Darko Milanic may have been sacked on Saturday, but he’s been telling Radio Slovenia that he could still come back as Leeds manager!
Milanic told Radio Slovenia "I still have a contract on paid leave. During this time, I must be ready to take over the team if requested by the owner." His contract runs through to the summer of 2016, so that’s yet another cost that Leeds will be saddled with and can’t get out of.
But while it might be technically true that Milanic could be recalled to the club as head coach at any time under the terms of his contract, in practise it must be highly unlikely given that Cellino was telling the world on Saturday that he’d made a mistake in appointing the Slovenian.
And after a while Milanic will want to get back into coaching rather than sitting around on ‘gardening leave’ and will take another job, relieving us of the obligation to keep paying him. He will surely be aware that if he just sits on his contract and takes the money until June 2016 it will be a lot harder to find another job at that time.
It is expected that Neil Redfearn will be appointed as head coach this week, this time on a permanent basis. He will be giving up his job at the academy, so we will have to hope that Cellino will allow him to move back there if the first team results aren’t spectacular enough for his liking and the Italian decides to make yet another change.
This leaves the question of who will run the juniors from now on, with no obvious candidate in house now that Leigh Bromby, Benito Carbone and Richard Naylor have all been sacked by Cellino. Naylor’s departure was particularly regrettable, as he’s not only a Leeds man through and through, but he was achieving good results as a youth coach and could possibly have been a Leeds manager of the future.
So the search is on to recruit another youth coach who is prepared to work under Il Presidente, with his autocratic and unpredictable ways. Over to you mister Cellino.