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"Three Lions back knife campaign”, a headline in the Wembley programme read last night. Perched in his seat in the royal box, Brian Barwick, chief executive of the FA and a keen student of comedy, would have appreciated the irony.

The blade protruding from between his shoulder-blades was delivered, not randomly, but with the practised precision of a professional assassin. Lord Triesman, the FA chairman, was a senior Labour Party member during the blood-letting of the 1980s, was general secretary of the Association of University Teachers for eight years, a member of the House of Lords for four, he has held government posts and has been responsible for delicate relations with countries in Africa, Latin America and the Caribbean. When it came to the crunch, in a face-off at Soho Square, there was only going to be one winner: the hard-nosed politician, not the genial television man. Triesman saw Barwick as lightweight from the start. Up against the agenda of the FA’s first independent chairman, he probably was.

Triesman was a former activist in the Communist Party during his student years and beyond and would class himself a friend of the working man, but he had little hesitation in adding to the unemployment figures once he had reviewed the abilities of his hapless chief executive. Over a number of weeks through the summer, Triesman and Barwick have differed on the chief executive’s future role so consistently and spectacularly that Barwick felt his position untenable. He negotiated a settlement worth in the region of £450,000 and will depart officially on the last day of 2008.

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In reality, he has been heading for the exit for considerably longer and now has so little power within the FA that his duties will be largely ceremonial. Even that moment of small glory was denied him last night when, tellingly, he did not appear in the line of dignitaries introduced to the players before England’s match with the Czech Republic. As news leaked out of his impending departure, television cameras honed in on Barwick, looking glum.

Was he reflecting on events of the past few weeks or yet another unconvincing 90 minutes for his England team? It was impossible to say, although neither would have brought him much cheer. Financially, he has strengthened the organisation, but certain blunders have left the England team weak and it will not have escaped his critics that news of the end of his regime coincided with another poor performance.

In all likelihood, as far as Triesman was concerned, Barwick had probably served his purpose in 2007 when his experience of the market and inside knowledge of television’s craving for football helped to secure a broadcast rights deal worth £425 million. Even that did not win him universal praise. Some within the organisation believe that Barwick has weakened the standing of the England team by agreeing a deal with ITV and Setanta, a fledgeling satellite sports network, affording little exposure. It is rumoured that the chairman would have favoured a deal with the BBC, even for slightly less money, and Barwick’s pursuit of the bottom line merely added to the belief that he lacked sufficient gravitas. Triesman made that perfectly clear with his actions, if not his words. Since arriving at the FA at the start of the year he has eroded Barwick’s power in a way that made the chief executive’s departure inevitable.

The only surprise is that the news should have broken inopportunely midway through the first England international of Fabio Capello’s season. The FA was hoping to avoid making an announcement until today, but sadly its senior members are not as adept at keeping secrets as its manager.

The FA board heard news of Barwick’s decision yesterday, but few of those in Triesman’s confidence can have been surprised that the relationship was curtailed. Many of the duties of the chief executive had already passed to Alex Horne, the newly appointed chief operating officer, and Barwick has not even chaired the regular FA management board meetings for three weeks. In May, when Triesman unveiled his proposal for the restructuring of the FA, the extent of Barwick’s exclusion was humiliatingly brutal. He was scarcely involved in approximately half of the FA’s business plan and his duties with regard to England had disappeared. The power was now with Triesman and Horne, as it will be this morning. Triesman has issued no guidance on the timespan for the appointment of a new chief executive, although when one is sought he is certain to apply more exacting standards and seek a CV of increased substance.

Barwick’s weakness was that he had no record as a stellar businessman, as befits an organisation with a turnover pushing £300 million, and he was not a stellar footballer, so could not be the figurehead that, for example, Franz Beckenbauer is for the German federation. He is a popular individual, though, with an impressive range of contacts throughout football, but Triesman wanted more. The furious way he has sought to change the FA in little more than six months in the job suggests he doubted the existing regime from the beginning, and most particularly the man at its helm.

Certainly there were times when Barwick appeared out of his depth, not least on the day when Steve McClaren was appointed as Sven-Göran Eriksson’s successor. Barwick made the mistake of insisting that McClaren was the FA’s first choice, when it was obvious that Luiz Felipe Scolari, then the Portugal coach, had been very publicly courted. The subsequent failure of England’s European Championship qualification campaign only highlighted the clumsy handling of the Scolari negotiations and although the appointment of Capello in December was seen as a coup, it was also a costly one, with his wages totalling £6 million a year and, so far, no real improvement in results.

The contradiction of Barwick’s time at the FA is that it is ultimately Triesman’s assessment of him as an inconsequential figure in the business world that has been his undoing, when his primary failures have been in his perceived field of expertise: football. Financially, Barwick has made the FA stronger, with sponsorship and television contracts at a high; in sporting terms, if the England team is its flagship, the organisation is perceived to be in the doldrums. On the night the clock began counting down on his time as FA chief executive, his team scraped a draw in stoppage time, was booed from the pitch and his stadium had banks of empty seats.

December 31 is more than four months away. For Barwick, this could prove a very long goodbye.

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