When Javier Clemente quit as Spain coach, he became the 22nd World Cup coach to move on since France ’98. The story we ran cited “media pressure” as the governing factor behind his resignation. I find this notion debatable, but less reprehensible than Tottenham chairman Alan Sugar’s Twinkie defense for his dismissal of Christian Gross early this season: “The media drove me to it.” The dismissal of World Cup coaches comes when a team has “disappointed” or “embarrassed” the nation, but the central problem is there can only be one outright winner in a World Cup. And aren’t definitions of disappointment and embarrassment highly subjective? Wasn’t Germany’s disappointment at a quarterfinal exit Denmark’s delight, when they went out at the same stage? It takes a hardy soul to thrive at this level. Look at Aime Jacquet, who aged about 15 years in the two it took to prepare France for the World Cup, and then immediately quit coaching once his mission was accomplished. No one else has the luxury of going out in a blaze of glory. Berti Vogts and Clemente should probably have done the decent thing and quit earlier than they did, but they were longtime incumbents, and therefore the worst judges of how to clean up their messes. Others simply move on to the next job. Philippe Troussier, aka the White Sorcerer, is now with Japan, while Bora Milutinovic has gone from coaching one team of prima donnas with a dubious goalie and defenders who can’t, to another. Will the man ever learn? Those who remain do so with the knowledge that the job can end at any time. Federation heads blame the coach and the media, and the coach blames the media when the real problem is the lack of realistic expectations every time the World Cup rolls around.