Current mood:	apathetic
Current music:	Show Me The Way To Amarillo

WALES
So Mark Hughes has decided to leave the job of trying to lead Wales to the World Cup finals in order to take up the interesting challenge of keeping Blackburn Rovers in the Premiership.

Possibly a harder job than managing Wales. I can't really blame Mark Hughes for leaving as he wants to further his career and keep up his managerial stock before the inevitable fall out from another Wales near miss.

The Welsh manager's job is a thankless task, it carries the weight of a nation who are craving some form of success, just an appearance at a major championship will do us!

The usual suspects are being touted as replacements, John Toshack, Brian Flynn, out of work ex England managers etc etc.

When Mike England was harshly sacked back in the late 1980's Bobby Robson, Terry Venables and Brian Clough were all considered. My personal favourite then would have been Brian Clough but he was possibly too much of a loose cannon for the inept Welsh FA to deal with!

At least now the Welsh FA is a lot more professional than in those bad old days even if they still treat their national league and clubs with contempt.

All of this money that has poured into the Welsh FA over the last few years from massive attendances really needs to be going on getting the best possible man for this job.

It's a big job and we can't afford sentiment. They need to look at it in a detached way, rather than going for the popular ex international look at all the candidates rationally.

Eddie Niedzwiecki could be a candidate, although injury curtailed his promising career he has forged a good reputation as a coach at Chelsea and Arsenal and is a vital cog in the Welsh set up.

It looks as if Mark Bowen will follow Hughes to Blackburn and with the recent departure of Eric Harrison it's possible Wales will have a completely new back room staff as well as a new manager.

I still believe Wales have the players to achieve something in this qualifying group but they can't afford to be messed about now with talk of part-time managers etc etc.

I really don't care who they appoint as long as we can rescue something from a very poor start to the 2006 qualifying campaign.

Bobby Robson, Terry Venables, Glenn Hoddle, if they manage to take us to Germany in 2006 then who cares!