0:55 "We prefer when its good news". This is the best news for Birmingham fans. 🎉

The only shocking thing about Rooney being sacked is that it's took so long!

As a Birmingham fan, im delighted he's been sacked, never wanted him in the first place and he was only sending us one place and thats to league one

Just because he "wants to play" a certain way doesn't mean he can manage the players or coach them to do it. The same players were 6th, they weren't playing badly and he took them in totally the wrong direction. Being a great player doesnt make you the best coach.

Didn't think the news was big enough to warrant an emergency podcast 😂

I think you're giving Rooney too much credit, just because you want to play a certain way doesnt mean you are skilled enough to train players to play that way or have the layer who are capable to play that way. He hasnt provided any evidence that he can coach a team of players

Micah knows he'll be working with him next week on sky 😂

The most shocking thing about it is that they gave him the job in the first place!

I suspect Rooneys relative success at Derby was more due to Liam Rosenior rather than Rooney. Wayne would probably be a better academy coach working on technique rather than tactics.

It was just the most absurd appointment in the first place, but to then let him go right as the window opens makes even less sense. Now someone else has to come in, analyse the players, and somehow upgrade the squad... all in a month. Bizarre practice.

Such a weird situation him being appointed in the first place, the original manager was doing fine and was sacked seemingly out of nowhere. Rooney I think needs to go down a step or two and sharpen his teeth a bit with less pressure

Was doomed from the start, our owners did him no favor's appointing him when they did. Was always destined to fail.

Rooney was appointment to lift the profile of the club, nothing to do with management skills. No one knew he'd be so bad that they'd drop like a stone.

How is Micah still defending Rooney, Gerrard, Lampard et al? They've proved repeatedly they're not good enough to manage. Ask the fans of the clubs they were at and nobody will tell you they were hard done by. Oh and Gary - Gerrard was not sacked after his first bit of poor form at Villa. His entire time there was awful apart from the first 5 or so games with the new manager bounce.

He’s perfect for Man Utd….

That would be a great experiment, if Pep went to coach a championship team for a season. Netflix where are you!

As a Birmingham fan, I am buzzing with Rooney being sacked, an awful manager but an amazing player, Rowett to come back would be amazing! Or even Eustace! KRO

I was happy to give him a chance, he was in a hard spot the way the new owners went about sacking Eustace. But 2 wins from 15, 30 goals conceded, 15 scored is not good enough. Someone else mentioned it and it is so true… he tried to run before he could walk with his tactics. Set his full backs up high, high line etc well there’s only a handful of players in our squad who can do that. A good manager will adapt to the players he’s got. He’s got a lot to learn still.

Love the Podcast! Do you guys think that Rooney, Gerrard, and Lampard would have benefitted from being in an assistant management role prior to managing as a head coach, like Arteta?

We told him at Elland Road this is old news.😂😂😂😂😂

Rooney decided to change everything with a squad that was playing reasonably well, small changes would've been better - one of the games we won with him (Cardiff) he resorted pretty much to a Eustace team and tactics and most people said it was the best performance. Remember a bad work man always blames his tools, Rooney is trying to frame this as everything else but his fault. This is totally down to Rooney, Cole, O'Shea and the other coaches he bought in - Also the board for bringing in such an unprepared manager.

Yes Lineker is making excuses! It’s his mate!🙄🙄

Rooney didnt do that well at Derby. They got closer to safety because a terrible Reading team that conceded 87 goals also had a points deduction.

Lineker was right to caveat how well Maresca is doing at Leicester with the quality of players that we have relative to the rest of the championship. Winks, Dewsbury-Hall, Mavididi, Fatawu, Hermansen etc. are a cut above most of the championship. I rate him very highly and he's doing a fantastic job but if you put him into Birmingham City and he tried playing the exact same style, they certainly wouldn't even be be in he play-off places. It will be interesting to see how he adapts to the premier league if we are promoted. Whether he will try and implement the same style whilst hopefully making some serious signings to upgrade the squad or if he'll adapt a but more of a pragmatic approach, or possibly both. I think if we were to go up with the exact squad we have now and tried playing the exact same way, we would struggle. Kompany and Burnley is probably the finest example of this. Although you could actually argue that in some respects Burnley's squad was actually stronger last season than it is now (Tella, Harwood-Bellis and Maatsen were all big players for them in the championship). As for Birmingham, I think they should go for Tony Mowbray. He'd implement a more expansive style than Eustace but he's got a proven track record at that level and generally leaves a club in a better place than he finds it. He's a safe pair of hands in the championship.

