March 11 - KK Resigns… Again

WE’RE approaching the business end of the season, a time when, as Billy Ocean once said, the going gets tough and the tough get going. Today in 2005 one of OTFD’s favourites found that, not for the first time in his career, the going was indeed too tough. It wasn’t in the Wembley toilets and it wasn’t with his side fighting for the title, but Kevin Keegan decided he’d had enough at Manchester City.

Keegan had taken over at City in May 2001, following his spell in charge of the national side, with the Citizens finding themselves freshly relegated from the Premier League under Joe Royle. Doing what he did best, Keegan inspired his side to a record-breaking promotion season in 2001/02, with experienced players such as Stuart Pearce, Ali Benarbia and Eyal Berkovic helping the side to 124 goals in all competitions.

Once City were back in the Premiership Keegan brought in the likes of Nicolas Anelka and the late Marc Vivian Foe as they were able to establish their place in the Premiership and even reach the UEFA Cup, albeit thanks to the UEFA Fair Play ranking-loophole. This would also be the last season at Maine Road, with Keegan winning a place in the heart of City fans forever more when his charges won the last-ever Manc derby at the old stadium would ever see. Keegan marked it’s passing by coming out with some of his normal rubbish: “Maine Road was a great football stadium but as time moved on it stayed where it is.”

It was the next season that things started to get a little sticky for King Kev. A 16th-place finish and a UEFA Cup departure at the hands of Groclin Dyskoblia, coincided with a few more gray hairs on the head of Keegan and a worsening dress sense (anyone remember those horrible turtle necks?). A whole host of terrible signings didn’t help either. Danish defender Mikkel Bishchoff made four appearances for his £700,000 fee, the £5 million spent on Jon Macken harvested only seven goals in 57 games and, in one of the worst transfers ever, the Argentinean striker Vicente Matias Vuoso cost the club £3.5 million but never once turned out for the club.

A poor start to the 2004/05 season got worse when Oldham got their giant-killing-on and knocked City out of the FA Cup leaving Keegan to decide that he would retire at the end of the 2005/06 season. But, in true KK style, he didn’t make it that long. A home loss to Bolton saw City slip to 12th in the table and Keegan’s usual firebrand motivational-talk deserted him as he would say: We’ve got a history of not building on good situations. We could have jumped into the European shake-up, again we couldn’t make that leap. That’s seven or eight times in a year we could have jumped into something good for this club and we’ve failed.” Keegan’s three-year and ten-month spell had ended and Manchester City had lost their longest-serving manager for 26 years.

We all thought that would be the end of Keegan as a manager, as he moved up to Scotland to run his ‘Soccer Circus’ football school in Glasgow. In October 2007 he said that he was unlikely to ever work again and had not watched a live match in three years. We all know what happened next though, and if you ask us, not watching any football and working in a circus instead is ideal preparation for the Newcastle job.

We fancy a laugh, so we’ll leave you with our top 5 Keegan quotes, and another daft KK video (great threads Kev). Join us again tomorrow for the tale of another manager who knows how to make us laugh.

• “Despite his white boots, he has real pace… ”
• “The tide is very much in our court now. ”
• “In some ways, cramp is worse than having a broken leg. ”
• “Argentina won’t be at Euro 2000 because they’re from South America. ”
• “As far as I’m concerned, Danny Tiatto doesn’t exist.”

(1 votes, average: 4 out of 5)

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