Your correspondent Ray King (Sportsbag, Jan 26) feels that football management is a tough job. I beg to differ.
Sackings have always been part and parcel of the game but managers who are terminated don't exactly leave empty-handed. Their contracts are paid out and they can sit back and wait for another opportunity or become a pundit. The media is full of them.
Of course, the master of the football management roundabout is Sven-Goran Eriksson, who has turned management dismissal into an art form and made more money from getting terminated than the average man could ever dream of. He's been dismissed from seven clubs since 2008, including England, Mexico, Manchester City and Leicester.
Sven has now reinvented himself as a technical director and is picking up quite a bit of pocket money from clubs like Thai team Tero Sasana and now at Al Nasr in Dubai.
Sven is intelligent, educated and articulate, qualities not necessarily required in football and the world is his oyster.
I'm not saying all managers can, like Sven, prosper and survive in the system. But a ''tough job''? I would think that going down a mine shaft for 10 hours a day falls more into that category.
Mike Parker, Chiang Mai
ADVENTURES WITH BENZEDRINE
Whoever would have thought, in years gone by, that drugs would become so ubiquitous within the sporting world?
Disgraced cyclist Lance Armstrong has certainly opened a can of worms by admitting he has been self-administering various kinds of drugs for many years in his quest to achieve international recognition as the world's greatest cyclist.
Why he wasn't caught out years ago remains a mystery.
During my playing days at Port Vale, we were hovering near the bottom of the old Second Division and the club doctor suggested to the manager that the players should take a drug called benzedrine to give us more energy.
As a goalkeeper, I didn't think I needed extra energy, but out of curiosity I decided to take one dose to find out what the effects would be.
I soon found out _ I couldn't sleep for at least a week and neither could the other players. It did nothing for the team's performance and in our next match and benzedrine was quickly discarded!
However, the story doesn't end there. In 1956, I was selected by the Football Association to tour South Africa, where we were to play 18 games.
Just before our last match of the season against Leicester City, I was given an injection in my left arm to prevent infection. That game still remains a blank in my memory as it appears the benzedrine I had taken interfered with whatever had been injected into me and subsequently gave me hallucinations.
The players told me afterward that I was doing all sorts of strange things, even coming off my line at one point to take a throw-in. We drew the match 0-0 and I was told that I'd given a good performance!
My arm was causing me a great deal of pain, which I thought was due to the injection, and I boarded the plane for South Africa expecting the problem to clear up quickly.
Instead, the pain got considerably worse and I was unable to lift my arm shoulder-high.
The situation was certainly bleak and the prospect of my being sent home seemed increasingly likely. Apparently, I had torn a ligament in my shoulder during that previous game and for that there was no easy fix.
After missing the first four games I was told that it was either 'play or be sent home'.
Needless to say, I played the next eight games with practically one arm and unbelievably we won every match.
Ray King, Bangkok
DJOKOVIC 'OUTLASTS' MURRAY?
Djokovic just won the Australian Open Tennis Championship by convincingly beating Murray in the finals. However, in Monday's Bangkok Post, chose to headline the win by stating that Djokovic outlasts Murray!
I am not sure if the individual that wrote the piece actually watched the match or for that matter checked the scores but anyway there was no way that Djokovic merely outlasted Murray. It was a strange choice of words to describe the final outcome of an excellent match!
Bangkok Crawdad