Three months was enough time for Emery to turn Villa around, for O'Neil to improve Bournemouth after Parker left, for Howe to reinvent Newcastle after Steve Bruce.

6th to 20th is a hell of a drop off lol

As a Sunderland fan I was shocked when Birmingham sacked eustace in the first place so honestly it was rarely ever going to work cause of the shock and probably sadness the players had when eustace got sacked too

How does Alan feel after his quite graphic online social media comments on jota, after the goal keeper admitted contact and agrees to the penalty. Chris Smull. Keep up a fab job boys.

Hard to have sympathy to a club that sacked a manager who had them 6th in the league. Shouldn't of been in the job bc it shouldn't of been available for him

Emergency episode for Rooney that’s the joke 😂

Not sure Micah is too familiar with the Championship these days 😂

I think for Birmingham fans. This IS good news.

Derby fan here… Yes he did well at Derby and almost achieved the impossible by keeping us up, but most Derby fans know it was mainly Rosenior behind the footballing side of things, and now he’s got Hull fighting for the top 6. We could see from afar it was never going to work at Birmingham. He didn’t really pull any trees when he was at DC either.

Gerrard, Lampard, Rooney just aren’t good managers. Lampard’s ‘success’, was taking Derby from 6th to 6th Chelsea from 3rd to 4th before the man who replaced him won the Champions League. Gerrard collapsed once Michael Beale left and is now struggling in Saudi Arabia and Rooney was only successful with Rosenior by his side who now has Hull flying . All are poor and wouldn’t have the same excuses made for them if they weren’t legends of the game

3:56 Thats the thing tho, Rooney did have 2 weeks before his first game, he had a international break of 2 weeks to start putting his ideas to the squad, and we only have 2 or 3 tops that go on international duty so the majority of our starting line up would of been training for those 2 weeks

😂 should of got Coleen in she knows how to win

The reality is, these guys like many other aren't cut for "The Managment" role, maybe for the top leagues, lower leagues they could probably do wonders. Maybe as a coach, behind the scenes they could excel.

Micah "The best managers know how to adapt at the right times." Well that would exclude Pep Guardiola

When Dean Saunders went into management at Wrexham, when they were in the Conference, he took some time getting to grips with players who were broken in some way, where players had failed to make the grade at higher levels. This was in addition to the usual management issues and pressures found at higher levels.

All his friends in the media avoided talking about his competence. 😅😂

There is a strange snobbery around top players who become managers ,how many unknown managers get sacked after a month but then become a solid Prem manager after a few clubs. Strange.

John Eustace will be having a good laugh 🤣

As a Villa fan I'm devastated.

Rooney is the Liz Truss of football.

The sacking of Rooney isn't as shocking as his appointment was.

I agree with the decision to sack Rooney, but some of the performances from the Birmingham defenders have been shocking, especially Sanderson.

It's mental - In the conference announcing Rooney it was asked if this would be another Zola. Cook gave a resounding no, yet that is what we saw. Thousands of Bluenoses saw it before it happened, and watched it happen unchecked. Tony Mowbray is the right appointment.

birmingham are the epitome of fixing what ain't broken. sacked rowett for zola who couldn't buy a win, and now sacked eustace for rooney to trade 6th place for 20th. they deserve exactly what they get for ignoring progress and chasing the big names

Wayne Rooney has been sacked by 3 clubs now I believe. The best he can hope for is being backroom staff as he doesn't have the capacity to be a top football coach. The sad thing is he probably isn't bright enough to realise it.

