Let's scrap football's post-match interviews

Spectator

2 days ago

'The view was stunning.' 'The hotel room was well appointed.' 'It's a city of contrasts.' Such numbing clichés in travel commentary are considered, by anyone remotely au fait with Eric Newby or Patrick Leigh Fermor, to be unacceptable. But if you watch Match of the Day, you'll know the footballing equivalents of these kinds of asinine blandishments have long been deemed worthy of the kind of critical scrutiny usually reserved for Jonathan Franzen novels.
After following the game for 40 years, I've finally reached breaking point with the abysmal drivel that comes out of the mouths of players, pundits and managers alike. Of course, they aren't being paid to be articulate and witty to the cameras – they're paid to win games of football. But the insistence from the media on making them talk, regardless of whether they have any communication skills whatsoever, is perhaps why I feel an unusual sense of dread about the domestic season that's beginning. I'm convinced that we'd all enjoy football a lot more if, just for one season to begin with, players and managers weren't required to talk to the media at all immediately after matches.
There was a time when at least a few football managers had something interesting to say. Everyone knows the 'more important than life or death' quote from Bill Shankly. But I prefer another of his waspish snipes at the linguistic constipation that bungs up intelligent analysis. 'Instead of me saying someone was 'avaricious', I'd say he was bloody greedy,' declared Bill, extolling the values of direct, incisive communication without frill or fanfare. The key ingredient Bill possessed in his own communications with the press was wit. And that's something that has long vanished from the endless stream of post-match interviews and analysis.
Huge culpability must lie with the interviewers who, in the main, have given up on asking questions at all. Instead, when faced with the cameras outside the dressing room after a narrow defeat, the BBC journalist working for Match of the Day will simply utter a statement such as 'a difficult afternoon Pep'.
This is not a question. And it's no wonder that Pep Guardiola has made no bones about his dislike of dealing with the media. This isn't diva-ish behaviour – it's entirely understandable. If you had to spend a chunk of your working week forced to find responses to this kind of water-thin gruel then you'd probably start questioning your sanity too.
Nothing of consequence is ever said and the interviews at times are so excruciating as to make Matlis vs Andrew seem relaxed. It doesn't matter how quickly the vision mixer passes back to the studio – in almost every post-match interview these days, the manager or player will dart away from the camera after the last appalling non-question is answered, in a manner that suggests they have acute gastroenteritis and need to find a bathroom post-haste.
We could also do without the subsequent analysis of the manager's anodyne utterances by a panel of ex-players whose shirts are too tight and vocabularies are too small. I have some sympathy. If I was asked to pontificate for five minutes with Stephen Warnock over the true meaning of the statement 'We go again on Tuesday', it wouldn't be long before I began having an existential crisis which would involve my questioning the possible malicious intent and latent conspiracy behind the 'Mind the gap' announcements on the Tube. Sometimes you can read too much into things. And sometimes, there's just nothing there to read in the first place.
I wrote a play two years ago about a traumatised football manager which played at the Underbelly on Bristo Square as part of the Edinburgh Fringe. The most enjoyable part of writing it was to give my 'gaffer' (for that was the name of the play) room to vent against the clichés that dominate the football lexicon. It was pure wish fulfilment. I once heard that Roy Hodgson is a fan of Saul Bellow's novels but, if true, this is a quite bizarre outlier. Most professionals, from Man City to Morecambe, behave as if they'd struggle with E.L. James.
Football has become so PR-clogged, so terrified of its own shadow, so utterly afraid of individual personality, that the few managers capable of holding a conversation (most notably Ian Holloway and Jurgen Klopp) have either left the country or, in Ian's case, are marooned in the footballing Siberia of Swindon.
If a player has anything interesting or catty to say, they use social media. If a manager has anything stimulating to say, they do it in the print-press-only news conferences which aren't televised. So can we just bypass the whole thing for one season? Let the players take a shower. Let the gaffer administer his dressing down. And let us poor Sky and MotD viewers take a break from yet another nine months of hearing a balding man in a badly tailored suit tell the world: 'We'll work on it in training.'