It was, some of you my recall, actually entered by Lowry in 1953 for a competition, which he duly and deservedly won, organized by the Football Association to commemorate their 90th anniversary.

After that, it hung for a time in the FA's Lancaster Gate headquarters. Thence it bizarrely migrated to the Hitchin Town Football Museum run by the club's Vic Wayling, where it languished in virtual obscurity, till Wayling died and his son eventually discontinued the museum.

And then? Total mystery. No one will talk. Not Christie's, not the Royal Academy where the painting was once exhibited, not the FA -- whence many an artwork strangely disappeared and one painting was once discovered with a broom handle stuck through it. Oh, and certainly not the anonymous vendor.

Of late, Gordon has accused the besieged Leicester manager Micky Adams of a "lack of professionalism" in the La Manga affair, to Adams' great resentment, having initially and ludicrously blamed the ever-guilty media, the eternal fall guys.

My own feeling is that Adams was absurdly trusting to allow his players, even though several of the accused were veterans, to frolic deep into the small hours. What, you may ask, has happened to curfews? Not merely in La Manga but also in cases such as Carlton Cole and Titus Bramble, involved in the repugnant "roasting" episode in the Grosvenor House Hotel.

Then there was Gordon's involvement in the Rio Ferdinand affair -- whose eight-month suspension has just been very properly confirmed -- and the deplorable threats of his fellow England players to strike.

He should have knocked that idiocy on the head right away but he didn't, his sympathies instead going to the errant players. You win some, you lose some, I suppose. But on £500,000 plus a year. Gordon surely looks to be winning.

MORE and more dirt keeps hitting the fan over football's agents and the vast sums clubs are paying them, sometimes for nothing obvious to the naked eye.

Now we have the revelation that Mike Morris, the Monaco-based agent already impugned in the Steve Howard affair, was paid £750,000 by Blackburn Rovers for his alleged part in the free transfer of Craig Hignett to Leicester City. A move in which he seemingly played no part at all. Blackburn have not explained it. Morris predictably won't talk.

It's an episode that desperately demands FA investigation, though having so surprisingly got rid of their enforcement, investigating, office, Mr. Bean, they seem depressingly slow to act.

You also wonder whether in such circumstances company law comes into the equation. As we know, Morris received £122,700 from the Italo-Swiss agent who himself did nothing at all to enable (as Manchester United maintained) Tim Howard to get a work permit, receiving some £239,000 for his phantom activities.

I've already expressed surprise that such a transaction, obviously doomed and destined to be seriously queried if and when it came to light, could ever be sanctioned under the aegis of as experienced and highly professional a chief executive as Peter Kenyon, now in charge at Chelsea.

The feeling in Fleet Street seems to be that the shots at Old Trafford at the time were being called in other quarters. I wonder where?

THRASHING West Ham United 4-1 in last Sunday's local derby, and reaching the FA Cup semifinals for the first time since 1937, Millwall have finally expiated the appalling dereliction of duty, the betrayal of their impassioned fans, when in the first league game of last season they lost 6-0 to Rotherham United at the Den, hardly raising a gallop.

Alas, I was there to see it -- hardly credible from a team whose reputation over the years had been one of the most fervent commitment, in the image of such players as Harry Cripps. Say what you like about the periodic excesses of Millwall fans, they didn't deserve this kick in the face; an evident, unjustifiable protection against the failure of the club to pay bonuses after the ignominious collapse of the Football League's ITV digital deal. It was ITV, and not the clubs, that were to blame, even if you might have thought the league could have been skeptical of so exaggerated an offer.

No wonder attendance plummeted; with the additional problem that the club was running so scared after the appalling riot that followed that Birmingham City game that they brought in Draconian regulations which seriously deterred supporters from coming, or from bringing their friends.

Brian Glanville is Britain's most celebrated football writer. He also writes a monthly column in World Soccer magazine. The opinions expressed here are solely those of the writer.

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