He came In and had 2 weeks to coach them as it was international break , we looked brilliant against Ipswich and could see a style of play , unfortunately that was the only time

I gather the brains of the situation at Derby was actually Leroy Rosenier ?

Why Birmingham made the appointment in the first place is beyond me, too many non football people running that club at the mo !!

It really is simple, you can’t put your own stamp on a club in 3 months. You should assess the players and set about tactics and formation that works for that group. Then, over time, have a plan to change the style by bringing in your own players and seeing who can adapt on the initial squad. Wayne tried too much too soon and he’s lost his job as a result. He was probably bought in to do it quickly so it shows the naivety of the owners too.

Give Pep Guardiola a £12 million budget and a bunch of decent championship players, and he would fail the same way as Rooney did. He’s never had to work under a tight budget in his whole career.

absolutely bonkers decision to appoint him in the first place. kind of signing you do at the start of the summer

Great pod as always. The irony is that had Blues sacked Eustace 2/3 weeks earlier than they did it probably wouldn't have registered to anything like the degree it did. There was plenty of disquiet from the fans with him and some of his tactics (no role for JJ, poor away form, the constant picking of Hogan etc). The problem stemmed from getting rid of him after those back-to-back home wins, a settled looking team, 6th in the table etc, etc. If they'd brought in an established, proven candidate and outlined a desire to push on and try to take the club forward, I think that would have been widely welcomed. Instead, they went for someone with no real record of achievement or anything to suggest he was ready for a job of this size and what to many looked like a stitch-up for a close Garry Cook associate.

As an Exeter City supporter i think Rooney should manage Argyle.

It should be noted that 50% of Wrexham’s famous owner duo is Canadian, not American. I know we seem to be the same people but that’s like telling the Scottish they’re English. Ryan Reynolds is not Tom Brady. Totally different approach to owning/supporting a local club.

What a cliche of great players not being great managers... Johan Cruyff and Zidane both did pretty well. In Cruyff's autobiography he explains why more great players in the past didn't go on to be great managers, it was more to do with coaching badges than anything to do with their ability to manage or the frustration they had with "inferior" players, or Shearer's only insight into football... passion. Also, can everyone get out of Pep's ass for once. We make out as if Pep designed modern football. He cut his teeth with Barcelona, whose football was based on Cruyff's style of play, who himself learnt it from his predecessors at Ajax from being a young boy. I am shocked at the amount of pundits and people in the game who never mention, or understand this. Who talk about "modern keepers". Cruyff used to make his goalies play on the wing in training so that they became better in possession, so his teams could play out from the back. We talk about Guardiola as if he is the first manager to get players to play in different positions. It is not true. I hear the same crappy overview of pressing. Pressing high up the pitch. Read an account of Cruyff talking about pressing and how to do it properly. It's not just about "pressing as a unit".

We know the job he did at Derby and under what circumstances. Those were off the pitch problems. His winning preventives were much the same at Derby and in the USA, middle 20's%. John Eustace had these players and got then into 6th place based on results and not style of play. A good starting position to build on for anyone. Sadly under Wayne Rooney it did not improve, just the opposite. These same players should be able to improve results playing more or less how they did earlier and no need to buy in January window just to keep us up and write this season off.

Giving Gerard and Lampard too much credit. Look how much Aston Villa and Everton have improved once getting in a proper manager, with pretty much the same squads. And Celtic pretty much threw it away when Gerard was up at Rangers.

Sad to see he's been sacked. But that is the nature of the game now.

Englands golden generation aren’t very good as managers are they

You guys talking about Gerrard at Rangers makes my heart hurt man, I’d have him back in a second

As I've said before GREAT footballers don't always make GREAT coaches. Get rid of that term MANAGER. They are NOT managers of the CLUB.

Still can't believe John Terry has not been a manager and no club has given him a chance. I'm shocked

From a business perspective, shame on these clubs that take on former players with little or no management experience. These 'big names' should learn their trade much further down in the football pyramid and then land management jobs with bigger clubs based on merit. You don't leave school as a top student and get headhunted by schools to be a teacher.

