Why does Steve Kean get so much grief when rock bottom Owen Coyle gets away with murder?

By Ian Winwood

Published 13:57 16/12/11

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Throw a stone anywhere in the areas of Greater Manchester and Lancashire and chances are you’ll break a window at a professional football club.

The North West is the undisputed home of the domestic game, with 12 teams spread over the four professional leagues. Although London has something like the same number of clubs, the capital city has a far greater number of people from whom to draw an audience.

As far as the top division goes, so far this term clubs from the North West are bothering both ends of the Premier League.

At the time of writing, one quarter of that league is made up by teams who play their football in either Greater Manchester or Lancashire.

By the time the 2011-2012 season reaches its climax, though, that figure may well have dropped to just two.

As far as the bottom two clubs goes, the fans of Bolton Wanderers (20th) and Blackburn Rovers (19th) seem to be dealing with their predicaments in wildly differing manners.

Bolton – played 15: won three, nine points – seem to be sitting at the bottom of the Premier League without their fans really being all that fussed about it.

The radio phone-ins are not inundated with calls from angry supporters demanding that manager Owen Coyle be fired and that their feckless playing staff be slaughtered in time for Christmas.

Despite being the most useless team in the Premier League, and despite Owen Coyle being statistically the most inept manager in that league, the Trotters and their Teflon gaffer seem to be have been given a free pass from the usual gnashing, foaming and fist-waving that accompanies a bad season.

Not so for Blackburn Rovers.

For pretty much the entire season, the soap opera at Ewood Park has been more entertaining than many of the games played there.

What hasn’t there been? Players schilling meat products, fans baying for manager Steve Kean’s blood, planes flying overhead demanding the sacking of Kean, banners calling for the sacking of Kean, t-shirts imploring the owners to sack Kean, Kean carrying on like King Canute through all of this, like nothing bad at all is happening.

Despite my personal dislike of Blackburn Rovers – the fact that the club has Margaret Thatcher as honourary chairwoman makes them a very hard sell indeed – I find myself warming to Steve Kean. The club may have won only two games all season, may have amassed only 10 points out of a possible 45, and may be racing certainties for relegation. But nonetheless Kean is there each week: Stoic, unbending, entirely hopeless.

While the season reaches its pivotal Christmas period, those of us who support neither team can play a little game of wait and see.

Wait and see which manager gets fired the quickest: the one who the fans hate and who demand to be dismissed, or the one the fans seem to like and tolerate and for whom no one demands the sack.

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