Latest news with #Manolo
Time of India
04-07-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
AIFF advertises India coach job, applications invited till July 13
Manolo Marquez (left) left his national team job last week after just eight games, despite having two years left on his existing contract Panaji: The All India Football Federation (AIFF) has invited applications from coaches for the vacant position of head coach, senior men's national team. The AIFF mutually parted ways with Manolo Marquez as the India coach early this week and have now kickstarted the process to find his replacement. According to an advertisement on the federation's website, coaches need to mandatorily have a minimum of AFC/UEFA Pro license or equivalent, and have 10-15 years of experience at the elite youth and senior level football. 'Experience as the first team coach (head coach) of the senior national team will be preferred with experience of coaching in the World Cup and continental championship qualifiers being an advantage,' said AIFF. Coaches have been asked to email their application with one page resume latest by July 13. 'We will wait for all applications and then do a shortlist,' said a senior official. The federation said that the duration of the contract of the coach and remuneration can be decided 'during the interview period' Manolo left his national team job last week after just eight games, despite having two years left on his existing contract. by Taboola by Taboola Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like local network access control Esseps Learn More Undo Under the Spanish coach's watch, India won just one international friendly against Maldives, while losing both games – Thailand and Hong Kong – as full-time coach since last month. The new coach's immediate task will be to start winning in the all-important AFC Asian Cup 2027 final round qualifiers. India are at the bottom of the four-team group with just a point from the first two games, having drawn against Bangladesh and then lost away to Hong Kong. Only the group winners qualify for the continental showpiece in Saudi Arabia.
Time of India
03-07-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
Under-fire Manolo Marquez steps down as India coach after mutual agreement with AIFF
PANAJI: Manolo Marquez's tenure as coach of the national football team ended after just eight games as the Spanish coach and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) mutually decided to part ways. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now The decision was endorsed during the AIFF executive committee meeting in the Capital on Wednesday. Go Beyond The Boundary with our YouTube channel. Under Manolo's watch, India won just one international friendly against Maldives, while losing both games - Thailand and Hong Kong - as full-time coach since last month. The coach had two years left on his contract. Poll Should the next national team coach be an Indian or a foreigner? Indian Foreigner It depends on experience 'We are parting ways without any financial implication to either of the two parties,' AIFF deputy secretary general Satyanarayan M told TOI. 'We will now advertise for a new national team coach, inviting applications from those interested in the job.' When AIFF followed a similar process last year following the sacking of Igor Stimac, it received 291 applications, which included 100 with UEFA Pro License diplomas, 20 with Asia's highest coaching degree and three with from South America. Facing a cash crunch, the AIFF eventually decided to rope in Manolo as coach of club-and-country. Some members, including those in the technical committee, are now in favour of an Indian as coach, with Khalid Jamil and Sanjoy Sen among the two names on top of that list. Sources, though, said no decision has been made if the next coach will be an Indian or foreigner. EXCLUSIVE | David Gower on Shubman Gill, Jasprit Bumrah and India's England tour 'We will need someone with experience of Indian football,' said one member who attended the meeting. 'It's never easy for a foreign coach to understand the country, its culture and the mindset. Tired of too many ads? go ad free now He will need at least six months (to settle down), and by that time the crucial AFC Asian Cup 2027 qualifying campaign would have been decided.' India are at the bottom of the four-team group with just a point from the first two games. Only the group winners qualify for the continental showpiece in Saudi Arabia. Manolo, who did a dual job last season also coaching FC Goa, took charge of the national team in July last year. But while expectations were high, given his stint with FC Goa and Hyderabad FC, where he won the ISL trophy and developed several players, his record as national team coach left a lot to be desired. His eight games in charge include one win, four draws and three losses, two of them last month as India's full-time coach. This is the second time that Manolo has walked away from a top job. In 2017, as coach of Las Palmas in the La Liga, the Spaniard quit after just six matches though his contract was till the end of the season. 'It was a nice experience, a short one, but I realized that this was not the correct moment to be there,' Manolo had told TOI during a Townhall early this year. 'The dressing room was very dangerous. Now, since it's been some years, I can laugh about this but in those moments, I could not sleep.' Manolo has not yet spoken on why he was reluctant to continue with the national team. Meanwhile, the AIFF executive committee proposed to increase match time for Indian players, particularly strikers, by reducing the number of foreign players in both leagues.
