Larry Ryan: Should the media really be trading in words not given freely?
BACK IN THE DAY: Clinton Morrison scores for Crystal Palace in their 2-1 League Cup semi-final first leg win over Liverpool in 2001. However, remarks he made in the aftermath of the match have been remembered for far longer than his goal.
It's remarkable, the durability of certain throwaway words. The rich full life they can live.
After Crystal Palace’s League Cup semi-final first leg win over Liverpool in 2001, former Ireland striker Clinton Morrison, who’d scored and wasn’t known for self-effacement, got drawn into some chat about the opportunities Liverpool had spurned.
“With the form you’re in at the moment, do you think you would have put away the chances Michael Owen had?”
As Clinton tells it: “The confident person I was, I said: ‘Yeah, most definitely, I would have put the chances away, easily!’
“But the story got so twisted in the press, that me — Clinton Morrison — was giving tips to Michael Owen, the great striker he was, on how to score goals. I don’t think so.”
Steven Gerrard’s autobiography takes up the immediate fallout, in the second leg, which Liverpool won 5-0.
“When we walked into the Anfield dressing-room, there on the wall were all Morrison’s offending articles, like a list of crimes pinned up outside a court-room.
“He got booed all game by Kopites at their merciless best.
“That’s why you don’t come out and say stupid things. Learn your lesson, Clinton.”
Clinton has often told the punchline against himself.
“The ball has dropped six yards out and I’ve done a complete air-kick, I’ve totally missed the ball. Gary McAllister taps me on the shoulder and says: ‘Don’t worry about it mate, Michael Owen would have scored that’.”
A week later, Morrison said his sorries: “I want to apologise to Michael Owen and Liverpool, as I was misquoted.”
Gerrard’s book was published 10 years after that game but still spared plenty of scorn for the episode: “If you want a really sound laugh, compare the respective goalscoring records of Michael Owen and Clinton Morrison. European Footballer of the Year v. Mr Average.”
Then Liverpool manager, the late Gerard Houllier, spun the fortune cookie version: “When you spit in the air it sometimes lands on your face.”
And Google will tell you the life story of this seemingly immortal post-match interview.
2016, veteran Morrison’s Exeter visit Anfield in the cup. The headline: ‘Liverpool FC taunter Clinton Morrison reunited with Reds’.
2017, on Morrison the pundit: ‘Comedy hate-figure Clinton Morrison mouths off about Klopp’s team selection’.
2017, went full Edgar Allen Poe: ‘When Motormouth Morrison Was The Reds’ Master Motivator’.
And don’t think it hasn’t gone global. Spanish publication : ‘Cuando Clinton Morrison molestó a todo Liverpool diciéndole a Michael Owen cómo anotar e incitó’.
Just this week, Phil Thompson stuck it back in the microwave for 30 seconds for the , reminiscing for the 20th anniversary of that cup treble for the Reds.
“When Clinton had that air-kick in front of the Kop...oh, the stick was merciless! And of course working with him many years later on , I did remind him every now and then, I was never short of winding him up and it’s become a big thing in his life, that miss.
Fortunately, on the face of things anyway, Morrison appears to be one of those bulletproof characters who can smile most things away. And maybe someone wide enough to even work an angle out of his accidental notoriety on Merseyside.
But mightn’t this neverending story easily read like your worst recurring nightmare?
That an off-hand remark made 20 years ago has become the single most notable thing about you.
How much would you charge by the word if you were signing away two decades use out of them?
“Look at the women’s tennis tour. It’s on the go for 46 weeks a year. How many press conferences is that for someone like Naomi Osaka,” pointed out Derval O’Rourke this week. “How many opportunities is that to say the wrong thing at the wrong moment, to be made feel uncomfortable? To be anxious about?”
To risk creating a big thing in your life.
Osaka missed a Grand Slam rather than face the ordeal, triggering an existential crisis in the media, as some examined their conscience, even as others lashed out.
Just as with most other topics on which the great man has pronounced, many are coming round to the thinking of Gilesy, who has long argued there should be no post-match interviews of any kind, due to the lack of sense produced in this environment.
Sure, it has given us mind games, it has supplied us with controvassy. There is often enlightenment and colour you couldn’t get elsewhere. Maybe 25% of the work of men like Jose Mourinho and even Jurgen Klopp is done in these exchanges. Theirs are words traded in fair exchange for narratives spun.
But too many reluctant participants have learned Clinton’s lesson. In mortal fear of the misquote, visualising the crimesheet on the dressing room wall, they are reluctant to say it and spray it back in their faces for the rest of time.
Of all the wrong turns media companies have taken over the years, how did everyone become so enslaved to the post-match quote, the nannygoat, that an industry would deal so readily in words not willingly given?
How does it fit into the notion of free speech, the compulsory supply of words that might just have a high price?
It is sporting bodies or clubs rather than the media that compel the likes of Osaka to appear, that have ways of making them talk. But there is nobody legally obliged to print the fruits of these exchanges, or broadcast them.
How is it we rarely hear the presenter tell us that we’ll give the pitchside interviews a miss, because nothing of interest was said? How many outlets can blank a presser, on the basis that nobody wants to be there?
This week the USGA announced a grant scheme for media organisations willing to cover women’s golf.
“It is nearly impossible for a sport to build household names without consistent and rich storytelling from the media,” its announcement said.
Some might take that as a reminder to Osaka of her obligations to a sport.
But it also highlights the power media once had, and might still if it only listened when someone has something interesting to say.
