England manager: Claudio Ranieri and Roberto Mancini tipped as candidates to replace Big Sam as England boss
THE BUNGLING FA could make the Three Lions’ poisoned chalice the Italian Job by offering it up to Claudio Ranieri and Roberto Mancini.
The last two homegrown bosses have crashed and burned – Roy Hodgson falling on his sword after a shocking Euro 2016 exit to Iceland and Big Sam stumbling over his tongue in a bid to fill his wallet.
The FA’s desperation to fill the job with an Englishman might have passed after the last two debacles and with the pool of possible native replacements looking worryingly shallow.
The Leicester City boss and reigning Premier League champion was asked on Tuesday night – after his side’s 1-0 Champions League win over Porto – whether he would fancy the job and he refused to rule it out.
The former Chelsea boss was also a glaring absence from the front cover of the Foxes match-day programme ahead of the European clash, with the club’s Thai owner facing centre-stage, making his position look less than watertight.
And the Italian press have thrown their weight behind former Leicester striker and Manchester City boss Roberto Mancini getting the once-coveted position.
Inter Milan were Mancini’s last employers but he was linked with an interest in the Wembley role before Allardyce replaced Hodgson due to his taste for the British game and capability with the language.
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Under former FA chairman Greg Dyke the job was always earmarked for an Englishman but new man Greg Clarke might waver from that plan.
With more details of the into football corruption in Britain to emerge, they might not be in a rush to appoint anyone who could still have skeletons in their closet.
Dyke said on Tuesday: “If you want to be the England manager you have to be whiter than white and I’m afraid what we’ve found out from the Daily Telegraph today is that the person who was the current England manager was not whiter than white – and I don’t think they’ve had any option [other than] to take the action they [have] done.
“This guy was being paid more than £3m a year, so why was he running around trying to find £400,000 from somewhere?”
Under-21s boss Gareth Southgate is taking charge for the next four games and is tipped to take it on full-time but he rejected the chance to beat Allardyce to the hot seat before his 67-day reign and little could have changed in that window to alter his standpoint.
Luckily for England fans the man with a key say in the next manager is The FA's chief executive Martin Glenn who is famously NOT a football expert.
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