Time of India
02-07-2025
- Sport
- Time of India
India starts hunt for new coach as Manolo quits after mutual agreement with AIFF
Manolo Marquez, who did a dual job last season, also coaching FC Goa, took charge of the national team in July last year Panaji: Manolo Marquez's tenure as coach of the national football team ended after just eight games as the Spanish coach and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) mutually decided to part ways. The decision was endorsed during the AIFF executive committee meeting in the Capital on Wednesday. Under Manolo's watch, India won just one international friendly against Maldives, while losing both games – Thailand and Hong Kong – as full-time coach since last month. The coach had two years left on his existing contract. 'We are parting ways without any financial implication to either of the two parties,' AIFF deputy secretary general Satyanarayan M told TOI. 'We will now advertise for a new national team coach, inviting applications from those interested in the job.' When AIFF followed a similar process last year following the sacking of Igor Stimac, it received 291 applications, which included 100 with UEFA Pro License diplomas, 20 with Asia's highest coaching degree and three with from South America. Facing a cash crunch, the AIFF eventually decided to rope in Manolo as coach of club-and-country. Sponsored Links Sponsored Links Promoted Links Promoted Links You May Like Зачем на ночь сжигают лавровый лист? Undo by Taboola by Taboola Some members, including those in the technical committee, are now in favour of an Indian as coach with Khalid Jamil and Sanjoy Sen among the two names on top of that list. Sources though said no decision has been if the next coach will be an Indian or foreigner. 'We will need someone with experience of Indian football,' said one member who attended the meeting. 'It's never easy for a foreign coach to understand the country, its culture and the mindset. He will need at least six months (to settle down), and by that time the crucial AFC Asian Cup 2027 qualifying campaign would have been decided.' India are at the bottom of the four-team group with just a point from the first two games. Only the group winners qualify for the continental showpiece in Saudi Arabia. Manolo, who did a dual job last season, also coaching FC Goa , took charge of the national team in July last year. But while expectations were high, given his stint with FC Goa and Hyderabad FC, where he won the ISL trophy and developed several players, his record as national team coach left a lot to be desired. His eight games in-charge includes one win, four draws and three losses, two of them last month as India's full-time coach. This is the second time that Manolo has walked away from a top job. In 2017, as coach of Las Palmas in the La Liga, the Spaniard quit after just six matches though his contract was till the end of the season. 'It was a nice experience, a short one, but I realized that this was not the correct moment to be there,' Manolo had told TOI during a Townhall early this year. 'The dressing room was very dangerous. Now, since it's been some years, I can laugh about this but in those moments, I could not sleep.' Manolo has not yet spoken why he was reluctant to continue with the national team. Meanwhile, the executive committee proposed to increase match time for Indian players, particularly strikers, by reducing the number of foreign players in both leagues. 'In addition, a feasibility study will be conducted to explore the possibility of fielding an under-23 national team probables in the I-League, as part of long-term preparations for the Asian Games,' the AIFF said in a statement.
The Hindu
02-07-2025
- Sport
- The Hindu
Manolo Marquez quits as India football head coach
Manolo Marquez's stint as the head coach of the Indian football team has come to an end after he and the All India Football Federation (AIFF) mutually agreed to part ways. The AIFF Executive Committee, in a meeting in New Delhi on Wednesday (July 2, 2025), agreed to relieve Manolo after he expressed his desire to step away. The development comes after India lost 0-2 to Thailand in a friendly on June 4 and followed it with a 0-1 loss against Hong Kong in the 2027 AFC Asian Cup qualifiers on June 10. 'We are sad. The dressing room is like a funeral. I am very angry and disappointed with everyone. I do not have words for this poor performance. Maybe this is the reality of Indian football,' the Spaniard said after the defeat to Hong Kong. Manolo Marquez took charge in July 2024, replacing Igor Stimac, and has overseen eight matches so far, with three losses and four draws. India's only win in his tenure came in a friendly against Maldives (3-0) in March. The 56-year-old was at the helm of the Indian team while juggling a dual role as the coach of FC Goa in the Indian Super League. His stint with the Gaurs concluded on May 31 with the Super Cup win in Bhubaneswar. AIFF will now look to appoint a new coach before India, which dropped to 127th in the FIFA rankings from 99th in July 2023, takes on Singapore on October 9.
