Quinn: Bradley deserves chance

In his latest column, Niall Quinn pays tribute to Swansea manager Bob Bradley and says the American is an interesting addition to the Premier League.

Swansea City won a crazy game of football on Saturday. Nine goals. Lots of drama. It was three points that Swansea needed like oxygen. A loss that Alan Pardew and Crystal Palace needed like a hole in the head.

Swansea hadn’t won a game since they beat Peterborough in the EFL Cup in August. They hadn’t taken three points since they beat Burnley on the first day of the season. It was a big day for them.

In between, they had bumped off the gentlemanly Francesco Guidolin in a way which seemed hurried and not very Swansea like. In their previous nine league games, they had played the likes of Chelsea, Manchester City, Arsenal, Manchester United and Southampton. And they had replaced Guidolin with the Premier League’s first American head coach, Bob Bradley.

The reaction went from condescension, quick jokes about soccerball and touchdowns to the repeated allegation that he only got the job because Swansea are owned by two Americans.

I laughed along till I began to feel sorry for Bradley. By Saturday, as the goals were raining in, I was hoping that Swansea would end up on the right side of the final score no matter how crazy that score might be.

His experience in football is interesting and gives me some idea of what Swansea’s owners saw in him.

After graduating from Princeton, he worked in many jobs in football, including managing the USA to a decent degree of success. Then in September 2011, he accepted the role as manager of Egypt. He took the job months after the January revolution. 

Instead of jetting in and out of Egypt to conduct training sessions and collect pay cheques, Bradley and his wife moved to the middle of Cairo and went out and became absorbed into the life and culture. 

Months after he took the job, the Port Said massacre took place. Some supporters of Al Ahly football club, their “ultras”, had been prominent in the battles of Tahrir Square the previous year. On February 1 2012, they went to play Al Masry in Port Said. They lost 3-1 and at the final whistle, for the fourth time that afternoon, the Al Masry fans invaded the pitch. This time though they were allowed to reach the Al Ahly fans. 

The floodlights went out and the only exit gate for the Al Ahly fans was locked. Seventy-four Al Ahly fans were killed and 500 more were injured.    

The authorities tried to call it a riot, but Bradley called it as he saw it. He said ”it had all the hallmarks of a set-up, of a massacre” and he marched …

continue reading in source www.skysports.com