We Pick The New England Boss

It's official then, Sven will be moving on after the World Cup. Did he jump? Was he pushed? Does it matter? He's going, and all we care about (apart from winning the World Cup of course) is who next for the Soho-Square hot-chair?

45eachway has it's own shortlist down to eleven men. Five Englishmen, five foreigners and one inbetweener.

Englishmen:

Sam Allardyce
Alan Curbishley
Steve McLaren
Stuart Pearce
Bryan Robson

Foreigners:

Guus Hiddink
Ottmar Hitzfeld
Luiz Felipe Scolari
Jose Mourinho
Arsene Wenger

The Inbetweener:

Martin O'Neill

Despite what 45eachway may have said earlier the English prospects don't fill us with confidence. Their respective shortcomings could be summed up as: long-ball, Champions League?, Middles'bore', experience and Bradford.

This leaves Martin O'Neill as the only quasi-non foreigner. On the upside the Northern Ireland flag looks a lot like the England flag (if you squint hard enough you can't tell them apart) and 45eachway thinks he'd do a great job, but it's common knowledge that due to personal reasons he's not seeking work.

This leaves the five foreigners, all of whom have excellent credentials. 45eachway would most like to see Jose Mourinho installed at FA HQ if only because he can't stop winning things. You get the feeling he's the manager to have in a penalty shoot out. But he'll be difficult (read: expensive) to tear away from the Chelsea bosom and has expressed a desire to someday manage Portugal, not England.

Arsene Wenger is similarly qualified and we'd love to see England playing the Frenchman's brand of football. However, he would be similarly difficult to remove from Arsenal, especially now he's all excited to cut the ribbon at Ashburton Grove next August. Which leaves us with the three men who will be actively seeking work next July.

Ottmar Hitzfeld was highly successful, winning the Champions League with both Bayern and Dortmund. He's currently on a career break to spend more time with his family (45eachway thinks of it as middle-aged man's gap year) but is looking to get back in the game.

Guus Hiddink will be available after taking his yet another country (Australia) to the World Cup this summer. He's the very definition of a successful international manager, taking tiny (we mean that literally) South Korea to the World Cup semis in 2002, although the FA will be unlikely to let the current PSV boss do the job part-time.

Luiz Felipe Scolari is a World Cup winning manager. You can't argue with that can you? More importantly he is the man who knocked Sven's England out of both World Cup '02 (with Brazil) and Euro '04 (with Portugal). He's set to vacate the Portuguese hotseat after the World Cup and 45eachway says "if you can't beat 'em, give 'em a multi-million pound two year contract."