New Statesman
18-06-2025
- Politics
- New Statesman
Princess Diana's kinder Britain
Edward White has pulled off an unusual experiment in his biography of Diana, Princess of Wales – the life of one of the most famous women in history captured entirely in long shot. There are times when his resourceful use of contemporary Everyman diaries and interviews with insightful nobodies provides valuable historical insights, and others when it's a bit like reading a profile of Lawrence of Arabia from the point of view of the sand. Only occasionally does the real Diana, the practised superstar I lunched with in New York six weeks before she died, break out of the suffocation of mass perceptions and cultural analysis. One such moment is a killingly self-revealing story I didn't know (and as a Diana biographer myself it always quickens my pulse to find a nugget that escaped me). According to Alastair Campbell, in 1995 Diana advised an as-yet unelected Tony Blair 'to touch people in pictures' and be sure to be photographed with 'down and outs'. 'Children with no hair,' she told Blair coolly, 'were especially effective in curating a reputation for compassion.' A mask-off moment hard to forget. The future PM was, White tells us, 'rapt by her shrewdness and savvy'. But not enough to want to give her the formal ambassadorial role she craved when he got into Downing Street. By then, tabloid coverage of her multiple affairs and her association with the son of the tawdry Mohamed Al-Fayed, who had been caught up in an MP bribery scandal, were too much of a political risk. However, when I met with her in New York in June 1997, the princess clearly was still hankering to be the British government's freelance Queen of Hearts. Her huge, limpid blue eyes filled with artful sincerity when she told me across the lunch that she felt she could be 'an enormous help' to bringing peace to Northern Ireland. Was she delusional? It's not surprising that by the end of her life, Diana had become high on her own supply. But in her presence, it was impossible not to be seduced. No photographs do justice to the combination of that blonde radiance and conferred charisma. In her stockinged feet Diana was five foot 11 inches, and when she crossed the Four Seasons restaurant to our table wearing three-inch Manolo heels and a peppermint green Saint Laurent suit, with a short skirt that gave full rein to her limitless legs, she electrified a dining room used to the appearance of high-wattage celebrities. White's book dives deeply into how Diana was mythologised by the media and the British people and, as her marital unhappiness seeped out and exploded, became a proxy for random sublimated pain that in turn confirmed her own sense of magical power. A sex worker at the time, whose observations White comes across in an oral history of prostitution project, considered Diana's life filled with parallels to her own. 'She had the same sort of shite [as me] when she was a kid. You know, didn't do particularly well at school… She said 'up yours' to so much hierarchy'. So muses the sex worker about a woman who was born into one of Britain's oldest aristocratic families and set her cap at an early age to marrying the future king. It's one of the most misunderstood aspects of Diana's story – especially during the Megxit coverage – that Diana, like Harry and Meghan, longed to escape from the cage of monarchy. But Diana's problem was not with being royal. She knew she was brilliant at that. (In her divorce demands, continuing to live at Kensington Palace was a non-negotiable.) It was being married to a man who was in love with someone else and was hopelessly jealous of his wife's popularity. Even after the royal divorce was final and she was supposedly thrilled to be free, Diana told me how much she regretted losing Charles, and wistfully spoke of how they could have been 'such a great team'. I tend to agree – had she married him at 30, rather than at 20. Dianaworld needs more helpings of such emotional content, but White's surround-sound approach amplifies how Diana was both shaped by the aristocratic culture of the Britain she was born into and how much she had changed that culture by the time she died. I was fascinated, for instance, by his parsing of Diana's early childhood trauma due to her parents' divorce. An underlying theme of his book is the abiding question of how external contemporary events unwittingly affect the behaviour of, or are absorbed by, the people who live through them. In the case of Diana's mother, Frances, her decision to leave Earl Spencer for the wallpaper heir Peter Shand Kydd occurred in 1967, when Diana was six, around the same time as British divorce numbers were surging. There was an explosive BBC documentary titled Whicker's World: The Stresses of Divorce: one episode features the celebrity model Sandra Paul, who bolted on her aristocratic husband, Robin Douglas-Home, a cousin of Diana's father. (It's incredible television even today, well worth the bad-quality YouTube rendering.) Alan Whicker's interviews with the couple are more intimate and fascinatingly invasive than anything in modern confessional talk shows or reality TV, mostly because it's rare to see candour like this expressed in such cut-glass accents. The distressed, ethereal beauty Sandra explains how she could no longer tolerate Robin's selfishness and Robin, with his quivering cigarette and clipped Noël Coward delivery, tells us he how he just cannot, cannot live with this humiliation and the 'leering little clerks in solicitors' offices' who arranged his divorce. 