Rooney’s sacking was inevitable, Joey Barton is wrong

In his fortnightly exclusive column for CaughtOffside, Jon Smith, one of football’s first-ever agents and a man who was an integral figure in the forming of the Premier League, discusses why Wayne Rooney failed at Birmingham, why Joey Barton is wrong, why modifying the FA Cup doesn’t mean breaking with tradition – and more! 

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Rooney is another big name that didn’t bother learning his craft properly

This is something that I’ve been talking about for a long while because of being involved with older managers, good friends like Harry Redknapp, who has been a great servant of the game.

There’s this desire to bring on the young talent too quickly as managers and I think people should read a little feature called ‘Why traditional number 10s are being deployed as number eights.’

It’s a very long feature from The Times and it describes how the original number 10 used to sit behind the striker but now functions pretty much as a number eight.

There’s various formulae that you can deploy, but it’s a really interesting article for any football fan because it actually illustrates the various formations that are being deployed now.

Promoting people into positions because they were successful players doesn’t necessarily mean they then become a successful manager, and there’s many that have fallen by the wayside over the decades.

Look at John Terry. He’s been a number two, a number three and has now actually gone back to Chelsea’s Academy to learn more of his trade. Doing it the right way.

He’s a dynamic character and my instant forecast is that he’ll be a really successful manager of the future if he decides to tread that path because he’s learned his trade properly, similar to Mikel Arteta under Pep Guardiola before blossoming at Arsenal.

Rooney, Gerrard and Lampard all appear to have been fast-tracked – not sure that’s the best way forward.

VAR needs more work but I remain a huge fan

Ultimately, one of the best things about VAR is that the referee’s decision is currently final. So the VAR can flag something that he wants the official to have a look at but the man in the middle still makes the final decision.

As I’ve said before I’m a big fan of VAR, though like we saw in the Liverpool vs Newcastle game, the problem with it is you’ll still always have players dive and there’ll always be human mistakes.

One would hope that the team of people in the VAR room should be able to decipher these types of decisions very,…