Mary Hannigan's Planet Football

"I will be in Germany with my team in 2006 and not in the grandstands with a hotdog and Coca-Cola," said Berti Vogts not so long ago. "Wake up and smell the hotdogs," declared the Scottish Daily Record during the week as they bid good riddance to the manager they had campaigned against for months.

Scotland, homo the brave

After their experience with a foreign manager the consensus in Scotland appears to be that it's time to appoint a home-grown supremo. Pat Nevin, the former Scotland, Chelsea and Everton winger, expressed this very view on Channel 5 last week.

Except, according to Football 365, he came out with: "I don't want to sound homophobic, but I want a Scottish manager." Either he meant parochial or Graham Norton's in the running to replace Berti.

Delia still flavour of the month

Life in the Premiership isn't proving to be a bed of roses for Norwich City and their director Delia Smith. On Saturday they were four minutes away from their first win of the season when 10-man Blackburn equalised, leaving Norwich the only team in the Premiership yet to win a game. Even West Brom have won one. Honest.

The fans, though, haven't turned on Delia because, it seems, they love her dearly. Who can forget "Delia Smith's a brilliant cook, she feeds our whole team porridge, she makes a cracking steak au poivre, but that don't rhyme with Norwich"?

Indeed, in an interview last week she recalled her delight when several middle-aged Norwich fans, replete with beer bellies and tattoos, turned up at one of her book-signing sessions, joining the queues for her to autograph their copies of Delia's Kitchen Garden: A Beginners' Guide to Growing and Cooking Fruit and Vegetables.

Still, she could do with an upturn in the club's on-the-field fortunes. As she put it herself last week, "we're a second-half side - the problem is the second halves aren't long enough".

Quotes of the week

FourFourTwo magazine: "As a goalkeeper, is it more difficult because your mistakes are under closer scrutiny than, say, a striker?"

Jens Lehmann (Arsenal): "You can't compare a chicken with a dog."

"Manchester United midfielder Roy Keane is having a £3 million three-storey, six-bedroom house built in Hale, Cheshire . . . to include nine toilets."

- From the Sunday Telegraph. As their headline put it: "Keane flushed with success". But blimey, that's a lotta, lotta loos.

"Word reaches us that Everton supporters have a new name for the Liverpool manger: Rafael Beneathus."

- We like it (Football 365).

"I didn't realise I was liked by so many people here. It was a lovely term of endearment, wasn't it?"

- Mick McCarthy after Millwall fans spent much of their game against Sunderland chanting "Mick McCarthy, you w****r, you w****r" at their former boss.

"I am not up to it any more. It's about a year since I last played. I am 50 years old. I am going to take part in one game and play no more than 20 minutes. I am too old to play football. I haven't even played chess recently."

- Socrates confirming that his Garforth Town career will be a rather brief one.

Ron not up to speed on race

Whatever happened to . . . Big Ron Atkinson? It's six months now since he described Marcel Desailly on air as a "lazy, thick n****r", a comment that pretty much ended Ron's media career. Well, he'll be back on our screens later this month in a BBC documentary provisionally entitled Big Ron - Am I a Racist?. Ron travelled to America for the programme, attended "race awareness" classes, visited memorials to slavery and to racial segregation and, he told the London Independent, "we looked at the Martin Luther King situation".

We wondered, then, if Ron was a changed man, if he'd finally accepted that he deserved what he'd got. Well, after reading Paul Kimmage's interview with him in yesterday's Sunday Times we're not so sure. Had the man on the street been supportive of him?

"Absolutely top drawer, top drawer," he said, adding, "but there you go, there's a two per cent PC brigade, isn't there?"

Then he attempted to clarify what he had actually said about Desailly.

"I said, 'He's the type of person some people might say was a . . .' which is a lot different from . . ."

Oh, Ron.

And finally: "What do you want me to do? Crawl around on my hands and knees? I've done that . . . well, I haven't done that, but . . . a muttered word to nobody, and yet I see other people getting away with things that I find absolutely unbelievable. A bloke walking round with a hook saying he's going to blow us all up!"

We're beginning to sense that, as it is for Abu Hamza, it's early doors in Ron's voyage to race awareness.

More quotes of the week

"I want to be successful so I'll want to beat Bohemians, Shelbourne and Dublin City. I'd beat my granny up and down the garden if that's what it takes."

- Roddy Collins, at his unveiling as the new manager of Shamrock Rovers. Assuming she too has boxing in her genes we take it that Granny floored Roddy with a right upper cut when he got home.

"I've heard of rats deserting a sinking ship, but the captain?"

- An unnamed Dublin City player after Roddy hitched a lift from the good ship Shamrock Rovers and left Dublin City all at sea.

"I'll set a professional standard that has never before been seen in Ireland."

- Roddy again, continuing to endear himself to his colleagues in Irish football.

"If you keep hitting yourself on the head with a hammer sooner or later you're going to realise that if you stop doing it the pain goes away."

- Rodney Marsh's analysis of Norwich's season so far.

"It would mean a lot to play against United, I've never liked them."

- Another reason why Manchester City fans are beginning to view Willo Flood as a God-like creature.

To Elland back with Blackwell

So, how are things at Leeds this weather? Is manager Kevin Blackwell enjoying the challenge? Ready? Here we go . . .

"The squad has been paper-thin from the beginning of the season. I've nowhere to go with the players. The club is paying more out in wages to players not available to me and to managers not managing here and that's the frustration. The debts are massive, the wages have been cut, but we're still in a situation where we're paying £18 million out a year.

"Now I think I'm good, but I don't think I'm a genius. Paul Daniels would have a good job here, I tell you."

Going swimmingly, then.