'I had to be ruthless in order to be free,' Sandra tells Whicker. 'It's the kind of statement,' says White, that, 'could have come from Diana's lips 30 years later.' In a book in which it's mostly hard to discern what the author really thinks of his subject, it's clear that White is unimpressed by many of the hyperbolic myths around Diana. He deflates the now-accepted view that she transformed attitudes to Aids and ushered in a new era of British emotionalism. There is no doubt that the princess's famous visit to patients in the Aids ward of the Middlesex Hospital in 1987 was the hand shake (without gloves) that went round the globe. But he considers Harry's declaration – and that of many others – that his mother 'changed the world' with her embrace of Aids patients is predictably overwrought. He suggests it's more likely that a long-running Aids storyline about the character Mark Fowler on the massively popular TV soap EastEnders was far more influential in changing cultural attitudes. Subscribe to The New Statesman today from only £8.99 per month Subscribe Similarly, Diana's public admission to suffering from eating disorders was not as pioneering in White's telling as it seems in sainted myth. Revelation of her bulimia in Andrew Morton's 1992 bombshell book came over a decade after Susie Orbach's bestselling Fat Is a Feminist Issue, which explored the often-concealed dysfunctional relationship women have with food and body image, and led to a wave of obsessive women's magazine coverage of the topic. Where we must credit Diana is her impeccable flair for capturing the zeitgeist, an ability to identify all the right things to care about and talk about at just the right moment which burned her into the nation's psyche. White may be correct that EastEnders played a more significant role in easing British attitudes to Aids, but Diana's global fame and royal mystique elevated its acceptance, and even made it into a fashionable fundraising cause. Charles and Diana on their honeymoon, in the grounds of Balmoral Castle, August 1981. Photo by Central Press/White doesn't have a fully baked new theory about the explosive grief of Diana Week, those seven days of histrionic mourning that rocked the streets of London in the wake of the princess's death. Some of the Mass Observation diary entries and interviews he turned up likened the Dianaists of 1997 to 'spellbound Nazis in 1930s Berlin'. Both mourners and 'those who felt differently', White observes, 'frequently framed their criticism of the other lot as the appearance of something not truly British. For decades, the Queen's aloofness, inscrutability and restraint had been hailed as the epitome of a distinctively British attitude to life. Now those same qualities were reviled as horribly out of touch with modern Britain.' At a minimum, Diana Week was the moment when a national dam broke and repudiated the harsh-faced politics of the Thatcher era and the Major government still attempting to hang on to them. The collective emotion was in perfect sync – as, even in death, Diana always was – with the coming of New Labour and Tony Blair who used the word 'compassion' seven times at the Labour Party conference a month after the funeral. White suggests the notion that the outpouring presaged the inklings of a rise in populism that 'had usually existed only on the fringe'. Like Boris Johnson, who at the time mocked the Diana frenzy as 'a Latin American carnival of grief', and Donald Trump, whose motto was always 'I alone can fix [the country]', Diana 'cast herself as a people's tribune who refused to be silenced by a bullying elitist establishment, just as those two men do'. Diana as a harbinger of Brexit? The irony of that thought is that the chaos of the post-referendum years has only strengthened a monarchy beloved more for its sangfroid than its sentiment. If Prince Harry is Diana's emotional heir, his efforts to reproduce her confessional connection to the British people have been rejected in favour of the stoic elder brother and his wife, who give the least away. One of Diana's greatest gifts, White suggests, was 'creating an atmosphere of intimacy where none existed'. And yet her personification of a kinder, more caring world blazes still. Tina Brown is the former editor of Tatler, Vanity Fair and the New Yorker and the author of 'The Diana Chronicles'. Her weekly newsletter Fresh Hell is on Substack Dianaworld: An Obsession Edward White Allen Lane, 400pp, £25 Purchasing a book may earn the NS a commission from who support independent bookshops [See also: Jarvis Cocker at 61: Is this hardcore?] Related
