Keano's Already An Experienced Championship Manager

Simon Clegg, current Chief Executive of Ipswich Town and former CEO of the British Olympic Association, has always been one for statistics. It was him who worked out that out of a total running time  of 13 minutes, 2 seconds,  a mere 0.545 of a second stood between five British gold medals and five British silvers at the 2004 Athens Olympics when you added up the winning margins of the 4 x 100 metres relay team, the coxless fours rowers, Kelly Holmes's two golds in the 800 and 1500 metres, and Chris Hoy's win in the kilo inside the velodrome. Put another way, it meant the difference between 10th and 17th in the overall medals table! Now he's come up with a staggering fact for Sportsvibe. Roy Keane, his manager at Ipswich, is the 11th longest-serving boss in the Championship out of 24 teams. Nothing incredible about that, you may believe, except that Keane has been at the helm at the Suffolk club since only last April, less than ten months' ago. He was under a bit of pressure, too, when his side began the season without a win for so long, but the club is sensibly looking at the long term and, as we enter a new year, Ipswich have now lost just one in their last 14 games. Is it just a coincidence that the two most successful managers in the Premiership, Alex Ferguson and Arsene Wenger, are also the two longest-serving? No, I don't think so, either.