Forget the phoney war and stick to the game
Lads asking the hard questions; “Do you take your press conferences yourself or do you let the assistant manager do it?”
A few with solutions; “I’ve started to praise managers of players I want to sign and it really works.” Others ground down by it all; “I don’t know how to respond when another manager says something that badly influences the players.”
If only Roy Keane had spoken up sooner, we could have been spared 15 years of nonsense.
Last week, Keane rubbished the widely-held view that Kevin Keegan conceded the 1996 Premier League title race with his memorable “I’d luv it” response to Alex Ferguson’s goading about opponents lying down for Newcastle, instead hailing it as a rare act of courage from one of Ferguson’s adversaries.
“Everyone was looking at that famous clip and laughing but they were laughing because we won. We won the league and everyone went on about the mind games and how brilliant they were. It helps when you’ve got good players winning you matches.”
Keane is correct, of course. Just as United’s failure in 1992 is invariably attributed to a fixture pile-up rather than Howard Wilkinson’s powers as a mentalist, Newcastle’s derailment in that final week owed more to the Geordies’ schedule of two games in three days than Keegan’s emotion at Elland Road.
But it was from there that this tiresome modern phenomenon snowballed. So, year on year, we hear Ferguson has “turned up the heat” on his rivals.
When Arsenal achieved things, Wenger was “winning the mind game battle”.
Then Jose joined in and it all turned even uglier.
With so many games, GĂ©rard Houllier once described his weekly press conference as the most important 30 minutes of the week. But then he won precisely as many titles as Keegan.
Maybe it’s all in our minds. Just play the game.
