YOUR LETTERS

I would like to enquire whether the Mrs Clinton Mr Fleming refers to is: The one who “dodged and ducked enemy fire” when visiting troops in Bosnia? The one who was involved in the Whitewater scandal? The one whose attempt at reforming the US social security system ended in disaster? The one whose presidential campaign ended in failure and in massive debt? The one who turned a blind eye on her husbands numerous infidelities so as not to lose her place in the power struggle? The one who uses her maiden surname when it suits hers and her husbands, who just happened to be the President, when not?

If so, he is quite right, Sarah Palin is definitely not a Hillary Rodham Clinton.

Yours sincerely,
Simon Tow,
Santa Ponsa

Dear Sir,

LEN Shackleton, a football superstar of a bygone era had a chapter in his autobiography called “How much Chairmen know about football”. The chapter consisted of a single blank page. The recent sackings of Alan Curbishley and Kevin Keegan and even the Abramovich/Mourinho divorce, display a worrying trend. Over the years there have, of course, been a whole series of autocratic Chairman, such as Bob Lord the sausage making martinet of Burnley and more recently Ken Bates at Chelsea. All of them fired managers on a regular basis without, apparently, a thought about their own blame as the person who made the appointment in the first place.

We seem now to have a new breed of chairman going a step further. They not only seem comfortable dispensing with a manager at the drop of a couple of points in the first week of the season, but do it having essentially chosen the team through buying and selling key players over the head of the manager. Of course, often their enormous wealth and enormous financial contribution to the club possibly gives them the idea that they are entitled to do this. Indeed, in many continental clubs the first team coach is just that, with no responsibility for buying and selling. Here the tradition has been different and it is difficult to see how a manager cannot be allowed a big say in comings and goings if his is the first head on the block. Of course any manager has to accept that the club may not be able to afford his hearts desire and that a promising youngster has to be sold to balance the books but allowing the Chairman the major say will only add to the idea that many of these men are only using football as an expensive boy's toy. We wait to see how Mark Hughes gets on with his new Chairman's present of Robinho! Football seems to operate within its own set of rules that have only a tenuous link to the real world but I have never understood why Chairman never seem to apply to their football clubs the rules that got them their first fortune. Or perhaps they do and doesn't that paint a very depressing picture of how to make a fortune!

Dave Partridge, Port of Pollensa