Being a great footballer doesn't always mean you'll be a great manager. Some of the best managers were average players. Fergie, Mourinho, Guardiola. Blues got what they paid for, Eustace was winning games, they were 6th in the table and they sacked him to bring in a name, it's no wonder they started to nose dive.

Liam Rosenior was assistant to Wayne Rooney at Derby, a lot of what both implemented at Derby, Rosenior does better.

I was desperately hoping that it worked for us but it became blatantly obvious after the Leeds match on Saturday. He walked down the tunnel after the final whistle not joining the players in appreciating applause for the 2.5k traveling support ..... DISGUSTING! Our squad is quite capable but Rooney is not ... look at his managerial stats !! Nuff said. KRO from Canada 💙

Regarding the comment about pep not having to deal with lesser quality players, pep is constantly changing the way he plays with the inverted fullbacks but now he’s realising everyone is adapting to that so I think he goes through different challenges which can be harder

He will get another chance somewhere, Hope there is a podcast after that liverpool game against the magpies

Its maybe not good news for Gary and Micah, it is for Birmingham

Big name ex-players have proven to rarely be the answer to your managerial needs. Sometimes they are. But mostly not.

Loads of hardworking managers that have worked hard to move up the ladder that have earned and deserve a chance at managing at high levels. To give it to ex players who haven't earned the position is a disgrace. No sympathy for Rooney or the club hierarchy just the fans that have been let down.

He should have followed the Rob Edwards way. Go in, don't make dramatic changes, respect what's working for those players at the time, and just make small tweaks. Edwards is gradually changing Lutons style, but he's not overloaded the players with confusing tactics.

Emergency pod button!....do me a favour🤣👍

Top players dont often make top managers but when they do they seem to work with top players. Cruyff, Ancelotti , Pep , Zidane , Beckenbauer. I cant think of any top players who went on to be successful when workinh with players of lesser ability or in lower leagues..

Maybe he is destined to be a number 2, would love to see him back at United working alongside the manager.

The worst part of it for me was the fact he stole the job out from someone else, someone who was actually doing a decent job too. I understand the cutthroat nature of football but it just sits badly with me and I think Birmingham and Rooney both got what they deserved for their shocking lack of loyalty and morals.

Agree with Gary, great footballers don’t always make good coaches!

Up to the management and staff to ensure the players fulfil a role. To make a team. Know their place. Their reason to be in the squad. Players are just tools. Managers are just fools and pundits haven't the balls to be either....

His only honours at DC United was that they actually asked him back

3 months from 6 table to 20 table fighting stay up

Great players rarely make great managers...

Reminds me of David moyes at united

Eustace open to going back apperently.

What worked at Wrexham is Ryan and Rob appointing a fella in Sean Harvey who said 'we don't need a big name, go and get Phil Parkinson'

since when was championship an urgent situation? Particularly with a manager most folk didnt rate anyway. Strange

i'll be convinced if Pep could turn Big Meek into a Lukaku-esque of a striker.

Micah Richards showing he knows fuck all about football as a whole again

These lads have great agents hence why they get these opportunities, but what they should have done is work down the system first, obviously ego would not allow them to do that but you can’t just get badges and go and manage a first team club

Why didn’t these former players first take a position as an assistant manager? To develop their skills before going on to manage their own clubs

Just a point. Are all teams not expected to work hard??

Rooney was shocking at Birmingham. He took them from top of the table to bottom. The best manager go in, look around at what they have and then get the best out of it. He can’t do that clearly. Great player though.

Surprising he was hired in the first place

This IS good news Gary :)

It wasn't just the results, it was the way the team was playing, there was no sign that things were improving and the performances were actually getting worse every week. He should have started in the lower leagues and worked his way up.

Not sure an emergency pod would be launched for any other Championship manager. Especially ones with Relegation, bottom of the division, and 6th to 20th the result of his last three roles.

Three months is long enough to change things. He took one of the biggest clubs in the Champ from 6th to 20th!!!