Portland Timbers manager Phil Neville has been spotted at Stamford Bridge wearing an Ipswich tracksuit emblazoned with the initials KMcK.
Chelsea sources claim the former Inter Miami boss hoodwinked Blues owner Todd Boehly into believing he was Ipswich’s highly coveted young Irish manager Kieran McKenna.
Eyewitnesses said Neville spoke to Boehly and his staff in a dreadful County Fermanagh accent and managed to convince them he was indeed the recently awarded LMA Manager of the Year.
“There’s a bit of a resemblance, although I think Kieran looks more like the lovechild of Phil Neville and Darren Fletcher”, one onlooker told Paddy Power News.
“Phil had me convinced he was Kieran until he opened his mouth.
“He sounded more like big Jim McDonald from Coronation Street than the Ipswich boss.
“He kept saying: ‘I’m Kieran McKenna, so I am, so I will’.
“Anyway, Boehly offered Phil a one-year deal with the option to be sacked after six months and promised him £1bn to spend on Brighton players.
“It looked a done deal.”
However, Neville’s mischievous scheme could be exposed after it emerged that the REAL Kieran McKenna was at Manchester United’s Carrington training ground for talks with Sir Jim Radcliffe.
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“After a forensic audit of the club’s managerial recruitment strategy this past decade, we believe that firing the man, who was hired to replace the man who replaced the man who used to tell the new man what to do, is the best way forward,” Radcliffe told PP News.
Meanwhile, after it emerged United were in talks with McKenna to replace Erik ten Hag, fans rushed to social media to delete all the disparaging Tweets they wrote about the 38-year-old while he was a coach under Ole Gunnar Solskjaer.
“Amazing young manager never doubted his potential for a second,” said one fan while deleting a post saying Ipswich would get relegated from League One when McKenna joined them as boss in December 2021.
*Paddy Power’s football coverage is pure fantasy – don’t believe it for a second.
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