Mjelde Falls On His Sword

..that is if you can call being drugged, tied up and thrown onto a sword "falling your sword".

After lasting longer in the job than any other Brann-manager this side of the second world war, Mons Ivar Mjelde has agreed to step down after the season. The board wanted him out, the players wanted him out, the local media wanted him out, and in his heart of hearts Mjelde himself probably wanted out as well. 

Mjelde: Unwanted and unloved. Strangely enough.

It's a far cry from last season when Mjelde led Brann to their first title in 44 years and received several awards for his leadership, but then that's football for you. Saddled with a blatantly unbalanced squad assembled by an incompetent sporting director, Mjelde failed to replicate last season's success and suffered some truly embarrassing defeats along the way.

According to Bergen's reasonably well-informed paper BT it was a vote of no confidence from the players that was the final straw: "At a players-meeting this Saturday there was one important matter on the agenda: The future of Mons Ivar Mjelde," they write. 

Having watched Brann's overpaid and overrated bunch of wannabes put in a procession of gutless, spineless and half-assed performances this season, fjordball tends to think it should have been the other way around: Brann's most successful manager in the modern era should have met with the board to discuss whether or not it's possible to get rid of half the first team-squad. But with player-power in the modern game being what it is that wasn't likely to happen.

Brann's captain Erik Bakke, youknow, the one who told his manager off in the media for daring to suggest that the players might have been at fault when they threw away a 2-0 lead against a pretty rubbish team that was down to 10 men, has gone one better and decided that he should have a say in what manager is brought in: "It's natural to involve the players in a decision like this", he claims. 

Among the candidates to replace Mjelde are heavyweights like Åge Hareide (who might soon be out of a job) and Nils Johan Semb. A raft of other names have also been mentioned, Tromsø's Steinar Nilsen is one, some Swedish blokes (as always), and hilariously Bengt Eriksen has been mentioned by some (presumably as an in-joke between journalists or something). It remains to be seen if any of them get Erik Bakke's seal of approval..

Bakke: Wants to decide what manager he gets to undermine next

Needless to say at this point, there are things wrong with SK Brann that no change of manager will ever fix.