Wise path is the way of the world

Good question from City fan Karam Radwan in her interesting and always passionate Leicester Mercury column today: ‘Just how has Dennis Wise managed to get another job?’

Simple answer: because football will always find other work for people like Dennis Wise, ‘football people’ as Harry Rednapp would call them.

And why not? Dennis Wise has been a long time in football. He was an international player, an accomplished club player at the highest level and has tried his hand at management.In terms of football achievement he’s at the upper end of the scale.

Oh yes. He’s made mistakes. Bad mistakes as far as City fans are concerned and pretty well all of us despise him, me included.

But if football ousted everyone who’s done daft things like cracking people’s cheekbone’s, like breaking Wesolowski’s leg, like launching a kung-fu attack on the crowd, like costing their club’s millions, there wouldn’t be many left apart from Gary Lineker. I exaggerate but there would be a lot of spaces.

And if football ousted every manager who has finished a failure sometime, they’d mostly be all gone, and I’m not exaggerating this time.

Football, in truth, is a self-protecting industy.

Football will look after you from the youth team to the pension so long as you don’t rattle its innards. Then, as Mike Newell may discover, it could be more uncomfortable.

That might well make you sick, it might be irritating, immoral or even foolhardy, but in so being, football is no different to many other occupations.

Take journalism.

In asking how Wise gets a job, Karam might as easily ask why some journalists keep getting offered other jobs or even how they keep the ones they’ve got.

There are people in her profession who make the most ridiculous or indefensible statements.

There are people who forever sit on the proverbial fence and refuse to ask the questions everyone hopes and expects them to.

There are even those who would sneakily undermine the credibility of other journalists for their own obscure ends.

But all these people keep typing away and will do so til they draw their pensions or their redundancies.

Everyone in truth, like Dennis Wise or the scribes I mentioned, makes mistakes and journalism like football protects its own, right or wrong. And so will it ever be.

Is journalism right and football wrong? Or do they both have a case to answer?