ETA: ABOUT TIME

If you thought the government’s newly-appointed “commonsense tsar”, Esther McVey, had a job on her hands in the UK, wait until she hears about what is happening in Germany. Union Berlin have only gone and appointed Marie-Louise Eta, a real-life woman, as their new assistant coach, in the latest act of wokery to hit football. The 32-year-old is the new assistant to Marco Grote on an interim basis, and will be the first female coach to appear on a Bundesliga bench.

Eta has arrived right on time in the backroom staff after Urs Fischer was sacked, simply for being a man – or possibly because Union are bottom of the Bundesliga with six points from 11 matches, and already out of their first-ever Big Cup campaign. Either way, this appointment could spell the end for Proper Football Men, and McVey should move fast to ensure Big Sam, Big Mick and Average Height Neil are not denied further years of mediocrity by the bloomin’ wokerati.

Union’s new hire won the Frauen-Bundesliga three times, and a Women’s Big Cup, with Turbine Potsdam, before retiring from playing aged 26 to focus on becoming a coach. Does that qualify her to get the best out of Brenden Aaronson and David Datro Fofana? Can a Uefa Pro Licence and six years’ experience of coaching in youth football, including three different age groups for the German women’s national team, really prepare a person for the challenge of facing Augsburg at home? Yeah, it probably does.

“It is not a conscious decision to have a woman as an assistant coach. For me, she is a trained football teacher,” the Union president, Dirk Zingler, said on Thursday. Still, the news has made international headlines, with the Bundesliga’s website claiming Eta has “broken the grass ceiling” – a phrase that sort of sounds clever at first but actually doesn’t make sense, but that is for another edition of Football Daily.

Eta, who told Kicker last December of her ambition to be an assistant coach in the…